Contemporary Art between Time and History
Lecture and Conversation Series
January 16–May 23, 2013
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
185, Rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest
(Corner Jeanne-Mance)
Montréal (Québec) H2X 3X5
Admission is free to lectures
Contemporary Art Between Time and History is a series of eight lectures and conversations that bring together renowned art historians, curators, artists, philosophers and scientists to discuss the aesthetic exploration of time through which contemporary art concerns itself with history. Organized by Christine Ross, James McGill Chair and Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University; Marie Fraser, Chief Curator and Director of Education, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and François LeTourneux, Associate Curator, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the series will take place at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Lectures begin on January 16 and will run until May 23. Admission is free to the lectures. The complete listing is available at www.macm.org.
Since the late 1980s, contemporary art has investigated and challenged the main components of the modern notion of historicity: the archive as an element of proof; the teleological deployment of the historical narrative; history as a means of inclusion and exclusion of what is judged to be historical; memory and forgetting, as well as the idea of progress. This turn has been a productive one. It has notably led to an innovative search for the “unthought” of historiography: the temporal dimension of history (Michel de Certeau). How does one define this temporality? How does contemporary art rearticulate, in its renewed interest for history, the relationship between past, present and future? How are these articulations conditioned by the twenty-first-century temporalities of acceleration, presentism, space-time compression and globalization? What happens to the notion of progress—one of the founding components of the modern regime of historicity—once it has been stripped of its content? The series will investigate contemporary art’s production, performance and representation of innovative forms of temporality, in order to think about the ways in which it holds itself between time and history, and updates the understanding of our historical condition.
January 16, 5:30–7:30pm (in English)
Ecological Time
Amanda Boetzkes, Professor of Art History in the School of Fine Arts and Music at Guelph University—”Plasticity in an Ecological Time”
Mark Cheetham, Professor of Art History in the Department of Fine Art at the University of Toronto—”Generation(s) and the Genre of Land Art”
January 30, 5:30–7:30pm (in French)
Suspended Time
Conversation between Olivia Boudreau, artist living and working in Montréal; and Christine Ross, Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University
February 7, 5:30–7:30pm (in French)
Parallel Space-Times
Conversation between Laurent Grasso, artist living and working in Paris; and Stéphane Durand, Researcher at the Centre de recherches mathématiques (CRM) at the Université de Montréal and Professor of Physics at Cégep Édouard-Montpetit
February 27, 5:30–7:30pm (in French)
Heterochronies
Nicolas Bourriaud, Director of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris—”The Work of Art in the Age of Heterochronies”
March 13, 5:30–7:30pm (in English)
The Archive
Conversation between Okwui Enwezor, Director of Haus der Kunst in Munich; and Stan Douglas, artist living and working in Vancouver
March 21, 5:30–7:30pm (in English)
To Historicize the Contemporary/To Contemporanize History
Jane Blocker, Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota—”Transitional Objects: Dario Robleto’s Historical Practice”
Rebecca Schneider, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University—”Acting in Ruins”
May 1, 5:30–7:30pm (in French)
The Coexistence of Local Times
Elie During, Teaching Researcher in Philosophy at the Université de Paris Ouest–Nanterre, and Lecturer at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris—”Time Floats”
May 23, 5:30–7:30pm (in English)
Returns
Conversation between Eve Sussman, artist living and working in Brooklyn; and Lesley Johnstone, Curator at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
For more information:
Wanda Palma, MACM, Head of Public Relations: wanda.palma [at] macm.org / T 514 847 6232
