Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
'1968': Activist Art and its Legacies
Convenors:
Jill Carrick, Carleton University, Ottawa jill_carrick@carleton.ca
Rebecca DeRoo, Washington University in St. Louis rderoo@artsci.wustl.edu
In French and non-French art-historical accounts of postwar art, ‘May 1968’ has come to function as a charged symbol of the fusion of art and political activism. The takeover of the national French art school in the Spring of 1968 by students and professional artists, and its brief transformation into a ‘revolutionary workshop’ for the production of political posters, has been employed as an occasionally romanticized (if still little-investigated) emblem of art’s marriage with contestation. The year 1968 also marked the publication of Art et contestation, a book of essays devoted to French contemporary art and its alleged contestation of establishment culture and social hierarchies. The book was republished the same year in English. May 1968 also witnessed the forced closure of the French National Museum of Modern Art, the occupation of the Latin Quarter, and the flourishing of a variety of ephemeral forms of protest art from graffiti to happenings in the streets.
This session investigates how terms such as ‘1968’ and ‘contestation’ have been used as symbols of political involvement and/or ‘revolutionary’ aspiration within the arts. It seeks to question and explore the aims, mythologies, legacies, and geographical and temporal dimensions of activist art during and immediately after the 1960s across a range of international contexts.
Speakers:
Steven Harris (University of Alberta)
The Abolition/the Supersession/the Persistence of Art: Late Thoughts on a Debate in and around 1968
Fabien Danesi
Mai 1968, a Situationist Revolution?
Elodie Antoine
Contestation in Artists’ Texts after May ‘68
Victoria Scott (Binghamton University)
Expressionism and the Posters of May 1968
Hannah Feldman (Northwestern University)
Making Politics, Siting Culture
Fabienne Dumont
A Case of Blindness in Art History: the Legacy of Seventies Feminism in France
Brandon Taylor (University of Southampton)
Absurd Lines, Protest Walks
Nicholas Cullinan (Courtauld Institute/Guggenheim Museum)
The Aesthetics of Politics: Arte Povera and 1968 in Italy
Gillian Whiteley (Loughborough University School of Art and Design)
Situating the insurgent imagination: Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture and British countercultural practice
Antigoni Memou (Courtauld Institute of Art)
The Student Movement of May 1968: Activist Photography, Self-Reflection and Antinomies
Johanne Sloan (Concordia University)
Countercultural war machines in Montreal, circa 1968
Adriana Kiss-Davies (University of Wales Aberystwyth)
Memories of a Crushed Revolution: Josef Koudelka’s Photographs of the 1968 Prague Invasion