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.

Michael Lent (PhD) is an artist, researcher, and academic working with visual and textual media. He investigates non-productive expenditure in art and culture and specifically how these ideas relate to space. He is Head of Fine Art at the University of Teesside.