Friday, 20 November 2015

10 am–2 pm: workshop
6 pm: lecture
With contributions by Simon Baier (University Basel), Eva Ehninger (University Basel), and Toni Hildebrandt (University Bern)
A cooperation with the Institut of Art History Berne (IKG), supported by Mittelbauvereinigung of the University of Berne (MVUB).
Co-organisation: Toni Hildebrandt (IKG, University Berne)

Workshop
In Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), the American art historian Pamela M. Lee proposes grasping the global art world not merely as a phenomenon of the symbolic order, but to examine in what she calls “the work of art’s world” the media-related and material shifts through which globalization takes place in art, and is reflected or repeated by art. For Lee, the artwork is always both an object and agent of globalization. Lee’s approach, expanded in New Games: Postmodernism After Contemporary Art (London: Routledge, 2012) to include perspectives on creativity technologies and phenomena of the history of science since the cold war, raises the question of the specific “contemporariness” of omnipresent contemporary art. The workshop will discuss the role that art criticism can play in the historicization of globalization, and how different political, aesthetic, and scientific trends can be sensibly related to each other in view of art and art criticism.

Lecture
This talk considers how postwar anthropologists, recruited by the RAND Corporation, licensed a new approach to the study of the image, as supported by the interdisciplinary engagements of the cold war think tank. It treats what the military investments of midcentury anthropology, broadly associated with the “culture and personality” school, might enable relative to the interpretation of its visual culture, including modernist painting. The specific case study is Jackson Pollock’s work of roughly 1947-1950, drawing upon the pseudomorphic associations between Abstract Expressionism and projective tests (i.e. Rorschach tests) used by anthropologists, psychologists and social scientists. Calling this method „pattern recognition“ acknowledges an earlier anthropological and psychological literature as it points to the increasingly visual stakes of an ascendant information culture.