Marxism, modernity and representation

EVENT POSTPONED

Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics seminar series.

'Redemption and Transformation: Marxism, Culture and the Lineaments of Revolution in Visual Arts'.

Out of history painting and landscape, through abstraction and conceptualism, and back to history painting and the photographic document, are we to read this trajectory as a process of disenchantment, the self-fashioning of the avant-garde as cult and as myth, and thus to treat modernism as merely part of our antiquity, as T.J. Clark counselled us at the end of the last century? Is that how we should read images and traditions? Alternatively, should we still seek to read images and the conditions of their production as elements of an integrated narrative, tracing the evolution of the arts as developmental, and rooted in history and politics and their impact on our appreciation of the human self? Can the latter be done without regression to a naïve historicism?

Tom Hickey, is Principal Lecturer in Politics and Aesthetics at the University of Brighton, and editor (with David Powell) of Democracy: the Long Revolution. In 2007 he curated a major exhibition of the work of internationally influential South African artist William Kentridge. His current research is on aspects of political and artistic representation, and their interaction, on historiographical theory and the scientific method, on the theorisation of the contemporary world order, and on new developments in critical theory.

For access to Pavilion Parade, contact: Catherine Bergin