analyse culturelle et études de genre / art, mythes et images

groupe de recherche coordonné par anne creissels et giovanna zapperi
docteures de l'ehess, chercheures associées au cehta

contact : annecreissels(at)orange.fr g.zapperi(at)gmail.com

conférence invitée le vendredi 20 novembre 2009


Conférence de Jonathan Katz

organisée en collaboration avec Terra Foundation for American Art Europe

« 'Flesh Jubilation': Eros in the Art of the Sixties »

Salle Fabri de Pereisc, INHA, 18h-20h

This seminar explores why in the art world of the late 1950s and 1960s, a single, universal human capacity – Eros – was made ground for a global politic of social liberation. As the most direct conduit to the liberatory potential of Eros, a large percentage of art in all mediums within a narrow historical moment beginning in the mid 1950s – in painting, film, theater, happenings, performance – turned on bodily seduction. The movement was short-lived, and by the mid 1960s, the art of the body increasingly took on its familiar cast, reifying essentially differentiated social categories where once the universal ruled. But for a few short years, a diverse group of artists, female and male, queer and straight, as different as Richard Hamilton, Lygia Clark, Franz West, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann, produced an art that, in politicizing the body while obfuscating its signs of differentiation, paradoxically helped engender the very contemporary social categories like feminist and queer that now obscure Eros formative and foundational role.

Lygia Clark, The I and You: Clothing/Body/Clothing, 1967

La conférence est en langue anglaise.

Jonathan Katz est un Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor au Courtauld Institute de Londres et directeur du programme doctoral en Études visuelles de l’Université de Buffalo (SUNY). Spécialiste de l’art américain de l’après-guerre dans une perspective “queer”, Jonathan Katz est l’auteur de nombreux essais ; son prochain livre Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and the Collective Closet: How Queer Artists Came to Dominate Cold War American Art est à paraître chez University of Chicago Press.