Warren Neidich

Warren Neidich
Warren Neidich performance at The Drawing Center in 2009. Photograph by Chris Lee.
Born	1958 New York City
Nationality	American
Known for	Contemporary art

Warren Neidich is an American artist. He lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles.

Neidich’s diverse practice explores the interstitial spaces between art, culture, language, society, mind and the brain using a conceptual approach.

As an artist, curator, writer and teacher, his projects span film, choreography, performance, public art sculpture, fine art, and theoretical essays.

Without adhering to a specific visual motif or branded form of representation, Neidich’s multidisciplinary work investigates the evolving conditions of historical materialism, general intellect, Theory of Mind, and the ways in which art forms affect the development of the brain’s neuroarchitecture – a process Neidich refers to as Neuroaesthetics or Neurobiopolitics and more recently, Neuropower.

Warren Neidich graduated from Washington University in St. Louis where he studied photography, psychology, and biology. From 1985 to 1995 he worked on a number of projects investigating the relationship between power and representation, including the American Civil War studies The Battle of Chickamauga and Amputation without Anaesthesia exhibited at The Photographic Resource Center, Boston in 1991 and "American History Reinvented" (1986–1991) at Burden Gallery, Aperture Foundation, New York City, in 1989.

Neidich’s appropriation of historical moments by means of photography has been discussed by John Welchman and Graham Clarke.

The series of altered photographs “Unknown Artist”, which recast the early 20th-century art coterie as a social rather than an individual phenomenon, were installed at Berlin’s Paris Bar in 1994 in collaboration with Martin Kippenberger. In 1994, Neidich’s photography-based sculptural installation "Collective Memory/Collective Amnesia" used the culturally-constructed story of Anne Frank to reflect upon pop culture’s vulgarization of history. Neidich’s slide show projection "Beyond the Vanishing Point: Media Myth in America" was shown at the N.Y. Kunsthalle, NYC in 1995. It traced a journey across America fifty years after Jack Kerouac, culminating in a photographic exposé of the media encampment that grew outside the courthouse during the O.J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles.