Professor Simon Morris

Simon Morris (b.1968) is an artist and a teacher. He is Professor of Art and Director of Research in the Leeds School of Art at Leeds Beckett University, UK.

In 2002, Morris founded the publishing imprint ‘information as material’ which has published over sixty books by international artists and writers. He is the author of numerous experimental books, including; Bibliomania (1998); The Royal Road to the Unconscious (2003); Re-Writing Freud (2005); Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head (2010); and Pigeon Reader (2012). He is an occasional curator and a regular lecturer on contemporary art and also directed the documentary films sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith (2007) and making nothing happen: Pavel Büchler (2010). In 2020, Morris founded Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History with his co-editors, Dr Gill Partington (Institute of English Studies, University of London) and Professor Adam Smyth (University of Oxford). The journal has over 400 subscribers including: The Bienecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; The Huntington Library, California; ten College libraries at Oxford and Cambridge Universities; The Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the University libraries from Princeton, Stanford University, New York University and Columbia University in the USA; the University of Toronto in Canada; the National Library of Scotland; and Tate Gallery, London. Morris has had solo shows at the Freud Museum in London and Printed Matter Inc., New York City. He regularly gives talks on his work and was recently invited to speak at; Institute of Advanced Study, University of Santiago, Chile; Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, UK; The Royal Academy in the Hague, Holland; Warsaw Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland; the Kelly Writer’s House at the University of Pennsylvania; USA; Cabinet Gallery in Brooklyn, New York City, USA; Harvard University, Boston, USA; and the Literaturwerkstatt in Berlin, Germany. 

“True watershed works, I suspect, are quite rare in the history of art. Duchamp’s Fountain is certainly one. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and John Cage’s 4'33" may be others. Each of these forced not only artists but ultimately the general public to rethink their notions of art. Each changed the nature and trajectory of art. Potential watershed works are those that stand at the outer boundary of our concepts of art and push further outward. This is where Getting Inside Jack Keroauc’s Head stands.” - Darren Hudson Hick, ‘Ontology and the Challenge of Literary Appropriation’ for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 71:2 Spring 2013, The American Society for Aesthetics.

“Getting Inside Jack Keroauc’s Head is an exemplary instance of a conceptual work that operates by means of remediation and reclassification.” – Paul Stephens, ‘From the Personal to the Proprietary: Conceptual Writing’s Critique of Metadata’ for Digital Humanities Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2012

“I can think of no more exemplary introduction to uncreative writing, or to the broader field of conceptual writing, than this book.” – Doug Nufer ‘On the Road Again’ in American Book Review, vol.32, no.4 (Victoria: University of Houston, May/June 2011) p.11

Simon teaches across the provision in Leeds School of Arts for undergraduate, Masters and Doctoral students. A key responsibility is the coordination of Unit: 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory for the University submission for REF.