Contemporaneity (E-Journal)
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What to do with the “Most Modern” Artworks? Erwin Panofsky and the Art History of Contemporary Art
Full text linkIn the 1930s, when the world-renowned Medieval and Renaissance art scholar Erwin Panofsky became acquainted with the New York contemporary art scene, he was challenged with the most difficult dilemma for art historians. How could Panofsky, who was firmly entrenched in the kunstwissenschaftliche study of art, use his historical methods for the scholarly research of contemporary art? Can art historians deal with the art objects of their own time? This urgent and still current question of how to think about “contemporaneity” in relation to art history is the main topic of this paper, which departs from Panofsky’s 1934 review of a book on modern art. In his review of James Johnson Sweeny’s book Plastic Redirections in 20th Century Painting, Panofsky’s praise for Sweeney’s scholarly “distance” from contemporary art developments in Europe is backed by a claim for America’s cultural distance, rather than a (historical) removal in time. Taking a closer look at Panofsky’s conflation of historical/temporal distance with geographical/cultural distance, this paper demonstrates a politically situated discourse on contemporaneity, in which Panofsky proposes the act of writing about the contemporary as a redemptive act, albeit, as this paper will demonstrate, without being able to follow his own scientific method.
Artificial Hells: A Conversation with Claire Bishop
Full text linkClaire Bishop answers questions about some of the arguments put forth in her recent book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
Denying Difference to the Post-Socialist Other: Bernhard Heisig and the Changing Reception of an East German Artist
Full text linkThis article traces the reception of East German artist Bernhard Heisig’s life and art—first in East Germany and then in the Federal Republic of Germany before and after the Wall. Drawing on post-colonial and post-socialist scholarship, it argues that Heisig’s reception exemplifies a western tendency to deny cultural and ideological difference in what the post-socialist scholar Piotr Piotrowski calls the “close Other.” This denial of difference to artists from the eastern bloc has shaped western understandings of Heisig’s life and art since reunification. Once perceived as an intellectually engaged, political artist, both in East and West Germany, after the fall of the Wall and German unification, Heisig was reinterpreted as a traumatized victim of two dictatorships, distorting not only our understanding of the artist and his work, but also of the nature of art and the role of the artist in East Germany
Mr. Hysteria
No full textFor more information on this video, see the interview Brianne Cohen conducted with Lucy Skaer of Henry VIII\u27s Wives in this issue of Contemporaneity
Spiral Betty
No full textFor more information on this video, see the interview Brianne Cohen conducted with Lucy Skaer of Henry VIII\u27s Wives in this issue of Contemporaneity
Marking Time: Women and Nazi Propaganda Art during World War II
Full text link"Marking Time" considers the relative scarcity of woman\u27s image in Nazi propaganda posters during World War II. This scarcity departs from the ubiquity of women in paintings and sculptures of the same period. In the fine arts, woman served to solidify the "Nazi myth" and its claim to the timeless time of an Aryan order simultaneously achieved and yet to come. Looking at poster art and using Ernst Bloch\u27s notion of the nonsynchronous, this essay explores the extent to which women as signifiers of the modern – and thus as markers of time – threatened to expose the limits of this Nazi myth especially as the regime\u27s war effort ground to its catastrophic end
Real Men Wear Uniforms: Photomontage, Postcards, and Military Visual Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Germany
Full text linkThis essay examines early twentieth-century German representations of men and women in uniform to consider how mass culture allowed individuals to participate in aspects of gender construction. It also reveals how masculinity was increasingly linked to military ideals. The pictures under scrutiny here were made in two significant but as yet under-researched types of pictures: pre-avant-garde photomontaged soldier portraits and popular postcards. Both of these visual forms originated in the 1870s, the decade that Germany was itself founded, and they both were in wide circulation by the early twentieth century. Individualized soldier portraits and postcards offered a glorious vision of a man’s military service, and they performed what Theodor Lessing has called Vergemütlichung, the rendering harmless of history. These idealized images of soldierly life were available to a broad swath of the public, but their democratization only extended so far. Representations of women in uniform served to reinforce—through stereotyping and humor—the unquestionably male nature of military institutions and, by extension, of public space. At the same time, by making apparent their own constructed nature, these portraits and postcards offered viewers a glimpse behind the masquerade of masculinity. This essay thus also identifies these images’ links to the subsequent work of avant-garde artists and to the National Socialists’ return to the ideal of uniformed masculinity
An Interview with Lucy Skaer of Henry VIII’s Wives
Full text linkThis interview took place on January 26, 2012 over Skype. I, Brianne Cohen, posed a series of questions to Lucy Skaer about three of Henry VIIIs’s Wives’ artworks presented in this volume of Contemporaneity – Spiral Betty (2004), Mr. Hysteria (2005), and The Returning Officer (2009) – in order to draw out thematic connections not only among the art collective’s moving-image installations, but also throughout their larger, diverse oeuvre. The six members of Henry VIII’s Wives live and work in different cities, but have collaborated and exhibited together since 1997, primarily in Europe. I am thankful to Lucy Skaer for her thoughtful answers and to Henry VIII’s Wives for permission to present their video and filmic work.The interview serves to introduce an artist portfolio containing three videos – Spiral Betty, Mr. Hysteria, and The Returning Officer – by the art collective Henry VIII’s Wives
Mirror of Time: Temporality and Contemporaneity in the work of Jorge Luis Borges
Full text linkBorges recognized the cracking facade of modernity and the fragility of its monist absolutisms, its commitment to linearity, and its faith in historical progress. By disavowing the ability of time to be contained within any collective structure of representation, Borges both refutes modernist conceptions of time and offers insight into recent theories of contemporaneity. A contemporaneous reading of Borges opens lucid temporal relationships, challenges assumptions about the affinities between the self and time, allows for the existence of multiple temporal antimonies, and ultimately reveals the contemporaneous relationship between individual sensations of time of the collective structural composition of temporality
The Returning Officer
No full textFor more information on this video, see the interview Brianne Cohen conducted with Lucy Skaer of Henry VIII\u27s Wives in this issue of Contemporaneity