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Jeppe Ugelvig

University of California, Santa Cruz, Visual Studies, Graduate Student

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, Culture, Criticism, Curation, Undergraduate

Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies, Graduate Student

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Jeppe Ugelvig is a Ph.D. student in History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz. He holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS) and a BA degree in Culture, Curation, Criticism at Central Saint Martins in London.

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University of Cambridge

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University of California, Berkeley

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Universite Paris-8, France

Daniel Spaulding

University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Virginia Commonwealth University

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Papers by Jeppe Ugelvig

The Make-Up of Angst

Spike Art Quarterly, 2023

Violence, it turns out, is packaged for every corner of the vanity cabinetin powders, serums, lot... more Violence, it turns out, is packaged for every corner of the vanity cabinetin powders, serums, lotions, and sprays-and sold as rituals of self-care formulated to fail. The artists Vaginal Davis, Sylvie Fleury, Sanja Ivekovic, and Pamela Rosenkranz work with cosmetics to contour the ways beauty regimens turn us into trauma commodities.

Viral Angst On Performance and Social Media

Movement Research Performance Journal, 2021

Performance art has managed to register many of the affective, corporeal, and material implicatio... more Performance art has managed to register many of the affective, corporeal, and material implications of social media, often while embracing
its multiple emergent communication and presentation
technologies in the process. It does so by animating and even
embodying the real material stakes of virality, that is, the
overwhelming angst felt by the actors who must navigate
its logics. The following timeline, partial and tentative, is
an attempt to analyze the process and politics of art’s social
viralization (willing or unwilling) through the framework of
performance, and to simultaneously position performance
as the ambivalent vanguard of this culture-wide process.

Styling Unpopular Knowledge: An Interview with Akeem Smith

Fashion Stylists, 2020

The Digiarchitextual Body - or: Brandon's Corporeal Virtualities

Parallax, 2019

What is a body? In both cybernetic theory and philosophies of sexual difference, there is a commo... more What is a body? In both cybernetic theory and philosophies of sexual difference, there is a common preconception of the body as a physical, stable, material entity. However, the heterogenous experiences of corporeity on cyberspace challenges such preconceptions in that bodies are found to exist in changing, malleable states, produces by processes of writing. In this essay, I propose a reading of Shu Lea Cheang’s web-art work Brandon (1998) and its recent restoration, combined with a critical analysis of philosophical writing on bodies and virtuality by Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Grosz in order to demonstrate that how the malleable and unstable nature of cyberbodies may help us re-think such notions more generally. In doing so, I propose a reading of bodiliness or corporeity as always-already virtual, made up of local ‘artifactualities’ that produce local realities in and outside cyberspace. This, ultimately, allows us to
begin to re-think and re-define an ethics of the body through the internet, one premised on survival instead of a life/death dichotomy.

Tishan Hsu by Jeppe Ugelvig

Artreview Asia, 2019

Technology figures as tool, site and condition in the paintings and sculptures of Tishan Hsu. Sin... more

Sandra Mujinga: Operate in the Dark

Spike Art Querterly, 2019

The artist Sandra Mujinga plays with economies of visibility and disappearance: performances that... more The artist Sandra Mujinga plays with economies of visibility and
disappearance: performances that take place in darkness, abstracted
voices, multiplied bodies, clothing elongated to inhuman dimensions.
The traditional identity politics of presence is reversed in order to
operate out of hidden realms. If everything is surveilled, the biggest
potential lies in not being seen.

Post-Critical: Modernist Critique and After

This dissertation studies the notion of critique in the context of art, understood through the Ka... more This dissertation studies the notion of critique in the context of art, understood through the Kantian paradigm as the enactment of political subjectivity through artistic practice. Firstly, I examine the 20th-century theorisation of critique, closely interlinked with the canon of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde (including conceptual art and 70s institutional critique), in order to highlight the essentially antagonistic and transgressive characteristic of modernist criticality – a critique that, despite its self-imagined ‘outside’ position, is deeply embedded in modernity’s commodifying institutionality. Secondly, I discuss some practices and theories emerging in the 90s in Western Europe and the Americas that began to deal with critique non-antagonistically, instead looking to find relational political subjectivity within institutional and corporate structures. Lastly, I discuss David Joselit’s After Art as a paradigm to think critical expression in the contemporary, in which the critical emphasis changes from art’s production to its circulation and movement as an image in the network. Discussing Hal Foster, I establish ‘post-critique’ as a category that embraces a range of critical cultural practices beyond the critical hierachies of modernity, and conclude that critique must operate omnipresently inside institutional structures to match the increasingly complex institutionality of neoliberal capitalism of today.

Spirit of Criticality: Frieze Projects and its Instrumentality in the Neocapitalist Art Market

This essay discusses a selection of the Frieze Projects art commissions, ranging from 2003 to tod... more This essay discusses a selection of the Frieze Projects art commissions, ranging from 2003 to today, not so much in order to evaluate the critical integrity or autonomy of individual projects so as to their instrumental value for advancing the art fair as an ideal market for contemporary art. This involves spatial, social and institutional legitimations of the fair as site and setting, often achieved through self-reflexive or context-reflexive art works – and here, the art market, despite its status as a ‘special market,’ reveals itself as operating under mainstream neoliberal or ‘neocapitalist’ economic strategies. Paradoxically, we might ask, ‘what is the value of art in the art market, when it stands outside of it’?

Books by Jeppe Ugelvig

The Fine Art of Fashion Production

Fashion Work 1993-2016: 25 Years of Art in Fashion, 2020

In this introduction to my 2020 book "Fashion Work" I review the uneven and often polemical terra... more In this introduction to my 2020 book "Fashion Work" I review the uneven and often polemical terrain on which art-fashion hybridity has been analyzed through history. I discuss historical distinctions between art and fashion due to economies of critique and divisions of labor. Rather than being seduced by formal or semiotic cross-overs of art and fashion, I insist on the importance of aesthetic praxeology, that is, the study of the distinct forms of production, distribution, and exchange that circumscribe art and fashion industries.

The Make-Up of Angst

Spike Art Quarterly, 2023

Violence, it turns out, is packaged for every corner of the vanity cabinetin powders, serums, lot... more Violence, it turns out, is packaged for every corner of the vanity cabinetin powders, serums, lotions, and sprays-and sold as rituals of self-care formulated to fail. The artists Vaginal Davis, Sylvie Fleury, Sanja Ivekovic, and Pamela Rosenkranz work with cosmetics to contour the ways beauty regimens turn us into trauma commodities.

Viral Angst On Performance and Social Media

Movement Research Performance Journal, 2021

Performance art has managed to register many of the affective, corporeal, and material implicatio... more Performance art has managed to register many of the affective, corporeal, and material implications of social media, often while embracing
its multiple emergent communication and presentation
technologies in the process. It does so by animating and even
embodying the real material stakes of virality, that is, the
overwhelming angst felt by the actors who must navigate
its logics. The following timeline, partial and tentative, is
an attempt to analyze the process and politics of art’s social
viralization (willing or unwilling) through the framework of
performance, and to simultaneously position performance
as the ambivalent vanguard of this culture-wide process.

Styling Unpopular Knowledge: An Interview with Akeem Smith

Fashion Stylists, 2020

The Digiarchitextual Body - or: Brandon's Corporeal Virtualities

Parallax, 2019

What is a body? In both cybernetic theory and philosophies of sexual difference, there is a commo... more What is a body? In both cybernetic theory and philosophies of sexual difference, there is a common preconception of the body as a physical, stable, material entity. However, the heterogenous experiences of corporeity on cyberspace challenges such preconceptions in that bodies are found to exist in changing, malleable states, produces by processes of writing. In this essay, I propose a reading of Shu Lea Cheang’s web-art work Brandon (1998) and its recent restoration, combined with a critical analysis of philosophical writing on bodies and virtuality by Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Grosz in order to demonstrate that how the malleable and unstable nature of cyberbodies may help us re-think such notions more generally. In doing so, I propose a reading of bodiliness or corporeity as always-already virtual, made up of local ‘artifactualities’ that produce local realities in and outside cyberspace. This, ultimately, allows us to
begin to re-think and re-define an ethics of the body through the internet, one premised on survival instead of a life/death dichotomy.

Tishan Hsu by Jeppe Ugelvig

Artreview Asia, 2019

Technology figures as tool, site and condition in the paintings and sculptures of Tishan Hsu. Sin... more

Sandra Mujinga: Operate in the Dark

Spike Art Querterly, 2019

The artist Sandra Mujinga plays with economies of visibility and disappearance: performances that... more The artist Sandra Mujinga plays with economies of visibility and
disappearance: performances that take place in darkness, abstracted
voices, multiplied bodies, clothing elongated to inhuman dimensions.
The traditional identity politics of presence is reversed in order to
operate out of hidden realms. If everything is surveilled, the biggest
potential lies in not being seen.

Post-Critical: Modernist Critique and After

This dissertation studies the notion of critique in the context of art, understood through the Ka... more This dissertation studies the notion of critique in the context of art, understood through the Kantian paradigm as the enactment of political subjectivity through artistic practice. Firstly, I examine the 20th-century theorisation of critique, closely interlinked with the canon of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde (including conceptual art and 70s institutional critique), in order to highlight the essentially antagonistic and transgressive characteristic of modernist criticality – a critique that, despite its self-imagined ‘outside’ position, is deeply embedded in modernity’s commodifying institutionality. Secondly, I discuss some practices and theories emerging in the 90s in Western Europe and the Americas that began to deal with critique non-antagonistically, instead looking to find relational political subjectivity within institutional and corporate structures. Lastly, I discuss David Joselit’s After Art as a paradigm to think critical expression in the contemporary, in which the critical emphasis changes from art’s production to its circulation and movement as an image in the network. Discussing Hal Foster, I establish ‘post-critique’ as a category that embraces a range of critical cultural practices beyond the critical hierachies of modernity, and conclude that critique must operate omnipresently inside institutional structures to match the increasingly complex institutionality of neoliberal capitalism of today.

Spirit of Criticality: Frieze Projects and its Instrumentality in the Neocapitalist Art Market

This essay discusses a selection of the Frieze Projects art commissions, ranging from 2003 to tod... more This essay discusses a selection of the Frieze Projects art commissions, ranging from 2003 to today, not so much in order to evaluate the critical integrity or autonomy of individual projects so as to their instrumental value for advancing the art fair as an ideal market for contemporary art. This involves spatial, social and institutional legitimations of the fair as site and setting, often achieved through self-reflexive or context-reflexive art works – and here, the art market, despite its status as a ‘special market,’ reveals itself as operating under mainstream neoliberal or ‘neocapitalist’ economic strategies. Paradoxically, we might ask, ‘what is the value of art in the art market, when it stands outside of it’?

The Fine Art of Fashion Production

Fashion Work 1993-2016: 25 Years of Art in Fashion, 2020

In this introduction to my 2020 book "Fashion Work" I review the uneven and often polemical terra... more In this introduction to my 2020 book "Fashion Work" I review the uneven and often polemical terrain on which art-fashion hybridity has been analyzed through history. I discuss historical distinctions between art and fashion due to economies of critique and divisions of labor. Rather than being seduced by formal or semiotic cross-overs of art and fashion, I insist on the importance of aesthetic praxeology, that is, the study of the distinct forms of production, distribution, and exchange that circumscribe art and fashion industries.