OSK PhD seminar: Paradigms in Art History
No Longer Atlas: New Approaches to Global Art History
Dates: 22 and 29 October 2024
Time: 13:00 – 17:00
Venue: Universiteit Utrecht, de Drift D25 – 203. Entrance is at Drift 27
ECTS: The course represents a course load of 2.5 ECTS. A certificate will be provided by the OSK after successful participation
Open to: This course is for OSK PhD researchers
Convenors: Dr. Matthew Mullane (Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen)
Instruction language: All discussions and presentations will be in English
Deadline for applications: 27 September 2024
Over the past two decades, art and architecture historians have increasingly considered their objects of study in a global framework. Themes of exchange, encounter, movement, adaptation, resistance, and integration predominate. Despite its vintage, questions and confusions still linger about the goals and methods of global art history. Critics wonder: is global art history necessarily globally inclusive? Is it postcolonial, decolonial, or both? Does global history sacrifice historical rigor for breadth? And how exactly can one person possibly tackle such increasingly large stories? This seminar will study recent examples of global art and architecture history to answer these questions.
The first session is dedicated to global histories of art objects, from material-based studies of “early globalisms” to critiques of a “globalized” contemporary artworld. The second session is dedicated to recent global histories of architecture, a different object of study that calls for different types of archives, argumentation, and writing. Participants will be expected to lead discussion and contribute their own research projects to bear on the readings. The goal of the course is reflected in the title, to outgrow the completionist’s atlas. Georges-Didi Huberman described Aby Warburg as an Atlas-like figure, “a titan bent under the burden of the world.” The contrary mission of the seminar is to show the field of global art history as one of possibilities, not burdens.
Literature:
Session 1: Art
Joschua I. Cohen, Foad Torshizi, Vazira Zamindar, “Art History Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn,” Art Margins, vol. 12, no. 2 (2023), 3-17.
Finbarr Barry Flood, Beate Fricke, Tales Things Tell: Material Histories of Early Globalisms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023), introduction, ch. 3
Elizabeth Horodowich and Alexander Nagel, Amerasia (New York: Zone Books, 2023), introduction, selected chapters.
David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020), introduction, selected chapters.
Session 2: Architecture
Lukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), introduction, chapter three.
Susan Schuppli, Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020), introduction, ch. 11, ch. 12.
Esra Akcan, “Open Architecture, Rightslessness, and Citizens-to-Come,” in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, eds. Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 324-338.
Ayala Levin, Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), introduction, chapter three.
e-flux and Aformal Academy, New Silk Roads, collaborative online project.