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Public Lectures during SUN 2001

A public lecture presented by the "Archives of Political Parties" course:

Patricia Grimsted

(Research Associate at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University)

Russia’s "Trophy" Archives—A New Cultural "Cold War" in Europe?

Patricia Kennedy Grimsted is Research Associate at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. She received her doctorate in Russian history at the University of California (Berkeley) and has taught at several universities. Dr. Grimsted is the West's leading authority on archives of the former Soviet Union. She is the author of several historical monographs and a series of directories and many other publications on Soviet-area archives, including the most recent Archives of Russia: A Directory and Bibliographic Guide to Holdings in Moscow and St. Petersburg (Russian edition 1997; English edition, 2000). She has written widely on World War II displaced cultural treasures, including the recent monograph Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Legacy of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution (Cambridge MA, 2001). Among other activities she directs ArcheoBiblioBase an electronic directory in collaboration with the Federal Archival Service of Russia (Rosarkhiv), the National Committee on Archives of Ukraine (KAU), and the International Institute of Social History (IISH, Amsterdam).

Displaced foreign cultural treasures (including archives) held in Russia have been one of the dramatic revelations since the collapse of the Soviet Union, while Russia’s failure to return them to the countries of their provenance has become one of the most thorny elements in Russia’s foreign relations. Among the vast archives seized by Soviet authorities during and after World War II are many "twice-plundered" ones, earlier seized by various Nazis agencies in occupied countries. Soviet authorities carried out considerable restitution to Eastern Bloc countries, Since 1991, however, despite the calls of the Council of Europe and other international agencies, restitution has been limited, and costly negotiations continue with many European countries. Besides many Russian cultural "trophies" have yet to be revealed or identified as to provenance.

A public lecture presented by the "History and Theory of Art after the Cultural Turn" course:

Keith Moxey

(Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Art History, Barnard College/Columbia University)

Art History Today: Problems and Possibilities

Keith Moxey is a specialist in the history of Northern European art in the sixteenth century, has written on the impact of the Reformation on artistic production (Peasants, Warriors and Wives, 1989). In recent years he has concentrated on the analysis of the historiography of the history of art, as well as on the application of post-structuralist theory to the understanding of the discipline's methods of meaning making. This concern has resulted in two books, The Practice of Theory (1994) and The Practice of Persuasion (2001), as well as several anthologies, Visual Theory (1991), Visual Culture (1994), and The Subjects of Art History (1998).

Art history finds itself at a paradoxical and productive historical juncture. Having seen many of its cherished methodologies - such as stylistic analysis, iconography, and social history - challenged during the 1980s by the implications of post-structuralist theory, art history has added a variety of new styles of interpretation to its agenda. Far from being consigned to oblivion, older forms of interpretation now co-exist with more recent initiatives, such as gender studies and post-colonial studies.

The paradoxical juxtaposition of incongruent perspectives means that the discipline is filled with dissent and contradiction as these voices compete to establish a new disciplinary paradigm. Complicating matters even further is the advent of visual studies or visual culture, a form of interpretation that draws its inspiration from cultural studies. In this context, it is the use of critical theory, loosely drawn from Marxism and gender studies, that identifies the enterprise, rather than the nature of artifacts, under analysis. Visual culture thus problematizes the notion of "art" by insisting on its geographical specificity (Western Europe), its historical location (late 18th-20th centuries), and its dependence on a discredited theory of aesthetic value (Kant/Hegel).

What might art history's attitude to this new field of study be?

Should it react defensively, maintaining a canon of "great" works at the center of its disciplinary concern, or should it recognize the malleability of its disciplinary borders by encouraging the investigation and interpretation of artifacts that have not hitherto been included under the rubric of "art"?

A public lecture presented by the "Complex Systems" course

Melanie Mitchell

(Staff Member, Santa Fe Institute))

Life and Evolution in Computers

Melanie Mitchell received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan and is currently a staff member and researcher at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive science, and complex systems. She is the author of two books, Analogy-Making as Perception (MIT Press, 1993) and An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms (MIT Press, 1996), and co-editor of Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms (Addison Wesley, 1996). She is currently at work on a book about the past and future of the sciences of complexity, to be published next year by Oxford University Press.

Can we build computers that are alive and that evolve? This has been on the minds of computer scientists since the dawn of the computer age and remains a most compelling line of inquiry. My own view is that the answer is unequivocally yes, but that to get there our notions of both life and computation will have to be deepened considerably. In this talk I will describe both early and recent attempts at making computers more life-like, adaptive, and evolvable, and how these attempts have refined our notions of what it means to be alive and what it means to be a computer.