Title: The Art of the Past: Before and After Archaeology

Speaker: Ian RUSSELL (Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, CUHK)

Date: 25 Sep 2020

Time: 1:00-2:30 pm

Zoom Meeting Info

ID: 960-7978-2594

Passcode: 728275

Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/96079782594

Abstract:

With intellectual and disciplinary roots in art history, early modern science, and antiquarianism, the field of archeology exists within the arts, humanities, and sciences. As with their antiquarian forebears, whose work to compose images of the past slipped easily from art to science and back again, contemporary archeologists compose pasts from traces, residues, absences and presences, appropriating, mixing, and inventing techniques and methods from across the academy. In the first decade of the twenty first century, there has been a resurgence of interest in the composition of the past within contemporary arts practice. With some artists focusing directly on archeology and the act of excavation and processing of finds in particular, some archeologists, such as Colin Renfrew, Ruth Tringham, Michael Shanks, and Doug Bailey, have endeavoured to meet this interest with-in the arts, sustaining critical, interdisciplinary work on the renewal of the past through both archeological as well as artistic practices. In many cases, archeologists themselves have transgressed disciplinary strictures engaging artists directly through residencies and commissions, and in some cases taking to making art themselves. Collectively, there is evidence of a concerted effort within both archeology and art to address the composition of the past – not as an end result of technological analysis but as the beginning of a possibility for renewal through process. Doing away with the rubric of a scientifically managed past, perhaps we may be witnessing a revival of an avantgardist past, akin to the predisciplinary spirit of antiquarianism, that is not constrained by disciplinary strictures or epistemic conventions, where the past is not a destination but a continual process of composition and renewal.

Short Bio:

Ian Alden Russell is a curator, educator and strategist and currently holds the post of Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before joining CUHK, Ian was an Artistic Director and Chief Curator with K11, Curator of Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery, a Lecturer in the Rhode Island School of Design’s Glass Department and an Instructor with Brown University’s School of Professional Studies. Previously, Ian held the posts of Assistant Professor of Curating and Contemporary Art at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, Fellow in Public Humanities at Brown University and NEH Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. Ian has also been a visiting critic at the University of Texas, Austin, Rhode Island School of Design and the School of Visual Arts New York.