Past as Prologue: Time, History and the Visual Arts

Past as Prologue / Present as Future is a two-year, two-part lecture series which aims to increase public understanding of the role of contemporary art in helping us recognize the critical issues of the present-day, by redressing our record of the past and postulating ideas for the future.

The impacts of environmental and temporal anxiety are visible in many facets of contemporary global culture, but none more profoundly than in contemporary art. In recent decades, artists have revisited history, materials, and historic and emergent forms of technologies to create art that questions that validity of the archive, the potentials of technology, and the anxiety that surrounds irreparable planetary change. Through this two-part series we hope to immerse students and the interested public in the intersections of time, narrative, science, and sustainability as it is filtered through the visual arts.

As the 21st century has gotten underway, we have seen a simultaneous fascination with looking back, via national cultural memory projects and individual personal archiving practices, as well as with the sustainability of our present in the future, as scientific developments have made all too apparent the fragility of our climate, our planet, and our local ecosystems. Ultimately, both tendencies reveal the most critical visual arts practices of our day to stand not alone, but as fundamentally entwined with the cultural, economic, social, scientific, and pedagogic concerns of our time.