Dr Paul Pieroni
I'm a Glasgow based art historian and curator. I hold a PhD in art history from Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), and an MA degree in Modern European Philosophy from the CRMEP, London.
My current research is concerned with the relationship between critical theory and artistic abstraction — in particular, how formal tendencies in American late-modernist and postmodernist abstraction, from Minimalism to Neo-Geo, might be understood in political-economic terms, as mediations of social contradictions arising from the breakdown of Fordism and the emergence of post-Fordism at the end of the 20th century.
Other research interests include (in no particular order):
- The possibilities and aporias of postmodernist art
- Pastiche, historicism and non-contemporaneity in art
- Self-organised and underground art cultures since the 1960s
- Psychedelic art, counter-culture and 'acid communism'
- Art and radical politics
- British photo-conceptualism (in particular the work of Jo Spence and Terry Dennett)
- The art of anti-psychiatry
- Intersections between art, urbanism and the spatial recomposition of cities
- Art, rent and land(scape)
- Art and cultural policy in Glasgow
- Downtown art and culture in New York (1960 – 1990)
- Artistic mediations of racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition
- Modernist painting and the work of Clement Greenberg
- Fredric Jameson's cultural theory
- Western Marxist hermeneutics
- Real abstraction vs artistic abstraction
- Lyotard and Baudrillard
- The aesthetics of Ai slop
- Questions of the curatorial
I completed my PhD at ECA under the supervision of Dr Tamara Trodd and Dr Kamini Vellodi in 2023. Fully funded by an ECA PhD Scholarship, my research developed a new framework for interpreting Peter Halley’s postmodernist 'Neo-geo' paintings of the 1980s. Intervening in a range of debates, I argued that Halley’s construction of new chains of meaning between past abstract art and a range of social forms and urban textures particular to New York City demonstrated how postmodernist strategies, such as pastiche and double-coding, could function as vehicles for historical orientation during a historical moment otherwise marked by disorientating economic, social, and cultural change.
I'm now (slowly) working on a new book project. Titled Zero Tolerance: Abstraction and Order in Revanchist New York, this book will explore the relationship between neoconservative urban policies relating to spatial regulation in New York c.1970-1995 and various forms of artistic abstraction emerging from the city at this time.
In addition to my academic work, I have held senior curatorial positions at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; Tramway, Glasgow; and Space Studios, London. I was also co-curator of the 2015 Turner Prize, Glasgow. I continue to curate today on a freelance basis.
In terms of criticism, I have published numerous articles and reviews in magazines such as Frieze, Flash Art, Art Review, and Art and America, and I have written catalogue essays for exhibitions by Peter Halley, Bonnie Camplin, Nicole Wermers, and Jo Spence.
Beyond my academic and curatorial work, I'm involved in housing activism in Glasgow, serving as a National Campaigns Delegate for Living Rent, Scotland's tenants and community union.