Academic Sessions: Glasgow 2010
AAH Annual Conference 2010
15 - 17 April, University of Glasgow
Art, Philosophy and Revolution in Mid-20th-Century European Art
Session Convenor:
Joanne Crawford, University of Leeds, j.s.crawford@leeds.ac.uk
Much work still has to be done to provide adequate theoretical frameworks within which to place the vast array of art produced in Europe immediately after the 2nd World War. Often, such art is dismissed by art historians as derivative of American art of the same period. Consequently, artists from this period are often shoe-horned into a Modernist model for the understanding and interpretation of their work, especially given Rosenberg’s mobilisation of quasi-existentialist ideas in 1950s American art criticism. Such interpretations don’t do justice to the rich body of work produced during this time, as European artists were working under a very different set of social and cultural conditions to those producing art and art criticism across the Atlantic. This session attempts to provide new frameworks for engaging with European art from this period, whilst mobilising the rich and complex philosophical enquiry into the nature of art, to consider both the artists and philosophers trying to understand the role of art at a time of great social, political and economic upheaval in Europe. The notion of the revolutionary in art is of particular interest to this session; as much of the writing of both artists and philosophers displays a real attempt to bring together the notion of a revolutionary consciousness and political agency of, and for, art and the realm of the imaginary to facilitate real social change for both artist and audience, especially in relation to art’s material affectivity.
Ed Kr?ma (University College Cork)
Wols, Smallness and Creaturely Life.
Andrew Warstat (Blackpool and The Fylde College)
Violence, Aesthetics and Ugly Revolution.
Sarah James (University of Oxford)
Paper Revolutions: Late Modernism in East Germany?
Nicola Hille (University of Teubingen, Germany)
West-German Debates on Modern Art in the Mid-20th Century: The so-called Darmstadt Dialogue and its Impact on the Development of Abstract Art.
Aaron Rosen (University of Oxford)
Chagall’s Revolution: Re-framing Postwar Jewish Culture.