Larne Abse Gogarty

Tinkering, Salvaging, Scavenging

11 November 2024

In this seminar I want to explore ideas of tinkering, salvage, scavenging. I am particularly interested in thinking about artworks and literary examples of materials, objects and stories being used in the “wrong” way and how this creates a certain kind of temporality which might be prophetic. Working through aesthetic and philosophical categories like the fetish, and bricoleur, to talk about artworks which use everyday objects as a means to arrest or enchant experience, I want to think about how the novelty internal to this process relates to commodity culture in ways which can be both corrosive and compensatory.

Required reading:

Larne Abse Gogarty “Screws and Spirals: To breathe Together” from What we do is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy Sternberg Press, 2023

Evan Calder Williams, “Salvage” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 49, No. 4 (November 2015), pp. 845-859.

Larne Abse Gogarty is a writer and art historian from London. She is the head of History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. She is the author of What we do is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy (Sternberg Press, 2023) and Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art (Brill, 2022) and has published in journals and magazines including Art Monthly, New Socialist, Tate Papers, Third Text, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. In 2020 she co-edited with Andrew Hemingway a special issue on “Keywords for Marxist Art History” of the journal Kunst und Politik.