History of Art

History of Art

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We invite you to join our new visual culture research seminar in which we hope to share and explore recent concerns with the past and its place in the present, a present increasingly over-invested in the value of the contemporary. With the critique of official histories and the conjoining of history and fiction behind us, we now confront new imperatives for what is at stake in thinking across historical, current and future perspectives. We start from the premise of the verb tense ‘past imperfect’, in which a past that is unfinished constantly challenges the idea of the ‘new’ and embraces the presentness of the past.

We will experiment with format and practice and hope to engage with current debates on changing conceptions of time, including history, modernity and memory.

Venue: UCL, History of Art Department, Gordon Square 20-21, Seminar Room 6

Monday, 13 May 2013, 6pm

Filmscreeining of "Siliva Zulu" (1927)

a silent film by Attilo Gatti
(with Giuseppe p. Vitrotti, and advised by the anthropologist Lido Cipriani)

Introduced by Tamar Garb and followed by discussion.

Please note that this event will take place in Seminar Room 3.

Previous events:

Wednesday, 20 March

We regret that the session due to take place on Wednesday 20 March has been postponed to the summer term. Details will be announced as soon as possible.

Christopher Pinney: The Civil Contract of Photography in India

Related text for discussion:

Ariella Azoulay: The Civil Contract of Photography, MIT Press, pp. 88-135.

Monday, 4 March 2013, 6pm

Simon Werrett: Picturing Pyrotechnics

Related text for discussion:
Kevin Salatino: Incendiary Art: the Representation of Fireworks in Early Modern Europe, Los Angeles: Getty, 1997, pp. 1-45.

Monday, 4 February 2013, 6pm

Filmscreening of Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) introduced by Rose Marie San Juan

Monday, 21 January 2013, 6pm

Marcia Pointon Artefacts at the Edge - Thinking about Death Masks

Related text for discussion: George Didi-Huberman, L'Empreinte, pp. 52-72,
or alternatively Didi-Huberman, 'The Molding Image'.

Tuesday 4 December 2012, 6.15 pm

Public Sphere/Public Space: Historical entanglements and current possibilities

A discussion with short presentations by
Rose Marie San Juan and Fred Schwartz
Related texts: Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, The Public Sphere and Experience, Judith Butler, The Politics of the Street.

Tuesday 30 October 2012, 6.15 pm

"Screening History"

Presenters:
Bob Mills
Derek Jarman's Medievalism
Richard Taws
The Spectacle of History: Peter Watkin's La Commune (Paris, 1871)

Tuesday 9 October 2012, 6.15 pm

This seminar will examine debates associated with
Bruno Latour’s We have never been Modern (1991)
Presenters:
Natasha Eaton
Iconoclash|Rubbish: Collecting and Colonialism
Mechthild Fend
Contagious Contacts: Dermatological Wax Moulages and the Never-Modern Indexical Image