Michael Corris

Michael Corris is an artist and writer on art. His earliest works were produced while living and working in New York as a participant in the Conceptual Art collective Art & Language (1972-1976). During the decade of the 1970s Corris was a contributor to the journal Art-Language and one of the founding editors of The Fox (1975) and Red-Herring (1976). In the artistic milieu of New York, Corris developed an essayistic practice where work was created collaboratively and distributed through various self-managed, artist-run publications.

Over the course of his career, Corris' work has been guided by the idea of versatility — a strategy whereby the artist engages critically with the circumstances of their life and the conditions of artistic practice without the constraints of conventional disciplinary boundaries and methodologies.

A hallmark of this sort of distributed practice in art is the artist's proliferation of mediums and the artist's adoption of multiple cultural roles. Now a commonplace of contemporary art practice, it seems unexceptional for an artist to write in the morning, organize exhibitions at noon, and invent community projects or manage an art gallery in the evening. All such activities and more are routinely considered to be components of a holistic profile of art practice. Yet not every instance of versatility demonstrates critical intent or is based on a principled desire to disaffirm consensus; each case deserves scrutiny and evaluation on its merits.

The critical analysis of the conditions of production and dissemination of art continues to inform Corris' work, which examines, comments on, and often intervenes in the situation of art as artistic practice continues to shuttle between studio, showroom, and public space. Some would call this the dynamic world of the "expanded field" gone mad, with its rich mix of theoretical discourses, improvised social structures, and artistic strategies seeking maintain a degree of control over the fruits of their labors.

The main areas of Corris' work as a critical and historian of art include postwar American art, Conceptual Art, participatory and activist art, the historical patterns and consequences of technological change in art and design, digital and hybrid media, the fraught question of interdisciplinary research and practice in art, and the contemporary behemoths of art education and the art market. The work generated by these interests often sprints back and forth across time, illuminating crucial aspects of our contemporary context by offering new interpretations for venerable historical narratives.

While Corris' work frequently addresses art and artists directly — for instance, speaking to the sustainability and independence of communities of artists within and outside major urban centers — the affordance to other communities of such specific models of cultural autonomy is increasingly an area of concern and promises to become the basis for future projects.

As a visual artist, Corris has exhibited in North America, Europe, and Australia; their artwork and artist book-works are held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), The Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, CA), Le Consortium Museum of Contemporary Art (Dijon, France), Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), Tate Gallery (London, UK), Staatsgaleri (Stuttgart, Germany), Château Monsoreaux Museum of Contemporary Art (Monsoreaux, France), the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX), and Le Musée des Beaux-Arts (La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland).

Corris has published widely on contemporary art in journals and magazines such as Art Monthly, Artforum, Art in America, Art History, Art Journal, and Art+Text. His writings on art have been published in collections including Alex Alberro & Blake Stimson (eds), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (MIT Press, 1999), Terry R Myers (ed.), Painting (Documents of Contemporary Art) (MIT Press and Whitechapel, London, 2011), and Leaving Skull City (Les Presses du Réel, 2016).

Recent monographs and chapters in edited publications include Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Ad Reinhardt (Reaktion Books, London, 2008), Art, Word & Image: 2,000 Years of Textual/Visual Interaction (Reaktion Books, London, 2010) (with John Dixon Hunt and David Lomas), “From Abstract Expressionism to Conceptual Art: A Survey of New York Art, 1940-1970”, in Art & Visual Culture: 1850-2010: Modernity to Globalization (eds. Steve Edwards and Paul Wood) (TatePublishing, London, 2012), The Dallas Pavilion (Free Museum of Dallas Press, 2013) (with Jaspar Joseph-Lester), “‘My Name is David and I Will Be Your War Artist for the Day’: David Cotterrell Shoots a Video”, in Joanna Bourke, ed., War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict (Reaktion Books, London, 2017), “Escape from Flatland: David Diao's Handmade Visualization of Information", in Philip Tinari, ed., David Diao: Works 1969-2015 (Prestel, 2018), and contributions to two volumes devoted to the work of David Diao, edited by Stéphane Mroczkowski and Alexandre Pignol, and published by Mare et Martin, Paris.

Corris is series editor for Art Since the 1980s, published by Reaktion Books.