Caplan-Rosen Lecture Spring 2025: Karin Zitzewitz

Description

Karin Zitzewitz, a chair and professor of Modern and Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan in the Art History and Archaeology Department at the University of Maryland, will give the Caplan-Rosen Lecture titled "Asking Historical Questions of Contemporary (Indian) Art."

Abstract:

This talk uses Shilpa Gupta's Listening Air (2019–23) to consider how best to take a squarely art historical perspective on contemporary art. By historical, I mean one driven less by the question "what does this work of art mean?" than by the question "how did this work of art come to be?"

Porous and world-hailing, Gupta's text-driven works openly participate in their conditions of possibility. Indeed, her works necessitate reconsideration of what sorts of materials can and should shape the historical account of their becoming. They allow us to explore the potential for rethinking the subject—meaning, the grammatical or agentic "I"—of contemporary art history. For, while contemporary art retains its consistent appeal to "the now," it is today rare for art's form to serve as the subject of its historicity, as it did for much of the 20th century. Indeed, an ambivalence about the inability to center formal change as historical change—and a confusion about what might serve as art's alternative historical agency—underlies a great deal of contemporary art discourse. This paper proposes an alternative approach to this question, one centered on questions of research method.

The Caplan-Rosen Lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins and the Baltimore Museum of Art.