Encounters with the 1930s
Type of activity: International seminar Encounters with the 1930s is a symposium that begins with a line of questions about a decade that has haunted historic and contemporary ideas about art and politics, artistic autonomy, and the pressure of context on artistic production. Why look to the 1930s today? The political pressures, economic crises, and social networks that seem to be unique to our current times have anchor points in the 1930s. Of course, it was a decade that marked the rise of totalitarian governments as well as the devastation of the 1929 Crack. But, the 1930s was also a moment in which artists and writers became adept at using and exploiting the media, technology, and creativity that marked the avant-garde's experiments throughout the early twentieth century. Forms of expression and protest that first emerged prior to and immediately after World War I were brought into the mainstream during the 1930s. Instead of being an exception, the use of the camera, publicity, mass media, and transport were common tools among artists and writers. The artistic output of the 1930s is marked at once by bravado and monumentality as well as ambiguity and uncertainty. The strategies that artists and writers used to understand and confront the realities of their times require scholars working today to pay attention, not only to the already established historical record but especially to those works, artists, and positions that may have been hidden, treasured, or overlooked. Of particular interest in the papers presented in this international seminar are the ways in which often moments of authority, closure, and opacity are accompanied by equally powerful instances of slippage, misidentification, and display. Over the last ten to twenty years there have been several exhibitions dedicated to the 1930s, and many scholarly studies focused on particular artists, national contexts, or movements. Among the most significant exhibitions, curators sought to bring attention to what had been labeled a period of time in the narrative of art history that had been troubled by the relation between art and politics. The problem of how to define the relation between the agency and autonomy of an artist and their potential interest in contributing to a political cause that was at once part of and yet separate from their formal experimentations lead scholars to bring forward categories of interpretation that focused largely on either the force of the state as a patron or broad thematic ideas related to utopian visions of renewal and revolution. Many artists worked to forge images, build environments, and design structures that announced departures from the more intimate, socially bound experiments of the previous years. While making bold and important interpretations about the contribution of artists to the political stakes of their times (and providing a foundation for scholarship undertaken today), one of the over-riding themes that seemed to emerge from this recent exhibitions and studies is the view of the 1930s that cordoned the decade off as an exceptional moment. And yet, as this symposium seeks to explore, the 1930s was at once a decade unto itself as well as one that was inextricably linked to the previous decades as well as fiercely relevant to the problems we face today. Program The 1930s: The Subject in/of History Exhibiting Nation, Art and the World Aesthetics and Late-Modernisms Technology, War, and Spectacle Participants Valeria Coronel is Research Professor in the Sociology program of FLACSO, Ecuador. She is a member of the network Conceptualismos del Sur. |
