Academic interests
Simon Baier teaches the history, theory and criticism of modernism and contemporary art with research interest in the relation between aesthetics, politics, technology and the production of subjectivity. His courses include lectures and seminars on contemporary art and globalization; the art of the 1960s, curating and museology; the politics of the historical avant-gardes; postmodern dance, methods and historiography; and the relation of aesthetics and ecology within modernity.
Professor Baier taught at the University of Basel, Switzerland from 2017-2023 where he held the Laurenz-Professorship for Contemporary Art. He has published Feld und Signal. Aporien der Malerei bei ElʹLisickij und Kazimir Malevič, 1928 (2021) and co-edited Aestehtics of Equivalence. Art in Capitalism (2024). He is also a frequent contributor to Texte zur Kunst and Artforum International.
Baier is currently researching how the decentering of human subjectivity in current discourses on digital technology, ecology as well as neuroscience reformulates concepts of aesthetics experience as well as artistic practice, resulting in various proclamation of non-conscious forms of agency.
His study considers a range of artists from the early 20th century to the present, including Marc Chagall, Vladimir Tatlin, Piet Mondrian, Donald Judd, Cecilia Vicuña, Isa Genzken, Sylvie Fleury, Cady Noland, Cheyney Thompson, Ei Arakawa, Nora Schultz, Sam Lewitt, Gishlaine Leung and Pamela Rosenkranz.
Recently, Baier has been tracking the relationship between the concept of site, gender and the reconstitution of sculpture against the background of the current environmental crisis.
Teaching
- KUN4552 Curating the Contemporary
Selected recent publications:
Portraiture in an Imploding Field, in: Sylvie Fleury. Exhibition History 1991-2023, exh. cat., Kunst Museum Winterthur, Cologne 2023.
Liquidity. Aesthetics of an Economic Category, in: Simon Baier and Markus Klammer (eds.), Aesthetics of Equivalence. Art in Capitalism, Berlin 2024.
Flavin's Outside, in: Dan Flavin. Dedications in Light, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, Cologne 2024.