Events

Contemporary Art, Philosophy and Politics
After /The Postconceptual Condition/

TECHNE Postgraduate Student-Led Symposium

University of Surrey, Centre for Performance Philosophy
Friday, 9 November 2018

We are pleased to invite you to a one-day symposium that will critically
examine notions of the contemporary and contemporaneity beyond concomitance,
in visual and performing arts, philosophy, and politics through panels and
keynote presentations from Peter Osborne (Kingston University London) and
Zöe Sutherland (University of Brighton).
When the contemporary is understood as the merely concomitant, comprising
artworks produced at the present moment but not engaging with the actuality
of that moment, it is reduced to a successive historicist category of
periodization, lacking any art critical content. Against this, both Osborne
and Sutherland engage with the contemporary as a coherent category of
historical time by reflecting on the condition of art in the wake of
1950s-70s conceptualism in order to discuss the changing structure of
historical experience. Osborne’s /The Postconceptual Condition/(Verso,
2017), from which this symposium takes its cues, argues that in historical
contemporaneity diverse temporalities come together resulting in a
disjunctive, fragmentary experience. Whereas, in essays such as ‘The World as
Gallery: Conceptualism and Global Neo-Avant-Garde’ (New Left Review, 2016),
Sutherland examines experiments in artistic conceptualism according to
distributed global conditions.
We invite proposals for 15-minute papers from doctoral and early career
researchers and artists that seek to develop, challenge and take in
unexpected directions some of the premises upon which  The Postconceptual
Condition elaborates the contemporary – such as the identification of history
with history of capitalism, contemporaneity as a project of crisis,
synchronicity as the dominant element of the temporality of globalization,
contemporaneity as global modernity or contemporaneity as a fictive
relational unity – by adopting similar or radically different theoretical
points of view. Topics to be considered include but are not exclusive to:
·      The contemporary as a historico-philosophical or art-critical
concept
·      Competing historical periodizations of contemporary art
·      Case studies of dialogue between modern and contemporary art
·      Current relevance of autonomy as a critical category in art and
politics
·      Thinking beyond the dilemma between political art or escape from
social determination
·      Tension between synchronization and temporal disjunction in the
historical present
·      Temporal, spatial and social aspects of globalization challenged
by contemporary art and its institutions
·      Art journals, international exhibitions, museums and archives as
platforms for shaping the historical present
·      Art space and the space of the work of art
·      Relation of digital technologies and the distribution of images
·      (In)compatibility between information and image production and/or
narrativity
·      Relevance for thinking the co-constitution of memory and the image
Please send 300-word proposals accompanied by a short biography of no more
than 100 words to afterpostconceptualcondition@gmail.com [1] by 14
September 2018. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 9 October 2018.
Travel bursaries are available for participants affiliated with non-TECHNE
institutions and independent early career scholars. Please indicate in your
proposal whether you wish to be considered for a bursary.
Please address any questions or comments to the aforementioned e-mail and
visit https://afterpostconceptualcondition.wordpress.com/ [2] for more
information.

[1] mailto:afterpostconceptualcondition@gmail.com
[2] https://afterpostconceptualcondition.wordpress.com/