The event occurs in and over time; the aftermath concerns the traces, which are frozen into images, objects, re-presentations. Traditionally, art history is written in the aftermath as representational. A different perspective on the visual arts is opened up when scholars insist on exploring the status of the event itself, allowing temporality to remain in place. By focusing on the event, recognition of the complex character of the traces becomes all the more evident, challenging the singularity of representation itself.
This book opens up debates on art history and theory to a broad range of perspectives, offering fresh approaches to art history and media culture alongside diverse investigations into cross-cultural and non-Western art practices. The essays draw together a wide and regionally diverse range of scholars from numerous areas, including film and documentary studies, philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, media theory and performance studies, as well as art history and theory.

Introduction: Charles Merewether and John Potts
Part One: Rewriting Global Visual Culture
1. Boris Groys: Two Cures: Making Art Visible
2. Mitchell Dean: Land and Sea: 'In the Beginning All the World Was America'
3. Ackbar Abbas: Migration as Spatial Fantasy
4. Paul Carter: Masters of the Gap: Art, Migration and Eido-Kinesis
5. Rex Butler: The World Is Not Enough
Part Two: New Art Histories: Other Modernities
6. Lolita Jablonskiene: Wins and/or Losses in Recent Eastern European Art History
7. Zdenka Badovinac: Interrupted Histories
8. Antje Denner: Aesthetic Experience and the Power of the Network
9. Lee Weng Choy: Intellectual Activism?: Crisis and Convening
Part Three: Memory: Documentary and the Archival
10. Charles Merewether: Archival Futures: On Kawara and the Date From Which All Things Begin, Again
11. Geeta Kapur: Mortal Remains
12. Michael Renov: Expressivity: The Art of Documentary Practice
13. Kathryn Millard: Documentary in the Age of the Remix
14. Laleen Jayamanne: Contact Lenses: Cinaesthesia in the Museum
Part Four: The Event and Re-Enactment
15. John Potts: The Event and its Echoes
16. Peter Osborne: The Truth Will Be Known when the Last Witness is Dead: Art as Evidence, or, History not Memory
17. Edward Scheer: 'What if Someone in New Zealand Wants to See It?' Performance Art's Cover Versions
18. Jane Goodall: When the Present Comes to Get You
Notes on Contributors
Index

Charles Merewether is an art historian and curator. John Potts is Associate Professor in Media, Music and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.