On Likeness and Difference: Modern Art of the Middle East and the Confines of Modernism
Third Annual Conference
Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey
Co-sponosred by the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near East Studies at NYU and NYU Abu Dhabi
Date: October 18-19, 2013
Location:
- Friday 18 October: NYU Abu Dhabi, New York University (19 Washington Square North)
- Saturday 19 October: Hagop Kevorkian Center, New York University (255 Sullivan Street)
RSVP Required: kevorkian.center@nyu.edu
The third annual AMCA conference seeks to problematize the comparative method with which the paradigm of modernism approaches modern art of the Middle East. This paradigm is, after all, a formulation of the historical experience of Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It maps the development of bourgeois society to an apotheosis of form, and then situates the emergence of modernist concepts and styles at this juncture. As new artistic practices develop outside of Europe, artists producing work in apparently modernist styles are consistently read in comparison to their European counterparts, eclipsing their historical specificity and rendering them derivative. The conference aims to interrogate this relation of comparison by opening up a set of interlocking questions about visual resemblances between works, uses of the concept of influence, and the availability of documentation that would enable the writing of a different historiography. Comparison is often premised on visual resemblances between the modern art of the Middle East and the modern art of Europe: “It looks like Picasso.” However, the identification of those resemblances is based on the epistemological fallacy that alikeness is evidence of a historical relation; it may look like Picasso but that does not necessarily indicate an influence. At stake in the lure of resemblance is not only methodological rigor; by inviting comparison, resemblances risk subordinating one art to another, obscuring its constitutive artistic problem and the historical context in which it was produced.
Program
