Enfilade

The following represents a selection of panels that might be of interest for scholars of the eighteenth century, though readers are encouraged to consult the full Call for Papers. HECAA members are asked to pay special attention to the session organized by Kevin Chua ‘After the Secular: Art and Religion in the Eighteenth Century’ and the ‘New Scholars Session,’ chaired by Kristel Smentek. Proposals for minor sessions (90-minute panels) typically have a slightly later due date; so stay tuned. -CH

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102nd Annual Conference of the College Art Association
Chicago, 12-15 February 2014

Proposals due by 13 May 2013 (extended from 6 May 2013)

The 2014 Call for Participation for the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 12–15 in Chicago, describes many of next year’s programs sessions. CAA and the session chairs invite your participation: please follow the instructions in the booklet to submit a proposal for a paper or presentation. This publication also includes a call for Poster Session proposals and describes the seven Open Forms sessions.

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Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
After the Secular: Art and Religion in the Eighteenth Century
Kevin Chua, Texas Tech University, kevin.chua@ttu.edu
Religious art of the eighteenth century has long been framed within a narrative of secularization. It was thought that, with modernization, societies would move away from religious values to embrace secular ones. Yet scholars such as Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, and Hent de Vries have questioned this dominant narrative. Not only has secularization been shown to be not the end point of modernization, it has proven to be, perhaps, the last progress narrative that we need to unbind. This panel seeks papers on religious art, visual culture, and architecture that trouble the old secularization narrative, and come to grips with the paradoxical efflorescence of religion in the eighteenth century. Papers might address the contradictory place of art between the flourishing of marginal religions and the public sphere, engage the various “returns” of religion in and for art, and rethink the supposedly unidirectional shift from “religious” to “secular” worlds in aesthetic media.

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Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
New Scholars Session
Kristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, smentek@mit.edu

The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) invite paper proposals from advanced doctoral students and recent PhDs that present innovative approaches to the interpretation of the art, architecture, and material culture of the global eighteenth century. Presenters selected for this session are expected to become members of HECAA before the conference.

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Restructuring the Fields: The ‘Modern’ in ‘Islamic’ and the ‘Islamic’ in ‘Modern’ Art and Architecture
Esra Akcan, University of Illinois, Chicago; and Mary Roberts, University of Sydney. eakcan@uic.edu and mary.roberts@sydney.edu.au
In recent years there have been thought-provoking debates about the integration of modern and contemporary visual culture within the field of Islamic art and architecture in response to their previous marginalization. At the same time a strident critique of the Euro-American biases of modernist visual histories has emerged alongside an effort to rethink the status of “non-Western” modernisms. The impact of these challenges is by no means resolved. This session invites papers that reassess the status of “non-Western” visual histories from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries within the subfields of both Islamic and modern art and architecture. Contributions are invited that question the current geographic, temporal, and religious categories used in art history to delineate these subfields. Can the institutionalized categories of the discipline respond to recent approaches that emphasize intertwined histories? We are particularly interested in scholars whose research traverses conventional borders of the subfields.

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Toward a Loser’s Art History: Artistic Failure in the Long Nineteenth Century
Jan Dirk Baetens, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, j.baetens@let.ru.nl
The narrative of art history has always been construed as a sequence of successes. This is especially true for the history of nineteenth-century art. The century conceived of itself as a glorious time of breakthroughs and achievements, and the various stories of its art production quickly integrated this logic. Progressist histories of nineteenth-century art have thought of success in teleological terms of change and innovation, whilst revisionist accounts have justified their focus on salon art by referring to its commercial success or official acclaim. This session aims to reverse the rigid logic of success, and proposes that a study of failure can contribute in an equally significant way to our understanding of nineteenth-century artistic developments. The panel invites papers addressing issues of lack of achievement, deficiency, and ill luck. It especially discourages all proposals relating to great artists, salon heroes, or unrecognized innovators, unless their stories can be told as stories of failure.

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The Early-Modern Child in Art and History
Matthew Averett, Creighton University, matthewaverett@creighton.edu
Who was the early-modern child and what was her childhood like? Despite the common assertion that the Victorians invented childhood, the concept has long existed. Recent scholarship on the child in history, including Nicholas Terpstra’s shocking Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence (2010) and Jeannie Labno’s Commemorating the Polish Renaissance Child (2011), has contributed significantly to our understanding of early-modern children and childhood. Various child-related issues have been explored, such as the legal rights of children, abortion and exposure, parental attitudes toward children, kin networks, gender roles, education and expectations, passage into adulthood, and children’s domestic spaces. Early-modern art is full of depictions of children, from princes and princesses to common street urchins, while cities contained children’s spaces both in the palace and on the street. This session seeks papers that use art-historical evidence to illuminate early-modern children: their births, lives, or early deaths. Papers addressing early-modern conceptions of childhood, creation of identity, or construction of children’s spaces are particularly welcome.

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Committee on Women in the Arts
Toward Transnational Feminisms in the Arts
Temma Balducci, Arkansas State University, tbalducci@astate.edu
Recent interest in transnationalism reveals the pressing need to overcome the monocultural underpinnings of Anglo-American feminist scholarship. Several exhibitions and publications have acknowledged “common differences” among women’s lives and art worldwide as well as the particularities of art feminisms within and beyond Western culture. There remains, however, space to question both how we re/define feminisms beyond Western cultural borders and how transnationalism affects the critical perspective of women in the arts. Papers are encouraged from scholars, critics, curators, and artists that advance transnational perspectives on past and present feminisms in the arts, interrogate articulations and absences in transnational feminist art, or critically address the transnationalist premises and pretensions of feminisms in the arts. Topics may include artists’ case studies, comparative analyses of feminisms in different contexts, decoding the legacy of Western feminist art in women’s art transnationally, reflections on the methodological challenges of intercultural research, and theoretical or empirical ruminations on dialogue/collaboration across generational and geocultural borders.

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Historians of Netherlandish Art
Moving Images: The Art of Personal Exchange in the Netherlands
Marisa Bass, Washington University in St. Louis, mbass@wustl.edu
The itinerancy of Netherlandish art is well known to be a defining aspect of its history. Yet within this history, global commerce and the market for large-scale productions such as tapestries and carved retables have received more attention than the intimate exchange of images between individuals. On this more intimate scale, images acted as agents affirming bonds of friendship and diplomacy, religious belief and intellectual endeavor, whether between artists, scholars, merchants, or noblemen. This session invites papers that examine how Netherlandish drawings, medals, prints, and so on communicated between senders and recipients divided by geographical distance. Studies that consider the ways in which the personal exchange of images operated within larger cultural structures such as the court or networks of trade are particularly welcome.

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Curatorial and Exhibition Studies: Training a New Generation of Exhibition Makers
Robert Blandford and Neysa Page-Lieberman, Columbia College Chicago. rblandford@colum.edu and
npage-lieberman@colum.edu
Curatorial and exhibition studies is a fast-growing field, with more programs than ever offering students a variety of training options. With an increasing number of students graduating and seeking careers in museums and galleries, there is a need to consider different educational models and modes of training. The best programs partner with professional venues to offer cutting-edge innovation, arming students not only with current theoretical frameworks, but also with experiential learning where student projects are realized and risk-taking is real. This panel will present examples of these partnerships that offer students a supportive, professional environment where they can apply theoretical training, exercise practical skills, realize creative visions and receive critical feedback from academic, professional, and public audiences. The conversation will also include a focus on the student experience and preparedness for entering the field.

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Re-examining Fashion in Western Art, 1775–1975
Justine De Young, Harvard University, deyoung@fas.harvard.edu
The recent Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago (2012–2013) foregrounded the importance of fashion to the Impressionists and to our understanding of Paris in the 1860s and 1870s. This panel seeks to expand the consideration of the significance of dress to the making of art and its reception from the eighteenth century to the late twentieth. Are there other movements or artists whose engagement with fashion requires a similar reassessment? Papers might focus on: dress in portraiture or modern-life scenes; the rejection of contemporary fashion and/or preference for exotic or historic costume in painting or sculpture; artists who designed clothing or accessories; or artists whose work influenced fashion trends. Preference will be given to those proposals that reflect on questions raised by recent scholarship (for example, gender and identity, the politics of dress, and the economics of fashion) and take into account the discourse surrounding dress and fashion in art.

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American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
Secrets of the Old Masters: Materials, Manuals, and Myths
Kristin deGhetaldi and Brian Baade, University of Delaware. kdeghetal@yahoo.com and apigmentboy@yahoo.com
The 2014 joint CAA-AIC conference session will examine the various ways that traditional painting materials and techniques have influenced and inspired later generations of artists and artistic movements. There has been a persistent and reoccurring theme throughout art history with painters searching for “secret” or “lost” recipes used by the Old Masters. Research topics could include the following: critical evaluations of primary sources (for example, artist’s manuals, correspondence, proprietary art catalogues, and so on); technical studies relating to an artist or artistic movement; the art market and its association with Old Master painting materials and recipes; conservation/preservation issues associated with to the misinterpretation of traditional techniques; and/or contemporary painting practices and their relationship to traditional techniques and materials.

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The Art of Display: Context and Meaning, 1700–1850
Christina Ferando, Columbia University, crf2002@columbia.edu
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, viewers encountered works of art in a variety of settings: private homes, churches, gardens, and the first public museums. Within these settings, colored walls, rotating pedestals, elaborate frames, well-thought-out lighting, and careful juxtapositions were used to showcase objects. These displays affected the way viewers encountered and thought about the works. Display could be used to educate the eye, emphasizing the formal qualities of a work or encouraging viewers to look closely at the material nature of an object. At the same time, display could have a significant impact on symbolic meanings as well, affecting the political, social, or cultural significance of a work of art. This panel welcomes papers that reconstruct displays that have been lost to us, and in so doing rediscover and historicize the meaning and significance of objects as they were encountered by viewers between 1700 and 1850.

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Ephemeral
Carson Fox, Adelphi University, carsonfox@gmail.com
At its core, the ephemeral defines the nature of human existence, yet it is an inevitability that humanity continues to deny and struggle against. As artists, viewers, and academics, we value material as a stand-in for so many things we cannot hold. But when we pause to truly contemplate the expanse of the human experience, we realize nothing is permanent. In this panel, we will explore our cultural expectations of the art object, the function of creation in the lives of artists, and our temporal experience as art viewers. Subjects may include the conceptual use of transitory materials and environments, the evolving disciplines of performance and installation, artistic themes of human mortality, or even the temporary nature of the student-teacher relationship. Questions may include: Does art need to be materially permanent to be “real” and impactful? What is our understanding of permanence in the world? Who should the object serve, the maker or the viewer, and how does this impact meaning?

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Music and Visual Culture: Assessing the State of the Field
Anne Leonard, University of Chicago; and Tim Shephard, University of Sheffield. aleonard@uchicago.edu and t.shephard@sheffield.ac.uk
The field of music and visual culture has become an increasingly important branch of art-historical scholarship in recent years. Moving beyond traditional studies in iconography, it now encompasses hybrid arts (such as dance, opera, film, and video), performance studies, synaesthesia, architecture and soundscapes, and much more. Yet, in all the enthusiasm around “intermediality,” certain problems present themselves. To what extent do the different arts maintain distinct characteristics even as they converge into new forms? How can existing disciplinary structures best accommodate inter-arts inquiry? Finally, how can we ensure the production of worthwhile, responsible scholarship that also remains intelligible, accessible, and useful to both musicologists and art historians? Closely following the publication of The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, edited by the co-chairs, this session will present recent approaches to research in music and visual culture that exemplify the aspirations and possibilities of this swiftly growing field.

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Historians of British Art
Queer Gothic: Difference and Sexuality in British Art and Architecture
Ayla Lepine, Yale University; and Matthew Reeve, Queen’s University. ayla.lepine@yale.edu and reevem@queensu.ca
Over the past four centuries, the Gothic style and its range of significations (including pre-modernity, romanticism, the foreign, and Catholicism) have been frequently employed as a locus or a cipher for sexuality. Within broadly Anglican, Neoclassical visual cultures, the style could express non-normative, minoritized experience, manifesting the values and ideals of an alternate subjectivity. Recent work in art history, literature, and gender studies has shown that from the Early Modern period to the present, Gothic aesthetics and ideas were appropriated and critiqued as an alternate historicist landscape within which diverse constructions and expressions of self could take place. Neo-Gothic aesthetics can be productively explored as a method of visual communication wherein queerness has been imagined, signaled, displayed, and censored. For historians of British art, the Gothic Revival and queer theory are increasingly marshaled as ways of understanding the wider phenomena of sexuality, historiography, and resistance. This panel welcomes new research on queerness and the Gothic across architecture, art, and design, which may speak to emerging ways of seeing tradition, innovation, futurity, utopianism, and the tensions between survival and revival.

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Objects, Objectives, Objections: The Goals and Limits of the New Materialisms in Art History
Bibiana Obler, George Washington University; and Benjamin Tilghman, Lawrence University. bobler@gwu.edu and benjamin.c.tilghman@lawrence.edu
It is time to take stock of the opportunities afforded art and art history by what might collectively be called the New Materialisms. What can we learn from thinkers such as Jane Bennett, Graham Harman, and Bruno Latour? How can art historians, attuned to the specificity and uniqueness of our objects of study, enrich and modify New Materialist ideas? This panel seeks papers representing diverse approaches to the topic. We are looking for case studies of New Materialist ideas in art historical and artistic practice, as well as theoretical or historiographic analyses suggesting ways forward or revisiting earlier moments in the discipline’s history marked by vitalism and materialism. We also believe there is cause to be skeptical of these new theories and would like to include challenges to the validity of New Materialist approaches. Do we have before us a valuable new tool or a broken toy?

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The Erotic Gaze in Early Modern Europe
Elizabeth Pilliod, Rutgers University, Camden; and Joe A. Thomas, Kennesaw State University. pilliod@aol.com and jthom205@kennesaw.edu
Historical studies of gender and sexuality have often been approached with a feminist or psychoanalytic theoretical apparatus narrowly focused on critical, social, or economic factors. This session focuses on the meaning and interpretation of sexual imagery through its pleasurable, “erotic” components. For early modern audiences erotic content could provide a variety of aesthetic, carnal, and intellectual viewing positions. Our goal is to attempt to reconstruct the ways in which early modern viewers would have enjoyed erotic and sexual content in art. Some avenues of inquiry might be: the influx of “new” objects into viewing spaces (Greco-Roman, Egyptian, New World or beyond) or differences in attitudes toward artworks. How do fairly recent theoretical models such as spectacle, agency, anachronism, and so on affect the discussion of the erotic? Papers are sought that: examine works of art previously censored or forgotten because of sexual content; reinterpret works to include or explain erotic aspects; delineate differences between early modern and contemporary attitudes; or otherwise provide insight into the erotically charged gaze of early modern viewers.

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Toward a Spatial (Digital) Art History
Béatrice Joyeux Prunel, École normale supérieure, Paris; and Catherine Dossin, Purdue University. beatrice.joyeux-prunel@ens.fr and cdossin@purdue.edu
Recent developments in Web mapping enable the ability to create multidimensional, dynamic maps that display vast amounts of spatial and temporal data while remaining readable and intuitive. Spatial dynamic visualizations allow historians to study the locations and movements of artistic agents and artworks, their integration in social fields, as well as their response, whether visual or discursive, to these spatial logics. The new Spatial (Digital) art history thus participates in the redefinition of art history by meeting the challenges of the spatial, global, and digital turns. But to which extent is it groundbreaking and productive? What are its unique contributions compared to those of traditional art-historical methods? This panel will bring together scholars who are pioneering in the field of Spatial (Digital) art history to take stock of projects under development, and foster exchange and collaboration among them. We seek papers that combine the presentation of a cartographic project with a methodological reflection.

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Objectifying Prints: Hybrid Media, 1450–1800
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Art Institute of Chicago; and Edward Wouk, University of Manchester. skarrschmidt@artic.edu and edward.wouk@manchester.ac.uk
Printed artworks were often by nature ephemeral, but in early modern Europe, they commingled with other media, setting off chain reactions of related imagery that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary session analyzes the effect of prints on more traditionally valued objects, and vice versa. Repeat iterations across conventional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries lead to a new kind of objectification in which original “meanings” were lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising ways. Prints—reproducible products of hybridity and collaboration—were singularly disposed to unleashing transformations. This session is not primarily concerned with copying or copyright, but rather with the fluid redefinition and repurposing of original designs and ideas permitted by prints’ pervasive availability. Papers exploring collaborations between multiple workshops combining printing and other media are welcome.

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American Society for Hispanic Art-Historical Studies
Death in Spain and Hispanic America: Representing an ‘Obsession’
Oscar E. Vázquez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, oscarv@illinois.edu
The subject of death has been constructed historically as a particularly Spanish national and artistic obsession. Spanish nineteenth-century politician Francisco Pi y Margall observed that “Our painters are obsessed with death,” while Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren wrote, “In Spain, death is the starting point of all thought.” This panel seeks papers examining the properties, reception, or historiography of specific monuments, objects, images, or artistic texts from any period and visual cultures of the Iberian Peninsula and Hispanic America that deal with or contributed to understandings of death. Topics may range from fraternities of the buena muerte, to martyrdoms, memento mori, and catafalques; from postmortem portraits to state burials and cemeteries; from Spanish Civil War photography to contemporary works; from artists’ deaths to the death of the author. How have these objects, sites, or texts contributed to discourses of death in Spain and its possessions, or as a Spanish “obsession”?

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The Absent Image
Michelle C. Wang, Georgetown University, mcw57@georgetown.edu
From Zhang Yanyuan’s Record of Famous Painters of Successive Dynasties (847) to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors (1550), histories of art teem with accounts of artworks that no longer exist. This panel examines the uses and values of absent images for the history of art by exploring how writings about them have informed our perceptions of art and society in particular historical moments. How may we progress beyond using such writings in purely documentary fashion or as sources in need of independent verification? What is the status of lost artworks in a discipline that deals from the outset with the visible and the tangible? Seeking a platform for cross-cultural and comparative dialogue, this panel seeks proposals from scholars in any field or period of art history for papers that investigate the problems and potential of studying art-historical writings that address absent images.

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The Unlikely Self
Veronica White, Morgan Library and Museum; and Anna Hetherington, Columbia University, New York. veronicamariawhite@gmail.com and anna.r.hetherington@gmail.com
We propose a theme of self-portraiture that extends our understanding of a portrait and goes beyond studies of mimetic representations. The artist is the primary viewer of his own self-portrait, but how are we, secondary observers, to interpret images where likeness is removed, but the self remains? Examples range from the skin of St. Bartholomew in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, which is often read as a self-portrait, to Jim Dine’s titled self-portraits, wherein an object such as a bathrobe identifies the sitter rather than his physical likeness. Jenny Saville’s Closed Contact features photographs of the artist’s own body, but the contorted poses challenge the viewer’s perceptions of beauty, femininity, and self-portraiture. It is with the inventive self-portrait that this panel is concerned. Proposals can deal with any time period and any artistic medium. We welcome presentations from art historians and artists that look beyond traditional examples of self-representation and challenge the very definition of a self-portrait.

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Early Modern Imperial Landscapes in Comparative Perspective
Stephen Whiteman, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, s-whiteman@nga.gov
Early modern social and economic transformations led contemporary regimes to develop new means for articulating and communicating visions of authority. Landscape both reflected and conveyed these transformations, and the relationship between land, its imagination, and consumption proved a fruitful site for the negotiation of royal and imperial identities. This panel seeks to illuminate how early modern states shaped, and were shaped by, landscape, including both physical sites, such as gardens, courts and hunting parks, and rhetorical ones, whether visual, textual, or otherwise. How did these states engage landscape as a medium for imperial identity? What effects did social and economic transformations, including the rapid expansion of printing, increasing mobility, and commercializing economies, have on these processes? How may a comparative study of these and related questions enlighten our understanding of both landscape and early modernity? We invite papers critically engaging the nature of landscape and state power in Asia, Europe, and beyond during the early modern period.

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N.B. — Notice of the New Scholars Session was added on 20 April 2013.