SMArt Talks: Contextual Art. Practices and Experiments Across Europe in the 1970s
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10 October 2024
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM - Hans Belting Library
Juliane Debeusscher Contextual Art. Practices and Experiments Across Europe in the 1970s
Abstract
What is contextual art? Who is behind it? And can it be exhibited? Between the late 1960s and 1970s, a number of artists and cultural operators active in Europe stressed the need to produce a contextual art, anchored in concrete social, cultural or environmental sites. These targeted interventions were often put into practice through fieldwork conducted with local communities and local authorities. At the same time, they were part of the framework of transnational collaborations or meetings that repositioned these investigations and concerns on a wider stage.
The lecture focuses on selected examples of experiments in across politically divided Europe during the 1970s from Debeusscher’s recent and ongoing research and publications. They include international encounters in Paris and Warsaw around the idea of ‚contextual art‘ formulated by Polish artist and theorist Jan Świdziński; the project ‚Une expérience socio-écologique‘ held in Neuenkirchen (West Germany), and ‚Operazione Arcevia,‘ an attempt at the artistic revitalization of a village affected by rural exodus in Italy. The lecture will discuss the implications of this particular approach and its relation to the notion of cultural decentralization, as well as possible variations related to the diverse geopolitical and cultural realities in which they took place. Debeusscher will also address the transposition of some of these projects to the exhibition format, as an indicator of the difficulty of circumventing institutional validation.
Juliane Debeusscher is a postdoctoral researcher at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her interests focus on transnational artistic exchange across Europe during the Cold War, with a particular interest on the medium of exhibition as a platform of visibility. She is working on a monograph on this topic, with particular attention to the circulations between Central Europe and Southern Europe in the 1970s. As a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Modern Art & Theory, she is developing a project on drawing exhibitions in Czechoslovakia and their related international networks. She is member of several projects and groups, including Equipo Comunicación: Publishing, Cultural Criticism and Anti-Francoism, 1969–1979 and the Spanish Research Network on Central and Eastern Europe (REIECO).
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