The Art of History. Anachronic Interventions Since 1990

This comprehensive art-historical publication presents and analyses the depiction and construction of history in recent contemporary art. Artworks are an important factor in the current critical examination of historiography. They actively produce and shape not only new narratives but also new concepts to structure and experience history. Among the diverse methodological elements and instruments developed within artworks, anachrony the emancipation of things, events or actors from their assigned time and the ability to keep mutually irreconcilable temporalities in tension with one another is of prime importance, as it connects historiographical ethos and experimental approaches to historiography. The starting point of this investigation is the emergence of the historical sciences at the junction of art, philosophy, politics and science. In order to overcome the conventional opposition of academic vs. artistic history, the publication aims at a thorough methodological re-examination of the contribution of artworks to history-writing and its theoretical foundations. They are an important factor in creating historical experience and historical consciousness which is the foundation of social identity and political agency. The book includes analyses of a number of artworks since the 1990s that have been key in developing new concepts of historiography, created by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Tacita Dean, Erika Tan, Bouchra Khalili, Walid Raad, Matthew Buckingham, Dierk Schmidt, Amar Kanwar, Zarina Bhimji, Omer Fast, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Michael Blum, Yael Bartana, Andrea Geyer, Philippe Parreno and Liam Gillick, Hiwa K, Deimantas Narkevicius and Kader Attia. Close readings of these artworks are presented alongside the set of premises developed for early academic history by authors such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gustav Droysen and Wilhelm Dilthey, and alongside the criticism of these concepts by 20th-century Modernist writers deeply interested in historiography such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, as well as by scholars of sociology and ethnography. As history and its representation emerge as a politically controversial and heterogeneous field in term of its actors, subjects, media, institutions and form of dissemination, artworks are ideally suited to counteracting prevalent post-histoire notions, and to opening the present to historical consciousness, agency and change.