Maria Stavrinaki, Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time

Abstract

In proposing ‘to write the history of a modernity that, in forever reinventing prehistory, constantly invents itself’, Maria Stavrinaki set herself the goal of ‘immersing’ herself in the ‘structuring themes’ and ‘revelatory moments’ constitutive of Modernism’s own complicated historicity (p. 17). An historicity constituted by contradictory polarities that have refused to yield to clean dialectical sublations: progress and regression, doubt and certainty, deceleration and acceleration, the longue durée and histoire événementielle, and so on (p. 18). Speaking art-historically, this historicity has unearthed the significance of some hitherto neglected or misunderstood element, which henceforth provided a putative skeleton key for unlocking the hidden motivations and problems of our shared and disorienting aesthetic past in the West. Conversely, Stavrinaki’s text marks a singular occurrence in recent attempts to grapple with the complicated temporal structure of prehistory and its ab/uses in artistic, art-historical, and theoretical production (see Foster, 2020; Rasula, 2020).