2018 Daphne Mayo Public Lecture: What Time Is It in the History of Art

Event Details

Date:

Thursday, 26 April 2018

Time:

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Room:

Terrace Room

UQ Location:

Sir Llew Edwards Building (St Lucia)

URL:

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Abstract:

This lecture criticizes the chronological system that has for so long dominated art history’s professional activities. Its orderly progression of periods from ancient, medieval, renaissance, to modern and contemporary, betrays a Eurocentric parochialism and fails to recognize that the world’s cultures do not organize their times according to a teleological chronology. Subscribing to a heterochonic view of time, the author argues that not only objects, works of art, but also subjects, the humans who create and treasure them, are constituted by many different forms of time. Works of art do not just belong to the historical horizon to which chronology would assign them but provoke aesthetic responses in a variety of different historical moments. This power to escape time is anachronic--it cannot be measured chronologically. The anachronic event that takes place when human subjects encounter these privileged objects is an aesthetic moment that cannot be predicted or defined. The argument is illustrated with objects from several different cultures that subscribe to distinct temporal systems that cannot be reduced to that adopted by Europe during the era of colonization. Keywords: Eurocentrism, Heterochrony, Anachrony, Chronology, Temporality.

Presented by Keith Moxey, Columbia University, New York