The Fall of Enthusiasm

Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield currently has work showing in Dispositions in Time and Space at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) Bucharest, four sections of his book ‘to come’ The Swerve of Freedom after Spinoza. He was selected for the first Mobile Biennale last summer in Oltenia, Romania. The Spinoza project has involved giving a 24-hour reading of The Ethics (also in the summer, at N Raum Gallery Berlin), and then a reading over 24 hours of the transcription of that reading and discussion (last month at KaaiTheaterStudios Brussels), to be followed by a reading over 24 hours of that reading and discussion (forthcoming in Vienna), and so on. Dronsfield has given performative readings of his work at many galleries, including Wilkinson Gallery London, Focal Point Gallery Southend-on-Sea, Extra City Kunsthal Antwerp, Stroom Den Haag, S.M.A.K. Ghent, Pallas Contemporary Projects Dublin, Sketch Gallery London, and at various other locations, including Cabaret Voltaire Zürich, L’institut francais London, and IKEA Ashton-under-Lyme; has had work included in a number of exhibitions, including la Biennale di Venezia 54 and art:gwanju 12; and has worked collaboratively with artists Ian Kiaer, Gregory Maass & Nayoungim, Benoït Maire, and Haroon Mirza.

Dronsfield is author of Cryptochromism (2007) and Materiality of Theory (2011), and many papers and essays in journals and books, including most recently ‘Filming deconstruction/deconstructing film’ in Callaghan & McQuillan (eds), Love in the Post: From Plato to Derrida (2014), ‘Materiality of theory’ in Elkins (ed), Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art (2014); and, forthcoming, ‘Immanent surface: art and the political demand for signification’ in Dejanovic (ed), Nancy and the Political, ‘“A strange image you speak of, he said”: cave painting and the allegory of the cave’ in Mircan & van Gerven Oei (eds), Allegory of the Cave Painting, ‘Philosophers enowning that there be no own (face)’, in Mattar (ed), You Must Make Your Death Public, ‘Democracy to Come’, §10, The Swerve of Freedom after Spinoza, in Sleigh-Johnson (ed), Thames Delta (all 2015).

Until recently Dronsfield was Reader in Theory and Philosophy of Art at the University of Reading, and before that Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art Research at the University of Southampton, and Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University. He sits on the Executive Committee of the Forum for European Philosophy at the London School of Economics, is a Permanent Fellow at the London Graduate School, and is a regular member of Faculty of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum Italy. He studied at Birkbeck College University of London, The British Film Institute, University of the Arts London, the Royal College of Art, the Jan van Eyck Academie, and the University of Warwick.

As well as having begun filming in Romania under Ceaușescu’s rule in the summer of 1988, and been present in Bucharest throughout the revolution in 1989, Dronsfield has made a number of return visits to Romania since. These include participating in Bucureşti 2000 with LAB architecture studio, London and Australia: see Bucureşti 2000, Bucureşti: Simetria, 1997, p168; and, together with Metahaven, organising the symposium Regimes of Representation/Representation of Regimes at MNAC in January 2007, with Nicholas Bourriaud, Dronsfield, Chantal Mouffe, and Marcus Steinweg. He also participated in Evicting the Ghost, the London Festival of Architecture 2008, at the Romanian Cultural Institute, London.