--- POSTPONED --- MC: Annetta Alexandridis: The Multiple Temporalities of Plaster Casts --- POSTPONED ---

In response to the coronavirus, our Keynote Lectures and the corresponding Master Classes are being postponed to the coming winter semester.

Plaster casts of three-dimensional artworks are traditionally taken as replicas of and substitutes for their respective prototypes – the raison d'être e.g. of the notorious Gipsabguss-Sammlung so typical of a Department of Classical Archaeology in Germany (casts, btw, were instrumental to Margarete Bieber's work on Roman copies and their alleged Greek originals). More recent scholarship emphasizes their value as originals, not only in view of the loss or damage of some of their prototypes, but also in the sense of objects with an individual "biography". Instead of this kind of dialectic view of plaster casts and expanding on Georges Didi-Huberman's, La ressemblance par contact, I want to emphasize the multiple temporalities the casts embody. I do this both on a conceptual and simultaneously practical level, i.e. by looking at how they were/are made, and on a historical level, by tracing the extra-European contexts of plaster cast collections, especially those of Greek and Roman art. The colonial and racist legacy of such collections is usually overlooked in European scholarship. Equally neglected is their appropriation (to this day) as epitome of "naturalism" in art education in China or Japan, cultures that traditionally do not share the European, hierarchical idea of original and copy. – In sum, while the casts are often discussed in terms of Benjamin's Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, it seems more productive to me to think of them as translated objects.

// Prof. Annetta Alexandridis (Cornell University, Ithaca)