Colin Gardner, Professor of Integrative Studies and Critical Theory, UCSB, will draw from his latest publication in James Benning’s Environments as a basis for discussion of the exhibition James Benning: Quilts, Cigarettes & Dirt (Portraits of America). Followed by a screening of Benning’s film Twenty Cigarettes, 2011.

Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches in the departments of Art, Film & Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and the History of Art and Architecture. Gardner has published Joseph Losey (2004) and Karel Reisz (2006) for Manchester University Press’  ‘British Film Makers’ Series, as well as Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art (2012), a critical analysis of Samuel Beckett’s experimental work for film and television and its relation to the philosophical writings of Deleuze and Guattari for Palgrave MacMillan. Most recently he has co-edited two anthologies with Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University): Deleuze and the Animal (2017, for Edinburgh University Press) and Ecosophical Aesthetics: Art Ethics and Ecology with Guattari (2018, Bloomsbury Academic).