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IMC 2015: Sessions

Session 141: Investigating Future Premoderns (TM): Neomedieval Aesthetics in the 21st Century

Monday 6 July 2015, 11.15-12.45

Sponsor:Confraternity of Neoflagellants
Organiser:Norman James Hogg, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society & Culture, Concordia University, Montreal
Moderator/Chair:Nick Thurston, School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies, University of Leeds
Paper 141-aBefore and after Contemporary Art‏
(Language: English)
Neil Mulholland, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
Index terms: Art History - General, Philosophy
Paper 141-bThey Came Back Wrong?: Nighthawking in the Middle Kingdom
(Language: English)
Norman James Hogg, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society & Culture, Concordia University, Montreal
Index terms: Art History - General, Performance Arts - General, Philosophy, Technology
Paper 141-cYou Have Never Been Modern!
(Language: English)
Simon O'Sullivan, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, University of London
David Burrows, Faculty of Arts & Humanities, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London
Index terms: Art History - General, Folk Studies, Performance Arts - General, Science
Abstract

Medieval archetypes such as pilgrimage, liturgy, anchoritism, relic-ing, alchemy, banquetry, palimpsesting, mumming, compagnonnage, gifting and commoning are popular practices and themes in contemporary art. Why are so many artists mobilising metahistorical anachronisms to explore their contemporaneity – recalibrating and reactivating a variety of premodern ideas as vehicles of renewal - in ways that are best described as neomedieval? This panel of artist-theorists will speculate on neomedievalism’s aesthetic potentialities, from the elasticated loops and folds it presses on our ideas about history, to the untimely visions of differing non-modern futures it can help us to invoke.