Enfilade

From H-ArtHist:

The Production of Ornament: Reassessing the Decorative in History and Practice
University of Leeds, 21–22 March 2014

Proposals due by 13 December 2013

Keynote speakers
· Susanne Kuechler, Professor of Material Culture in the Department of Anthropology, UCL
· Alina Payne, Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, Harvard

The descriptive terms ‘decorative’ and ‘ornamental’ are in many ways synonymous with superfluity and excess; they refer to things or modalities that are ‘supplementary’ or ‘marginal’ by their very nature. In the West, such qualitative associations in made objects intersect with long-standing and inter-related philosophical oppositions between ‘form’ and ‘matter’, ‘body’ and ‘surface’, the ‘proper’ and the ‘cosmetic’. Accordingly, this has weighed both on determinations of value in artistic media, and on the inflexions of related histories – particularly histories of ‘non-Western’ art, design and culture, where a wide range of decorative traditions are deemed unworthy of critical attention.

Yet such frameworks are no more historically stable than they are culturally universal. To take one very clear and ‘central’ counter-example, decoration in some strands of Renaissance architectural theory (Filarete, Alberti) emerged as a rigorous codification of meaning, as an essentially functional (political) language. In many ways the history of ornament may itself be seen as a process of marginalisation of such ways of thinking, and the separation of ornament from any form of social practice.

This two-day conference seeks to explore the various ways in which ornament might be regarded as itself productive of its objects and sites. How might the technologies, techniques, and materials of ornament be related to the conception and transformation of modes of object-making? How might ornament be understood to inform its objects, disrupting the spatial categories of ‘surface’ and ‘structure’, and the temporal models in which ornament ‘follows’ making? What are the relations between ornament and representation, and what is at stake in the conventional oppositions between these categories? What are the roles of ornament in larger dynamics of copying, hybridisation and appropriation between things? In what ways have practices and thinking on ornament staged cultural encounters, and engendered larger epistemological and social models?

The conference will explore the production of ornament across a broad range of historical and geographical contexts. We invite proposals from researchers and postgraduates working in any discipline, as well as practitioners, conservators and curators. Proposals of no more than 300 words, along with a CV, should be sent to Dr Richard Checketts and Dr Lara Eggleton at production.of.ornament@gmail.com by Friday the 13th of December 2013.

From the Call for Papers:

Visualising and Materialising Colonial Spaces: Female Responses to Empire
University of Warwick, 11 January 2014

Proposals due by 31 October 2013

Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers for Visualising and Materialising Colonial Spaces: Female Responses to Empire, a conference organized by Dr. Rosie Dias (Art History, University of Warwick) and Dr. Kate Smith (History, University College London) and funded by The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Confirmed keynote speakers include David Arnold, Emeritus Professor, Department of History, University of Warwick and Caroline Jordan, Honorary Associate in the Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University Melbourne.

In recent years scholars working in the field of British art history have increasingly broadened their approach to include transnational and imperial topics. Despite such interest, however, little attention has been paid to the gendered nature of such artistic productions. The majority of research on Anglo-Indian visual culture for example, has focused upon work created by men and as yet little research has considered the role of women in the creation and dissemination of visual and material culture. Visualising and Materialising Colonial Spaces: Female Responses to Empire demonstrates the significance of women’s cultural productions upon ideas of empire at home and abroad by examining the rich visual and archival sources created by British women in imperial spaces. It examines the paintings, sketches, writings, collections, and objects that women created to capture and record their experiences of empire. In doing so it questions the role women played in constructing particular understandings of and narratives about imperial experiences in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical note to visualisingcolonialspaces@gmail.com by October 31, 2013.

In April of 2014 the Royal College of Art in London will host the 40th annual meeting of the Association of Art Historians (AAH). Panels will address a wide variety of themes. Here’s one example, the Museums & Exhibitions Group Annual Session (a full list is available here).

AAH Annual Conference | Challenging Conventions: Exploring Hierarchies
within the Historiography of the Fine and Decorative Arts
Royal College of Art, London, 10–12 April 2014

Proposals due by 11 November 2013

This session explores hierarchies within the discipline of art history, tracing the separation of the ‘fine’ and ‘decorative/applied’ arts and examining the impact of this division on the research, display and use of art objects within academic and museum contexts. Even before Kant subdivided the arts into ‘mechanical’ and ‘aesthetic’ groupings, the ‘decorative’ arts were somehow deemed lesser due to their inherent functionality, allied to base manual labour and divorced from the purity and higher appeal/role of the ‘fine’ arts. This approach was perpetuated throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and continues to influence modes
of practice to the present day.

Within this session questions may include, but are not limited to, exploring how these historiographies affect perceptions within the study of art history and the presentation of objects within museums. Have they actively shaped the way we research, collect and display objects? Have these exclusions/inclusions limited or facilitated ways of working within the discipline generally, or affected the way specific fields have been shaped more particularly? And what impact has this legacy had on contemporary practice, in modes of working, forms of display or the evolution of funding streams?

The Museums & Exhibitions Group represents a wide range of practitioners, including art historians, curators and artists/makers, from all eras and cultures, and invites a similarly wide range of responses. Papers may examine specific areas within this topic, examples of interdisciplinarity or case studies within museum/gallery or academic contexts.

Please send proposals (maximum 250 words) to the session convenors Dr Marika Leino, Oxford Brookes University mleino@brookes.ac.uk and Marie-Therese Mayne, Laing Art Gallery, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums marie-therese.mayne@twmuseums.org.uk by 11th November 2013.

From IU:

Eighteenth-Century Hospitalities | The Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Studies Workshop
The Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, 14–16 May 2014

Proposals due by 13 January 2014

An enduring controversy in eighteenth-century studies—how to interpret the death of Captain Cook—turns on questions of stranger and self, hostility and hospitality. Canonical eighteenth-century European texts defined hospitality as something individuals, states, and institutions extended to strangers. (“Hospitality,” wrote Kant, “means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another.”) Other cultures understood the workings of hospitality, hostility, and the stranger in different fashions, however. Natives of North America, for instance, organized their worlds in terms of kinship, fictive and otherwise, which structured lines of peace and conflict. If for Kant, hospitality was a technique for managing hostility (for preventing strangers from becoming enemies), this was not always the case. When incommensurable hospitalities clashed, hostility could easily arise.

We invite scholars to reflect on the ways that hospitality and self-stranger relations were thought, negotiated, represented, imagined, and lived across the eighteenth century. Questions to be addressed might include everything from how and why different categorizations of stranger-ness arose to daily practices of hospitable interaction. What conceptual, social, legal, etc. arrangements regulated the ways that those seen as socially distinct (the strangers) inhabited one’s own or an alien space?

We welcome papers on topics ranging from forced confinement (e.g., captivity, quarantine, servitude, ghettoization) and the eighteenth-century hospitality industry (coffee shops, restaurants, hospitals, etc.) to ideas and models of refuge, asylum, sanctuary, and contact. Evidence might be found in ethnographies and travelogues (fictional or factual, pictorial or textual) but also in novels, private correspondence, international treaties, etiquette manuals, or works of architecture. Cross- or interdisciplinary approaches are especially welcome.

During the Workshop, we will discuss 4–6 pre-circulated papers each day and have an occasional lecture. Expanded abstracts of papers will be published in the Center’s The Workshop, along with discussion transcripts.

The application deadline is January 13, 2014. Please send a paper proposal (1–2 pages) and current brief CV (3 pages, max) to Dr. Barbara Truesdell, Weatherly Hall North, room 122, Bloomington, IN 47405; 812–855–2856, voltaire@indiana.edu. We will acknowledge all submissions within a fortnight: if you do not receive an acknowledgment by January 27, 2014, please contact Barbara Truesdell or the Center’s Director, Professor Rebecca L. Spang (rlspang@indiana.edu).