“Digitizing Global Art History” Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel
16 març, 2017En el marc del Seminari internacional Perspectives globals en les Humanitats i les Ciències Socials, us convidem a la conferència Digitizing Global Art History. The Decolonial Potential of a Very “Western” Method, a càrrec de Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, investigadora i professora de l’École Normale Supérieure.
La conferència tindrà lloc el dijous 6 d’abril de 14:30h a 15:30h, a la seu central de la UOC (Avinguda Tibidabo, 39-43 08035 Barcelona).
Inscripcions: l’entrada és lliure, però cal inscriure’s aquí.
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel proposarà una reflexió sobre les metodologies que ens podrien ajudar a globalitzar i descolonitzar la història de l’art. Un camp que ha canviat poc i continua establint els mateixos patrons. Podríem començar per descolonitzar els nostres mètodes? És òptim proposar una resposta computacional per al desafiament descolonial? Aquestes metodologies poden servir de punt de partida per a una història descentralitzada de modernitats artístiques? A continuació us adjuntem un petit resum del tema central de la jornada:
Resum
This paper proposes a reflection on the methodologies which might help us to globalize and even to decolonize art history, and to depart from the modernist canon. As historians like James Elkins have continued to remind us, nothing has changed, or so little, in the way modern and modernist collections are exhibited, and in the way the history of art is told. We continue to discuss the same artists, the same places, and the same movements, with few moments of self-correction.
Decolonial thinkers, like Boaventura De Sousa Santos, call for a ‘new ecology of knowledges’, proposing to splice scientific methods with other ways of thinking (non-cartesian, non-western, etc). This task is far from simple: the decolonization of our minds is a profoundly difficult process. Yet we might begin by decolonizing our methods, and so by putting some distance between ourselves and our research objects and the discourse that has overdetermined them for so long. Quantitative, cartographic, sociological and transnational approaches can help us to do so.
Fully acknowledging the paradoxicality of proposing a computational answer to the decolonial challenge, I still argue that the “distant reading” of sources with digital methods shows previously unobserved phenomena and helps us to reconsider existing hierarchies in art history, before using other modes of inquiry. With this horizontal re-reading comes a new perspective: one which nuances national histories through a transnational and global approach; which attenuates the monocentric tendencies of a discipline that accords an excessive importance to a handful of cities (Paris and New York) and instead emphasizes circulation; one which challenges the relevance of monographic studies and their hagiographic tendency, in favor of a comparative approach where every kind of actor has a relative position; one which cares for the social as much as for the history of forms. These methodologies can offer a starting point for a mobile and decentralized history of artistic modernities.
Nota biogràfica
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel is an Associate Professor for Contemporary Art at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. She works on the history of the avant-gardes in a global and transnational perspective, an area of research that brought her to challenge the methodologies used in the study of art globalization and explore quantitative and cartographic approaches, digital humanities, and collaborative research. She is the founder and director of the ARTL@S project since 2009 (http://www.artlas.ens.fr). She directed the collective publication L’Art et la Mesure. Histoire de l’art et méthodes quantitatives : sources, outils, bonnes pratiques (2010), and coedited with Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Catherine Dossin the book Circulations in the Global History of Art (Ashgate, 2015). She has published Nul n’est prophète en son pays ? L’internationalisation de la peinture avant-gardiste parisienne, 1855-1914 (Paris, Musée d’Orsay/Nicolas Chaudun, 2009 – Prix du musée d’Orsay). She is currently finishing a 3 volumes transnational history of modernist art for the Editions Gallimard (Folio histoire Series, pocket books), Les avant-gardes artistiques – une histoire transnationale. The first volume has been published in January 2016 (1848-1968); volume 2 (1918-1945) forthcoming April 2017; volume 3 (1945-1968) forthcoming in 2018. Personal page: http://www.dhta.ens.fr/spip.php?rubrique4 (and Academia).
Selecció d’articles
Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice. Les avant-gardes artistiques. Une histoire transnationale, 1848-1918. París: Gallimard, coll. Folio Histoire, 2016 (2 toms posteriors en preparació: 1918-1945 i 1945-1968).
Catherine Dossin, Nicole Ningning Kong, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel. « Applying VGI to collaborative research in the humanities : the case of ARTL@S », Cartography and Geographic Information Science August 31, 2016. Online
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, i Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, eds. Circulations in the Global History of Art. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015.
Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice. « Provincializing Paris. The Center-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantitative and Transnational Approaches ». Artl@s Bulletin, 4, no. 1, 2015. Online
Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice. « ¿Exponer al cubista sin cubismo ? De cómo Kahnweiler llegó a convencer a Alemania —e incluso al mundo entero— del aura de Picasso mediante su pedagogía expositiva (1908-1914) ». Dins Picasso. Registros Alemanes, cat. exp. Malag, Museo Picasso, 2015, pp. 258-273.