Michael Corris is an artist and writer on art. His earliest works were produced while participating in the Conceptual Art collective Art & Language (1972-6). During the decade of the 1970s, Corris was a contributor to the journal Art-Language and a founding editor of The Fox (1975) and Red-Herring (1977).
A significant portion of Corris’s work has been produced collaboratively, yet his entire practice has been informed by the concept of versatility — a strategy whereby the artist engages critically with the circumstances of their life and the conditions of artistic practice without the constraints of conventional disciplinary boundaries and methodologies.
The hallmark of this sort of distributed practice in art is the artist’s proliferation of media and adoption of multiple cultural roles. Now a commonplace of contemporary art practice, it seems unexceptional for an artist to write in the morning, organise exhibitions at noon, and invent community projects or manage an art gallery in the evening. All such activities and more are routinely considered to be components of a holistic profile of art practice. While the ability to negotiate and develop over time a critical position might entail being versatile, the converse is not necessarily true. Versatility is not in and of itself an intrinsic good.
The critical analysis of the conditions and possibilities for the production and dissemination of art continues to inform Corris’ work, as it shuttles between studio, showroom and public space. Over the course of his career, Corris’ rich mix of theoretical tools has often contributed to the creation of educational and organisational resources in support of social activism.
Corris’ work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout North America, Europe, and Australia, and is represented in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), The Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, CA), Le Consortium Museum of Contemporary Art (Dijon, France), Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), Tate Gallery (London, UK), Staatsgaleri (Stuttgart, Germany), Château de Montsoreau Museum of Contemporary Art (Montsoreau, France), the Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, TX), the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX), and Le Musée des Beaux-Arts (La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland). His writings on art have appeared in Art Monthly, Artforum, Art in America, Art History, Art Journal, and Art+Text; and reprinted in collections including Alex Alberro & Blake Stimson (eds), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (MIT Press, 1999), Terry R. Myers (ed.), Painting (Documents of Contemporary Art) (MIT Press and Whitechapel, London, 2011), and in two volumes devoted to the work of David Diao, edited by Stéphane Mroczkowski & Alexandre Pignol, and published by Mare et Martin, Paris (2020 & 2021).
Corris’s personal papers on Conceptual Art and the Art & Language collective are held by the Getty Research Institute.
Corris is the author of more than a dozen artist bookworks, beginning with Typographic Samples, Pictures, and Polemics (Nexus Press, Atlanta & Clarté Press, New York, 1986) and most recently, Yikes! Recounting the Wind at My Back (Free Museum of Adams Press, 2025).
Corris’s art criticism and book reviews have appeared in Art History, Art Journal, Artforum, Bookforum, Word & Image, Art Monthly, Studio International, FlashArt, Art+Text, Kunstforum, and Glasstire, among other periodicals.
His publications on modern and contemporary art include Art, Word & Image: 2,000 Years of Visual/Textual Interaction (with John Dixon Hunt and David Lomas, Reaktion Books, London, 2010), Ad Reinhardt (Reaktion Books, London, 2008), Leaving Skull City: Selected Writings on Art (Les Presses du Réel, 2016), and Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
The second, expanded edition of an interview with Sezgin Boynik — In The Belly of the Beast: Art & Language New York Project 1972-1976 (Rab-Rab Press, Helsinki, 2017) — is forthcoming in March 2026.
Website: https://michaelcorris.net/