Navigation auf uzh.ch
Navigation auf uzh.ch
Instructor: Dr. Raphaèle Preisinger
Teaching assistant: Lucas Hagin, B.A.
Tuesday, 14:00–15:45
The Baroque period in Latin America, which started in the seventeenth century and lasted for about two hundred years, coincides with the full thriving of Colonial rule in religious, social, and economic respects. The exuberant forms and dazzling ornaments of artworks from the Viceregal era in Mexico fascinate viewers to this day.
The Baroque was coined in Europe as a Counter-Reformation aesthetic and ideology intended as a response to the rise of Protestantism. It was exported to the areas of the world colonized by Catholic Europe, but proved to work poorly as an instrument of colonization. In the New World, Baroque visual forms were immediately adapted to incorporate the cultural perspectives and iconographies of the colonized populations. European, Indigenous, African and Asian influences would merge into the New World Baroque, which in turn came to transform the Baroque in Europe. In the twentieth century, Latin American writers began considering the New World Baroque a genuinely American expression. Thus, rather than being depreciated as a colonial imposition, today, the New World Baroque is celebrated as an expression of cultural mestizaje and artistic resistance.
Instructor: Prof. Dr. Michele Bacci
Teaching assistant: Michael Zimmermann, B.A.
Tuesday, 16:15–18:00
Description: The course aims to provide an interpretive frame to our understanding of the ways in which material objects, media, and sets of forms came to be shared, appropriated, transformed, adapted, and invested with new meanings by the different artistic cultures of the Medieval Mediterranean. Focussing on the analysis of the processes of exchange in both the large-scale dimension of cross-maritime connections and some specific regional contexts standing out for their multi-layered and multicultural societies (such as al-Andalus, the kingdom of Castile, the major trade centres of Italy, Sicily, Venice, the Dalmatian coast, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, the County of Tripoli and Palestine), it will investigate the different dynamics by which artworks and forms came to be adopted or rejected. More specifically, it will lay emphasis on the mobility of objects and artists; the reuse of spolia and artworks; the emergence, diffusion, and transformation of forms regarded as authoritative on purely aesthetic grounds; the imitation of techniques and media deemed to be specific to some distinctive regional contexts; the intentional and selective appropriation of forms regarded as specifically connected with other people’s traditions and invested with distinctive (political, religious, social, economic) meanings; artistic practices taking place in border areas and in culturally and linguistically “mixed” societies".
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Tristan Weddigen
Description: Elements of Art History in a Global Context is a mandatory self-study module that builds the methodological basis for the Art in a Global Context teaching program. Students have access to a corpus of digitized texts online. These cover a relevant choice of approaches, terms and questions concerning a wide chronological and geographical range of artistic phenomena that students will encounter in their studies. The knowledge acquired is examined at the end of the semester in an oral exam carried out by Prof. Weddigen.
The oral exam is scheduled for Monday, January 6, 2020.
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Tristan Weddigen
Saturday, December 14, 2019
The research colloquium is the forum for presenting and discussing the current research undertaken by master's students, doctoral candidates and postdocs at the Chair for the History of Early Modern Art and by master's students of the Art in a Global Context program.
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Hans B. Thomsen
Friday, 12:15–13:45
This series of lectures will deal with the public and private arts from East Asia that are located in Switzerland. Some of the objects interject themselves into our daily lives, often without our being aware of their existence and origin. A major topic of the series will be to examine how we interact and receive East Asia through these objects and spaces. We will deal with "art" as a broader concept, including statues, architecture, interior design, and gardens. Most of the examples will be from Zurich, but a few will deal with phenomena in other locations, such as Frauenfeld, Ascona, Bern, Interlaken, and Geneva. We will explore ideas of exoticism, propaganda, and cultural appropriation as we examine the various East Asian objects that have been placed/constructed in Zurich by Swiss citizens as well as by foreign countries and institutions. During the semester, we will plan one or two excursions, in order to visit some of the sites within Zurich. The objects include sculpture by the artist Yuan Xiaocen, a possible donation by the artist Kang Mu-Xiang, Ming-dynasty Sprit Road sculpture, Buddha figures on Zurich street corners, Metasequoia invasions, Villa Patumbah’s Japan Room, the G/59 Gartenbau-Austellung, the Shinagawa temple bell, Chinagarten Zürich, the exotic world of Monte Verità, tea ceremony rooms in public museums, and the stone lions of Chinese restaurants.
