Dan Karlholm
Biography
B. 1963. Professor of Art History, Södertörn University. PhD in Art History from Uppsala University in 1996, with dissertation on the construction of "General Art History" (allgemeine Kunstgeschichte) in the 19th-century Germany. His work on historiography includes Art of Illusion: The Representation of Art History in Ninteenth-Century Germany and Beyond (2004). Founder and director of the Art History Department at Södertörn, responsible for research project “Art (without) Spaces: Identities of Internet Art in Germany, Lithuania, and Sweden” including Charlotte Bydler and Håkan Nilsson, and "Contemporary (Post)modernity? Canonization Processes of Advanced Art in Germany and Sweden 1977-2007 (both sponsored by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies). Editor-in-Chief for Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History (Routledge) from 2009.
Ongoing research
Karlholm will contribute a study which addresses the need within art history to reconsider the standard scheme of historicizing art, with particular view to how “contemporaniety” is and has been understood. The “contemporaneity” to which contemporary art ultimately refers appears less as a temporal sequence than as a contested space of issues of relevance for “us” “here” “now”. The standard mode of art history writing, modelled on 19th-century narratives of unilinear development, is ill suited for assessing contemporary art as a historical-conceptual phenomenon. This art is discursively dissociated from the past as well as the future, and excluded from most art simultaneous with it. To avoid perpetuating historicism by suggesting further neo- or post-isms, the need to critically reconsider this entire scheme of historicizing art is evident. The project will compare a number of historical situations or microenvironments of art over two centuries in order to establish discursive regularities as well as contingent nuances when it comes to situating art to (ones own) time. Building on the work of Jacques Rancière, Niklas Luhmann and Reinhard Koselleck, the intention is to contribute to an understanding of modernity, where new artworks are not merely diachronically linked to previous contenders, but situated in their respective synchronic environments and art systems.
Selected bibliography
“Surveying Contemporary Art: Post-War, Postmodern, and then what?”, Art History, vol. 31, 2009
- "Konstnären som verket och andra postmoderna verkningar" in Sven-Olov Wallenstein (ed.), Svar på frågan: vad är det postmoderna?, Axl Books, Stockholm 2009.
- "'Does it work?': A Note on Pragmatic parts and Global Wholes" in James Elkins (ed.), Is Art History Global? The Art Seminar, vol. 3, Routledge & Cork U. P. 2006.
– ”Tradition and Visual Culture in the Face of Contemporary Art” (http://nordik.uib.no/nordik2006/index_papers.html)
– Art of Illusion: The Representation of Art History in Nineteenth-Century Germany and Beyond, Peter Lang, Bern, 2004. (2nd ed.: 2006)
– “Icons and Idols: On the Role of Representation in the Practice of Interpretation”, in Rossholm Lagerlöf, Margaretha & Dan Karlholm (ed.), Subjectivity and Methodology in Art History (Eidos 8, Stockholm, 2003)
– Handböckernas konsthistoria. Om skapandet av ”allmän konsthistoria” i Tyskland under 1800-talet, Diss., (Symposion, Stockholm/Stehag, 1996)