16 décembre 2021 - 5 h 30 min - 7 h 30 min
- Terra Foundation for American Art Center,
- Salle de réunion, 121 rue de Lille, 75007 Paris
- Jeudi 17h30 – 19h30
Atlantis, “Mound Builders” précolombiens, hommes des cavernes luttant contre des T. Rex ; du fait à la fiction fantastique, les mondes anciens, préhistoriques, mondes « perdus » ont longtemps fasciné les artistes américains. Dès la rencontre entre les indigènes américains avec ceux issus de ce qui deviendra « l’Ancien Monde », les Amériques ont posé problème à l’établissement d’histoires portant sur le passé très lointain. Au cours des 19ème et 20ème siècles, les développements des sciences et de la culture populaire ont accéléré un processus par lequel divers mondes « anciens » et « perdus » ont été inventés pour donner un sens et imaginer le nouveau monde. Ces mondes pouvaient être au fond de l’océan, enfouis sous terre ou perdus dans les jungles, mais ils pouvaient être ramenés via l’image.
Dans ce séminaire, nous nous demanderons comment les artistes américains et producteurs d’images du 18ème siècle à nos jours ont dépeint la préhistoire, et dans quels buts. En sondant les relations entre production, circulation et réception, ainsi qu’entre image, média et forme, nous étudierons des artistes tels que Thomas Cole, Charles R. Knight, Walker Evans, Archibald Motley Jr., Louise Janin, Hilaire Hiler, Robert Smithson ou encore Stephen Spielberg. À la fin du séminaire, nous comprendrons mieux comment les représentations visuelles américaines de la préhistoire ont contribué à créer de nouveaux concepts de culture, de temps et d’espace.
Bibliographie non-exhaustive :
- Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin et the Arcades Project. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989.
- Miller, Angela. “‘The Soil of an Unknown America’: New World Lost Empires et the Debate over Cultural Origins.” American Art, Summer-Autumn, 1994, Vol. 8, No. ¾.
- Mitchell, W.J.T. The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life et Times of a Cultural Icon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
- Mooney, Amy M. “Representing Race: Disjunctures in the Work of Archibald J. Motley, Jr.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2, 1999.
- Orvell, Miles. Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, et the Spectacle of Destruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
- Pillsbury, Joanne. Past Presented: Archaeological Illustration et the Ancient Americas. Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2012.
- Truettner, William H. et Allan Wallach, eds. Thomas Cole: Landscape into History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Enseignant : Jonathan Dentler
Contact : dentler[at]usc.edu
Programme
- Semaine 1 : Introduction au séminaire – 16/9
- Semaine 2 : Considérations méthodologiques – 23/9
Groupe A et B
*Stefanos Geroulanos et Maria Stavrinaki. “Writing prehistory.” RES: Journal of Anthropology et Aesthetics, 69/70, 2018.
*Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989. Chapter 3, Natural History: Fossil, Part 1, pp. 58-71.
*Margaret W. Conkey, “Images without Words: The Construction and Prehistoric Imaginaries for Definitions of ‘Us’,” Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 9(3), 2010, pp. 272-283.
*Akinwumi Ogundiran, “The End of Prehistory? An Africanist Comment,” AHR, Vol. 118, No. 3, 2013.
- Semaine 3 : American Monsters – 30/9
Groupe A
*Paul Semonin, American Monster: How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity, New York: NY University Press, 2000. Pages TBA.
*W.J.T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon, Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1998. Pages TBA.
- Semaine 4 : Landscape, Nature, Infrastructure – 7/10
Groupe B
*William Truettner et Allan Wallach, eds. Thomas Cole: Landscape into History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. Pages TBA.
*Angela Miller. “Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America: The Course of Empire as Political Allegory,” in Critical Issues in American Art, ed. Mary Ann Calo. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998.
*Patricia Anderson, The Course of Empire: The Erie Canal and the New York Landscape, 1825-1875, 1984. Pages TBA.
*Ross Barrett, “Picturing a Crude Past: Primitivism, Public Art, and Corporate Oil Promotion in the U.S.,” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 46, No. 2, 2012.
- Semaine 5 : Lost Continents, Lost Tribes — the Debate Over American Indian Origins – 14/10
Groupe A
*Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pages TBA.
*Angela Miller, “‘The Soil of an Unknown America’: New World Lost Empires and the Debate over Cultural Origins.” American Art, Vol. 8, No. ¾, 1994.
*Donald Blakeslee, “John Rowzee Peyton and the Myth of the Mound Builders,” American Antiquity, 1987.
*Kenneth L. Feder, Frauds, Myths, et Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, Oxford: Oxford UP, 10th edition, 2019. Pages TBA.
*Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. – section on mound builders, Pages TBA.
- Semaine 6 : Museums, Prehistory, et the Public – 21/10
Groupe B
*Jennifer Greenhill, Introduction and Ch. 3, “William Holbrook Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum,” in Playing it Straight: Art et Humor in the Gilded Age. UC Press, 2012.
*James Snead, Relic Hunters: Archaeology and the Public in 19th Century America, Oxford UP, 2020. Pages TBA.
*Victoria Cain, “‘The Direct Medium of the Vision’: Visual Education, Virtual Witnessing and the Prehistoric Past at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890-1923,” Journal of Visual Culture, 9: 284, 2010.
*Lukas Rieppel, “Bringing Dinosaurs Back to Life: Exhibiting Prehistory at the American Museum of Natural History,” Isis, Vol. 103, No. 3, 2012.
- Semaine 7 : Exhibition Visit et Painting/Object Write-up – 28/10
Groupes A et B
-Georgia O-Keefe – Centre Pompidou https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/program/calendar/event/60bdJRm
-Or Artois Cabinet of Curiosities at the Versailles Central Library?
https://croyan.quaibranly.fr/en/september-18-2021-exhibition-the-curiosity-of-a-prince
*Sascha T. Scott, “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Hawai`i? Decolonizing the History of American Modernism,” American Art, Summer 2020.
- Semaine 8 : Myth, Symbol, Modernism – 11/11
Groupe A
*Alan, Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, 2nd ed. Chicago: U. Chicago P., 1979, Introduction, Epilogue.
*Elke Seibert, “ ‘First Surrealists Were Cavemen’: The American Abstract Artists and Their Appropriation of Prehistoric Rock Pictures in 1937,” Getty Research Journal, no. 11, 2019.
* Philip J. Deloria, Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. Introduction, Part Two, Chapter 6, Conclusion. Pgs. 3-23, 93-187, 227-80.
- Semaine 9 : Conference Event – November 18-19
Groupes A et B
Xerography: Women Artists, 1965-1990 – Galerie Colbert, Salle Giorgio Vasari, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Nov. 18-19
- Semaine 10 : Special Event at the Terra Foundation – Curating and Researching with American Photographs – 23/11
Groupes A et B
- Semaine 11: Afro-Myth and Afro-Future – 2/12
Groupe B
*Derrick Bell, Afrolantica Legacies. Chicago: Third World Press, 1997. Pages TBA.
*Amy M. Mooney, “Representing Race: Disjunctures in the Work of Archibald J. Motley, Jr.,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2, 1999.
*Krista Thompson, “A Sidelong Glance: The Practice of African Diaspora Art History in the United States,” Art Journal, Vol. 70, No. 3, Fall 2011.
*Robert Farris Thompson, “Communiqué from Afro-Atlantis,” African Arts, Vol. 32, No. 4, Winter 1999.
*Laura U. Marks, “Monad, Database, Remix: Manners of Unfolding in the Last Angel of History.” Black Camera, Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring 2015.
- Semaine 12 : Contemporary Art/Prehistory – 9/12
Groupe A
*Jennifer Roberts, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History, New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. Pages TBA.
*Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Pages TBA.
*Larisa Dryansky, “Paleocybenetics: Technology and the prehistoric imaginary in American art of the 1960s et 1970s,” RES: Anthropology et Aesthetics, 69/70, 2018.
- Semaine 13 : Historical Time in Ruins – 16/12
Groupe B
*Miles Orvell, Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction, New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Preface, Introduction, Part 1, ix-69; Chapter 8 “Picturing Climate Change, et Conclusion, 193- 216.
