Art and its Publics (original) (raw)
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This course is an introduction to art history as a field of cultural production. The readings and conference discussions will be directed towards exploring not only the paradigmatic works of art and architecture from antiquity to post-modernity but also the interpretive texts produced about them. Emphasis will be placed on the shift of practices of artifact production with skilled crafting in pre-industrial societies towards modern definitions of art and visual culture with their distinctive socio-cultural status in the contemporary world. Case studies are thus drawn from ancient Near Eastern and classical antiquity as well as the Western post-industrial art. While the development of the discipline form 18th century onwards will be problematized, core discursive issues in art history such as representation, iconography, narrative, technology, style, museum studies will be addressed.
Radical History & the Politics of Art
2014
The primary objective of this book is to open space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. It seeks to combat one of the fundamental assumptions that has plagued many of the previous debates on this issue: that art and politics are distinct entities definable in terms of common properties, and that they have privileged points of intersection, which can be determined once and for all in terms of an established formula. This common sense assumption is rooted in a transcendent illusion according to which there are more or less fixed characteristics that unify our terms, concepts, and practices in such a way as to guarantee their meaning. Against this substantialist approach, "Radical History & the Politics of Art" argues for a praxeological account that begins the other way around by analyzing specific cultural practices without presupposing a conceptual unity behind them. Such an orientation is radically historicist in the sense that it recognizes that all of our practices—be they linguistic, theoretical, aesthetic or political—are historically constituted and that they are necessarily part of a temporal dynamic. Hence the contingent nature of the labels used to classify various practices or even identify ‘practice’ as such. Radical history thereby proposes a significant departure from the extant debates on art and politics by maintaining that there is no ‘art’ or ‘politics’ in general, nor a singular relation between them. There are only historically constituted practices in various conjunctures, some of which have been labeled, through practical acts of denomination, as ‘artistic’ or ‘political.’ Instead of proposing one more response to the oft-repeated question ‘what is the relationship between Art and Politics?’ this book seeks to overcome the presuppositions that plague such a question. It thereby changes the very nature of the investigation by asking: ‘how do the diverse aspects of practices identified as ‘aesthetic’ and ‘political’ overlap, intertwine and sometimes merge in precise socio-historical force fields of action?
The Revaluation of Art History
Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics
Recent debates on the content and objectives of a global art history have been accompanied by an increasing number of questions about its historical foundations. Is the degree of attention that is now devoted to non-Western art really such a new phenomenon, or does it have its own history? Is it the case, as one often reads, that people only started looking at art from a global perspective after the profound economic and geopolitical changes of the late twentieth century, with the year 1989 generally being cited as the decisive caesura? Was it really the present generation of art critics and historians who first recognised the Eurocentric bias of their subject and started to clamour for its revision? And lastly, is there any truth in the notion that all prior art-historical research was confined to national historiographies and as a consequence never even tried to replace the national paradigm with the idea of an international art, a global art or a world art? No small amount of energy has been dedicated to answering this question of late, and though our historiographical knowledge remains fragmentary there can now be no doubt that the current concern with non-Western art is by no means new. On the contrary, it is quite easy to show that art historians have been looking beyond the borders of Europe and seeking to explain and understand what they found there ever since the formation of the discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. In the years around 1900 in particular there were many researchers who started to go beyond mere descriptions of the alterity of non-European artefacts and actually began to concern themselves with the multifarious relationships between European and non-European art, that is, with the mutual influences, dependencies and interactions between them, even if the resulting value system was often very rigid and generally tended to present European art as the apogee of global development. 1 In any case, from around 1890 to 1930 the topic was an extremely popular one among art historians, and it is a striking fact that most of the researchers who were interested in world art came from the German-speaking countries.
2012
The current debates about political art or aesthetic politics do not take the politics of art into account. How can artists address social politics when the politics of art remain opaque? Artists situated critically within the museum self-consciously acknowledge the institutional frame and their own complicity with it. Artists’ compromised role within the institution of art obscures their radically opposed values. Institutions are conservative hierarchies that aim to augment and consolidate their authority. How can works of art be liberating when the institutional conditions within which they are exhibited are exclusive, compromised and exploitive? Despite their purported neutrality, art institutions instrumentalise art politically and ideologically. Institutional mediation defines the work of art in the terms of its own ideology, controlling the legitimate discourse on value and meaning in art. In a society where everything is instrumentalised and heteronomously defined, autonomous art performs a social critique. Yet how is it possible to make autonomous works of art when they are instantly recuperated by commercial and ideological interests? At a certain point, my own art practice could no longer sustain these contradictions. This thesis researches the possibilities for a sustainable and uncompromised art practice. If art is the critical alternative to society then it must function critically and alternatively. Artistic ambition is not just a matter of aesthetic objectives or professional anxiety; it is particularly a matter of the values that artists affirm through their practice. Art can define its own terms of production and the burden of responsibility falls on artists. The Exploding Cinema Collective has survived independently for twenty years, testifying to this principle. Autonomy is a valuable tool in the critique of heteronomy, but artists must assert it. The concept of the autonomy of art must be replaced with the concept of the autonomy of the artist. KEYWORDS: art, art institution, autonomy, institution, contemporary art, critique, Exploding Cinema, institutional critique, ideology, politics, political, aesthetic, agency, museum, use-value, underground cinema.