Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
Globalisation and Art since 1945: Disciplinary Renewal or Transformation?
Convenor:
Jonathan Harris, Centre for Architecture and the Visual Arts (CAVA), University of Liverpool jharris1@liv.ac.uk
This session seeks to assess the effects of globalisation upon culture, art, and art history in the period since 1945, and to consider the likely forms of disciplinary reconfiguration within the institutions that teach or in other ways promote art and art history (including, beyond the universities, museums, galleries, government cultural funding agencies of many kinds, and other private and/or public arts-related organizations). This reconfiguration might also be represented as a contest or standoff – poignant or stagnant, depending on one’s opinion – between art history in its current or received forms and formations, and the now quasi- or neo-fields of study (‘visual culture’, ‘visual studies’, etc.) that once promised, or threatened, to replace or outmode it.
Papers in the session will examine this question from a variety of perspectives, making use of different kinds of empirical materials. Some deal with visual-cultural or artistic phenomenon marked or created under globalised conditions – e.g. artworks, artists, and organisations – while others review broader historical and theoretical problems, including the continued efficacy of inherited art-historical categories and methods of study. I have in mind a set of basic terms that could inform and motivate our discussion. These are: institutions, formations, means of production, identifications, forms, reproduction, and organisation. These are drawn from Raymond Williams’ 1981 book Culture which presents the outline of a projected new field of study he called the ‘historical-sociology of culture’. Understanding globalisation’s impact on visual art and culture, arguably, requires such a radical inquiry.
Speakers:
Jonathan Harris (CAVA, University of Liverpool)
Globalisation and the Worlds of Contemporary Visual Art
Judith Rodenbeck (Sarah Lawrence College)
New Collectivism: How Globalization made the Artworld Useful
Dennis Wardleworth (Independent Scholar)
The Parallel Development of Capitalism and Architecture in the Twentieth Century: Anglo-Persian to beyond petroleum: Neo-Classical to Post-Modern
Felipe Hernandez (CAVA, University of Liverpool)
South by North + West: Contesting Architectural History and Heritage in Latin America
Judith Walsh (CAVA, University of Liverpool)
Irish Landscape Painting: Postcolonial Object of Nostalgia or Ideological Witness?
August Davis (University of Liverpool)
Spectres and Spectacle: the Visual Culture of Martha Rosler