History of Art and Architecture

The Incommensurability and Commensurability of Time in Different Cultures

Tuesday, January 29, 2019 - 4:00pm

Frick Fine Arts Building, Room 202

Keith Moxey - Barbara Novak Professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University

Histories of non-European culture have been seriously distorted by inappropriate aesthetic values and a purposive chronology. If all measurements of time betray the cultures to which they belong, and there is no universal canon, how can we capture the texture of time's passage through cultures other than our own? To what extent is time's durational experience capable of translation? Examples of Chinese landscape of the fifteenth and Indian court miniatures of the seventeenth centuries might help us think about these issues of intercultural translation and/or appropriation.

Keith Moxey recently retired as Barbara Novak Professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University. His publications include Visual Time: The Image in History (2013), The Practice of Persuasion (2001), The Practice of Theory (1994), Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation (1989); and several anthologies, Time in the History of Art: Temporality, Chronology and Anachrony (2018), Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Culture (2002), The Subjects of Art History (1998), Visual Culture (1994), and Visual Theory (1991).