Time: Immaterial Postgraduate Research Student Symposium

Though Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s provocative Anachronic Renaissance primarily focuses on classically-inflected case studies from late antiquity to Raphael, their text can be taken as a starting point for art historians working in a wider variety of contexts. Nagel and Wood propose that works of art, whether prints, paintings, sculpture, buildings, and beyond, function not simply as individual works of genius or anonymous reproductions, but as points in time. More than that, the work of art is a point in a temporal system: it can bring the past into the present via chains of continuity or through the act of constant substitution and repetition. The anachronic is the work purposefully out of time, hesitating or remembering or looking forward, as opposed to the belated or chronologically misplaced anachronistic work. The reconfiguration of works of art as anachronic also allows for deeper and broader readings of works which may have been previously seen as merely referential or imitative and repositions them in a temporal system which could span centuries rather than the immediate milieu of the author or patron. It allows for the artwork/artist’s purposeful engagement with a concept of time and timeliness, continuity and historicity, style and stylishness.

This symposium will take the first chapter to Anachronic Renaissance as its foundation and look beyond the Renaissance to find the anachronic in new times and places, with papers presenting case studies focusing on specific works of art or architecture. Of special interest would be case studies of the anachronic at work in non-Western contexts, queer or feminist works, or arguments against the possibility of the anachronic outside the Western Renaissance.

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