About the part that art plays in a globalising society

Framer Framed

Yayoi Kusama, Dots Obsession (2006) mixed media © Yayoi Kusama

Symposium: In the Wake of the Global Turn

The 2011 Clark Conference, In the Wake of the Global Turn: Propositions for an “Exploded” Art History without Borders (2011), will ask what a shift towards a broader geographical expanse in art historical inquiry has meant—and could mean—for the discipline.

How must the discipline of art history change, what are the assumptions it must relinquish, and what ideas must it embrace in order to effect a true dislocation of “center-periphery” models of cultural intellectual exchange? How might an emphasis on interregional collaboration take the place of an emphasis on monolithic concepts such as the nation-state or “the global”? How might a radically de-centered art history differ from one re-centered around a different origin (Africa vs. Europe, for example)? How must a “global art history” address not simply the geographical range, but an entire reconception of art history’s objects, methods, and goals? How might the focus on regional interactions aid or detract from such objectives?

Friday, November 4

9.00 Welcoming Remarks
Michael Ann Holly, Research and Academic Program, The Clark
9.15 Conference Introduction
Jill Casid, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Aruna D’Souza, Research and Academic Program, The Clark
10.00-12.30 Session 1: Theoretical Terrains
Moderator: Parul Dave Mukherji, Jawaharlal Nehru University
10.00 T.J. Demos, University College London: The Research Exhibition: Object and Model for a Global Art History
10.30-11.00 Break: Tea and Coffee in the Clark Café
11.00 Renata Camargo Sà, Universidade Federal Fluminense: For a Hermeneutics of the Impure – Art and Truth in an Age of Contamination
11.30 Kobena Mercer, Yale University: Contraflow: Mapping Networks in Cross-Cultural Modernity
12.00 Discussion of Session Papers
1.00-2.30 Lunch
2.30-4.00 Session 2: Histories and Times: Temporalities of and against the “Global”
Moderator : James Elkins
2.30 Isabel Seliger, Independent Scholar, Berlin: Crosscultural, Interpictorial, and Transgender: The Convergence of Male Icons in the Gandhāran Visual Field ––Implications for Art History
3.00 Kerstin Schankweiler, Free University Berlin: Writing Art History Transculturally: A Postcolonial Reading of George Kubler’s The Shape of Time
3.30-4.00 Break: Tea and Coffee in the Clark Café
4.00 Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), Delhi: An Ephemeris, Corrected for the Longitudes of Tomorrow: Speculations on Orbits and Motions, Objects and Processes in Contemporary Art
4.30-5.15 Discussion of Papers
5.15-5.30 Conveners’ Comments: Prompts and Provocations for Conversation Tomorrow
5.30-6.30 Reception in Clark Foyer

Saturday, November 5

9.30-12.30 Session 3: New Practices of and beyond the Global: Regionalisms, Localisms, Contacts, & Flows
Moderator: Steven Nelson, UCLA
9.30 Kishwar Rizvi, Yale University: Transnational Islam, or the Reification of History through Contemporary Architecture
10.00 Alessandra Russo, Columbia University: De tlacuilolli: Renaissance Artistic Theory in the Wake of the Global Turn
10.30-11 Break: Tea and Coffee in the Clark Café
11.00 Talinn Grigor, Brandeis University: Neither Orient, nor Rome: Art History’s Global Turn in 1901
11.30 David Roxburgh, Harvard University: Troubles with Perspective: Case Studies in Picture-Making from Qajar Iran in the 1800s
12.00 Discussion of Papers
12.45-2.00 Lunch
2.00 Session 4: Positionalities: Interrogating locations amidst the “Global”
Moderator: Sven Spieker, University of California at Santa Barbara
2.00 Todd Porterfield, Université de Montréal: Transversal Positioning Practices
2.30 Nicholas MIrzoeff, New York University: Inside Out: The History of the Anonymous in the Crisis of Visuality
3.00 Ranjanna Khanna, Duke University: Technologies of Un-Belonging
3.30-4.00 Break: Tea and Coffee in the Clark Café
4.00-4.45 Discussion of Papers
4.45-5.30 Conference Roundtable
Moderators: Jill Casid and Aruna D’Souza

Date
November 4-5, 2011

Convened by
Jill Casid and Aruna D’Souza

Location
Sterling and Francine Clark
Art Institute
225 South Street
Williamstown, MA, US



Global Art History /