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What is it, these days, to imagine the present, to grasp the quick of contemporary life, to think contemporaneity, now? Why is the concept of "the contemporary" being so thoroughly interrogated, by so many, incessantly and so insistently? Whatever happened to postmodernity? Who remembers modernity? Why have so many pasts returned to haunt the present, and to stake a claim on tracts of the future? Perhaps contemporaneity has always been like this. Yet there is a dawning sense among many—from innovative theorists in a variety of disciplines to certain influential public media columnists—that these increasingly incompatible contemporalities may be unprecedented, at least in degree, perhaps in kind. Their extraordinary, intense and often violent conjunction suggests something that is distinctive about these times.
In this course, we will join a number of scholars, journalists, artists and filmmakers in their efforts to articulate exactly where this distinctiveness lies. We will review the strongest theories of modernity, modernization and modernism, and of postmodernity and postmodernism, before examining the propositions concerning contemporaneity that are just beginning to be advanced in a variety of contexts. We will consider, among others, the following concepts: colonialism, decolonization, nationalism, postcolonialism, world systems theory, globalization 1 and 2, ecology and planetarity, regionalism and locality, virtuality and cosmopolitanism. We will examine certain practices of thought and action—such as world picturing, placemaking and imagining "in-between spaces"—deployed by key scholars, journalists, artists and filmmakers.
The input of outstanding visiting scholars will enable us to consider these questions in special depth in two vital contemporary contexts: Judith Farquhar, Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, a leading expert on health in contemporary China, and Associate Professor Nancy Condee of the University of Pittsburgh, a prominent interpreter of Russia during both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The major text will be Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, edited by Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee, published by Duke University Press in December 2008. Throughout the course, participants will be able to present short papers on key themes if they so wish.
Seminar Leaders
Terry Smith
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Pittsburgh
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Judith Farquar
Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences, University of Chicago
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Nancy Condee
Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, Director of the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies, Director of Graduate Studies, University of Pittsburgh |
TERRY SMITH, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney. During 2001-2002 he was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, and in 2007-2008 the GlaxoSmithKlein Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC. From 1994-2001 he was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney. He was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of Union Media Services (Sydney). He is the author of a number of books, notably Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Transformations in Australian Art, volume 1, The Nineteenth Century: Landscape, Colony and Nation, volume 2, The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); and The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006). He is editor of many others including In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity (Power Publications and the University of Chicago Press, 1997); First People, Second Chance: The Humanities and Aboriginal Australia (Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1999); Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era (Power Publications and the University of Chicago Press, 2001), with Paul Patton; Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars (Power Publications, 2001, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005); and Contemporary Art + Philanthropy (University of NSW Press, 2007). He is working on these books: Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (with Nancy Condee and Okwui Enwezor, Duke University Press, 2008); What is Contemporary Art?; Contemporaneity; and Contemporary Art: World Currents. A foundation Board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, he is currently a Board member of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. In 1996 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Membré Titulaire of the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art. See www.terryesmith.net
VISITORS:
JUDITH FARQUAR is Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences, at the University of Chicago. Farquhar has done extensive fieldwork, including research on self-care techniques and health attitudes on the part of urbanites in Beijing. She also has studied entrepreneurial medicine in northern China and conducted field research on case management in traditional Chinese medicine at the Beijing College of Traditional Chinese Medicine and the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine. She is the author of Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China and Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (Duke University Press, 2002). Farquhar recently co-edited the collection Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life (Duke University Press, 2008). A 2007-2008 fellow at the National Humanities Center, she worked on a book titled A Thousand Happy Occasions: Nurturing Life in Millennial Beijing. Farquhar also served as president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology from 2005 to 2007.
NANCY CONDEE is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, Director of the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies, at the University of Pittsburgh. She is also affiliated with Film Studies and Cultural Studies. Her field is contemporary Russian cinema and cultural politics. Her books include Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late 20th Century Russia (British Film Institute and Indiana University Press, 1995); Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style (with Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko; Northwestern University Press, 2000); and Imperial Trace (Oxford University Press: forthcoming 2009). She is co-editor of Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Duke University Press, 2008), in which she has a chapter on modern and contemporary Russia.
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