TY - CONF
T1 - Before and After Contemporary Art
T2 - International Medieval Congress
AU - Mulholland, Neil
N1 - I co-organised this Session with Norman Hogg (University of Concordia) as The Confraternity of Neoflagellants:
Session 141 Abstract:
Medieval archetypes such as pilgrimage, liturgy, anchoritism, relic-ing, alchemy, banquetry, palimpsesting, mumming, compagnonnage, gifting and commoning are popular practices and themes in contemporary art. Why are so many artists mobilising metahistorical anachronisms to explore their contemporaneity -- recalibrating and reactivating a variety of premodern ideas as vehicles of renewal -- in ways that are best described as neomedieval? This panel of artist-theorists will speculate on neomedievalism’s aesthetic potentialities, from the elasticated loops and folds it presses on our ideas about history, to the untimely visions of differing non-modern futures it can help us to invoke.
Sponsor: Confraternity of Neoflagellants
Organisers Norman James Hogg, Centre for Interdisciplinary
Studies in Society & Culture, Concordia University,
Montreal and Professor Neil Mulholland, Director of Postgraduate Studies, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
Moderator/Chair Nick Thurston, School of Fine Art, History of Art &
Cultural Studies, University of Leeds
Paper -a Before and After Contemporary Art (Language:
English)
Speaker: Neil Mulholland, Edinburgh College of Art, University
of Edinburgh
Indexing Terms: Art History - General, Philosophy
Equipment: Data Projector ("beamer"- requires laptop)
Paper -b They Came Back Wrong?: Nighthawking in the Middle
Kingdom (Language: English)
Speaker: Norman James Hogg
Indexing Terms: Art History - General, Performance Arts - General,
Philosophy, Technology
Equipment: Data Projector ("beamer"- requires laptop)
Paper -c You Have Never Been Modern! (Language: English)
Speakers: David Burrows, Faculty of Arts & Humanities, Slade
School of Fine Art, University College London and
Simon Sullivan, Department of Visual Cultures,
Goldsmiths College, University of London
Indexing Terms: Art History - General, Folk Studies, Performance Arts
- General, Science
Equipment: Data Projector ("beamer"- requires laptop)
Session Time: Mon. 06 July - 11.15-12.45
Our Session is a contribution to:
'Reform and Renewal' IMC 2015
The theme has been chosen for the crucial importance of both phenomena in social and intellectual discourse, both medieval and modern, as well as their impact on many aspects of the human experience.
The changes brought about by deliberate individual and collective interventions demonstrate the impact of reform and renewal on the development of spirituality, ideologies, institutional and socio-economic realities, literary and artistic expression, and a sense of shared identity amongst communities. Change could be justified by referring rhetorically to a 'restoration' or 'renewal' of a perceived former reality. Monastic and ecclesiastical groups regarded spiritual and institutional reform as closely interconnected. Secular rulers invoked divine will and natural order to validate interventions in political and socio-economic structures. Innovators in literary and artistic spheres referred to a desire to return to a more 'authentic' or 'original' intellectual, spiritual, or aesthetic experience. In reality, reform and renewal could be profoundly radical but could also be more ambigiuous, remaining virtually unnoticed by contemporaries. Medieval commentators' tendency to append positive and negative connotations to accounts of reform and renewal continues to impact upon modern discussions of both phenomena and their rhetorical uses.
PY - 2015/7/6
Y1 - 2015/7/6
N2 - Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, the 2013 Biennale di Venezia overflowed with works that speculated on how things are material, relational, entangled, porous, coaffective, autopoietic, embodied, vibrant… These nonmodern practices reform contemporary art’s established paradigms of politics, agency, corporeality, criticality, representation, and time by disrupting the binarism and anthropocentrism of the Cultural Turn. This paper will analyse the reception of Gioni’s Il Palazzo Enciclopedico by critics circumscribed by the limits of critical theory. Material culture scholarship on extra/somatic relations and medievalists’ experiments with thing theory will be mobilised as a transversal neomedieval theory of emerging art.
AB - Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, the 2013 Biennale di Venezia overflowed with works that speculated on how things are material, relational, entangled, porous, coaffective, autopoietic, embodied, vibrant… These nonmodern practices reform contemporary art’s established paradigms of politics, agency, corporeality, criticality, representation, and time by disrupting the binarism and anthropocentrism of the Cultural Turn. This paper will analyse the reception of Gioni’s Il Palazzo Enciclopedico by critics circumscribed by the limits of critical theory. Material culture scholarship on extra/somatic relations and medievalists’ experiments with thing theory will be mobilised as a transversal neomedieval theory of emerging art.
KW - Neomedievalism
KW - Aesthetics
KW - New Materialisms
KW - Contemporary Art
KW - Contemporary Art Theory
KW - Medievalism
UR - https://www.leeds.ac.uk/ims/imc/imc2015_call.html
M3 - Paper
Y2 - 6 July 2015 through 9 July 2015
ER -