Department of Art and Art History

11th Annual Art Student Graduate Organization Symposium

Anachronic Enchantment: Temporalities in Visual and Material Culture

Keynote Speaker: André Dombrowski

When something is described as anachronistic, it is often to say that it is contradictory, inconsistent, illogical, or misplaced. Essentially, to be anachronistic is to exist outside of historical time. However, has science not demonstrated that time is relative? Is temporality, meaning our relationship with time, not subject to change? Instead of anachronistic, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood have coined the term anachronic to refer to art that has “witnessed time.” Art historian, Keith Moxey, adds that anachronicity is the ability of objects “to exceed the parameters of their chronological circumstances.”

With this in mind, this symposium considers temporality as its central framework and invites interdisciplinary reflection on how time is constructed, experienced, and represented across humanistic study. By foregrounding temporal frameworks, we seek to interrogate whose times are privileged, silenced, or contested, and how alternative conceptions of time challenge dominant narratives. Central to this inquiry are questions that examine how artists have engaged with temporality to construct new and alternative histories; how meaning and interpretation inevitably shift across time, requiring us to reconsider our own scholarly and curatorial practices; and how ephemeral forms of art disrupt and complicate traditional art historical methods.

Image: Claude Monet, Exterior of the Gare Saint-Lazare, The Signal, 1877, Lower Saxony State Museum, Hannover