The French Art Historian and Curator Anne-Marie Duguet receives the international MediaArtHistories Award 2019.
The MediaArtHistories Award is given bi-annually for lifetime achievements and major contributions to the histories of media, art, science and technology. Previous award recipients have included Barbara Stafford and Werner Nekes (posthumously). Anne-Marie Duguet (*1946) is an Emeritus Professor in Aesthetics and Art History at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, an art critic and curator. Since 1995, she has been the director and editor of the “anarchive” series which comprises monographic digital archives and multimedia projects of such contemporary artists as Antoni Muntadas, Michael Snow, Thierry Kuntzel, Jean Otth, Fujiko Nakaya, and Masaki Fujihata. The most recent anarchive edition appeared in conjunction with an international touring exhibition of the US-American video artist Peter Campus (showing at Bronx Museum of the Arts (NY), until July 21, 2019, after presentations at Jeu de Paume in Paris, in Sevilla, and Lisbon).
In her research, Anne-Marie Duguet combines a curatorial engagement with contemporary artistic production, and in-depth historical and aesthetic investigations. She is a pioneer of art historical research on the medium of video, on electronic audiovisual technologies, computer graphics, and interactive art, ever since the publication of Vidéo, la mémoire au poing (1981) [Video, memory at hand], and her innovative approach to the study of video installations in the essay “Dispositifs” (1988). Besides her writings on international artists like Nam June Paik, Jeffrey Shaw, Bill Viola, Nil Yalter, Norman White, or Tamas Waliczky, Anne-Marie Duguet has also drawn attention to French artists like Thierry Kuntzel whose first retrospective she curated at Jeu de Paume, and to the French experimental television pioneer, Jean-Christophe Averty, whose collages and exceptional story boards for television programs she exhibited for the first time in Paris in 1991. http://www.anarchive.net/
Anne-Marie Duguet has had an immense influence on the production and study of video and media art in France through her seminars at the Art and Science of Art Department of the Sorbonne University (Paris 1), where she taught since the 1970s, supervising a large number of PhD projects about art, aesthetics and technology. She was a Guest Professor at the Interactive Cinema Research Center University of New South Wales, Sydney (2007–2009), and continues to lecture internationally.
Duguet studied in Paris where she concluded her research with a study on the aesthetics of video and television (“Vers une esthétique de la création électronique (vidéo et télévision)”, 1991). She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics AICA, and was a member of the advisory board of Transmediale Media Art Festival, Berlin (1996-2005). Since 2000, she has been an Officer in the French national “Ordre des Arts et des Lettres”.
The selection of MediaArtHistories Award winners is based on an international call for proposals, and was in 2019 decided upon by an international jury including Andreas Broeckmann (Leuphana Universität, DE), Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths, UK), Andres Burbano (Universidad de los Andes, CO), Oliver Grau (Danube University, AT), Inge Hinterwaldner (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, DE), Erkki Huhtamo (University of California, US), Machiko Kusahara (Waseda University, JP), Gunalan Nadarajan (Ann Arbor School of Art & Design, US), Katja Kwastek, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam NL), Paul Thomas (University of New South Wales, AU), and Chris Salter (Concordia University, Montreal CA).