LFU:online

Developing a basic understanding and specific advanced knowledge of the lectures topic.

The topic of non-Western modern art has only recently attracted attention within the field of art history. This lecture series explores modernist art that goes beyond being seen simply as a set of ‘responses’ to European master narratives. From colonial to post-colonial modernism in South Asia, cosmopolitanism and tradition will be looked at closely thereby investigating modern pan-Islamism, twentieth-century metropolitan and transnational artistic modernism as well as contemporary debates on the local versus the global. Furthermore the role of two Austrian refugees in the advancement of modernism in mid twentieth century Bombay will be briefly discussed. The rise of calligraphic modernism will be an opportunity to explore modernist centres in West Asia and North Africa where calligraphic abstraction emerged at around the mid twentieth century, linked to a desire for equal participation in transnational modernism. Finally, a relationship between the ‘modern’ and the ‘contemporary’ will be addressed thereby pointing to the ways in which the latter continues to be shaped by a dialogue with the former.

Lecture

Oral exam

Partha Mitter’s historiography of modern art is exemplary as an approach that steps out of the boundaries of a Eurocentric world view through the examination of the consequences of modernisation.

--‘Interview: A “Virtual Cosmopolis”: Partha Mitter in Conversation with Keith Moxey’, Art Bulletin, vol. 95, no. 3, 2013.

--The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922-1947, London: Reaktion Books, 2007.

--Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

--Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

On shared histories of art in various regions see

--Kobena Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms, Cambridge: MIT Press; London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2005.

--Monica Juneja and Franzika Koch (eds.), ‘Multi-Centred Modernisms: Reconfiguring Asian Art of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries’, Themed Section, Transcultural Studies, 2010-14, http://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/transcultural/issue/archive

On the intellectual history of art and its relation to literary form across the 20^th century in Muslim South Asia see

--Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

On networks of encounters and transnational influences see

--Monica Juneja and Christian Kravagna in Conversation, ‘Understanding Transculturalism’, in Transcultural Modernisms, Model House Research Group (Ed.), Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013.

On an advancement of the term “modernism at large”, see

--Andreas Huyssen, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World’, New German Critique, vol. 34, no. 100, 2007, pp. 189-207.

On modernity with different outcomes see

--Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, in Alternative Modernities, Durham and London: Duke University, 2001.

On modernism in Pakistan in relation to place and space see

--Simone Wille, Modern Art in Pakistan. History, Tradition, Place, New Delhi: Routledge, 2015.  

LFU: online registration is required!
Registration for Bachelor-Students only.
Attention! Monday, 30.11.2015, 14.00 Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck