Profile

Biography

BA (London), MA (Essex), PhD (London)

Jo Applin is lecturer in modern and contemporary art. Her research focuses on American art since 1950. She also has research interests in British and European art of the 1960s and contemporary international art, with a particular interest in thinking about art and its histories in relation to questions of subjectivity, gender and materiality. 

Research

Overview

Jo came to York from UCL, where she was Henry Moore Post-Doctoral Fellow (2004-2005). In recent years she has also been a Visiting Scholar in the School of Visual Arts at the University of North Texas (2007) and a Research Associate at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (2009).

Current projects

Jo is currently completing a book Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America (Yale University Press, 2012), which focuses on work by artists including Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, H.C. Westermann, and Bruce Nauman.

Jo is also writing a book on Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s 1965 Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field (Afterall/MIT Press, 2013).  She recently contributed an essay on Kusama’s ‘world-building’ to the exhibition catalogue for a major retrospective of Kusama’s work which opens at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, in 2011, before traveling to the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Tate Modern, London and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 2012.

Jo has recently co-edited a special issue of Art Journal on obsolescence and bricolage, and a themed issue of Tate Papers, titled ‘On Drawing’. She has an article forthcoming in Art History (2011) on Claes Oldenburg’s Proposed Monuments for New York and London and the figure of the tourist. An essay titled ‘When Attitudes Became Formless: Art and Antagonism in the Sixties’ will be published in David Peters Corbett and Dana Arnold (eds) A Companion to British Art 1600-Present (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012).

In addition, Jo has recently begun a new book project on women artists in the 1950s and 1960s titled Not Working. As part of this project she is researching Lee Lozano’s tool drawings and the problem of labour. An essay on Lozano was published in 2010 in the catalogue accompanying the major Lozano retrospective at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In 2010 Jo was awarded a year-long Anniversary Lectureship from the University of York to work on this project.  

Research group(s)

• Sculpture Studies
  
• British Art
• Modern and Contemporary Cluster

Supervision

In Progress

• Catherine Spencer, 'The (Object) Lessons of Anthropology for Artists in Britain and America, 1950-70'. (AHRC funded) 
  

Publications

Selected publications

Edited Collections

• ‘On Drawing’, Jo Applin, Jennifer Mundy and Michael White (eds) Tate Papers, 14 (Autumn 2010)
  
• ‘Assemblage, Bricolage and the Obsolete’, Jo Applin, Anna Dezeuze and Julia Kelly (eds) Art Journal, 67:1 (Spring 2008)
  

Articles

• ‘Surviving Reality: Lee Bontecou’s Worldscapes’, Tate Papers, 14 (Autumn 2010)
  
• ‘Death Ships’, parallax, 15:1 (January-March 2009)
• ‘There's a Sculpture on My Shoulder: Bruce McLean and the Anxiety of Influence’, Sculpture Journal, 17:2 (Winter 2008). To be reprinted in Anglo-American Exchange in Post-War Sculpture (Los Angeles: Getty Publishing, 2011)
• ‘Bric-a-Brac: The Everyday Work of Tom Friedman’, Art Journal, 67:1 (Spring 2008)
• ‘Alberto Burri and Niki de Saint-Phalle: Relief Sculpture and Violence in the Sixties’, Source: Notes in the History of Art, 27:2 (Winter 2008)
• ‘This threatening, and possibly functioning object: Lee Bontecou and the Sculptural Void’, Art History, 29:3 (June 2006)
• ‘Small-Scale Boxes: Lucas Samaras and Eva Hesse’, Object, 4 (2002)

Chapters in Books

• ‘Productive Fictions: Eva Löfdahl’, in Ann-Sofi Noring (ed) Eva Löfdahl (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 2011)
  
• ‘I’m Here but Nothing: Yayoi Kusama’s Environments’, in Frances Morris (ed) Yayoi Kusama (London: Tate Publishing, 2011)
  
• ‘Looking Back: Prints in the Lurie Collection’ in Angus Trumble and Eleanor Hughes (eds) The Lurie Collection: British Modern Art at the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)
  
• ‘Lozano's Labor’ in Iris Müller-Westermann (ed), Lee Lozano (Stockholm: Moderna Museet/Hatje Cantz, 2010)
  
• ‘Resisting Infinity’ in Yayoi Kusama (London: Victoria Miro Gallery, 2008)
  
• ‘Towards a Haunted Art History?’ in Jennifer Fisher (ed) Technologies of Intuition (Toronto: YYZ Books, 2006)
  
• ‘The Silent Stuff of Sculpture’ in Neat Stuff: Leo Fitzmaurice (Colchester: Firstsite and the Arts Council, 2005)
  

 Reviews and Shorter Pieces

• ‘The Disappearance of Objects’, Sculpture Journal (2011)
  
• ‘Since 1950: Art and its Criticism’, Modernism / Modernity, 17:3 (September 2010)
  
• ‘Discrepancies: Expo ‘67’, Scholar’s Choice, Canadian Centre for Architecture (2010)
  
• ‘Katy Moran: Paintings’, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Map, 17 (Spring 2009)
  
• ‘Tom Friedman: Monsters and Stuff’, The Art Book, 16: 2 (May 2009)
  
• ‘The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age’, The Art Book, 16: 2 (May 2009)
  
• ‘Gallery in Focus: mima’, The Art Book, 16:2 (August 2009)
  
• ‘You are the measure: Gordon Matta Clark’ The Art Book, 15: 3 (August 2008)
  
• ‘Modern Sculpture Reader’, The Art Book, 15: 1 (February 2008)
  
• ‘Eva Hesse: Sculpture’ and ‘Eva Hesse: Drawing’, The Art Book, 14: 4 (November 2007)
  
• ‘Carl Andre, Cuts: Texts 1959-2004’, The Art Book, 13: 2 (May 2006)
  
• ‘All at Sea’, Oxford Art Journal, 29:3 (October 2006)
  
• ‘Dan Flavin: A Retrospective’, The Art Book, 12: 3 (August 2005).
  
• ‘A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1965’, The Art Book, 12: 2 (May 2005)
  
• ‘With Hidden Noise: Sculpture, Video, Ventriloquism’, The Art Book, 12:1 (February 2005)
  
• ‘Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties’, Object, 5 (2002)

Teaching

Undergraduate

• The Modernist Object
  
• Sculpture in the Twentieth Century
  
• Sexuality and Subjectivity in Art Since 1960
  
• Modernism
  
• Contemporary art: practice and debate
  

Postgraduate

• Installation/Participation
  
• Encountering Modernism
  

External activities

Invited talks and conferences

Jo has presented invited lectures at UCL (2011), Princeton University (2010), Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (2010), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010), University of Sussex (2010), the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2009), The Getty Center, Los Angeles (2008), McGill University (2008), University of California, Berkeley (2007), Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2007), University of North Texas (2007), University of Nottingham (2006), The Courtauld Institute, London (2007), Essex University (2006), Slade School of Fine Art, London (2003).

She also regularly presents papers and convenes panels at the annual meetings of the Association of Art Historians (AAH) and the College Art Association (CAA). Jo currently serves on the editorial board of Tate Papers and is on the advisory board of Object and Immediations.