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The Expanded Field of Black Social Sculpture

Daniel Horn

Kommentar

In the seminar we want to critically revisit definitive geneses of the postmodernist forms of “social sculpture” and “environment” in view of their respective western art historical theorizations and subsequent canonizations (eg. Kaprow 1958/1966, Beuys 1964/65, Krauss 1979). To do so, we will draw on 20th-to-21st century theories pertaining to African-diasporic social sculpture. Prior to Joseph Beuys’s postwar notion of a rationalistic-restricted “Westmensch” (Western Man) that emerged around 1964/65 and ensuing redefinitions of art/work as holistic “social sculpture” (Soziale Plastik), the Senegalese writer, politician and philosopher of négritude ideology Leopold Senghor posited a Black-African artistic subjectivity and plasticity as “intuitive by participation”, as opposed to “analytical by utilization” (1956). Departing from these premises we study postwar African-diasporic intellectual histories and artistic practices that conceived of art’s "social" and "environmental turn" as integral to concurrent decolonization processes and thus afforded visual praxis genuine and concrete political momentum. To this end we critically delineate a diasporic African-Atlantic notion of the “sculptural” and the “Expanded Field” across which it may be situated. Rosalind Krauss’s often quoted argument of the variously expanded guises and “(non-)sites” of (Minimalist) sculpture (1979) explicitly acknowledged that it was “...a historically bounded category and not a universal one”, one further beset by Western-modern “negative conditions” such as “sitelessness” and “absolute loss of place”, by which the genre attained its “nomadic function”. Yet we might discern such a nomadic function and placelessness to already inhere in the cultural production and transmission of Black social sculpture's material and visual attributes, owing to the colonial space of the “Black Atlantic” (Farris Thompson 1983/Gilroy 1993). Our focus will thus be on how arguably peripheral artistic positions altered and expand what we understand "social sculpture" and "environment" to signify and to actually look like. Schließen

Literaturhinweise

Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African art as philosophy : Senghor, Bergson and the idea of negritude, London 2011 (FU Primo) Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, October, Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), pp. 30-44 (FU Primo) Ka?rî’ka?chä Seid’ou, “On Stage-Crafting and State-Crafting Beyond Crisis: Ibrahim Mahama's Word and Deed”, African arts, 2021-05 Vol.54 (2), p. 52-67 (FU Primo) Schließen

11 Termine

Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung

Do, 12:00 - 14:00 11 Termine

Do, 17.04.2025 12:00 - 14:00

Dozenten:
Dr. Daniel Horn