Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
History and Class Consciousness and Art History
Convenors:
Gail Day, School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies, Old Mining Building, University of Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS2 9JT. Tel: 0113 343 5263 g.a.day@leeds.ac.uk
Steve Edwards, Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA. Tel: 01908 652479 s.j.edwards@open.ac.uk
Andrew Hemingway, Department of History of Art, University College, London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT. Tel: 020 7679 7549 a.hemingway@ucl.ac.uk
Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) is one of the intellectual landmarks of the twentieth century and a foundational text of Western Marxism. More than any other single work, it brought out the philosophical complexity of the Marxist heritage and offered resources for critiquing the impoverished and positivistic Marxisms of the Second and Third Internationals. It is symptomatic that in his accommodation with the official communist movement Lukács was forced to renounce his most important philosophical work and that of all his writings it had most influence among his successors working for a critical reconstruction of Marxism, from the Frankfurt School to Guy Debord and beyond. It is also indicative of the book’s revolutionary élan that it was first published in Malik Verlag’s ‘Little Revolutionary Library’ with a cover design by John Heartfield. The Budapest Sunday Circle, in which Lukács was the leading light, included figures who would go on to make major contributions to art history, namely Frederick Antal, Charles de Tolnay, Arnold Hauser, and Johannes Wilde, as well as the film theorist Béla Balázs. Although some of the book’s key concepts such as ‘totality’, ‘mediation’ and ‘ascribed class consciousness’ were heavily criticized in the 1970s, others (and notably ‘reification’) continue to have widespread currency. The recent publication in English of a translation of Lukács’s 1925–26 work, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, Tailism and the Dialectic (Verso, 2000), makes this a particularly apposite moment to reassess the significance of his early Marxism for art history, both historical and contemporary.
Speakers:
Martin Gaughan (Independent Scholar)
Berlin Dada: Transforming the Subject/Object
Michael Orwicz (University of Connecticut at Storrs)
Lukács and the US Art-Historical New Left
Alex Potts (University of Michigan)
Realism: Lukács's Dialectics and Postwar Artistic Culture
Alistair Rider (University of York)
Alienation and Artistic Labour
Blake Stimson (University of California at Davis)
Guilt as Form