Steve Baker - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Steve Baker
The research question informing this keynote address is as follows: What might currently constitu... more The research question informing this keynote address is as follows: What might currently constitute an adequate approach to the visual representation of animals? This question has been central to my research as an art historian and animal studies scholar since the early 1990s, and to the development of my current art practice over the past decade. By an adequate approach, I refer to the construction of imagery that avoids anthropocentric assumptions and is recognizably contemporary. In recent decades many scholars and artists in the arts and humanities have constructed critiques of representation, the pictorial and the gaze, often casting these notions and practices as aesthetically conservative and ethically dubious. An unusually subtle and persuasive expression of this line of thought within animal studies can be found in Rosemarie McGoldrick’s recent essay ‘Unscoping animals’. I consider some of that essay’s arguments in order to shape my own counter-argument for a ‘necessary gaze’, drawing both on Elaine Scarry’s discussion of generous attention and Iris Murdoch’s notion of ‘a just and loving gaze’. My own practice has focussed increasingly on the construction of particular kinds of pictorial space. It is only in retrospect (via ideas adapted from Deleuze and Guattari and from Ron Broglio) that I have been drawn into considering whether and how certain kinds of pictorial space might be less anthropocentric than others, and how that might influence the presence or absence of animals in my recent work. (The exhibition that accompanied the symposium included three photographs from my 2019 series Fish Market, Lagos, with a supporting statement that also appears in section 9 of this keynote address.) The address concludes with a report on a collaborative project-in-progress with the Melbourne-based artist Catherine Clover, in which our focus is on the representation of white storks in European urban environments.N/
"Vandalism Strikes Our Community"; FMCC Experienced Damages; Matthew Locatelli; Faculty... more "Vandalism Strikes Our Community"; FMCC Experienced Damages; Matthew Locatelli; Faculty Author; Supermarket Cashier Tells All by Mercedes Culick; Number One Beauty Problem by Patricia Butkus; Editor's Corner by Rebecca Rice; Housewives Are People Too submitted by Carol Richu; Survivors contributed by Bob Gordon; Alibi-Ography contributed by A. DeMarco; SGA Meeting; Sheldrake Prize Available; Blind Student Scholarship; Audrey Toscano by Janice Lundblad, Editor of Nursing Students Association of New York State; Spring Play at FMCC by Melissa Gero; Dinitto Attends Advanced Seminar; Nursing Student Loan Program
Culturescope, Jul 1, 2014
The role and influence of historical, political and legal forces in the generation and maintenanc... more The role and influence of historical, political and legal forces in the generation and maintenance of social inequality, prejudice and discrimination in Australian society and culture.
Social Science Research Network, 2011
A collaborative project between the University of Warwick, Rover Group, Lucas Rists Wiring System... more A collaborative project between the University of Warwick, Rover Group, Lucas Rists Wiring Systems, FEGS Ltd. and Electro Magnetic Applications Inc. has started. It will investigate the effect of using lightweight structures on the electromagnetic performance of motor vehicles. The success of the project will be dependent upon the development of new statistical approaches to the correlation of modelled data
BRILL eBooks, 2009
Lucy Kimbell describes herself as an artist and interaction designer whose recent work disturbs e... more Lucy Kimbell describes herself as an artist and interaction designer whose recent work disturbs evaluation cultures in management, technology and the arts. One Night with Rats in the Service of Art is in fact her only animal-themed project to date, though the projects concern with the ways in which rats get enmeshed in human evaluation cultures certainly connects it to other aspects of her art and design practice. Kimbells own awareness of and attentiveness to her working methods allows her to be surprisingly forthright about the limitations of her knowledge. One of the decision pointsthe ridiculous decision pointsin the proposed Rat Evaluated Artworks tubular maze is a junction where one route suggests that the rat has decided that this artwork entails ethical dilemmas and the alternative suggests that it entails no ethical dilemmas. Keywords: Lucy Kimbell; Rat
Internet Archaeology, 2007
PubMed, Jun 1, 2002
1. Health Manag Technol. 2002 Jun;23(6):100-3, 105. Building reliability into your digital teleme... more 1. Health Manag Technol. 2002 Jun;23(6):100-3, 105. Building reliability into your digital telemetry system. Baker S. Welch Allyn Protocol Inc., Beaverton, OR, USA. sbaker@monitoring.welchallyn. com. PMID: 12073491 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]. MeSH Terms: ...
Fieldwork is the exhibition catalogue that accompanied my small solo exhibition at the University... more Fieldwork is the exhibition catalogue that accompanied my small solo exhibition at the University of Sheffield in April 2019. Some months earlier I was invited by Dr Sarah Bezan and Prof. Robert McKay to serve as the Artist in Residence for an international conference they were planning, called Animal Remains: Biennial Conference of the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre. The research question to be explored through the residency and the exhibition was how best to present my work to conference delegates who were likely to be more familiar with my academic writings on animal studies than with my recent art practice. The US-based artist Maria Lux was chosen as the exhibition curator and the works selected came partly from existing series including Scapeland, and also from new work made in a Portuguese fish market during the residency. The full colour catalogue reproduced all works in the exhibition and included short essays by the curator and by the conference organisers.N/
This closing plenary paper for Portraying Animals explains why serious contemporary art on animal... more This closing plenary paper for Portraying Animals explains why serious contemporary art on animal themes in the 2010s needs to take recognizably contemporary forms in order to reach audiences beyond those who already share its particular ethical concerns. In 2013 Giovanni Aloi, editor of Antennae: The journal of Nature in Visual Culture and a significant thinker on art and animal studies, publically announced his intention to distance himself from what he dismissively termed the ‘minor propagandist art’ produced by artists associated with animal studies, and instead to focus on animal imagery made by artists with an established international profile such as Damien Hirst and Mat Collishaw. My own writing from the late 1990s to my 2013 book Artist|Animal had focused on valuing contemporary artists’ distinctive contributions to the wider interdisciplinary field of animal studies, concentrating on those artists directly concerned with questions of animal life. ‘The contemporary animal’ ...
12th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA'06), 2006
In "The Postmodern Animal", Steve Baker explores how animal imagery has been used in mo... more In "The Postmodern Animal", Steve Baker explores how animal imagery has been used in modern and contemporary art and performance, and in postmodern philosophy and literature, to suggest and shape ideas about identity and creativity. Baker cogently analyses the work of such European and American artists as Olly and Suzi, Mark Dion, Paula Rego and Sue Coe, at the same time looking critically at the constructions, performances and installations of Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys and other significant late twentieth-century artists. Baker's book draws parallels between the animal's place in postmodern art and poststructuralist theory, drawing on works as diverse as Jacques Derrida's recent analysis of the role of animals in philosophical thought and Julian Barnes' best-selling Flaubert's Parrot.
The complex and technical subject of bank reform has scarcely been more popular. Events in Cyprus... more The complex and technical subject of bank reform has scarcely been more popular. Events in Cyprus have demonstrated banks are a way of investing money for a return, with all the risk that entails. Van and minibus entrepreneur Dave Fishwick has created a documentary —Bank of Dave— which shows banking can be a simple entrepreneurial function providing a safe return to savers at the entrepreneur’s risk. It’s award-winning and a soar-away popular success. Of course, thanks to regulators, it’s not actually a bank: it’s a savings and loans firm. Whereas these route savings to borrowers, a bank creates credit. That is, banks lend money into existence. It is that distinction, together with other features of the financial system, which has led the world into crisis. It is both one of the least well-understood economic phenomena of our time and the most central to our present difficulties. Yet, astonishingly, Dave Fishwick has struck on a model of ban-king close to a theoretical ideal: he car...
The research question informing this keynote address is as follows: What might currently constitu... more The research question informing this keynote address is as follows: What might currently constitute an adequate approach to the visual representation of animals? This question has been central to my research as an art historian and animal studies scholar since the early 1990s, and to the development of my current art practice over the past decade. By an adequate approach, I refer to the construction of imagery that avoids anthropocentric assumptions and is recognizably contemporary. In recent decades many scholars and artists in the arts and humanities have constructed critiques of representation, the pictorial and the gaze, often casting these notions and practices as aesthetically conservative and ethically dubious. An unusually subtle and persuasive expression of this line of thought within animal studies can be found in Rosemarie McGoldrick’s recent essay ‘Unscoping animals’. I consider some of that essay’s arguments in order to shape my own counter-argument for a ‘necessary gaze’, drawing both on Elaine Scarry’s discussion of generous attention and Iris Murdoch’s notion of ‘a just and loving gaze’. My own practice has focussed increasingly on the construction of particular kinds of pictorial space. It is only in retrospect (via ideas adapted from Deleuze and Guattari and from Ron Broglio) that I have been drawn into considering whether and how certain kinds of pictorial space might be less anthropocentric than others, and how that might influence the presence or absence of animals in my recent work. (The exhibition that accompanied the symposium included three photographs from my 2019 series Fish Market, Lagos, with a supporting statement that also appears in section 9 of this keynote address.) The address concludes with a report on a collaborative project-in-progress with the Melbourne-based artist Catherine Clover, in which our focus is on the representation of white storks in European urban environments.N/
"Vandalism Strikes Our Community"; FMCC Experienced Damages; Matthew Locatelli; Faculty... more "Vandalism Strikes Our Community"; FMCC Experienced Damages; Matthew Locatelli; Faculty Author; Supermarket Cashier Tells All by Mercedes Culick; Number One Beauty Problem by Patricia Butkus; Editor's Corner by Rebecca Rice; Housewives Are People Too submitted by Carol Richu; Survivors contributed by Bob Gordon; Alibi-Ography contributed by A. DeMarco; SGA Meeting; Sheldrake Prize Available; Blind Student Scholarship; Audrey Toscano by Janice Lundblad, Editor of Nursing Students Association of New York State; Spring Play at FMCC by Melissa Gero; Dinitto Attends Advanced Seminar; Nursing Student Loan Program
Culturescope, Jul 1, 2014
The role and influence of historical, political and legal forces in the generation and maintenanc... more The role and influence of historical, political and legal forces in the generation and maintenance of social inequality, prejudice and discrimination in Australian society and culture.
Social Science Research Network, 2011
A collaborative project between the University of Warwick, Rover Group, Lucas Rists Wiring System... more A collaborative project between the University of Warwick, Rover Group, Lucas Rists Wiring Systems, FEGS Ltd. and Electro Magnetic Applications Inc. has started. It will investigate the effect of using lightweight structures on the electromagnetic performance of motor vehicles. The success of the project will be dependent upon the development of new statistical approaches to the correlation of modelled data
BRILL eBooks, 2009
Lucy Kimbell describes herself as an artist and interaction designer whose recent work disturbs e... more Lucy Kimbell describes herself as an artist and interaction designer whose recent work disturbs evaluation cultures in management, technology and the arts. One Night with Rats in the Service of Art is in fact her only animal-themed project to date, though the projects concern with the ways in which rats get enmeshed in human evaluation cultures certainly connects it to other aspects of her art and design practice. Kimbells own awareness of and attentiveness to her working methods allows her to be surprisingly forthright about the limitations of her knowledge. One of the decision pointsthe ridiculous decision pointsin the proposed Rat Evaluated Artworks tubular maze is a junction where one route suggests that the rat has decided that this artwork entails ethical dilemmas and the alternative suggests that it entails no ethical dilemmas. Keywords: Lucy Kimbell; Rat
Internet Archaeology, 2007
PubMed, Jun 1, 2002
1. Health Manag Technol. 2002 Jun;23(6):100-3, 105. Building reliability into your digital teleme... more 1. Health Manag Technol. 2002 Jun;23(6):100-3, 105. Building reliability into your digital telemetry system. Baker S. Welch Allyn Protocol Inc., Beaverton, OR, USA. sbaker@monitoring.welchallyn. com. PMID: 12073491 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]. MeSH Terms: ...
Fieldwork is the exhibition catalogue that accompanied my small solo exhibition at the University... more Fieldwork is the exhibition catalogue that accompanied my small solo exhibition at the University of Sheffield in April 2019. Some months earlier I was invited by Dr Sarah Bezan and Prof. Robert McKay to serve as the Artist in Residence for an international conference they were planning, called Animal Remains: Biennial Conference of the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre. The research question to be explored through the residency and the exhibition was how best to present my work to conference delegates who were likely to be more familiar with my academic writings on animal studies than with my recent art practice. The US-based artist Maria Lux was chosen as the exhibition curator and the works selected came partly from existing series including Scapeland, and also from new work made in a Portuguese fish market during the residency. The full colour catalogue reproduced all works in the exhibition and included short essays by the curator and by the conference organisers.N/
This closing plenary paper for Portraying Animals explains why serious contemporary art on animal... more This closing plenary paper for Portraying Animals explains why serious contemporary art on animal themes in the 2010s needs to take recognizably contemporary forms in order to reach audiences beyond those who already share its particular ethical concerns. In 2013 Giovanni Aloi, editor of Antennae: The journal of Nature in Visual Culture and a significant thinker on art and animal studies, publically announced his intention to distance himself from what he dismissively termed the ‘minor propagandist art’ produced by artists associated with animal studies, and instead to focus on animal imagery made by artists with an established international profile such as Damien Hirst and Mat Collishaw. My own writing from the late 1990s to my 2013 book Artist|Animal had focused on valuing contemporary artists’ distinctive contributions to the wider interdisciplinary field of animal studies, concentrating on those artists directly concerned with questions of animal life. ‘The contemporary animal’ ...
12th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA'06), 2006
In "The Postmodern Animal", Steve Baker explores how animal imagery has been used in mo... more In "The Postmodern Animal", Steve Baker explores how animal imagery has been used in modern and contemporary art and performance, and in postmodern philosophy and literature, to suggest and shape ideas about identity and creativity. Baker cogently analyses the work of such European and American artists as Olly and Suzi, Mark Dion, Paula Rego and Sue Coe, at the same time looking critically at the constructions, performances and installations of Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys and other significant late twentieth-century artists. Baker's book draws parallels between the animal's place in postmodern art and poststructuralist theory, drawing on works as diverse as Jacques Derrida's recent analysis of the role of animals in philosophical thought and Julian Barnes' best-selling Flaubert's Parrot.
The complex and technical subject of bank reform has scarcely been more popular. Events in Cyprus... more The complex and technical subject of bank reform has scarcely been more popular. Events in Cyprus have demonstrated banks are a way of investing money for a return, with all the risk that entails. Van and minibus entrepreneur Dave Fishwick has created a documentary —Bank of Dave— which shows banking can be a simple entrepreneurial function providing a safe return to savers at the entrepreneur’s risk. It’s award-winning and a soar-away popular success. Of course, thanks to regulators, it’s not actually a bank: it’s a savings and loans firm. Whereas these route savings to borrowers, a bank creates credit. That is, banks lend money into existence. It is that distinction, together with other features of the financial system, which has led the world into crisis. It is both one of the least well-understood economic phenomena of our time and the most central to our present difficulties. Yet, astonishingly, Dave Fishwick has struck on a model of ban-king close to a theoretical ideal: he car...