Patrons' Circle Lecture 2012: Alexander Potts
"Hybrid Practices and Political Art—Asger Jorn, Joseph Beuys and the Counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s"
Lecture Description:
It is widely assumed that artists who pursued a genuinely radical political agenda in the 1960s abandoned painting and sculpture and moved into non-object based forms of work. This lecture seeks to complicate this now conventional understanding of the correlation between political activism and committed artistic practice by comparing two artists, both strongly motivated by a radical agenda: Joseph Beuys and Asger Jorn. Beuys responded to the countercultural imperatives of the 1960s by moving from a method of working based on the making of sculptural objects to a more diverse and hybrid practice centered on the staging of actions and events. By contrast, the Danish artist Asger Jorn—who, if anything, was even more politically motivated than Beuys—persisted with the semi-abstract gestural form of painting he had fashioned in the 1950s. A comparison of the two artists thereby makes it clear that politicized artistic practice of the 1960s was not synonymous with making non-object based kinds of work, but rather a broader imperative to fashion art—object-based and non-object based alike—that would resist being accommodated as mere art. Art of any real significance, it seemed, also had to be non-art.
Bio:
Alexander Potts is the Max Loehr Collegiate Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Michigan. He received his Bachelor of Arts Degree in mathematics, physics and chemistry from the University of Toronto before going on to earn his PhD in art history from the University of London. One of the world's foremost authorities on modern art and theory, Professor Potts is the author of numerous essays and articles as well as two highly influential books, both from Yale University Press: Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (1994) and The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (2000). Professor Potts is currently completing a book on the significance of experimental forms of realism in post-war European and American art, the subject of the Slade Lectures in Fine Art and of the Kirk Varnedoe Memorial Lectures he delivered at the University of Oxford in 2008 and at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2009, respectively.
Event Details and Registration:
Please note that this will take place on Oct. 18, 2012 at 5:30PM Eastern Standard Time (EST) in Psychology Building 0002.
