Michael Lent

Michael Lent (PhD) is a British-American artist, researcher, and theorist who specifically focuses on disappearance. He is the Head of Fine Art at Teesside University.

Lent’s research focuses on location and the intersection between space and place. He asserts that the way we approach and experience the world, in fact leads “to a spatial disappearance into place.” In both his research and visual practice, Lent attempts to court this dissolution as an attempt to “uncover and produce an imagining of space” as an investigation into the experience of site without “hastening its dissolution.” Through this he examines alterity as a method for avoiding this dissolution whilst preserving the unknown in space “as an act towards singularity."

His website is located at www.michaellent.co.uk

In his latest book, Courting Dissolution, Michael Lent asks what role art has in colonisation and subsequent dissolution. He proposes a practice informed by the fatal strategies and 'raw' phenomenology of Jean Baudrillard as a challenge to a system of disappearance. Focusing on the otherness of space to prevent its ultimate dissolution, Lent promotes a spatial practice of radical alterity. Examining ideas of disappearance put forth by Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, he utilises art as a means for investigating loss of potentiality and experience through the representation of space, shifting their ideas originally ascribed to objects into a new emphasis. This book ultimately attempts to break a cyclical system that causes everything to disappear into representation and equivalency.