Seminar explores wide-ranging ways in which artists working in Western Europe since the 1960s have confronted questions about how works of art emerge from and shape historical circumstances. Reckoning with history and responding to the present, artworks engage viewers to address ethical and political issues of responsibility and guilt in the wake of fascism, colonialism, and the Holocaust; the dynamics of late capitalism, the Cold War, and political shifts since 1989; existential threats of nuclear warfare and ecological disaster; and transformations effected in culture and everyday life by new media, biopolitics, surveillance.
