Johnny Golding is Professor of Philosophy & Fine Art, and Senior Tutor: Research at the Royal College of Art, London, UK. She leads the PHD Research Group: Entanglement, an intensive PHD environment including 21 PHD researchers; co-led with artist Emma Talbot, and in the previous year, with artist Aura Satz. From 2012-16, Johnny was Director of the Centre for Fine Art Research at Birmingham School of Art, and from 2009-2012 Director of the Institute for the Converging Arts and Sciences at the University of Greenwich and Head of Theory at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht.. Most recently she was honoured by the Royal Academy Schools as their Philosopher in Residence.
Personal life and work
Johnny Golding holds the Chair in Philosophy and Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London England, UK. Golding's work situates post-Newtonian analytics, new materialisms and poetics as ‘radical matter’, a practice-led intellectual encounter with contemporary philosophy, art and the wild sciences. Latest works include Entanglement: The Opera an opera in homage to Kurt Weill's anti-fascist ‘White Cheese’, RCA, Jan 2019; Of The Thick and the Raw: Cannibalising the 21st Century. Texts and poetic-philosophic installations most recently exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Vienna, Bogotá and Berlin. Resituating the multiversal as a particular form of dimensional and superpositional entanglement, Golding's epistemological moves foreground erotic praxis, meta-mathematics, modern physics and the logics of sense. Forthcoming: Golding, Reinhart, Paganellli and Coster. Data Loam-Sometimes Hard, Usually Soft ,. Born in New York, Golding lived in Toronto where she completed her PHD in political philosophy at the University of Toronto, concurrently studying under the tutelage of Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau, and from 1980-84 under the guidance of Raymond Williams at Cambridge University. She was the founding President of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the first LGBT theatre company in Canada, whose humble start began in local community centres and, as importantly, local porn houses, with the first show, Drag Queens in Outer Space helped shape the political agenda of gay/lesbian politics for several generations. of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre from 1983 to 1995. She was a regular contributor to The Body Politic, a monthly magazine that played a key role in the LGBT community in Canada. In 1994 Johnny moved to Soho, London. She has written and edited several books including Gramsci's Democratic Theory, The Eight Technologies of Otherness, and On the Verge of Photography. She produces public lectures presented in the form of sound/image installations, often in complete darkness. Head of theory at the experimental post-academic institute, the Jan van Eyck from 1998-2003, working with artist Steve McQueen, art historian Norman Bryson and philosopher-artist Sarat Marharaj.
