Addiction

I curated this exhibition entitled ‘Addiction’ consisting of selected works from nine leading contemporary artists.

The exhibition explored how and in what ways the notion of addiction might apply to facets of contemporary art in terms of its imagery and methods of visualisation. The exhibition also asked how the notion of addiction might be thought about and imaged in ways, which superseded populist ideas about the subject. The exhibition emphasised addiction as a self-enclosed habit and a denial of the Symbolic. These characteristics applied to the art works, all of which possessed a strong sense of anonymity and feeling of psychological distance.

Many of the exhibits (e.g. Mabb, Morris, Hale, Ball) used grids which conveyed a sense of impersonality, almost as if there was only an optical contact with the viewer and not a bodily one.

The space of the exhibition – a vacant architects’ office – was carefully selected in this respect to convey a clinical sense of anonymity and coldness. Thus, the exhibition demonstrated not what might be associated with addiction in the media and via the stereotypical discourse of Romantic excess (i.e. extremism, wildness etc.) but a strictly ordered and ‘impersonal’ sense of control which I aimed to show is a truer picture of the nature of a deep-set addiction.

Christopher Kul-Want

Research interests

Continental aesthetics and philosophy from Kant to the present. Nietzsche and post-Nietzscheanism. The art of Géricault. Contemporary art and theory.

Current research

I am currently editing an anthology of writings by philosophers on aesthetics and art which assembles the primary sources referred to in my previous book 'Introducing Aesthetics' (Icon Books Ltd., 2007). This anthology is entitled, 'Philosophers on Art: From Kant to Postmodernism, A Critical Reader' (Columbia University press, ISBN 0-231-14094-0; 0-231-14095-9, due to be published in 2008). Both books focus upon Nietzsche's revaluation' or 'overcoming' of metaphysics and its implications for understanding subsequent Continental philosophy, aesthetics and writings about art. At the same time I am involved in ongoing research into the art of the French Romantic artist, Théodore Géricault. In this connection I am writing an article expanding upon my paper given at the Art Historians' Conference (2001) entitled 'Géricault, Fetishism and Abuse'.