Professor David Houston Jones

Prof David Houston Jones

I came to Exeter in 2005, having taught previously at the universities of Bristol, Oxford and Paris VIII Vincennes-St. Denis. My main research interests lie in Art History and Visual Culture, in particular photography, installation art and new media.

My recent book Visual Culture and the Forensic (2022) explores the ways in which forensic activity, such as crime scene investigation, spills over into the broader cultural sphere. A number of contemporary artists and photographers respond to forensic evidence, including crime scene photography, and to some of the assumptions underpinning its consumption. Their work asks how we look, and in whose name, foregrounding and scrutinising the enduring presence of voyeurism in visual media and instituting new forms of ethical engagement. Such work responds to the object-oriented culture associated with the forensic and offers a reassessment of the relationship of human voice and material evidence. It displays an enduring debt to the discursive model of testimony which has so far been insufficiently recognised, and which forms the basis for a new ethical understanding of the forensic. The book brings this methodology to bear upon a strand of contemporary visual activity that has the power to significantly redefine our understandings of the production, analysis and deployment of evidence. Artists examined include Forensic Architecture, Simon Norfolk, Melanie Pullen, Angela Strassheim, John Gerrard, Julian Charrière, Trevor Paglen, Laura Poitras and Sophie Ristelhueber.

My collaborators include Dr Kathryn Smith (chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Stellenbosch University). Kathryn is an interdisciplinary visual artist, curator and forensic imaging specialist. Her forensic and curatorial work come together as dual expressions of critical care for bodies, infrastructures and non-human things, directed at mutual visibility and legibility, and applies her skills to archival, forensic, humanitarian, and historical contexts.

Much of my research is concerned with art and evidence, in particular as they are shaped by testimony, the archive and the medical humanities.

My book Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism (2016) is concerned with the many installation art projects which respond to the archive. Some artists explicitly depict the archive (Beckett, Boltanski, Walid Raad), while others are preoccupied with archival materials and practices (Baka, Godard, Kolbowski, Egoyan). Work like this is part of the pervasive contemporary nostalgia for ‘archival’ media such as analogue photographs and film, a tendency I analyse by reference to five types of archival practice, the intermedial, testimonial, personal, relational and monumentalist. The book produces new understandings of how we archive today: contemporary archiving, I suggest, is a response to the predominance of ‘prosthetic’ memory (Nora), in which cultural memory has gradually shifted away from communities of memory and into archiving technologies themselves.

From 2013-15 I was UK principal investigator on the EU INTERREG IV-funded research project 1914FACES2014 on the cultural legacy of facial disfigurement, in particular the way practices derived from art and sculpture come to influence surgical techniques, and vice versa. The unprecedented scale of facial injury, and the radical measures adopted to attempt to mitigate its effects, are the starting-point for an enquiry into the changing understandings of the face from 1914 to the present. I led the Exeter team for 1914FACES2014, based in the Colleges of Humanities and of Social Sciences and International Studies, and coordinated the third project strand, on Representing the Face, working with partners including Changing Faces, the Historial de la Grande Guerre, the Université de Picardie Jules Verne and the Institut Faire-Faces led by the world-leading surgeon Prof Bernard Devauchelle.

In 2011, I published Samuel Beckett and Testimony (Palgrave Macmillan). Here, I argued for the first time that testimony helps us understand Beckett's fiction, and that Beckettian narrative helps us understand testimony. I questioned the association of trauma in Beckett's work with the Second World War as historical event, arguing instead that the idea of testimony has to be understood via philosophical and iconographical traditions. In particular, I analysed the debt in Beckett's work to the Noli me tangere tradition and depictions of the crucifixion, a debt which engages with the work of Georges Didi-Huberman on understanding the visual documentation of the Holocaust.

My research interests span modern and contemporary literary and visual culture, from trauma and testimony to visual archives, installation art and the forensic. I have particular interests in photography, the face, French contemporary art, the medical archive, archiving practices and technologies, Samuel Beckett, new media and cultural memory and am happy to receive PhD proposals in any of these areas.