SPEAKERS
Monica Juneja
Universität Heidelberg, Germany
Panel 1. Critical Perspectives in Global Art
History
Title: The Ethnic and the Global – Tangled Trajectories of the “Primitive” in Modern and Contemporary Art
Klara Kemp-Welch
The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK
Panel 2. "Close Others" in "The West"
Title: Translation and the Dialogic Imagination: From Critical Theory to Experimental Art
Abstract: While modernism constituted the primitive as its alter ego, the “excess visibility” (Jean Fisher) that the contemporary art world accords to cultural difference has led to its silent assimilation into mainstream exhibition circuits, a phenomenon often described as constituting an “ethnographic turn”. My talk traces the convoluted routes travelled by the “primitive” – a notion that has proved to be both a resilient discourse as well as a double-edged sword, deployed at different sites, within and beyond the West. Its reconfigured form in contemporary art and institutional practice has come at a conjuncture where deepening fault-lines that cut across national boundaries confront societies and art practices. I conclude my presentation by imagining a scenario that the logical path of a transcultural art history would lead us to envisage.
Abstract: Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” (1934-35), written in internal exile in Kazakhstan, proposed the “living diversity” of the novel, capable of capturing the “rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia” as a means to counter “those forces that serve to unify and centralize the verbal-ideological world”. Bakhtin distinguished authoritative discourse which is “inflexible and indivisible … incapable of being double voiced [and] cannot enter into hybrid constructions”, from internally persuasive discourse which is “open; in each of the new contexts that dialogise it, this discourse is able to reveal ever new ways to mean”. With close reference to the writings of Baktin and other Central and Eastern European critical theorists, my paper draws parallels between the 1930s and the 1970s in Europe and the Americas to explore creative dialogue and its wider ideological implications. Cross-referencing to artistic initiatives, my paper ranges methodologically from Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay on “The Task of the Translator” to Hungarian dissident György Konrád's writings on the need to form “horizontal human relationships of civil society” in opposition to “the vertical human relationships of military society” (1984).
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel
École Normale Supérieure, France
Panel 3. Visualizing Global Networks
Title: Graphs, Charts, Maps: Plotting the Global History of Modern Art
Abstract: A ‘new ecology of knowledges’ calls for a reflection on the methodologies which might allow us to decolonize the foremost narrative of the history of art: the modernist canon. To this end, this paper explores how quantitative, cartographic, and statistical approaches can be used to analyze and compare large bodies of similar sources, namely exhibition catalogues and journals, whose formats have remained relatively consistent since their inception.This “distant reading” of sources can produce original visualizations which help us to reconsider existing hierarchies in the art historical field. Such an approach also makes possible the construction of a coherent and global historical narrative of the geopolitics of modernities and their social dimensions; we can use it to further our understanding of the formation of a canon that continues to dominate, and to better account for the hitherto neglected peripheries. With this horizontal re-reading comes a new perspective on the history of art: one which nuances national histories through a necessarily transnational approach; which attenuates the monocentric tendencies of a discipline that accords an excessive importance to a handful of cities (Paris and New York in particular) and instead emphasizes circulation and exchange; and which challenges the relevance of monographic studies and their ever-present danger of hagiography in favor of a more comparative approach. These methodologies can thus offer a starting point for a mobile and decentralized history of artistic modernities.
Maria Hlavajova
Basis Voor Actuele Kunst, Netherlands
Panel 4. Art-as-Intervention-in-Reality: “Ecology of Knowledges” and Institutional Practices
Title: How to Be Together Otherwise
Abstract: In her lecture, Maria Hlavajova will probe into art as a space for negotiating and inhabiting the forms of “being together otherwise.” Driven by a deep concern about the contemporary condition, “being together otherwise” proposes assemblages of socially-just relations actuated through the entangling of the human and non-human, and modeling an alternative that is simultaneously social and ecological. This involves working in spite of the heritage of Western modernity, including its variant manifested through the extant infrastructure of art deeply implicated in its colonial, imperialist, capitalist legacies. The notions of “former West,” “survival well,” “human-inhuman-posthuman,” and “instituting otherwise”—which she explored through her practice-driven research at the intersection of art, science, and activism—will be inquired into while presenting concrete propositions stemming from the projects FORMER WEST (2008–2016), Future Vocabularies (2014–ongoing), and New World Academy (2013–ongoing).
Keynote Speakers
Convenors
Anna Maria Guasch
Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Panel 1. Critical Perspectives in
Global Art History
Nasheli Jiménez del Val
Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas,
UNAM, Mexico
Panel 2. "Close Others" in "The West"
Paula Barreiro López
Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Panel 3. Visualizing Global Networks
Christian Alonso
Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Panel 4. Art-as-Intervention-in-Reality: “Ecology of Knowledges” and Institutional Practices
Presenters
Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Visualizing alternative cartographies of artistic exchange during the Global Sixties:
El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, Mexico City 1962-1969
Miguel Amado
Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK
The useful museum: From John Ruskin to Post-New Institutionalism
- The case of 'localism' at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
Annette Bhagwati
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Germany
Connecting ways of knowing. Art and institutional practice at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
Anna K. Brus
University of Siegen, Germany
Appropriation and alterity in global “tourist art”
Katarzyna Cytlak
Conicet, Argentina
Towards the globalized art world. The self-invention of the CAYC- Centro de Arte y Comunicación
(Center for Art and Communication) seen in the decolonial perspective
Andrea Díaz Mattei
Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
“Los argentinos descendemos de los barcos”, pero ¿de cuáles?
Renate Dohmen
Open University, UK
Racial ‘thick’: Re-thinking art and the global
Jacopo Galimberti
Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, France
Global Maoism. Painting Mao after Duchamp
Beata Hock
Leipzig University, Germany
“Modernisierungsvorsprung”: Gender regimes and image politics in the Cold War
Antje Kramer
Université Rennes 2, France
Reframing a transnational history of art criticism in the shadow of the Iron Curtain
Christian Kravagna
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria
Painting Global Art: Hale Woodruff's Atlanta University Murals
Giulia Lamoni
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
Exploring the role of friendship in transnational artistic networks: Lourdes Castro in Paris (1960s-1970s)
Daniel López del Rincón
Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Diálogos interdisciplinares. Aprendiendo de la relación problemática
entre el arte tecnocientífico y el arte contemporáneo canónico
Lorena Lozano
Universidad de Oviedo, Spain
Transversal art practices in the intersection of science and humanities
Anne Nike van Dam
Leiden University, Netherlands
Global art: A challenge in language? How reviewing the language-based practice
in art history may change our art historical world
Jaime Vindel
Universidad Complutense, Spain
Geoestéticas (y geopolíticas) del exilio: Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez
y la praxis creadora como impugnación del marxismo occidental
Andrew Weiner
New York University, USA
Contingency, ecology, and solidarity: Exhibitions of Tricontinentalism