080051 SE Seminar: Imaging Europe: The Aesthetics of a Continent (2015W)

This seminar emerges from the premise that one of the fundamental challenges of artistic practitioners and cultural institutions from the postwar period to the present has been to harness aesthetic materials to shape a uniquely European sphere that is still in the making and to envision new forms of sovereignty, publics, and models of citizenship within it. Conceived primarily as a way to prevent future border conflicts on the continent through economic, political, and cultural integration, the construct of ‘Europe’ initiated with the Schuman Plan of 1950, ratified by the Treaties of Rome of 1957, and reformulated in The Maastricht Treaty of 1992, envisioned the fabrication of novel singular and collective identities. In these treaties, Europe was not simply conceived as a territory, but also an “idea and a normative center” with political and ideological goals.

Artistic practices were either explicitly marshaled to this project by various constituencies (i.e., governments, commercial enterprises, museums and other cultural institutions) or implicitly navigated the stakes of a newly emerging geopolitical reality and its nascent publics. Using specific case studies, this seminar focuses on the way that artistic production and consumption from the post-war period to the present, has been confronting and producing plural fictions of ‘Europe’ by the intertwinement of formal means with a constellation of contingent issues related to the dynamics of modernity and advanced capitalism.

Our central question will be to analyze and theorize how aesthetic forms and materials intersect, mediate, and give shape to such complex questions like the 1) tensions between national and supra-national representations of identity and between ‘universal’ and ‘particular’ representations of ‘the people’; 2) problem of borders, divisions of Europe along north-south / east-west axis, and shifting dynamics between 'center' and 'periphery' ; 3) representations of ‘others’ in the European Community whether gender, race, religion, or class; 4) relation between histories of colonialism and narratives of modernity.

Issues such as difference, diaspora, postcoloniality, immigration and citizenship, statelessness and exile, economic and technological inequities will also inform our discussion