Contributor

Tom McGlynn

Tom McGlynn is an artist, writer, independent curator and lecturer based in the NYC area. His work is represented in many national and international collections including the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian. He currently a contributing writer to The Brooklyn Rail and founding director of Beautiful Fields, a curatorial entity dedicated to socially engaged practices. Mr. McGlynn has taught as an Assistant Professor at Castleton State College, Vermont, and has previously been a Visiting Artist Lecturer at the Mason Gross School of Fine Arts at Rutgers University, NJ. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Parsons/The New School in New York City and at The New Centre for Theory and Practice.

McGlynn’s projects take into account the role of the artist in the expanded field of interdisciplinary practice to include socially oriented sculptural installation, abstract painting derived from social semiotics, and photography that blurs the line between quotidian documentation and generic repetition.

Articles

Toward a Generic Aesthetics: A Non-Philosophy of Art

In this article I initially diagram a genealogy of the generic in order to reconsider long-held philosophical suppositions of difference and similarity, representation and abstraction and immanence and transcendence, as set forth in contemporary continental philosophy by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Deleuze. Next I discuss what exactly is Laruelle’s position in relation to these dialectics of difference and what constitutes his radical intentions in his Non-Philosophy and Non-Standard Aesthetics? Finally, I develop and apply possible categories of the generic through specific examples in historical and contemporary art. By ending in this way, with discrete examples of an underdetermined aesthetics, I hope to derive possible working proofs of the generic even beyond Laruelle’s theories of The Generic Orientation of Non-Standard Aesthetics.