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About me: I'm currently teaching and doing my PhD in 'Visual Culture' at Middlesex University. I originally trained (to MA level) in Fine Art, but over the years became more and more fascinated by the 'theoretical' discourses around art practice, so this is what I do now. I'm centrally interested in contemporary art and its role within a larger cultural sphere; I see the task of my work as attempting to understand the way that contemporary art practices have their place both within this broader sphere of 'visual culture' - in relation to television, film, advertising, the media, and so on - and also within the various intersecting histories of this visual culture.
contact details:
email - lukewhite@mac.com
address:
home:
Flat 49, Rowe House,
Chatham Place
Hackney
London
E9 6LX |
work:
Visual Culture,
Middlesex University,
Cat Hill,
Barnet,
Herts.
EN4 8HT |
current work: I'm currently working on a PhD dissertation which - to put it in a nutshell - attempts to track the strange 'after echoes', both in the high art and broader visual culture of the present day, of the idea of 'the sublime' that grew up in the eighteenth century. The work focuses on Damien Hirst as a contemporary artist who straddles the borderlines between fine art and popular culture. As an iconic presence not just in the art world but in the media too, he may be highly symptomatic of our times.
The word 'sublime' is now either a rather vague term for excellence, or an obscure philosophical category, but in the eighteenth century it was one of the central words which were used to articulate the experience of art and nature; in fact it has often been understood by academics as having been central to major changes in the ways that art was made and nature was appreciated at this time. My hypothesis is that these changes which were ushered in through the notion of the sublime are still a major shaping-force in our own culture. Furthermore, although the notion of the 'sublime', as an evaluative term, has generally been used to promote the superiority of high art over commercialised culture (high art is 'sublime', popular culture merely ridiculous), the 'legacy' of the notion of the sublime is felt today as much in low as in high culture. Broadly speaking, my dissertation attempts to trace the exchanges between the sublimes of high and low culture from the eighteenth century to the present.
(For more detailed information on this project, click here)
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