Dr Josephine Berry

Josephine started teaching at Goldsmiths in 2008 after developing a rich set of critical and practical tools for analysing and participating in cultural production as an editor, writer and events organiser. She has recently joined the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Department after teaching at the Centre for Cultural Studies for nearly a decade. She has worked as an editor for the cultural politics magazine Mute since 1995, which has developed into a crucial and much valued resource for those wishing to think through cultural, natural and technological questions in the midst of post-internet globalisation.

Her PhD thesis was one of the first to address net art and considered the ways in which computer networks participate in art's redefinition after Duchamp and the demise of the artwork's aura, originality and siting in gallery space. As the fall out of New Labour era regeneration programmes started to reveal a different face of globalisation, with cities being turned into branded investment opportunities for international capital, her interest turned to the politics of aesthetics at the fulcrum of the 'creative economy'. This has led Josephine into a longer research project involving the relationship between creativity, life and biopower.

Teaching

Josephine is Lab Lecturer for the MA Culture Industry, focusing on experimental methods of research and a spatial approach to culture.

She teaches an option module entitled ‘Biopolitics and Aesthetics’ which she developed in 2010.

Area of supervision

Josephine supervises PhD students in the areas of cultural politics, art and aesthetics, biopolitics, digital culture, creative economy, neoliberal urbanism and culture-led regeneration, urban activism, site-specific art, and art in the public sphere.

Research Interests

Her monograph, Art and Bare Life, (Sternberg Press, 2019), brings the biopolitical theory initiated by Michel Foucault to bear on aesthetic theories of autonomous art in a way that is still rare within art writing. The simultaneous emergence of the democratic state, life sciences and artistic autonomy are read in combination as an effect of the Enlightenment’s dismantling of divine Truth and sovereignty. Its epistemic rupture precipitated open, material and polemical models of life, politics and art. Yet the discovery of life’s openness to transformation is also understood as driving power’s newly invasive techniques of control. Art and power’s shared desire to ‘change life’ – that describes both inoculation programmes and art after Baudelaire – create parallels and intersections in their forms and development in urgent need of analysis. Art and Bare Life argues it is the openness and ‘aimlessness’ of life that forms one of modernity’s central dilemmas for artists and philosophers as much as governments and capitalist production. If autonomous art is centrally concerned with life’s reinvention, its susceptibility to biopolitical transformation becomes an overt risk of its very development.