John Muse

Biography

John Muse is currently a visiting Assistant Professor of Fine Arts and was the 2007-2009 Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Hurford Humanities Center. In 2006 he received a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from U.C. Berkeley. His dissertation, The Rhetorical Afterlife of Photographic Evidence, co-chaired by Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman, analyzes Roland Barthes' numerous writings on photography, an artwork by Roni Horn entitled Another Water (the River Thames, for Example), and an essay by Avital Ronell on the videotaped beating of Rodney King, “TraumaTV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Muse shows how these works use photographs to promulgate rather than reduce a crisis of the evident. His single-channel videotapes and multi-media installations have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. In 2003 New Langton Arts in San Francisco staged a mid-career retrospective of the installation works that he and frequent collaborator Jeanne C. Finley have created.  In 2001 Muse and Finley received a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship for their experimental documentary project, Age of Consent. In 1999 they received a Creative Capital Foundation Award. In 1995 they received Artist in Residence fellowships from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco represents his installation works, and the Video Data Bank distributes his single-channel works.

Education

A.B., Cornell University

M.F.A., San Francisco Art Institute

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

Research

His research interests include photography, film, and other strata of contemporary art. He works within the traditions of rhetorical theory and continental philosophy, concentrating on semiotics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis.

Courses: Fall 2009, Haverford

Courses: Spring 2010, Haverford