The Glasgow School of Art

Ron Broglio
'Minor Art: Becoming-Animal' watch video

What is an animal phenomenology? What is it like to be an animal, not as observed from an objective perspective of natural history but from under the fur of the beasts themselves? This impossible limit to human knowledge serves as the starting point for contemporary animal artists who slough off social values of humanism in order to produce opaque objects that bear witness to the other side of the animal-human divide. Through the method of unfettered becoming-animal, minor art speaks from the minority position of the nonhuman and so challenges the social values and codes which legitimate humanist projects. This talk will examine how artists create works in the "contact zones" with other species and how theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, and Donna Harraway provide a language for approaching such art.

Ron Broglio is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute for Technology's School of Literature, Communication & Culture where he teaches animal studies, literary theory, and British Romantic period literature. His research focuses on how philosophy and aesthetics can help us rethink the relationship between humans and the environment. He is author of 'Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry and Instruments 1750-1830' (Bucknell UP, 2008) and his current manuscript 'On the Surface: Thinking with Animals and Art' is under review with the University of Minnesota Press. Recent publications include: "'Living Flesh': Human Animal Surfaces and Art" for the Journal of Visual Culture; "Heidegger's Shepherd of Being and Nietzsche's Satyr" in New Formations; and "Thinking about Stuff: Posthumanist Phenomenology and Cognition" forthcoming in AI and Society. In 2009 will be scholar and artist in residence at the University of Waterloo where he will investigate the sensate world of cattle.

Hosted by The School of Fine Art, The Friday Event Lecture Series is The Glasgow School of Art's flagship public lecture series, and brings major international speakers (including artists, architects, designers, historians and cultural theorists) to the city of Glasgow.