Enfilade

From the conference website:

Art and the Environment in Britain, 1700–Today
Université Rennes 2 Haute Bretagne, 2–3 March 2017

Proposals due by 3 September 2016

The concern of artists for the fate of their environment—understood as the natural world in which they breathe, live, and create—is often thought to be a relatively recent phenomenon. The term ‘environmental art’ was indeed coined in the 1960s, while more recently eco-art has been used to refer to the rise of ecological awareness and pressing concerns for sustainability, with a more specifically political and activist take on environmental art. Recent exhibitions in Britain, such as Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet, 1969–2009 at the Barbican and Earth: Art of a Changing World at the Royal Academy, both held in 2009, or Art and Climate Change presented in 2006 and 2007 in London and Liverpool, along with the Art & Environment conference held at Tate Britain in 2010, testify to this recent interest in environmentally-conscious practices. Contemporary artistic practices directly engage with the environment, thus displaying multi-faceted relationships between British visual arts and the surrounding world of trees, plants, animals, and even sounds.

However, the contemporary focus on preservation and political activism should not obfuscate the fact that the interaction between Britons and their environment has a much older history. Visual artists from earlier periods also had something to say, both in pictures and in related writings, about their place as humans cohabiting with non-humans, both animate and inanimate, in a physical world whose boundaries were relentlessly pushed back and transformed. As explorers and scientists uncovered new areas—from the far reaches of the earth to that of human ancestry—these artists reacted to an expanding environment that elicited all kinds of emotions, from excitement and wonder to, all too quickly, anxiety and a sense of loss. The British countryside, largely mediated by the visual representations of eighteenth-century landscape painters, has now become artistic heritage, part of a national identity defined by an osmotic relationship with exceptionally hospitable surroundings. The way eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists represented—and, in the case of landscape gardeners, actively refashioned—a natural world on which cities impinged at a quickening pace in fact often bore the mark of an awareness that what they contemplated and plundered for ideas and ideals was in constant flux. The advent of the Industrial Revolution was to be one of the most decisive illustrations of the transformative power of man over a land so far presented as a timeless Eden. Brought up with the Enlightenment notion that emotional engagement was mandatory for any self-regarding man of feeling, British artists were the prime observers of and witnesses to the alterations that humankind imposed on the natural substrate that ensured its maintenance. Just as their productions betrayed the preoccupations of their times, their personal takes on the relationship between humans and their environment, disseminated through visual representations, contributed to shaping contemporary debates.

The word environment as in ‘nature, or conditions in which a person or thing live’ did not appear until 1827, at which time it was used by the reformer Thomas Carlyle to translate the German Umgebung. The much older verb ‘to environ’, in use in the English language since the late fourteenth century, had come from the French environner and conjured up the image of a circle with a centre around which other elements turned, or veered. For centuries, the centre of this circle was firmly believed to be humankind. Yet, as Keith Thomas has made it quite clear in Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (1983), man’s theologically grounded belief in his total dominion over nature was gradually, over the course of the three centuries spanned by the British historian’s study, dented by “new arguments,” “new conditions,” and “new sensibilities.” As what Thomas called the “dethronement of man” had started a century earlier at the very least, Charles Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species was to provide the final nail with which to close the coffin of a certain human uniqueness tightly shut. Closer to us, the momentous post-human turn in the humanities—an umbrella term that encompasses an amazing variety of paradigm shifts—currently contributes to reinforcing the idea that humans live in a symbiotic environment characterised by a porous line with non-human animals and machines, and where New Materialist theories such as Jane Bennett’s go as far as claiming agency for ‘things’ such as food, commodities, electricity, and minerals. Part of our scientific committee, T. J. Demos advocates the definition of a post-anthropocentric political ecology. His very latest book, Decolonizing Nature, Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, published in 2016, posits that creativity, and more specifically contemporary art, are instrumental in developing this less possessive relationship to nature.

Whether one thinks of environment as context, setting, climate change, green spaces or sounds, today’s epistemology invites us to rethink man’s relation to the external world to the extent that the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ coalesce, nature and culture merge, man and animal are reconfigured. How have British artists responded to these shifting perceptions of the world around them, of this great swirling circle of life and non life in which they found—or imagined—themselves diversely positioned, for a long time at the centre, then in a more undefined place—at the margin even? How has art itself positioned itself in this newly defined environment? A precursor to such interrogations, environmental art was early on intended as a decidedly extensive term, which, due to the American influence of Robert Smithson, came to encompass both sites and non-sites, both the pastoral and the urban. With the introduction of Environmental art departments in British art schools in the 1980s, the environment has been understood by artists as all the different contexts available to them outside of the gallery. We see this conference as an ideal opportunity to highlight these tensions between different definitions and to look into terminologies, as well as historical variations; to explore the links between representation and preservation; the way British artists have represented animals, natural elements, and the climate, and their preoccupation with environmental aesthetics and the altered positioning of humankind in the world, in a British context. Abstracts of about 400 words should be uploaded, along with a short biographical note, to the conference webpage.

Organizers
Laurent Châtel (csti-HDEA EA 4086, Paris Sorbonne), Charlotte Gould (Prismes, Sorbonne Nouvelle), and Sophie Mesplède (ACE EA 1796, Université Rennes 2)

Scientific Committee
Laurent Châtel, Sophie Mesplède, and Charlotte Gould
T. J. Demos, Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture, and Director of the Centre for Creative Ecologies, UC Santa Cruz
Anne Helmreich, Dean of the TCU College of Fine Arts, Fort Worth, Texas
Marie-Madeleine Martinet, Emeritus Professor of British Visual Culture, Sorbonne, Paris
Corinne Silva, Artist and Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication, UCL
Anne Goarzin, Professor of Irish Literature and Visual Culture, Rennes II University

Save

Save

Frederick MacKenzie, The National Gallery When at Mr J. J. Angerstein’s House, Pall Mall, 1824–34, watercolour
(London: V&A, 40-1887)

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Private Collecting and Public Display: Art Markets and Museums
University of Leeds, 30–31 March 2017

Proposals due by 1 November 2016

Keynote Speaker: Susanna Avery-Quash

This two-day conference investigates the relationships between ‘private’ collections of art (fine art, decorative art, and antiquities) and the changing dynamics of their display in ‘public’ exhibitions and museums. This shift from ‘private’ to ‘public’ involves a complex dialectic of socio-cultural forces, together with an increasing engagement with the art market. The conference aims to explore the relationship between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres of the home and the museum and to situate this within the scholarship of the histories of the art market and collecting.

Art collections occupy a cultural space which can represent the individual identity of a collector—often as a manifestation of self-expression and social class. Many museums today arose from ‘private’ collections including The Wallace Collection, Musée Nissim de Camondo, The Frick Collection, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Whilst they now exist as ‘public’ spaces, many still signify the residues of the ‘private’ home of a collector. What processes do collections undergo when they move from a ‘private’ sphere to a ‘public’ exhibition space? In what ways are collections viewed differently in these environments?

How and when do ‘private’ collections move into the ‘public’ domain, and what does this tell us about the increasingly porous nature of these boundaries? Whilst the relationship between ‘private’ and ‘public’ art collecting takes on particular forms from the early modern period onwards, it emerged particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with the creation of temporary exhibitions and permanent displays in museums that relied on donations from collectors. Many national museums are indebted to loans made by private individuals. The Waddesdon Bequest at The British Museum, the Wrightsman Galleries at The Metropolitan Museum, and the John Jones Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum are key examples of the continuity of the private in the public. What are the ‘private’ to ‘public’ dynamics of these exchanges? How have museums negotiated the restrictions proposed by the collector for the display, containment, expansion or reinterpretation of their collection? What is the implication for the status and value of an object when ‘public’ works are sold and re-enter the art market? What meanings are attached to ‘public’ art objects when they begin, once again, to circulate in the art market?

The PGR subcommittee of the Centre for the Study of the Art and Antiques Market welcomes proposals for 20-minute papers which explore these themes or which address any other aspect of the private collecting and public display of collections, from the Early Modern period until the 21st century. We are delighted to confirm Dr. Susanna Avery-Quash, Senior Research Curator (History of Collecting) at the National Gallery, London as our keynote speaker.

Topics can include but are not limited to
• The relationships between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres
• The role and impact of the art market in the ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms
• The history and role of temporary loan exhibitions
• The role played by gender in collecting practices and bequests
• Collecting and loaning objects by minority groups
• Legacies of the collector
• Philanthropy vs self-promotion
• Deaccessioning- public museums selling art back into art market/into private collections
• The dynamic of contemporary art collecting and public art galleries

To propose a paper, please send a Word document with your contact information, paper title, an abstract of 300-500 words, and a short biographical note. Full session proposals for a panel of three papers are also welcomed. Some travel bursaries will be available for accepted speakers. Proposals should be sent to csaa@leeds.ac.uk by 1st November 2016.