2025 Caplan Rosen Lecture: Karin Zitzewitz, "Asking Historical Questions of Contemporary (Indian) Art"
2025 Caplan Rosen Lecture: Karin Zitzewitz, "Asking Historical Questions of Contemporary (Indian) Art"
This talk uses Shilpa Gupta’s Listening Air (2019–2023) to consider how best to take a squarely art historical perspective on contemporary art. By historical, I mean one driven less by the question, what does this work of art mean? than by the question, how did this work of art come to be?
Porous and world-hailing, Gupta’s text-driven works openly participate in their conditions of possibility. Indeed, her works necessitate reconsideration of what sorts of materials can and should shape the historical account of their becoming. They allow us to explore the potential for rethinking the subject—meaning, the grammatical or agentic “I”—of contemporary art history. For, while contemporary art retains its consistent appeal to “the now,” it is today rare for art’s form to serve as the subject of its historicity, as it did for much of the 20th century. Indeed, an ambivalence about the inability to center formal change as historical change—and a confusion about what might serve as art’s alternative historical agency—underlies a great deal of contemporary art discourse. This paper proposes an alternative approach to this question, one centered on questions of research method.
Karin Zitzewitz is a specialist in the modern and contemporary art of South Asia. She is the author of Infrastructure and Form: The Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991-2008 (2022), The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (2014), and The Perfect Frame: Presenting Indian Art: Stories and Photographs from the Kekoo Gandhy Collection (2003). She curated exhibitions by Pakistani artist Naiza Khan (2013) and Indian artist Mithu Sen (2014) for the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. Her research has been supported by the European Research Council, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and the Fulbright program. She is a former Chair of the editorial board of Art Journal and Art Journal OPEN. Zitzewitz is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
The Caplan-Rosen Lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
This talk uses Shilpa Gupta’s Listening Air (2019–2023) to consider how best to take a squarely art historical perspective on contemporary art. By historical, I mean one driven less by the question, what does this work of art mean? than by the question, how did this work of art come to be?
Porous and world-hailing, Gupta’s text-driven works openly participate in their conditions of possibility. Indeed, her works necessitate reconsideration of what sorts of materials can and should shape the historical account of their becoming. They allow us to explore the potential for rethinking the subject—meaning, the grammatical or agentic “I”—of contemporary art history. For, while contemporary art retains its consistent appeal to “the now,” it is today rare for art’s form to serve as the subject of its historicity, as it did for much of the 20th century. Indeed, an ambivalence about the inability to center formal change as historical change—and a confusion about what might serve as art’s alternative historical agency—underlies a great deal of contemporary art discourse. This paper proposes an alternative approach to this question, one centered on questions of research method.
Karin Zitzewitz is a specialist in the modern and contemporary art of South Asia. She is the author of Infrastructure and Form: The Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991-2008 (2022), The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (2014), and The Perfect Frame: Presenting Indian Art: Stories and Photographs from the Kekoo Gandhy Collection (2003). She curated exhibitions by Pakistani artist Naiza Khan (2013) and Indian artist Mithu Sen (2014) for the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. Her research has been supported by the European Research Council, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and the Fulbright program. She is a former Chair of the editorial board of Art Journal and Art Journal OPEN. Zitzewitz is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
The Caplan-Rosen Lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Baltimore Museum of Art false