Claire Bishop: Deja Vu. Contemporary Art and the Ghosts of Modernism

Rupert is thrilled to announce the next guest of the program – art historian and critic Claire Bishop. While in Rupert, Claire Bishop will meet with Rupert’s Educational Program participants and current residents for a series of studio visits. At 6 pm on Thursday, 29 May, Claire Bishop will give a public lecture on contemporary art and the ghosts of modernism, organised in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art and Vilnius Academy of Arts, at the National Gallery Auditorium. One of the most persistent themes in contemporary art since 1989 has been the proliferation of work that addresses ‘Modernist utopias’: art that takes twentieth-century architecture and design as a starting point for contemporary sculpture, installation, photography, video and research. It seems ironic that Modernism, the most futurist of movements, is now the subject matter of retrospective artistic practices. This lecture raises questions about a contemporary art of quotation, its relationship to temporality, and its tendency to bury contemporary concerns behind a fascination with canonical figures of the past. Claire Bishop is a Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Her books include Installation Art: A Critical History (2005) and Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012). Her most recent book, Radical Museology or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art?, was published last year by Koenig Books. She is a regular contributor to Artforum. This visit is made possible through the generous support of the Lithuanian Council for Culture. Image: Ai Weiwei, “Fountain of Light”