Video, photography, and cinema have played key roles for identifying the challenges and prospects of twenty-first century history of art, regarding how to question, critically reformulate, and overcome modernist notions and models of medium specificity. They have also helped to enrich both inter/transdisciplinary approaches in the contemporary history of art and our understanding of art produced in different mediums, before and after modern times. In this direction, the VIII Art History Symposium at the Universidad de los Andes invites proposals for individual papers discussing and examining some of the methodological, analytical or theoretical new challenges and prospects for the discipline concerning the relationship between art & mediums in artworks produced in any time, place, and medium(s). Papers may include responses to, but are by no means limited by the following:

1. Rosalind Krauss reformulated the modernist discussion on medium in response to what she considered a crisis related to the emergence of video in the sixties. She proposed a post-medium notion of medium in terms of supporting structures of “differential” and self-differentiating elements and in terms of the open possibilities of various interactions between these components. On her part, Carol Armstrong proposes a feminist interpretation of Georges Seurat’s “pointillist mark”, which she interprets in terms of a “complex matrix of interrelated media and materialities,” and as optical as well as embodied, tactile, and generative mark. The symposium invites papers related to the study of how artworks and practices could be understood from a perspective that emphasizes materiality and creation within conditions and dynamics of an art medium’s “self-differentiating elements” or of interrelatedness of different art media.

2. Ji Hoon Kim’ Between Film, Video and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-Media Age (2016) shows that both medium specificity and Krauss’ proposal hardly help to study works that use other exhibition devices and platforms to “mediate and scrutinize in the material and technical complexity of the cinema”. Andrew Uroskie’s Between the Black Box and the White Cube (2014) shows how artists in the 1950s/60s used sculpture & other media “to address fundamental aspects of the cinematic experience”. In this direction, the symposium seeks papers that study how production and reception of art before and in modernity occurs in terms of perception, communication, and the interweaving and hybridization of media and mediums. The symposium also invites investigations on how artists and institutions have developed and problematized formal, structural, and ontological characteristics of mediums/media in order to ‘expand’ the different cultural and communicational possibilities of art.

3. Raymond Bellour’s L’Entre-Images: Photo Cinéma Vidéo (1990) demonstrated that video, electronic, and digital artifacts did not dissolve cinema, but rather enabled its development and allowed the reexamination of the relationship between old and new mediums. This task was assumed and reformulated by the “media archeology”. The symposium invites papers evaluating intricate (bio)tecnologic dynamics of memory, narrative, and (bio)politics in specific art works, addressing reexaminations of the relationship between traditional and new (art) mediums, or studying how these mediums give an account of their own histories and hybridizations.

Speakers have 20 minutes for presentations. Please send your proposal to Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernandez (historiadelarte@uniandes.edu.co). Make sure you write “VIII Art History Symposium” in the subject. Proposals should include 2 files (PDF or Word). The 1st file includes a tentative title of the paper & an abstract (400-600 words). Please, avoid including your name in this document. The 2nd file should include a short CV (between 100-200 words) stating your full name, academic affiliation, e-mail, and list of publications.