Introducing the FUS Faculty: Gabriel Gee

Professor, Art History and Visual Communication

Ph.D. Université Paris X
M.A. Université Paris X
B.A. Université Paris X

Office: Lowerre Academic Center, Office 15
Phone: +41 91 986 36 51
Email: ggee@fus.edu

Gabriel N. Gee holds a PhD in contemporary art history from the Université Paris 10 Nanterre. His doctoral research focused on aesthetics and politics in the North of England from the 1980s onwards. His book Art in the North of England. 1979-2008 was published by Ashgate (now Routledge) in 2017. He joined Franklin in 2011, where he teaches contemporary art history and theory. His research interests include the arts of port cities, interconnected global histories, and contemporary artistic research (member of the Swiss Artistic Research Network). He recently edited with Caroline Wiedmer a volume on Maritime Poetics. From Coast to Hinterland (Transcript 2021). He is the initiator and co-founder of the interdisciplinary study group TETI, (Textures and Experiences of Trans-Industriality), active through workshops, exhibitions, culinary events, and through a press, which recently published Mobile Soils a collection of essays looking at territorial transformations.

2024-2025 Courses

AHT 103	Introduction to Art History and Visual Culture II: High Renaissance to Contemporary Art	FALL 2024
The course is the sequel to AHT 102 and offers an introduction to the history of art and visual culture from the High Renaissance to the present day. It studies early modern painting, sculpture, architecture, and prints within their historical, social, and cultural contexts, as well as photography and new media in the modern and contemporary world.
AHT 199	Land ho! Oceanic Encounters and the Planetary Imagination	FALL 2024
This course takes as a starting point the acceleration of global encounters initiated by the increasing maritime traffic of the early modern age, reaching out to our present early 21st century interconnected societies. Dramatic and decisive increases in cultural, economic, and ecological exchanges occurred through the opening of oceanic routes in the 16th century that have now become industrialised motorways of material and social transformations. Throughout visual artists engaged from varied perspectives with the oceanic expanse, a place both fearsome and inspiring, and to the unforeseen encounters it brought about to ships navigating its once vast and mysterious spaces. In the past decades, contemporary artistic practices have additionally addressed the socio-political, economic and environmental pressure that has accompanied the process of domestication of oceans, and their now hyper-connected shores. Students will get to explore a range of historical and contemporary artistic practices that reflect upon such oceanic crossroads, and the implications they have had, and have, on the formation of our current planetary imagination. Like all First Year Seminars, this course will cultivate the fundamental critical and analytical skills necessary to succeed at university.
AHT 208T	Art now! (Berlin)	FALL 2024
This course offers an introduction to the history of contemporary art from 1960 to the present, paying particular attention to artistic developments in increasingly global and interconnected cultures at the turn of the 21st century. Our topics include the diversification of practices, the dematerialization of art, institutional critique and feminist critique, environmental and relational aesthetics, and new media arts in the 21st century. The course looks at the frame of production and reception of artworks, from the studio to the museum and gallery, from the artists to the art critic and the public. A particular attention will be put on the writings of artists and critics, as well as the mediation of artistic practices. In this vein, students are encouraged to develop documentary and critical discourses in the form of audio and video formats, in dialogue with the travel component of the course, which brings students in direct contact with artworks, artists, and curators in Germany. Visits to contemporary Art museums, studios and galleries are scheduled as part of the travel component of this course.
AHT 103	Introduction to Art History and Visual Culture II: High Renaissance to Contemporary Art	SPRING 2025
The course is the sequel to AHT 102 and offers an introduction to the history of art and visual culture from the High Renaissance to the present day. It studies early modern painting, sculpture, architecture, and prints within their historical, social, and cultural contexts, as well as photography and new media in the modern and contemporary world.
AHT 226T	Gardens and Art (Naples)	SPRING 2025
Gardens condense world views that balance environmental and human agency reflective of a given age and society. Some were designed to reflect an imperious order, others to display a playful mindfulness, when some chose to embrace the monstruous, the sublime, and the wasteland. A certain art is required to organize and manage the actors of enclosed gardens: plants, flowers, trees, but also rocks, water, wind, in a sculptural design that might involve sight, smell, touch, sound, and sometimes taste. On the one hand, students are introduced to a history of garden design, paying particular attention to cosmological visions and social contexts through case studies in Europe, Asia and Africa. In parallel, the course presents a range of contemporary artistic interventions with garden spaces and histories, in an age of increasing environmental imbalance and planetary awareness, in which the decision to garden can offer a path to nurture an active engagement with the present. The course includes a travel component to Naples.
AHT 334W	Artists in Film	SPRING 2025
This course looks at the representation of artists’ lives and artistic practices in film. Biopics explore a character’s personal journey, depicting a biographical tableau of a lifetime’s tribulation and achievements. The figure of the artist has long held a fascination for society. Misunderstood, decadent, melancholic, single-minded against the odds, and above all prophetic and visionary, the romantic potential of artists offered dramatic material to film directors and the film industries alike. At the same time, the cinematic medium provides a remarkable platform from which to enter the artist’ personal studio, and to gain an insight into the complex mechanisms of artistic creation. This course will explore both facets of artists’ biopics, engaging with the representation in film of the lives of artists such as Caravaggio, Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the works of directors such as Maurice Pialat, Dereck Jarman and Peter Greenaway. (This writing-intensive course counts towards the Academic Writing requirements.)

Publications:

Books:

Gee G. N & Wiedmer C. eds., Maritime Poetics: from coast to hinterland, Transcript Verlag, 2021.

Franchette, A.L., Jose Cacceres & Gee G.N, eds, Mobile Soils, Zurich: Teti Press, 2021

Gee G.N & Vogelaar A. eds, Changing representations of nature and the city: the 1960s -1970s and their legacies, London, New York: Routledge, 2018

Gee G.N., Art in the North of England. 1979-2008, London, New York, Routledge: an Ashgate book, 2017.

Book chapters:

Gee G.N, “Art in former military sites: spectres of geopolitics in the South China Sea”, in Edward Boyle & Steven Irving, eds., Heritage, contested sites, and border of memory in the Asia Pacific, Brill 2023.

Gee G.N. “The late 20th century marine: ‘forgotten spaces’ and trans-industrial visions”, in Terms, Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art, Beijing, 2021.

Gee G.N & Wiedmer C., “Introduction: Maritime introspections”, in Gee G. N & Wiedmer C. eds., Maritime Poetics: from coast to hinterland, Transcript Verlag, 2021.

Gee G.N, “Market Stall: The Representation of Trade in European Maritime Museums”, in Gee G. N & Wiedmer C. eds., Maritime Poetics: from coast to hinterland, Transcript Verlag, 2021.

Gee G.N. “Les navires de croisière entre narcissisime et passages de civilisations – 1880 - 1970”, in Christine Peltre, ed. Genèse de la croisière moderne. Les formes d’une expérience, entre loisir et découverte (1830-1970), Mare e Martin, 2020.

Gee G.N. “Beyond Narcissus: The metamorphosis of port cities in the 20th century”, in Gee G.N & Vogelaar A. eds, Changing representations of nature and the city: the 1960s -1970s and their legacies, Routledge, 2018

Gee G.N. “From stone to flesh: the deconstruction and reconstruction of the British monument” in Monument et modernité dans l’art et la littérature britanniques et américains, Marc Porée & Christine Savinel, eds, Paris, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2015.

Gee G.N, “Markers, borders, crossings: on the representation of a divided space in Northern Ireland”, in Claire Dubois & Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding (eds), The foreigness of foreigners: cultural representations of the Other in the British Isles (17th- 20th centuries), Cambridge Scholar, 2015

Gee. G.N. “Learning from the post-industrial transition in Northern England: alternative developments in the visual arts (1979-2008),” in Cultural Economies in Post-Industrial cities: Creating a (different) Scene, ed. Myrna Breitbart, Farnham, Ashgate, 2013.

Gee, G.N. “Art without Commerce in the North of England”, in Art and Commerce in the United Kingdom, Charlotte Gould & Sophie Mesplède (eds), Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.

Selected Articles:

Gee G.N, “Fragments: all so near”, in Terms of engagement, ThierryDufrêne & Peter Schneemann, eds., CIHA Journal n.1 (2023)

"Fragment. All to nah: patterns of fragments", in Terms of Engagement, CIHA Journal of Art History, n.1 (2023)

Mobile Soils, Anne-Laure Franchette, Gabriel N. Gee & Jose Caceres Mardones, eds., Zurich: TETI Press, 2021

Maritime Poetics. From Coast to Hinterland, Gabriel N.Gee & Caroline Wiedmer, eds., Transcript Verlag 2021

Gee G.N, “Painting within itself: the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition”, Journal of contemporary painting Issue 2, Vol.4, October 2018, pp.345-61

Gee G.N, “The metamorphosis of Cain: aesthetic in the trans-industrial city at the turn of the twenty-first century”, Visual Resources, Vol..4 October 2014

Gee G.N, “The catalogues of the Orchard Gallery: a contribution to critical and historical discourses in Northern Ireland, 1978-2003”, Journal of art historiography, n.9, 2013

Gee.G.N. “Malédiction et renaissance : lectures imagées de la ville du nord,” in Textimages, revue du dialogue texte-image, Varia 3, hiver 2013

Gee, G.N, “The representation of the northern city in the photography of John Davies (1981-2003)”, Visual Culture in Britain, Volume 11, Issue 2, December 2010.

Gee, G.N, “Valeurs instrumentales et valeurs de résistance dans l’art du Nord de l’Angleterre, 1979-2008” in Marges, “Valeurs de l’art”, Presses de l’université Paris VIII, n. 11, October 2010, pp. 76-80.

Gee G.N. “Négocier les ‘Troubles’, la Orchard Gallery à Derry, 1978-2003” in Textuels, revue Lettres, arts, cinéma, Presses de l’université Paris VII, September 2010.