Untimely Media / Domestic Techniques – The 60s and 70s between New York and Vienna

This international symposium aims to address the latent dialogues and outright tensions that come to light when the respective artistic and socio-political contexts of Vienna and New York in the 1960s and 70s are critically juxtaposed. We aim to develop historiographic approaches that take into account asynchronous and even conflicting developments within the so-called “Western” history of art.

An understanding of the use of “untimely media” and the cultivation of “domestic techniques” requires, we posit, the retrospect of what is now over fifty years, and the benefit of new interdisciplinary methodologies that attend to histories of craft and fiber art, cultures of display, embodiment and sexuality, and affect from a perspective informed by feminist and queer theory. Taking Vienna-New York as an unlikely art historical axis from which to initiate discussion, “Untimely Media / Domestic Techniques” sets out to advance interdisciplinary research devoted to two tumultuous decades in which art criticism and contemporary art were in a constant and still reverberating dialogue. The artistic projects at the heart of this investigation, though untimely, unassuming, and often spoken-over, are perhaps for that reason no less provocative and significant.

The symposium is generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies of the University of Vienna, the City of Vienna MA 7 Kulturabteilung, and Campus Aktuell, University of Vienna. The organizers gratefully acknowledge the Kunsthistorische Gesellschaft and the Verband österreichischer Kunsthistorikerinnen und Kunsthistoriker (VöKK) for their cooperation.