Gavin KeeneyAgence 'X'/OOI-MTA+++
Gavin Keeney
Doctor of Philosophy
Works for Works (2019-) – a study of works-based agency in the Arts and Humanities.
About
31
Publications
2,461
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Citations
Introduction
Gavin Keeney is Director of Agence 'X', founded in New York, New York, in 2007. He completed a research doctorate in Architecture at Deakin University, Australia, in 2014, on the subject of “Visual Agency in Art and Architecture”. His most recent books include Works for Works: Book 1, Useless Beauty (2022); Knowledge, Spirit, Law: Book 2, The Anti-capitalist Sublime (2017); and Knowledge, Spirit, Law: Book 1, Radical Scholarship (2015).
Additional affiliations
March 2023 - April 2023
American Philosophical Association
Position
- Co-funded Research Fellowship
Description
- Research Grant and Co-funded Research Residency, “Ideational Franciscanism,” Berry Fund for Public Philosophy, American Philosophical Association, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA, in association with the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities, Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, Italy, March-April 2023.
February 2022 - February 2024
Postgraduate School ZRC-SAZU
Position
- PhD Student
Description
- W4W is the successor project to “Lived Law” (2017-2019), which focused on the performative and existential rites of passage for works of artistic scholarship. As successor project, W4W deals with the internal metrics of works of artistic scholarship produced in opposition to forms of cultural patrimonialism and paternalism as found in both contemporary academia and the art world. The project effectively, in André Breton’s words, “goes over to the other side of the mirror.”
June 2017 - June 2017
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
Position
- Fellow
Description
- Visiting Research Fellowship, “The Moral Rights of Authors in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism,” Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (co-sponsored by the School of Arts and School of Law), Birkbeck, University of London, London, England, June 2017.
Education
November 2011 - November 2014
September 1988 - January 1993
Publications
Publications (31)
Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image is a study of a late-modern chiasmus, impersonal-personal agency, as it comes to expression in the works of French artist and filmmaker, Chris Marker, as the dynamic interplay of political and subjective agency. As chiasmus, the complementary halves of this often-apocalyptic dynamis (a semi-catastrophic, te...
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/knowledge-spirit-law/
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/knowledge-spirit-law-book-2-the-anti-capitalist-sublime/
Portfolio of transmedia projects conducted in India at CEPT University, 2017. Produced with Ishita Jain, Harsh Bhavsar, and Owen O'Carroll.
Now that B.V. Doshi has received the 2018 Pritzker Prize (the "Nobel Prize of Architecture"), performative events staged at CEPT University in February 2017 investigating institutional memory and its repressions have taken on added significance. This paper describes the use of 18 archival photographs from CEPT Archives to launch a series of events...
Semaforo is a research methodology based on asking a set of divination cards developed in May 2017, in Venice, Italy, "where" to take a project. The reading then specifies, in most cases, a time-frame and a methodology for proceeding. This, then, involves observing the rites of passage for works versus any proprietary and/or careerist agenda, thoug...
Ego-histoire is a novella/anti-memoir documenting a research PhD launched in late 2021. Episodes, to be presented serially, are redacted (i.e., self-censored) and semi-encrypted through an aleatory form of shorthand, in part to anonymize aspects of the unfolding story but also to enhance the literary merit.
Program for a collectivist-based literary agency devoted to the editioning and dissemination of works of radical-artistic scholarship with little or no relation to intellectual property rights. The literary agency, EDITION OF ONE, is to be based in New York, London, and Ljubljana.
Press Release for a debate on the elective abolition of Intellectual Property Rights
“Veronese,” Gavin Keeney w/ Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Ilenia Maschietto, and Neža Zajc, Vesper: Journal of Architecture, Arts & Theory 8, “Vesper” (May 2023).
“Architectural Parallax + The Wedding at Cana” is an “outtake” produced in advance of (or in the absence of) a performance-based project/installation proposed for the Palladian Re...
‘The Debauched Commons: A Dark Parable’ summarizes issues regarding intellectual property rights and immaterial culture through a nuanced reading of how First Nations Peoples worldwide have been forced by forms of neoliberal-capitalist exploitation of the knowledge commons to ring-fence and/or commodify their lived traditions, in many cases dating...
In this performance-based work, which essentially concerns the fable of “Khi + Ordo,” we obliquely – through visual-textual storytelling – focus on what we call “the agency of the artist-scholar,” deconstructing, inter alia , many of the rules and regulations associated with the art-academic industrial complex – i.e., the institutional dictates to...
The working document is the basis for an article subsequently published in Vesper in May 2023. The basis for the research was established in August 2021, with a performance in an old barn in Vermont, followed by photo-reconnaissance in Venice. Then a "full summary" was submitted to an architecture journal in the UK. They sent it out to peer review...
When Hardin penned “The Tragedy of the Commons” he was little aware of the wider precedent reading of its philosophical scope and application outside of his economic context, and its increasing relevance to the corporatization of the globe. Hardin’s argument was that “commons” means any shared and unregulated resource where individual users, acting...
Preface from Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image …
A discussion of editioning strategies for works for works departing from Situationist International (SI) precepts and engaging with forms of symbolic capital versus intellectual property rights per se. Includes an initial analysis of metrics and forms of institutional or corporate maneuvering to capture mediatized culture. Chapter Two of Works for...
The following is a somewhat subjective, non-exemplary, impressionistic sample -- with intentional gaps -- of positions taken across roughly fifty years (1967-2017) regarding visual and discursive agency in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, culminating in the field of theoretical inquiry in Law denoted Jurisprudence. It begins with the emer...
A summary of the various possible outcomes of submissions to open calls for research and teaching fellowships, publications, exhibitions, and residencies.
The "White Cube/Black Box" project, which nests within the "Lived Law" project (a study of the moral rights of authors in the age of cognitive capital), works from the premises of Louis Marin's post-structuralist opposition of "arcadian" white space and "arcanian" black space. This opposition -- presented in Marin's De la représentation (1994) -- c...
A "black" White Paper concerning academic publication ecosystems originating in a Fulbright Specialist Project at the University of Ljubljana:
“Knowledge, Spirit, Law: A Phenomenology of Scholarship” (multimedia lectures), University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia, in association w/ US Fulbright Commission, Fulbright Specialist Program, and Igo...
Diary of a Fulbright Specialist Program project held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in March-May 2015. The seminars associated with the project concerned academic publication ecosystems and the neoliberalization of the research university.
Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture is a series of essays delineating the gray areas and black zones in present-day cultural production. Part One is an implicit critique of neoliberal capitalism and its assault on the humanities through the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-empirical biases of academic and professional disciplines, whi...
Essay regarding Chris Marker’s portrait of Alexandre Medvedkine in the 1993 film, Le tombeau d’Alexandre/The Last Bolshevik. A version of this essay appeared in both eVolo 5 (2013) and Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image (2012).
Cultural ecology is no longer what it once was – that is to say, a strange amalgam of vernacular essences perpetrated in the rather forlorn 1970s and/or the insistent and incessant production of difference. Instead, cultural ecology invokes spectral civil war – arguably the very state of things today – and the return of “the dead” in the persistenc...
“Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002–2011 is a synoptic survey of the representational values given to art, architecture, and cultural production at the closing of the twentieth century and the opening of the twenty-first. Written primarily as a critique of what is suppressed in architecture and what is disclosed...
Art as “Night” proposes a type of a-historical dark knowledge (a-theology and theology, at once) crossing painting since Velázquez, but reaching back to the Renaissance, especially Titian and Caravaggio. As a form of formalism, this “night” is also closely allied with forms of intellection that come to reside in art as pure visual agency or materia...
