Piotr PIOTROWSKI

Le labex TransferS, en collaboration avec le projet Artl@s, invite du 15 mai au 15 juin le Professeur Piotr Piotrowski (Professeur ordinarius au département d’histoire de l’art de l’Université Adam Mickiewicz, Poznan) pour les cours, séminaires et conférences suivantes, qui se dérouleront à l’École normale supérieure et à l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art (entrée libre dans la limite des places).

L’histoire globale de l’art est-elle vraiment décentrée ?

Spécialiste de l’histoire de l’art en Europe centrale après 1945, Piotrowski prône une « histoire de l’art horizontale » qui renouvellerait les historiographies traditionnelles, et décentrerait en particulier l’histoire de l’art moderne de ses problématiques et de sa géographie traditionnelles. Plusieurs de ses publications ont été traduites en anglais et en franais. Notamment In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989. London : Reaktion Books, 2009, éditions française et italienne en préparation. Et And Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, London : Reaktion Books, 2012.

Programme des interventions

- Jeudi 16 mai, dans le cadre du séminaire Artl@s : présentation personnelle et discussion avec Jérôme Bazin (Univ. de Créteil) : « The Communist Geography of Arts after 1945 : other centralities, other universalities ».
École normale supérieure, 45 rue d’Ulm, amphi Rataud, 13h30-15h30.

This study addresses the question of so-called realistic artistic production in Communist countries-often considered marginal because this kind of creativity failed to correspond to the traditional definitions of art history and was made in peripheral regions-laying the east of the Iron Curtain. But in the context of the Cold War and the opposition between two dominant universal ideas-Capitalist and Communist-proponents of this realism attempted to implement a geography of alternative art, a geography in which this art would not be considered as peripheral.
In the vast and diverse geopolitical Communist milieu, other central places, platforms, and networks have also been developed. These are not merely traces of those existing in the West, but rather have been designed to follow the objectives of realistic art : to create an art that is close to the people and to the working class. It is this construction of a Communist universality, based on the relationship of local and daily experiences, which will be discussed here.

- Jeudi 30 mai, séminaire Artl@s : conférence : « Globalizing Eastern Europe. The Global NETwork. An Introduction to Comparative Art History ».
ENS, amphi Rataud, 13h30-15h30.

At the beginning of the 1970s Jarosaw Kozowski and Andrzej Kostoowski invented NET - a global network of artists who wanted to exchange their thoughts. This was the first such idea created in the Eastern Block, and one of the first in the entire world. Ultimately over the course of more than a dozen years a few hundred people from both Eastern and Western Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Asia participated in this initiative.
This paper does not aim to describe the project itself, but rather takes it as a point of departure for an analysis of the different contexts in which artworks circulate, in an effort to arrive at a theoretical approach to comparative art history. Piotrowski understands this concept not necessarily in the way that the circulation of ideas caused them to be influenced by each other, but rather how different geo-historical circumstances lie behind their meaning in context, how they illuminate each other---something that was not always perceived by the public that visited NET exhibitions. We may thus be able to differentiate aspects of global culture as they were developed at the time, that are otherwise usually seen as homogeneous and west-centric, existing in a one-way relationship between the metropolis and its periphery.

- Jeudi 14 juin, dans le cadre du colloque international Global Art History and the Peripheries (12-14 juin, ENS et INHA) : Keynote Address : « From Horizontal to Alter-Globalist Art History »
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2, rue Vivienne (Paris 2e), Salle Walter Benjamin, 14h30-15h30

The point of departure of this paper is the idea of « horizontal art history, » published some years ago. The horizontal approach of art history challenges the dominant geopolitical narrative of modernism, and its unilateral and hierarchical denomination of centers (points of diffusion) and peripheries (areas of reception). Its main issue is to see modern art historical production in a couple of « historical cuts, » such as - for example - late 1940s. (beginning of the Cold War), 1968 (worldwide revolution), and 1989 (the end of the Cold War and a wake of « globalization »). The question, however, is : how art history, understood both as academic and curatorial practices, is able to take part in a global resistance movement called « alter-globalist, » against political processes responsible for the present crisis of democracy in the world ?" 

- Vendredi 14 juin, Global Art History and the Peripheries. Participation à la table ronde : « Which place for the peripheries in global art history ? »avec Christophe Charle, James Elkins, Carmen Popescu, David Cottington, Piotr Piotrowski, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, modérée par Catherine Dossin.
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2, rue Vivienne (Paris 2e), Salle Walter Benjamin, 14h30-15h30