12. Art, its History and (No) Working Class? (FULL DAY)
Class, as bell hooks observed, remains the subject we are most reluctant to tackle; a category often dismissed (hooks 2000). Art history is no exception. Class keeps slipping from view, though it is inscribed in art itself: as a possession of the ruling class, as a question for the working class. This session examines the past and present of the working class in art and its history, looking for it not only as an object of representation but as an agent.
Asking how this relation is shaped and read, the session takes up three aspects to bring class back into view – the very subject hooks found hardest to name. The first is historiographical: the legacies of Marxist art history (Max Raphael) and its feminist readings (Griselda Pollock). The second is institutional: the museum, from the civilizing institution (Tony Bennett, Carol Duncan) and site of distinction (Pierre Bourdieu) to its reinvention as a popular space, such as Lina Bo Bardi’s São Paulo museum. The third turns from analysis to agency, foregrounding art for, with and by the working class and its intersections with migration and gender: from the Hackney Flashers’ photography on work as a gendered and racialized matter to exhibitions such as Marta Herford’s Annem işçi – Who Sews the Red Flags?, on migrant workers in 1970s West Germany, especially Turkish women.
The session welcomes contributions across periods and geographies, reading class alongside race and gender, from researchers, curators, artists, and practitioners, including reflections on our discipline’s class conditions.
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Themes: working class, Marxist art history, museum
Additional format comment: Planned for four to six 20-minute papers, each followed by 5 minutes for questions, concluding with a shared discussion. For the third aspect of the proposal (agency / art for, with, by working class, migrants and women), contributions from artists and practitioners in other forms, such as a lecture performance or a short provocation, are specifically welcome, provided they fit the 20+5-minute slot. Full day session.
Lead Convenor: Seda Pesen, University of Vienna, Department of Art History, Vienna, Austria
To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.