"The Now is the Night"
History and Allegory of the Present

International Symposium
Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg

While the present seems to be downright obsessed with history, it has increasingly become difficult to define its own historical context. Since the great historico-philosophical narrative of the modern, which accorded the present a logical slot within the transformation of past into future, has lost its appeal, nowadays the present tends to defines itself as history. Orchestrated in cautionary recollections, retro trends and retrospectives of past awakenings, it seems to jeopardise the very nature of its own presence.

The conference aims to tackle the challenge of addressing the present in its historical dimension on three levels. An attempt shall be made to outline the logical and historico-theoretical horizon, as the basis for approaching the present. We are dealing here with the specific historicity of the present, as conceived of as “contemporary history” since around 1800.
Then the art-historical and art-critical dimension of the issue will be delineated in the direction of if and how narratives of contemporary and global art can be envisioned beyond the paradigm of Modern Art.
Thirdly, examples of some artistic practices shall be examined in terms of their self-positioning enmeshed in a conflict between their interest in historical content and their manifestation as special forms of the present.

Provincialising Universalism
Historico-theoretical debates over the last two decades have been dominated by the conflict between the criticism of the euro-, ethno- and androcentricity of the western universalist interpretation of history and the demand for a new kind of universalism that addresses the particularist and culturalist distraction of political perspectives serving capitalistic exploitation. However, history as a symbolic form can be understood as a medium for linking the two positions, and the present as the respective current form of their conflict.
(Speakers: Sarat Maharadj, Alex Demirovic, Astrid Deuber-Mankofsky, Peter Osborne)

Narratives of Contemporary and Global Art
Since the 1990s responses to criticism of the one-dimensional, progress-oriented narrative forms of the Modern have largely focused on strategies of spatialization. So today concepts of contemporary and global art tend to be parallel rather than sequential. Nevertheless, questions of artistic value cannot be completely divorced from temporal references. How can multiple parallel strands be understood in the historical context, the difference acknowledged, and yet a common narrative still developed?
(Speakers: Susanne Leeb, Christian Kravagna, Monica Juneja, Alexander Alberro)

My History in History: Artistic Self-Positioning and the Allegorical Moment
Artistic works exist in a state of tension between historical references and their respective contemporary form. In the best moments they densify historical references allegorically, and thus create an image of the present that neither loses itself in history, nor rejects it. Instead history assumes material form, only then allowing the presentness of the artistic approach to crystallise.
(Speakers: Jutta Koether, Josef Strau)

Concept
Helmut Draxler, Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg

Moderation
Lars Blunck, Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, and Helmut Draxler

Program

Thurs, December 5, 2013

11:00
Ottmar Hörl (President, Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg)
Welcome Remarks

11:15
Helmut Draxler (Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg)
Introduction

11:45
Sarat Maharaj (Malmö Art Academy, Lund University, Sweden)
The Surplus of the Global

12:45
Alex Demirovic (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Zur Verteidigung der Gegenwart

14:00
Lunch break

15:00
Jutta Koether (University of Fine Arts of Hamburg)
The Double Session: Poussin Material

16:00
Susanne Leeb (University of Basel)
Die verstrickten Erzählungen der zeitgenössischen Kunst

17:00
Coffee break

17:30
Christian Kravagna (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
Counterpoint and Contact: Relinking Discrepant (Art) Histories of the Modern

Fri, December 6, 2013

11:00
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky (Ruhr University Bochum)
Historicity of Life – Human Finitude. On the Concept of Presentness by Canguilhem and Foucault

12:15
Peter Osborne (Kingston University London)
“Working” the Contemporary: Globality, History, Ccrisis, Project

13:30
Lunch break

15:00
Josef Strau (New York/ Berlin)
How to Use Redemption

16:00
Monica Juneja (Heidelberg University)
Partisan Spaces, Braided Histories – Narratives within and about Modernism and Contemporary Art from South Asia

17:00
Coffee break

17:30
Alexander Alberro (Columbia University, New York)
On the Horns of a Dilemma: Contemporary Art between the Local and the Global

18:45
Helmut Draxler (Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg) Conclusions

ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS NUERNBERG
Bingstraße 60
D-90480 Nuernberg
meyeradbk-nuernberg.de | 0911 9404 134
http://www.adbk-nuernberg.de/symposium/

The participation is free of charge and does not require advance registration.