OSK PhD seminar: Paradigms in Art History
Art out of Time: Transhistorical Approaches
Dates: February 18 and 25, 2022
Time: 13:15-16:00
Venue: Universiteit Utrecht, Drift 23, room 1.06
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 only
Convenors: Prof. dr. Hanneke Grootenboer (Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen) and Dr. Victor M. Schmidt (Universiteit Utrecht)
Instruction language: All discussions and presentations will be in English
Registration will open September 7.
Deadline for applications: 1 December 2021
Does an artwork only belong to the period in which it is created, or should it be interpreted in today’s context? To what extent are there formal and conceptual links between contemporary art and works from the past? Are combined presentations of past and present art works, as is increasingly done in current museum exhibitions, meaningful or even necessary? How do works from the past inform our present modes of looking and interpretation?
This seminar will address these and related issues (including anachronism, period eye, and reception theory) by examining current debates on the relationship of historical to modern art and looking at recent transhistorical museum exhibitions (Base in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Shape of Time, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 2018; Remix, Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam, 2021, Louvre Lens, and all exhibitions in the Frans Hals Museum). Contemporary art based on masterpieces of the past (such as of Fiona Tan, Francis Alÿs and Kara Walker) and artists interventions will also be discussed.
The first session will be devoted to a discussion of various concepts on the basis of the readings (see Literature). During the second session participants will give a short presentation of their own research projects, and will discuss to what extent a transhistorical approach will be relevant to their own work.
Literature
- Wittocx, Ann Demeester, eds., The Transhistorical Museum: Mapping the Field, (Valiz, 2018), particularly the interviews with Hanneke Grootenboer and Alexander Nagel, and the contributions by Nicola Setari and Jean-Hubert Martin
- Amy Powell, ‘Preface’ to Depositions: Scenes from the Later Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (MIT Press, 2012), 9-19.
- Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (Thames & Hudson, 2014), chapters 1-6 (browse: pp. 7-68).
- Christopher Wood & Alexander Nagel, “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism” in The Art Bulletin, 87:3 (September 2005): 403-32.
Further reading
- Hal Foster ‘Preposterous Timing’, review of Medieval Modern: Art out of Time by Alexander Nagel and Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum by Amy Knight Powell in: The London Review of Books, Vol. 34 No. 21 · 8 November 2012
- Carambolages, ed. Jean-Hubert Martin, 2 vols. and leporello, Paris : Réunion des musées nationaux, 2016)
- Keith Moxey & Dan Karlholm, “Introduction: Telling Art’s Time” in Time in the History of Art: Temporality, Chronology and Anachronology (Routledge, 2018), 1-10.
- Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Duke University Press, 2013).
- Hanneke Grootenboer, “Every Period Gets the Medievalism it Deserves”, review of Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art out of Time (2012), and Amy Knight Powell, Depositions: Scenes from the Later Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (2012), Oxford Art Journal, Volume 36, Issue 1, 1 March 2013, Pages 137–142, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcs041