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University of Arts Belgrade EUROPEAN CULTURE – PAST PRESENT FUTURE

2013-2014 / topics - Nikola Šuica and Jelena Todorović

Nikola Šuica

Mnemosyne and the peculiar case of Aby Warburg

Focus on Aby Warburg (1866-1929), one of the legendary figures of twentieth century cultural history reveals a hidden depth beyond capacites of european humanistic tradition. Presentation holds a glimse into unknown territories of experience between documentary data from the past and mythological fiction as well as Warburg's own age of modernist mechanical progress beyond potency of pictorial iconography within European Renaissance Art.

Further reading:

Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, MIT Press, Cambridge MA 2004.

Selected Webography

DIVING INTO SECRETS: Case of Duchamp, Surrealist Art and peculiar objects

Enigmatic scope of Marcel Duchamp’s work (1887 -1968) proves to be an outstanding dissent in European cultural and artistic revolution. This French then American artist opened a level of perceptive powers of everyday while suggesting a productive reading as debates in Arts & Humanities. His found object became a principle of abjection of direct order of things in universe end human position. His careful built and humorous approach became highly influential path for further European Avant-Garde artists and thinkers. Making the relations of thought on the very existence, on mythical past and European values lead Duchamp’s peculiar artistic actions into a realm of unprecedented twists. This was also the case with manifests and action of international Surrealist Movement that from the very centre of European Avant-Garde Art created an array of subconscious provocations.

Further reading:

Gough Cooper, Jennifer and Caumont, Jacques - Marcel Duchamp - Palazzo Grassi /Bompiani, Venezia - Milano 1993.

Mink, Janis - Marcel Duchamp, Taschen Koln 2003.

Schwarz, Arturo The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, Delano Greenidge Editions, 1995.

Eyes, Lies and Illusions, Hayward gallery, London 2004.

Knowles, Kim, "A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray". Bern; Oxford: Peter Lang; (2009).

Naumann, Francis. Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray; Rutgers University Press; (2003).

Mileaf, Janine. "Between You and Me: Man Ray's Object to be Destroyed," Art Journal 63, No. 1 (Spring 2004): 4-23.

'Jake and Dinos Chapman' Tate Britain, London 2007.

Archer Michael, Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art Royal Academy Of Arts, London 2000.

Selected webography

Dystopian Future: from Time machine to Cyber Waste Lands

Origin of doomsday, monstrosity and scopes of time travel is a pervading phenomena and a continuing cultural, artistic and media attention. Its European origin rises in debates in ethics, politics and public belief of projected future. Contents of H.G. Wells novel Time machine is leading to a new cultural genre both in cultural media and in artistic outputs. Such vision belongs to a great scope of late modern and postmodern examples in culture. One of a kind is a strange world of British novelist J. G. Ballard. His novels and stories develop a distinctive state of projected existence inside a dystopian modernity, were we can face a bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.

Further reading:

H.G. Wells, Time Machine, Dig reads, London 2005

J.G. Ballard, Short stories and Novels (pdf’s)

User’s guide to the Millennium

Dž. G. Balard : Carstvo Sunca; Sudar, - romani (izdavač Čarobna knjiga, Beograd 2011; 2013.)

Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of Millenium, Oxford University Press; Oxford 1970.

Konrad Lorentz, Die Acht Todsuenden der zivilisierten Menschkeit, Piper Verkag, Muenchen 1974.

Classification of the space – Belgrade Artist Leonid Šejka

Question of formation of late modernist artistic space attributed to a regional tiny revolution of Belgrade artist Leonid Sejka (1932-1970). He addressed European humanistic tradition and pictorial illusionism as escapism in the midst of social changes and turmoil of establishing a core of consumer postmodern societies even under changes in communist states in years after a 'cold war ‘period in global politics. Included after a presentation of Slate Sejka's composites of arts and theoretical phantasm, a documentary film on the artist.

Further reading:

Marcuse - Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia By Robert Pippin, Andrew Feenberg, and Charles P. Webel, Bergin & Garvey Paperback. South Hadley, Mass. 1988.

Ješa Denegri, Pedesete; Šezedeste: teme srpske umetnosti Svetovi NS,1993;1995.

Bora Ćosić, Bekstvo Šejkino na zapad,u: Sodoma i Gomora, Nolit. Bg 1984

Kristine Stilles, Material Culture and Everyday Life, u: Theories and Documents of XX century

Art, UCLA, Berkeley, Los Angeles 1996.

Elizabeth Wilson, The Death of Bohemia, u: Ambient Fears, Rivers Oram Pres, London 1996.

Entoni Gidens, Modernost ili postmodernost?, u: Posledice modernosti, Filip Visnjic, 1998.

Elegies of immigration and exile – from writings to visual culture

States of emergence in diverse aftermaths of modernism inside 20th century reveal an ongoing social, historical, but moreover personal experiences of exile, forced immigration within violent outcomes. This vast topic is seen inside contemporary arts visual practise mainly on literature and writings throughout 20th century as well as further back into European past.

Further reading:

Searching for Sebald Photography After W. G. Sebald (essays and artworks), Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles, 2007.

V.G. Zebald Saturnovi prstenovi; Austerlic; Iseljenici (prevodi na srpski jezik - Plato; Paideia, Beograd)

Svetlana Bojm, Budućnost Nostalgije, Geopeoetika, Beograd 2005.

Josif Brodski, Tuga i razum, Russika, Beograd 2007.

Jean-Christophe Royoux , Marina Warner et al., Tacita Dean - Contemporary Artists, Phaidon, London 2006.

W.G. Sebald: Austerlictz, Penguin, London 2009.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, London, 1995.

Jelena Todorović

The past is a foreign country – Understanding the past and history in European culture

As lucidly noted by David Rosenthal in this work The Past is a Foreign Country, the concept of the past is both less and more than history. But what is the past? And how does it differ from history? What is memory in relation to the past? Even today this presents a highly contested field among historians and historiographers. It could be said, that awareness of the past is common to all individuals, and that it shares both the mechanisms and its subject matter with the concepts of history and memory.

Further reading:

J.H. Plumb, The Death of the Past, Mackmillan, 1969.

Theories of Memory: A Reader, ed. Michael Rossington, Edinburgh Uni. Press, 2007

John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, London 2006.

If you do not like the past – change it! The manipulation of time in European culture

History, by its very nature and due to the fact that it is always created from one viewpoint, can only treat one section and never the entire past. Also, it can never recover the past since the past has been, it has passed and cannot be retrieved. For that very reason we can never know the real outlines of a historical truth, which means that truth can always be altered, history rewritten and time shifted.

Assigned reading:

David Lowenthal The Past is a Foreign Country, CUP 2005, 185-237

Further reading for topics 1&2:

Marc Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History, Rautlege and Kegan Paul, 1984

David Lowenthal The Past is a Foreign Country, CUP 2005

J.H. Plumb, The Death of the Past, Mackmillan, 1969.

Theories of Memory: A Reader, ed. Michael Rossington, Edinburgh Uni. Press, 2007

John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, London 2006.

The spatial and temporal pluralities as the Baroque legacy in the contemproary literature (the case of writer W.G. Sebald)

How the issues of time, of the European history, of our patsts, personal and collective alike, could be incorporated in our own worldview? Are the events of the past perpetually present in our present? How do we remember, and why do we forget? In what way our memory shapes our sense of identity and belongingness? All these questions are central for one of the most conspicuous contemporary writers W.G. Sebald. Throughout his writings Sebald merges documentary, historiography, fiction and travel writing in order to create a new artistic form in itself. Sebald himself claimed that his literature does not belong to any fixed category, but that it unites all of them.

In this class we would present to you how literature could be used to shift our notions of both the space and time in European culture. For Sebald the past never ceases to be current, it is always around us, only hidden behind the immediate plane of reality. He experiences time as immovable, unaltering, as if everything stands still, as if the years behind us were still to come.

The time for Sebald is not continues but fragmented, not linear but circular in its flow. For Sebald it is the ever present composition of diverse elements, belonging to different ages and epochs. Like his emblematic Rings of Saturn it is a collection of individual particles belonging to our presents, as well as to our pasts that in one unending vortex ambulate perpetually. All the pasts and all the presents, all our visions and our memories, our perceptions and reminiscences converge.

Further reading:

The emergence of memory, conversations with W.G. Sebald, ed. , London, 2002.

Svetlana Boym, The future of nostalgia, Basic books, London, 2002.

Searching for Sebald Photography After W. G. Sebald (essays and artworks), Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles, 2007.

W.G. Sebald: Austerlictz, Penguin, London 2009.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, London, 1995.

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