Artist Fellow 2024-2025
Danny Hayward is a poet and critic. His books of criticism include Wound Building: Dispatches from the Latest Disasters in UK Poetry (2021) and Training Exercises (2024) and his most recent volume of poetry is Loading Terminal (2022). He runs the archive of out-of-print and inaccessible/DIY poetry Free Trials www.pxxtry.com, where much of his own work is freely available. For some years participated in the coordination of the events series “No Money”. Currently he is editing a posthumous collection of writings on Infrastructural Critique by his partner Marina Vishmidt.
Abstract
INFRASTRUCTURAL CRITIQUE
For the last three decades, art which engages its institutional settings has been theorised under the heading of ‘institutional critique’. In the work of artists within this tradition, such as Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson, the museum or gallery has become the fundamental object of the artwork itself, at once instrument, material and target of the artistic criticism of capitalist, patriarchal and racist society.
Marina Vishmidt's project of ‚Infrastructural Critique‘ updates and at the same time radicalises this tradition from the perspective of its material base. Starting from and affirming the vaunted reflexivity of institutional critique – the concept of the art institution thinking about itself via the artwork – while purging that approach of its residual moralism, this project ushers its predecessor out of the museum and into the streets, where collapsing social safety nets, organisations of essential workers and scenes of racial subjection traverse the art institution, bringing into crystal clear focus the relations that produce and reproduce it—its ‘conditions’. Danny Hayward is currently editing a volume of Marina Vishmidt's work on this theme.
Lateste Publications
Training Exercises, Brighton: Both are Worse, 2024.
Loading Terminal, London: 87 Press, 2022.
Wound Building: Dispatches from the Latest Disasters in UK Poetry, [Goleta, California]; Earth, Milky Way : Punctum Books, 2021.