"Why Abstract Art?"

Conference on Art and Iconoclasm at the University of Chicago
October 12-13, 2001

What accounts for the 20th century’s most striking, yet least digestible art form? This week, top scholars, top scholars will gather at the University of Chicago to ask that question and debate a provocative new answer.

Unlike the works of the Impressionists, so beloved of museum-goers and poster-buyers, abstract avant-garde works of the 20th century remain puzzling to the average viewer. But on Friday and Saturday, October 12 and 13, a group of prominent French and American philosophers, art historians and artists will discuss a compelling explanation for the origin and continued vitality of this form: abstract art is just the latest version of religious iconoclasm, the rejection of images in the name of the sacred.

That 20th-century abstract painting is just the latest movement in a long struggle over idolatry, going back to the Bible’s Second Commandment, is itself a new and controversial idea. It originates with Alain Besançon, the renowned French historian and cultural critic, who develops this argument in his book The Forbidden Image, recently translated into English and published by the University of Chicago Press. Besançon will be a featured speaker at the conference.

The conference will address central issues of art, theology and philosophy where they intersect the average person’s questions about what artists do. It is sponsored by the University of Chicago’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Committee on Social Thought and the France-Chicago Center and will take place on Friday, October 12 from 9:45 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday, October 13 from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. in the Classics Building, 1010 E. 59th Street, room 10. Those interested in attending should contact Thomas Bartscherer, Lecturer in Social Sciences in the College (thomAuchicago.edu).

Schedule:

October 12-13, 2001
University of Chicago
Classics Building (1010 E. 59th St.), Room 10

Friday, October 12

9:45
Opening Remarks: Janel Mueller, Dean of Humanities (University of Chicago)

10:00 - 12:00
Robert Pippin (University of Chicago)
Respondent: Thomas Pavel (University of Chicago)

2:00 - 4 :00
Joel Snyder (University of Chicago)
Alain Besançon (Institut de France, Paris)

Saturday, October 13

10:00 - 12 :00
W.J.T. Mitchell (University of Chicago)
Marc Fumaroli (Académie Française, Paris)

1:30 - 3:30
James Welling (UCLA)
Michael Fried (Johns Hopkins University)

Sponsors: The Committee for Social Thought, The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, The France-Chicago Center, The Olin Center, The University of Chicago Press

Organizing Committee:
Ewa Atanassow
Thomas Bartscherer
Thomas Pavel (chair)

The participants:

Robert Pippin, the Raymond and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, is a prominent American specialist on the philosophy of Kant and Hegel. His books include Modernism as a Philosophical Problem and Kant&146;s Theory of Form.

Joel Snyder, Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, has written on questions of visuality and the theory of photography. His essays include "Photography, Vision and Representation," "What Happens by Itself in Photography?" and "Picturing Vision."

Alain Besançon had taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France. He is a member of the Institut de France and has published numerous books on Russian and Soviet history, cultural criticism and art history.

W. J. T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in English and Art History at the Unversity of Chicago. He is the author of Iconology, The Last Dinosaur Book and "The Rhetoric of Iconoclasm" and editor of the journal Critical Inquiry and the book Art and the Public Sphere, among others.

Marc Fumaroli, a member of the French Academy, is Visiting Professor in the Committee for Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He has written prolifically on early modern European literature and art. He was in charge of a history of rhetoric in modern Europe and the author of L'école du silence: le sentiment des images au XVIIe siècle.

Michael Fried is Professor of Comparative Literature and Art History at Johns Hopkins University. Described by Thomas Pavel as "One of the most important art historians in America today," he is the author of numerous books on 19th-century French and German art.

James Welling is a photographer who has worked and exhibited widely in Europe and the United States. He has drawn extensively on abstraction in his work, inspired, among other things, by European and American avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Rhys Chatham. He is a professor in the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles.