Note: in my inbox yesterday, details of 2015 conference: when public artworks are created to serve political agendas, their legitimacy and meaning is often challenged in subsequent historical periods. Old statues horrify the present. [1]
Note: when sculptors improvise in the ‘expanded field’ they exceed predictable outcomes. [2]
Quote: The past and present of lndian situations must be dealt with together because they are inextricably connected … In non-Indian art and history about Indians, the seventeenth and twentieth centuries are rarely connected. Academic studies deal with colonial history of the eighteenth century or with events of the twentieth century, not both. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are both part of the stream of lndian experience. From lndian perspectives the fact that a value or a practice or an idea comes from the past does not render it irrelevant in the present. (In this way the past can exist in the present.) Emphasis is placed not on the point of division or disruption between time periods but on the continuity between eras. [3]
References:
[1] Blurring the Boundaries of Medium at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
[2] Rosalind Krauss (1978) ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’. In Krauss, R. E. (1986) The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp 277-290.
[3] Doxtator, D. (1992) ‘Reconnecting the Past: An Indian Idea of History’. In Revisions, exh. cat., Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff: wpg, 1992), P. 3
