Steve Dutton

United Kingdom °1961
affiliation: Bath Spa University UK. Bath School of Art
en

Steve Dutton is Professor of Fine Art at Bath Spa University in the UK and is Director of the Art Research Centre.  His past academic roles include Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University for 5 years, Professor in Creative Practice at Coventry University for 4 years ( where he founded and developed Lanchester Gallery Projects along with Sadie Kerr ) and  Professor in Contemporary Art Practice at the University of Lincoln for 5 years. He is an artist with an international profile who works on both collaborative and individual projects. Much of his work has been in collaborations but he is currently producing a new body of solo work which is characterised by a play with image/ text boundaries. Individual and collaborative projects have been exhibited throughout the UK and internationally including The Stag and Hound at PSL in Leeds for which Dutton and Swindells were nominated for the prestigious Northern Art Prize. His most recent work is an ongoing collaboration with Neil Webb and Bend in the River entitled ‘end of ends’ ( see www.endofends.co.uk ) . He also co-curated a major project entitled ‘Possession ( 1 )’ with Brian Curtin of Bangkok University for Bangkok Arts and Culture Centre ( BACC ) which opened in March 2013.  Steve is increasingly writing and delivering papers on the subject of ‘Artists’ institutes and the Institutes of Art’,  drawing on complexities within his own practice and the practice of a growing body of artists ( as opposed to academics and managers ) who seek to rethink the nature of the art educational institution as a process of unfolding ‘epistemic events’ rather than a sequence of ‘progressive’ tiers of knowledge.  This relationship to non-teleological space/time is central to his work both as an artist and as an academic.

research

research expositions

  • An Obstract for Midpointness (2018) author(s): Andrew Bracey, Steve Dutton published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
    Our aim here is to both provide a response to the Conference ‘Please Specify!’ and to find an alternate way of ensuring that the intrinsic generative nature of research and art is kept active, akin to the mobius strip-like path of both conclusions, and openings. “Midpointness” is a generative project. It is dismantled and reconstructed through the gradual accretion of surrounding connections, associations and influences of the curators, artists, students and other audiences who contribute to it. These are in the form of artworks, public events, texts, artefacts, performances or other interventions. 'An Obstract for Midpointness' (Obstract)is a piece of artistic research constructed before, during and after, "PLEASE SPECIFY!", The SAR Annual Conference 2017. 'Obstract' is as an element of the ongoing project “Midpointness” that seeks to invite us to consider the ‘work’ of art as art’s labour or task. We seek to explore the dynamics of inner/outer dialogues of the process of artistic work, opening up other potentials that an artist researcher might hope for when he/she explores the generative potential of the work of artistic research directly within and in response to a conference about artistic research. At the centre is spoken text that is a play on the tradition of the conference ‘abstract.’ The abstract is the site of an outline of intention, yet here we couple it with an ‘obstruction’ as a means of aggravating and diverting the attempt at a conclusion towards which an abstract, and indeed a formal presentation, might be aimed. “Obstract” suggests, by a process of intervention that the ‘centre’ (the work and/or the text) and its surrounding universe are completely indivisible. As such the principle of ‘footnotes’ filter through to the whole spoken text; the footnotes being analogous to the surrounding constellations within which the ‘centre’ of the work sits, swapping footnotes for centre and vice versa. The footnotes refer to points both real and imagined in the past, present and future.
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