To Be Or Not To Be 'Avant-Garde' and 'Postcolonial' in a Nordic Country with a Colonial Past

Beskrivelse

‘Is avant-garde a useful notion when it comes to contemporary art?’ asks the Call for Papers. The question picks up on the skepticism that many professionals air when the term is brought into discussions of contemporary art. This skepticism about the avant-garde discourse – a legacy of hegemonic Western conceptualizations of radical ‘modern’ art and culture - may be related to the fact that much contemporary art has become globalized to the extent that the term ‘global art’ now occupies a central position in the mainstream vocabulary of art history and art criticism. Moreover, many professionals associate ‘avant-garde’ with the historical avant-garde, which is why the designation ‘contemporary avant-garde artist’ seems to be a contradiction in terms. The question of the pertinence of the term avant-garde is thus usually answered in the negative. Nevertheless, this paper seeks to re-open what appears to be a closed case by posing three questions: First, could the notion of the avant-garde be productively applied to so-called global art? Second, could a postcolonial perspective complement it to ensure that anti-Western aspects as well as thematics concerning a world outside the West are not glossed over? A third, regional question follows from the second, namely the question of how to apply postcolonial perspectives to material from the Nordic countries, particularly to art from Denmark, which has a colonial history that has never been properly worked through. The test case will be Whip it Good (2013), a performance by the Copenhagen-based artist Jeannette Ehlers and one out of several works by Ehlers which address sensitive issues related to the history of the Danish slave trade and colonialism while also travelling across the global art world.

Periode	3 dec. 2015
Begivenhedstitel	The Avant-Gardes in the Nordic Countries 1975-2000: History, Culture and Aesthetics
Begivenhedstype	Konference
Placering	Copenhagen, DanmarkVis på kort