Colin Gardner
Professor
Integrative Studies/Critical Theory
Working at the intersection of film-philosophy, interdisciplinary media theory and Deleuze Studies, Colin Gardner earned his M.A. in History from St. John’s College, Cambridge and Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at UCLA before becoming Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches in the Departments of Art, Film & Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and the History of Art and Architecture.
Gardner has published two books in Manchester University Press’s “British Film Makers” series: a critical study of the blacklisted American film director, Joseph Losey (2004), and a monograph on the Czech-born British filmmaker and critic, Karel Reisz (2006). Related research has also appeared in the Franco-American film journal, Iris; the Parisian web-based theoretical journal, Critical Secret No. 6 (2001), Interdisciplinary Humanities (2002), Media History (2006), and Lo Sguardo dei Maestri's Joseph Losey: Senza Re, Senza Patria (Milan: Il Castoro, 2010).
He recently completed Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), a book length study of Samuel Beckett's experimental work for film and television and its connection to Gilles Deleuze's ontology of the image in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. An excerpt appeared in Continuum Books' Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text (2009). Gardner contributed the chapter on Roland Barthes to Felicity Colman's Film, Theory & Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (Acumen, 2009) and is currently collaborating with Dr. Colman on a Three Volume Encyclopedia of Film-Philosophy, due to be published in 2013.
Gardner is also the author of critical essays on Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (for Creation Books' Jack Nicholson: Movie Top Ten, edited by Mikita Brottman); Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky, in Trudy Bolter’s Le politique éclaté (Paris: L’Harmattan); as well a theoretical study of Diana Thater’s video installations in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (Erika Suderberg, ed.) for the University of Minnesota Press. His extensive list of catalog monographs include essays on Mike Kelley for the Whitney Museum of American Art, John Baldessari for the Graphische Sammlung, Albertina in Vienna, Wallace Berman for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Amsterdam, video artist Rachel Khedoori for the Kunsthalle in Basel and Mike Bouchet's film works for Sternberg Press in Berlin. Gardner has worked extensively with the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (CAF), including catalog essays for Sandow Birk's “Prisonation” series, Linda Stark's “Runaway Love” retrospective, and the 2001 group exhibition, “Diabolical Beauty,” co-curated with UCSB Professor, Jane Callister. Gardner was also co-curator and co-editor of Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion, an exhibition and accompanying book that was initiated by the Blaffer Gallery (the Art Museum of the University of Houston) in 2008 and subsequently traveled to the Grey Gallery at NYU and the Parrish Museum on Long Island.
Most recently Dr. Gardner has expanded his research into the area of Media Geography (he is currently adjunct faculty in Geography at San Diego State University). This has taken the form of conference papers as well as a chapter on Tomas Gutierrez Alea's seminal Cuban film, "Memories of Underdevelopment" in James Craine, Giorgio Curti and Stuart Aitken's collection, The Fight To Stay Put: Social Lessons Through Media Imaginaries of Urban Transformation and Change (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012).
Apart from regular attendance at Deleuze Studies and Film-Philosophy conferences throughout Europe, Gardner's public lectures include discussions of Stan Douglas’s video work at Cal Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Diana Thater’s “Knots + Surfaces” projected DVD installation at New York’s Dia Center for Arts’ Robert Lehman Lecture Series (published in 2006); “Decentered Spectatorship: Constructing a Hybrid Scopic Space in Recent Art Film and Video,” at Louisville’s Speed Art Museum; and analyses of cinema and the brain for Warren Neidich’s “The Mutated Observer: Neurological Structures, Perception and Visual Culture” at UC Riverside’s California Museum of Photography and his interdisciplinary panel on “Movies, Buildings and Brains” at UCLA.
