Dr Kenneth Wilder
Title
Reader - Research
College
Chelsea College of Arts
Email address
Tags
Researcher Research

Biography
Dr Ken Wilder is an artist and writer. With teaching responsibilities at both Chelsea and Camberwell Colleges of Art, he is the UAL Reader in Spatial Design. Having studied Environmental Design at the Royal College of Art, Wilder previously practiced and taught architecture. Since the late 1990s, his practice has shifted to site-responsive sculptural installations (often including video projection) and architectural interventions. He has exhibited widely in the UK, and has also exhibited in China, Germany, Sweden and the Ukraine (see https://www.kenwilderartist.com/).Wilder is author of the monograph Beholding: Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception, published by Bloomsbury in May 2020. The book considers the spatially-situated encounter between artwork and spectator. It argues that artworks created for specific places or conditions structure a reciprocal encounter, which is completed by the presence of a beholder. Each chapter frames a particular work of art from the remit of a contemporary theoretical text. Wilder's discussion engages a diverse range of practices: from Renaissance painting and group portraiture to intermedia practices of installation and performance art (see https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/beholding-9781350088412/).
Wilder's wider research also focuses on the phenomenological experience of art, particularly in terms of how artworks structure an often problematic relation with the beholder. His methodological position draws upon reception aesthetics and its relation to analytic philosophy. Wilder has written extensively for a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the British Journal of Aesthetics, the Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Estetika: The Central European Journal for Aesthetics, Architecture and Culture, Theatre and Performance Design, and Image [&] Narrative. He has chapters in the following publications: Manifesto Now! (London: Intellect, 2013); Painting: Critical and Primary Sources (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015); The Persistence of Taste (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018).
Wilder has recently submitted a funding bid in collaboration with Dr Aaron McPeake, which seeks to investigate non-sighted modes of beholding artworks. The bid is in partnership with Tate, the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Shape Arts and VocalEyes.
Wilder completed his PhD, entitled Projective Space: Structuring a Beholder’s Imaginative response, at Chelsea in 2009.
External Links
Research Outputs
Art/Design item
- Wilder K, McPeake A. Circumstantes (2017)
- Wilder K. Skylights (2016)
Article
- Wilder K. Installation Art and the Question of Aesthetic Autonomy: Juliane Rebentisch and the Beholder’s Share (2020)
- Wilder K. Michael Haneke’s 'Caché (Hidden)' and Wolfgang Iser's 'Blank' (2017)
- Wilder K. Projective art and the ‘staging’ of empathic projection (2016)
- Wilder K. Vermeer: Interruptions, Exclusions, and ‘Imagining Seeing' (2015)
- Wilder K. Filmic Bodies: Transgressing Boundaries Between Filmic and Real Space (2014)
- Wilder K. Anri Sala: Absorption and 'Theatricalizing' Reception (2012)
- Wilder K. Michael Fried and beholding video art (2012)
- Wilder K. Neither here nor elsewhere: displacement devices in representing the supernatural (2011)
- Wilder K. The case for an external spectator (2008)
- Wilder K. Negotiating Painting's Two Perspectives: a Role for the Imagination (2007)
Book
- Wilder K. Beholding: Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception (2020)
Book Section
Conference, Symposium or Workshop item
- Wilder K. Michael Fried and beholding video art (2011)
Show/Exhibition
- Cummings N, Bradfield M, Szreder K, Wilder K, Michaela R, Warner E, Metod B, Schwager S, Robin B, White N, Cremona C, Steierhoffer E, Hasegawa T. Parade: public modes of assembly and forms of address (2010)
- Wilder K. Plenum #4 (2010)
- Wilder K. Projective Space (2004)
Thesis
- Wilder K. Projective Space: Structuring a Beholder’s Imaginative Response (2009)
Teaching
Current research students
- Anna Baranowska, The Mapping of Site: Depicting the Woven Mesh of a Spatiotemporal Situation (Lead supervisor)
- Adrienne Bennie, Invisible You: Challenging Attitudes to Homelessness Through Artistic and Design Practices (Lead supervisor)
- Owain Caruana-Davies, Spatial Obsolescence: Disentangling the human-spatial relationship through the presence and absence (Lead supervisor)
- Sarah Dryden, ‘Imagining the Home: A critical investigation into the frontier home space and its mediated form within the Western film’ (Lead supervisor)
- Sarah Dryden, "A Practice-based Critical Investigation into the United States Frontier Domestic Space and its Mediated Form within Western Film." (Joint supervisor)
- Sally Hilal, The Art Installation as a ‘Healing’ Space: A Syrian Context (Lead supervisor)
- Keun Lee, Trace of Everyday Performance: A Contemporary Reinterpretation of the Ondol and Dot Jari (Lead supervisor)
- Lihong Liu, 'In-between' spaces: Memory, location, 'space of uncertainty' and an 'idea of home' (Joint supervisor)
- Milica Vukovic, Designed with movement in mind - 18th century garden design and 21st century choreographic thinking (Lead supervisor)
Past research students
- Fangyu Cheng, Architecture as Performance: the Trace of Performance within the Ambiguities of Spatial Sequence. (Lead supervisor)
Subjects
Architecture, spatial and interior design
Fine art