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Lehrende/r: Dr. Charlotte Bydler
Veranstaltungsart:
Übung
Anzeige im Stundenplan:
Üb: Spezialstudien 1
Semesterwochenstunden:
2
Credits:
6,0
Unterrichtssprache:
Deutsch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl:
3 | 25
Anmeldegruppe: Übungen, CI-Modul KG, WS 10_11
Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie
Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007.
Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinie
Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:
Achtung Terminänderung: Beginn eine Woche später, ab 05.11.2010 im Hörsaal. Weitere Termine: jeweils freitags: 19.11., 03.12., 17.12..2010 sowie 21.01., 04.02 und 11.02.2011 im Übungsraum.
Englischsprachige Lehrveranstaltung!
Veranstaltungsleitung: Dr. Charlotte Bydler
Blockseminar, 14täglich im Übungsraum, freitags, 10 - 15 Uhr, Beginn: 29.10.2010
Inhalt:
The Global and the Cosmopolitan: Art History and Art Worlds in the Age of Internet
No true universalism can be constructed without recognizing that there is a diversity of universals on which analyses are based, and that these are often in fact quite particular – not universals at all, but rather interpretations devised for particular historical and conceptual situations.
Like a child with many parents, art history has acquired ancestors in several registers. It is a way of communicating over historically changing practices centred on aesthetic artefacts as well as an academic discipline with important ties to the formation of European nation states and modern standards of research. This distinction is a foundation for the proposed research-seminar topic. I suggest that we study how time-space compression (or distanciation) effects of globalisation processes have undone the unit of ”art history”. Faster communications – both in terms of personal transport and information exchange – have changed the event-scene; cultural and spatial distances are easily overbridged. These zones of shared concerns are however flanked by areas of conflict, or total absence of contact points. In my research on international contemporary art and internet art communities, it is not least the lack of connections that has struck me. A gap is revealed between the agendas of art history and art historians on the one hand, and between the fields of art history and artistic practices on the other hand. There is no evidence that knowledge of art history would be necessary for the creation of art, and art historians’ concerns are not those of artists. Verbal, linear academic knowledge production is no adequate representation of either art history or the field of artistic production. Indications speak for a view of cultural production as unstable and excessive in comparison with its scholarly interpretation. This has interesting consequences.
In art history as in several other disciplines, globalisation has been a discourse of universalism. Art historians’ scientific claims encourage objective, universal and global, approaches toward problems, method, theory, and material. In order to see art history as practice and narrative more clearly I want to investigate the fringes of canonised art history and events that may not even have entered history but are in becoming: art production intended for the internet.
This project proposes a comparative take on artistic versus art historical practices, with special attention to their respective materiality. I focus on a few key concepts for discursive analysis. These concepts are the global and globalisation; art history and art; and not least cosmopolitanism. To limit the scope of the investigation, I will use case studies in two steps.
I will set out with a tentative presentation and analysis of four online fora: Ctheory, Leonardo Online, Adaweb, and Dia Center for the Arts. These projects are all located in the USA, but otherwise vary in format: cultural criticism publication, cross-disciplinary publication, artist-driven platform, and private art foundation. They were initiated (in the case of Adaweb even terminated) between 1992 and 1997 and all have contributions by well-known artists on subjects that are relevant to globalisation. Critical Arts Ensemble’s Technology of Uselessness (1994) on Ctheory, will for example be analysed contrapuntally with the project Wired Ruins: Digital Terror and Ethnic Paranoia (2002). In the latter, the curators Arthur & Marilouise Kroker and Timothy Murray included work by e.g. Young-Hae Chang’s (Y.H. Chang Heavy Industries) and Andrew Hieronymi & Tirdad Zolghadr. This will provide a starting point for discussing the localised nature of the concepts that are in focus, during the 1990s, as compared with the 2000s. This first case study, which includes an international range of artists within the US-based platforms, will subsequently be contrasted with cases based in Europe.
Individual artworks contextualised within an oeuvre, in exhibitions, with related verbal descriptions and framed by cultural theory, will be analysed further. The larger art world system constitutes a constant reference point in the investigation. A measure of the acceptance of internet art in the contemporary art world – and vice versa, of the net artists’ embrace of the contemporary art world – are collaborative exhibition projects that draw on the participants’ prestige in their own special field. Internet art was presented at the Documenta X in Kassel, 1997, and new media art at the Venice Biennale, 1999. A reverse interest could be distinguished at the Whitney Biennial 2002, where the Swedish-Greek artist Miltos Manetas participated with whitneybiennial.com, in collaboration with several internet art pioneers. Information material described its ambivalent position and awareness of straddling the art worlds:
Even if the Whitneybiennial.com is in “competition” with the Museum show, because it represents a different view of the actual visual reality, it is not an anti-show. It completes instead, the intention of the official show to “expose multiple, sometimes conflicting currents, as well as extraordinary works that fall outside of any conventional aesthetic definition”.
In a global perspective the art scene can be described as a loosely connected system of several art worlds, partly in conflict and partly irrelevant to each other. Even modern art has much wider traditions than modernism accounted for. This has been analysed by Hans Belting, and consequences in institutional practice are currently explored by Andrea Buddensieg, Belting, and Peter Weibel in the project Global Art and the Museum, at ZKM – Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe. If possible, it would be an enticing prospect to use ZKM collections, temporary exhibitions, and scholarship for reference material and individual case studies. Collecting art institutions share certain challenges but in a media art museum they are perhaps more pronounced. Collections grow, competing genealogies enter the scene. As art historical scholarship diversify, the popular constituency provides even more stimuli to redefine museums’ objects. A museum can hardly be conceived of without supporting narrative. Herein lies its connection with art history.
André Malraux (1967) envisaged a path for art museums and art historians wanting to go global in the UNESCO project for a ”museum without walls”. This black-and-white photographical project prefigures current technological possibilities to retrieve, store, and juxtapose information pertaining to the arts via communications technologies. More than anything, Malraux’ published photo reproductions revealed the author’s universal or global ambitions – in all senses of the words. Documentary and antiquarian quandaries abound, just as in present-day UNESCO world cultural heritage project.
The diverging senses of ”global” as all-encompassing, and comprehensive respectively, is reflected within the disciplinary field of ”art history”. One way is to go for the object under study and account for art, all artforms and genres. David Summers (2003) dispensed with historical narrative in his world art history. Summers is looking for universal tools in the human, just as Immanuel Kant was. The focus on social space, and phenomenological worldview, aim to form a less ethnocentric understanding of human culture. But as important as it was for Kant to find eternally true and just methods of interpretation of culture and perception, was the experience of beauty. So, does Summers’ method provide a foundation for judgments of taste? How can we know why the pieces analysed in his book are worthy our attention as parts of a history of art or of spatiality? Meanwhile, Thomas DaCosta Kauffmann (2004) chose to study the actual process of diffusion and limit the range of empirical material. John Onians (2004) and John Clark (forthcoming) have both studied evolutionary processes behind world cultural production either in human nature or culture, while James Elkins (2007) chose a historiographical disciplinary approach. I am more interested in looking closer to communities of both art and art history; something which I see in e.g. Kitty Zijlmans (2008). The interpretation and uses of history is a contemporary concern, intersecting with communications technologies in art worlds. Marc Augé (1994) and Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condé (2008) all expand the conception of how (art) history comes to be known, in more plausible ways than the historicist horison of Arthur C. Danto (1997).
Contemporary art history and art worlds practices have broken up into local (even national) traditions, narratives and histories. This prompts a closer look at conceptions of the global, in order to identify globalisation processes in practices related to contemporary art. As the OED summarises it, global refers to something
1. spherical, globular; 2. pertaining to or embracing the totality of a number of items, categories, etc.; comprehensive, all-inclusive, unified; total; spec. pertaining to or involving the whole world; world-wide; universal. b. global village, a term popularized by M. McLuhan (1911-80) for the world in the age of high technology and international communications, through which events throughout the world may be experienced simultaneously by everyone, so apparently ’shrinking’ world societies to the level of a single village or tribe; also in extended use. Hence [...] globalization, the act of globalizing; globalize v. trans., to render global; so globalized ppl. adj.
Globalisation designates a process, or a set of relations; the interconnectedness of events and phenomena over the world in relations of mutual influence or dependence. By the mid-1990s,
Empfohlene Literatur:
Literature (short listed)
Marc Augé, An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism, Eng. transl. Caroline Salzwedel, Mitch Cohen & Kenneth Northcott, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Hans Belting & Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), The Global Art World. Audiences, Markets and Museums, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009.
Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art: Genèse et structure du champ littéraire, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992/1998.
Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1999.
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2004.
Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art in the Pale of History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
James Elkins (ed.), Is Art History Global?, Routledge, 2007.
Immanuel Kant,”Idee zur einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht” (1784), and ”Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf” (1796). Kant’s political writings, ed. & introduction by Hans Reiss, transl. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge UP, 1971.
Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, Eng. transl. Eva M. Knodt, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995/2000.
André Malraux, Museum Without Walls, London: Secker & Warburg, 1967.
John Onians (ed.), Atlas of World Art, London: Laurence King, 2004.
Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge & Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds), Cosmopolitanism, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2002.
Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique, La Fabrique éditions, 2000.
Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor & Nancy Condee (eds.), Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2008.
Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated. The Story of Contemporary Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, London: Phaidon, 2003.
Peter Weibel & Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), Contemporary Art and the Museum. A Global Perspective, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2007.
Kitty Zijlmans & Wilfred van Damme (eds.), World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007.
Tirdad Zolghadr, “Bonus Miles. A Case for Cosmopolitanism”, Bidoun: Arts and Culture from the Middle East, Winter 2005.
Zusätzliche Informationen:
Course outline:
Fri 5 November, morning and afternoon sessions
1 Lecture
Introduction, cases and concepts. The problem: on ”general art history”, ”world art history”, and ”New art history”, world systems, the international, the local, globalization, connectedness, cosmopolitanism.
2 Lecture
Cases and concepts. On art worlds: time and place.
Fri 19 November, morning and afternoon sessions
3 Seminar
Discussion of concepts relevant for studying globalization in art history. Literature
4 Seminar
Introduction of cases and methods for individual research assignments.
Fri 3 December, morning and afternoon sessions
5 Lecture
Internet: Ada-web, Ctheory, Dia Center for the Arts, Leonardo Online
6 Lecture
Internet and (in) the globalized contemporary art world. Institutions, producers and users.
Fri 17 December, morning and afternoon sessions
7 Lecture
Institutionalization and valorization in art worlds under globalization processes. Internet art, global contemporary art, folk arts
8 Lecture
Institutionalization and valorization in art history under globalization processes. Visualisations, verbalisations, and interpreters.
Fri 21 January, morning and afternoon sessions
9 Seminar
Discussion of work in progress; individual research assignments
Compose short papers to be distributed in seminar
10 Seminar (continued)
Discussion of work in progress; individual research assignments
Compose short papers to be distributed in seminar
Fri 4 February, morning and afternoon sessions
11 Seminar
Back to the problem: why art history? Literature
12 Seminar (continued)
Back to the problem: why art history? Literature
Fri 11 February, morning and afternoon sessions
13 Seminar
Presentations and discussion of individual research assignments (oral and short paper)
14 Seminar (continued)
Presentations and discussion of individual research assignments (oral and short paper)
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