In this talk, Monica Amor will follow arguments developed in her book Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944-1969. Departing from the premise that modernity is not a Euroamerican narrative that was exported abroad through colonization, but instead that otherness is constitutive to modernity, she will suggest alternative methodological figures to approach postwar global art. Indeed, this otherness is not merely geographic and pertains propositions that we consider anathema to modernist art such as the synthesis of the arts, or in the case of the art object, the rejection of medium specificity that the Nonobject represented. By unframing the art object the Nonobject becomes a paradigmatic proposition that serves as a model for discursive intervention in contemporary art. To wit, the Nonobject, she will argue, is not merely a local operation at the edge of modernity but a central conceptual device to intervene in a postwar global art history.
Bio: Monica Amor is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and has written art criticism and essays for Art Margins, Artforum, Art Journal, Art Nexus, Grey Room, October, Poliester, Third Text, and Trans, She is author of Theories of the non-object: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela 1944-1969 (University of California Press, 2016).
Lecture sponsored by Kunsthistorische Gesellschaft, Institut für Kunstgeschichte der Universität Wien, in collaboration with Noit Banai, Institut für Kunsgtgeschichte, Universität Wien, and Sabeth Buchmann, Institut für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien.
Location: Universitätscampus Hof 9, Building 9.2, Seminar Room 1 // Entrance to Hof: Garnisongasse, corner of Beethovengasse, 1090, Wien