Dr Josephine Berry

Josephine has interests in the creative economy and the relationship between creativity, life and power.

Staff details

Dr Josephine Berry

Position

Research Lab Lecturer, MA Culture Industry

Department

Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Email

j.berry (@gold.ac.uk)

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.

Publications and research outputs

Book

Berry, Josephine. 2018. Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry. Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press. ISBN 9783956793936

Berry, Josephine and Iles, Anthony. 2010. No Room to Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City. Mute Publishing Ltd.

Edited Book

Berry, Josephine and van Mourik Broekman, Pauline, eds. 2009. Proud to Be Flesh: A Mute Anthology. Mute. ISBN 978-1906496289

Book Section

Berry, Josephine. 2021. Spectatorial Splitting and Transcultural Seeing in the Age of Pandemics. In: Saul Newman and Tihomir Topuzovski, eds. The Posthuman Pandemic. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781350239081

Berry, Josephine and Iles, Anthony. 2021. The Exploitation of Isolation: Urban Development and the Artist's Studio. In: Ana Vilenica, ed. Radical Housing: Art, Struggle, Care. (42) Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, pp. 165-186. ISBN ISBN PaperBack: 9789492302786

Berry Slater, Josephine. 2015. Dis-Embodying Regeneration. In: , ed. Alex Frost: Property Guardian. London: Flat Time House, pp. 45-50.

Article

Berry, Josephine. 2022. The Agency of (Planetary) Feeling. e-flux Journal(127), pp. 61-68.

Berry, Josephine. 2019. How to Explain Pictures to a Dying Human: On Art in Expanded Ontologies. The Large Glass Magazine(27/28), pp. 7-18. ISSN 1409-5823

Berry, Josephine. 2016. Agents or Objects of Discontinuous Change? Blairite Britain and the Role of the Culturepreneur. Kunstlicht,, 36(1), pp. 25-33. ISSN 0921-5026

Conference or Workshop Item

Berry, Josephine. 2019. 'Between Kitchen Semiotics and the Privatised Public: How is the Personal Political in Art Today'. In: Private Life. University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom 10 June 2019.

Berry, Josephine. 2016. 'Self-relation as Self-negation in Post-Internet Art'. In: Technology is Not Neutral. Watermans Gallery, United Kingdom.

Charalambides, Sarah and Berry, Josephine. 2016. 'Autonomy and precarisation: A talk by Isabell Lorey with a screening of kleines postfordistisches Drama’s Kamera Lauft!'. In: Culture Industry Now! Centre for Cultural Studies Public Programme. Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom 25 April 2016.