Enfilade

Body as Architecture / Architecture as Body
Kelly Freeman (University College London), k.freeman.11@ucl.ac.uk; and Rebecca Whiteley (University College London), rebecca.whiteley.12@ucl.ac.uk

Just as the head, foot, and indeed any member must correspond to each other and to all the rest of the body in a living being, so in a building … the parts of the whole body must be so composed that they all correspond to one another.  –Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria (c. 1450)

There has, since classical antiquity, been a complex set of correspondences between the human body and the designed building. Such interactions spring from the enduring art- theoretical ideal whereby art and architecture should imitate nature, as well as from broader cultural, medical and anatomical thinking wherein the body is described in terms of architecture and domestic arrangement. Throughout recorded history, architects have turned to the proportions, structures, processes, and narratives of the human body when designing built spaces. Likewise, artists and writers working in anatomy, medicine, politics and literature, to name a few, have turned to the shape, design and spaces of the building when discussing and explaining the body.

Our panel will explore how this enduring correspondence has been expressed and shaped by visual culture. We encourage papers that treat as broad an array of visual and theoretical material as possible: from art theory and architecture to anatomical print. Papers may wish to address one of the following themes: the body’s architecture, organic and anatomical theories and representations in architecture, metaphors of bodies and buildings, the (gendered) materiality and form of the body and of architecture. We intend to set no limits on geography or period, and to convene a session with as wide a scope as possible. In response to the theme of ‘Look out!’, we hope to bring together a variety of disciplines—from art history and architecture, to literature, history of science and medicine—and to bring different theoretical and disciplinary approaches into conversation.

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Dangerous Bodies – Look out! Fashioned Bodies on the Boundaries
Royce Mahawatte (Central Saint Martins, London), r.mahawatte@csm.arts.ac.uk; and Jacki Willson (University of Leeds), j.m.willson@leeds.ac.uk

This panel explores the cultural intersection between bodies, fashion and transgression. Bodies are political players in culture. What role do fashioned bodies play in resistance, in meeting governmental boundaries or institutional power? Fashion is an aspect of modern warfare. Style can defend and attack in cultural space. How do fashioned bodies occupy the grey area between social control and the resistance to power? In relation to Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s idea of the ‘performative in the political’ (2013) this session would like to consider how fashioned bodies—which are ‘revolting’, ‘laughing’, ‘unruly’, ‘grotesque’, ‘contaminating’, explicit, or silent and still—enact resistant strategies of protest.

We welcome readings of historical fashion media. How do governmental changes find embodiment in 18th-century masquerade, 19th-century fashion cultures, Modernist imagery? How does fashion intersect with race and gender discourses where colonialism, capitalism and embodiment are inextricably linked? To this end, this session would also like to consider the way that dress has been used emblematically to symbolise specific recent activist moments—for instance the woman in the flowing black dress in the Black Lives Matter demonstration in July 2016 or the ‘woman in red’ who became a symbol of protest in Turkey in 2013. How do acts of fashioned stillness (not passivity), play, refusal or rage mediate conflict, and challenge, critique or attack violent regimes? In what way does the artistic and deliberate use of fashion and the transgressive body differ from digital exposure which is not a deliberate part of a discursive framework? We welcome multi-disciplinary papers that engage with this topic from Art History and Critical Practice, Cultural Studies, Fashion Critical Studies, Film and Literary Studies, Performance Studies, Politics and International Studies, Sociology, Gender, Queer, LGBTI, and Critical Race Studies.

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Dangerous Portraits in the Early Modern World
Jennifer Germann (Ithaca College), jgermann@ithaca.edu; and Melissa Percival (University of Exeter), M.H.Percival@exeter.ac.uk

Portraiture was a dynamic and, at times, disruptive artistic practice in the early modern period. Portraits could and did undermine, reconfigure, or otherwise step outside the bounds of social propriety. Rather than upholding or reinforcing existing hierarchies and/or maintaining the status quo, these portraits challenged the expectations of spectators and consumers. Dangerous portraits could disavow normative behavioural expectations, challenge the political order either openly or privately, or imagine and even generate new identities. How were social expectations engaged and subverted in portraits? Where and in what forms were dangerous portraits consumed or shared? How did artists, spectators, critics, and/or markets respond to these challenges? This session seeks papers that consider early modern portraits that pushed beyond the bounds of social norms and expectations. It engages the theme ‘look out!’ by allowing for reflection on identities traditionally viewed as ‘outside’ the bounds of the normative or desirable in terms of gender, race, class, geography, etc., produced between 1500 and 1800. Papers are welcomed from diverse cultural traditions around the globe, which address the impact of cross-cultural exchange, consider media beyond painting and sculpture, and by scholars, curators, and artists who work outside of the discipline of art history.

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Dialogues: Things and Their Collectors
Nicole Cochrane (University of Hull), Cochrane@2014.hull.ac.uk; Lizzie Rogers (University of Hull), E.J.Rogers@2012.hull.ac.uk; and Charlotte Johnson (Victoria and Albert Museum), ch.johnson@vam.ac.uk

Acts of acquiring, collecting, curating and reception of the object, are generally understood as reciprocal relations between the collector and the object of desire, whether institutional or individual, art or artefact. However, the content of that exchange or dialogue has often been taken for granted. Collecting for display and social advancement, collecting as speculation, collecting for love etc. have too often been accepted as self-explanatory, diverting academic enquiry elsewhere, and obscuring the complexities at the heart of collecting practice. This panel seeks to build on the recent development of scholarship in this field, exploring the push and pull between things and collectors, artists and institutions. It questions how dialogues between parties transform the status, values, identity and character of each.

We propose an object-based approach, focused upon these ‘conversations’, conversations that we invite from any historical moments and geographical location. We encourage participants to engage with issues of class, gender and race as they relate to collecting and especially to the dialogue between collecting and identity. Particularly welcome are collaborative papers from artistic practitioners, academics and museum professionals, that address these issues from their respective vantage points, and papers from those based in scientific and ethnographic collections.

Dialogues between individual collectors and their things could include: provocation and comfort, artistic inspiration and practice, tactical or impulsive, therapeutic or detrimental, sameness and difference, temporality and permanence, lived or fixed, animate or inanimate. Dialogues between stakeholders and institutions could explore: exchanges between collector/donor and museum, boundaries between public and private modes of display, academic approval and the canon, natural history collections and modes of knowledge, national pride.

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Figuring Change: The Early Modern Artistic Reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Lydia Hamlett (University of Cambridge), lkh25@cam.ac.uk; and Philip Hardie (University of Cambridge), prh1004@cam.ac.uk

This session—co-convened by a classicist and an art historian—explores the art-historical legacy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its underlying myths of classical transformation. It seeks papers that extend the chronological and geographical remit of Ovid’s visual cultural reception, as well as those that relate shifts in art historical reception back to the Ovidian metapoetics of transformation. We seek to attract papers on a wide range of case studies—not just sculpture and painting, but also tapestries, murals, music, architecture, and performance; we are likewise interested in papers that ‘look out’ to the intersection of art history with, for example, changes in social history, politics and the history of science. Individual papers might be diachronic and transhistorical in scope, or else home in on the visual culture of specific times and places.

The visual reception of episodes from the Metamorphoses has long been studied by art historians; likewise, recent work on the text by classicists has focused on the aesthetics and politics of the gaze, the ecphrastic challenge to the artist and the transformative power of art. There are nonetheless some important lacunae where an interdisciplinary approach might prove instructive—for example, in the case of Britain during the 17th and early 18th centuries (a particularly rich lens for thinking about how early modern readers and viewers looked at, and thought with, the traditions of Greece and Rome). What should we look out for in terms of the visual treatments of Ovidian subjects? Are images of Ovidian tales of metamorphosis merely entertainment and titillation? Or do they point to important changing moral, cultural and political ideas?

We are particularly interested in papers that focus on lesser-known aspects of Ovidian reception, or which to build new modes of interdisciplinary exchange. Topics might include differing receptions of the Metamorphoses in Britain and on the Continent; editions of Ovid in country house libraries and how and by whom they were read within the context of wider collections; traditions of illustrating Ovid; the appropriation of Ovid in public and private spheres, across court, country and city; the representation of material change, including alchemy and apotheosis; and ideas of intermedial translation between words and images.

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Interdisciplinary Entanglements: Towards a ‘Visual Medical Humanities’
Fiona Johnstone (Birkbeck, University of London); and Natasha Ruiz-Gómez (University of Essex)

This roundtable conversation will consider how the disciplines of art history and visual culture might cultivate a mutually productive relationship with the interdisciplinary field of medical humanities. Situated predominantly in departments of English Literature or History (and increasingly, the Social Sciences), the medical humanities have, to date, been dominated by the written or spoken word, with visual culture yet to take centre stage. This may be changing: recent developments suggest that it might be possible to speak of a ‘visual turn’ within the medical humanities. Arts-based methodologies have been proposed as one possible alternative to an overemphasis on narrative techniques in healthcare; there has been a renewed interest in art therapy and the arts-in-health movement, in the efficacy of arts-based interventions in clinical settings, and in potential therapeutic and/or diagnostic applications of art and art-making. Several medical schools now run elective modules aimed at developing students’ visual literacy skills through exposure to artworks; in other programmes, artists are engaged to teach students ‘soft’ skills such as empathy and communication techniques. Despite these encouraging developments, scholars of art history and visual culture have yet to convincingly articulate the contribution their discipline can make to this rapidly expanding field.

To address this, panellists will be invited to imagine the possibility of a ‘visual medical humanities’. We suggest that this must do more than simply offer analyses (historical or otherwise) of iconographies of illness or injury. At its most productive, a visual medical humanities could raise searching questions about the social, political and ethical conditions of visibility and spectatorship; query how certain types of bodies come to be more visible than others; consider how medical identities are visually as well as linguistically constructed; and think critically about the way in which images and objects are used and displayed in (for example) textbooks and research papers, public health campaigns, and medical museums and art galleries. Acknowledging that ‘the space where one speaks’ and ‘the space where one looks’ operate according to different sets of rules (Foucault, 1970), a visual medical humanities might advocate for an increased sensitivity to the potential of the visible (and invisible) to articulate that which may not be expressed in words. Finally, a visual medical humanities would recognise that visual practice has a vital role to play in the construction of knowledge (as opposed to simply the dissemination of it).

The ramifications of this panel go beyond the specific relationship between art history, visual culture and medical humanities and speak directly to ongoing debates about the complexities of interdisciplinary research. Participants will consider how different disciplines can enrich each other, how we might use the tensions between disciplines constructively, and how the ‘messiness’ of interdisciplinarity might offer a valuable space for critical collaboration and productive entanglement.

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In/visibility and Influence: The Impact of Women Artists and Their work
Helen Draper (Institute of Historical Research, University of London), helen.draper@postgrad.sas.ac.uk; and Carol Jacobi (Tate), carol.jacobi@tate.org.uk

The assumption that ‘influence’ is something that can be traced backwards (or even forwards, as Baxandall argued in Patterns of Intention) is an issue for feminist art history. A feminist art history, that is, that seeks to avoid implicitly patriarchal genealogies and fully to acknowledge the effects of women artists and their work in artistic realms theoretically constituted in masculine terms and traditionally dominated by men. This session aims to review the the age-old issue of ‘the anxiety of influence’ through the lens of feminism and the agency of women artists.

Whitney Chadwick’s edited book Significant Others (1996), which focused on the relationships between artist-couples, and Lisa Tickner’s essay ‘Mediating Generation: The Mother–Daughter Plot’ (OAJ, 2002), which examined the way in which women artists ‘thought through’ their mothers, are important contributions to this revision. This session aims to expand the discussion through evidence-based papers relating to periods and cultures in which the experience of women was or is structurally different from that of men. We welcome papers that retrieve and analyse the hidden or suppressed agency of women artists and their works, and/or demonstrate the effects they have had through conversations, inter-relationships, collaborations, negotiations, networks, pedagogical interventions and other personal and material interactions. Our aim is to contribute to alternative cultural maps and historical accounts that pinpoint and more adequately describe the ‘influence’ of women artists and their works. We invite 250-word abstracts for 25-minute papers, short films, or 250-word interventions.

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Just Looking? Art, Pedagogy, and the Object Lesson in the Long 19th Century
Elena Chestnova (Università della Svizzera Italiana), elena.chestnova@usi.ch; and Andrea Korda, (University of Alberta), korda@ualberta.ca

The popularity of object lessons in the 19th century attests to the fact that looking at things was not taken for granted as a straightforward or innate activity. Vision was to be educated. Its formation was embedded in a complex of senses and ‘mental faculties’, which meant that seeing involved more than just the eye; it was both multi-sensorial and multi-dimensional. Looking was not always aimed solely outwards, and the path between the subject and the object was not necessarily a direct line.

This session aims to examine the history of the object lesson—a pedagogical approach that relies on first-hand engagement with artefacts and phenomena—by inviting contributions that investigate its ‘messy’ instances. The growth of both general and artistic education in the 19th century saw the methodology of learning through things expand into new media, with images increasingly used as learning aids. Teaching activities of artists and historians led to the introduction of object lessons into artistic practices and art historical writing, and in some instances, artworks themselves became object lessons. How can we understand 19th-century object lessons in view of this growing complexity? And what are the implications for our conceptualisation of vision, which indeed ‘has a history’? The ongoing scholarly interest in the history of education and growing attention to popular forms of art history resonate with the concerns of this session. We invite paper proposals from a range of disciplines including but not limited to the history of art.

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Looking Out and In: Reflecting, Remaking, and Reimagining Historical Interiors from Contemporary Viewpoints
Helen McCormack (Glasgow School of Art), h.mccormack@gsa.ac.uk; Anne Nellis Richter, anne.nellis@gmail.com; and Jennifer Gray (Edinburgh College of Art), Jennifer.Gray@ed.ac.uk

Recent research on the history of the domestic interior has highlighted the significance of meanings embedded in the architecture, decoration and objects that comprise the furnishings and fittings of houses and homes. Such increasingly rich and diverse investigation has demonstrated an expansive reach, encompassing grand, architectural schemes and minute inventoried, personal belongings. Despite this development, often the interpretative and communicative aspects of art and design that make up the social meanings of these spaces is misrepresented or can be overly speculative. Therefore, in reflecting, remaking and reimagining historical interiors, the contributions of artists, designers and craftspeople might best be foregrounded in constructing ideas of authenticity, transparency, and materiality in the making process, alongside scholarly study. This panel explores such ideas by reflecting on how historical interiors are remade and reimagined by looking in and out; at how a reassembling of spaces ought to avoid ‘a shrinking definition of the social itself’ (Latour, 2005).

Surveying a range of interior ‘types’ from a number of historical periods, the panel welcomes papers that investigate how meaning is made in refashioning domestic and social spaces in, for example, the homes of 18th-century naturalists and collectors, the colonial governor’s house or plantation mansion, the 17th-century artisan’s house or the 19th-century mogul’s glittering halls. Palatial to austere, we invite papers from researchers and practitioners currently working on these reimagined spaces that explore how historical interiors are made meaningful from a contemporary viewpoint, explaining how they might be embedded in the social and grounded in the present.

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Remembering and Forgetting the Enlightenment
Hans Christian Hönes (The Warburg Institute), hoenes@bilderfahrzeuge.org; and Daniel Orrells (King’s College London), daniel.orrells@kcl.ac.uk

Art history is often considered a child of the Enlightenment: its methodological roots—aesthetics and historicism—are commonly associated with towering figures of the 18th century. Winckelmann and Kant loom large, and their influence on the development of the discipline is uncontested. And yet, numerous art writers have been virtually forgotten, even though their contribution to and influence on 18th- and 19th-century discourses on art was probably just as important as the theories of the better-known German grandees. Pierre d’Hancarville or Jørgen Zoega are just two names, representative of those whose work has not stood the test of time. More often than not, these writers belong to what has been called the ‘Super-Enlightenment’: their thinking is infused with mystical and occult ideas and is often interested more in history and myth than in beauty and style.

That art history turned a blind eye might be surprising, given recent attempts to reinvigorate approaches open to ‘unreason,’ in order to develop new ways for explaining the power of images. The renaissance of the work of Aby Warburg is notable here. This panel aims to evaluate these selection processes in the historiography and epistemology of art history and aesthetics: where and why do art historians, from the 18th to the 21st century, acknowledge the Enlightenment legacies of their discipline and when is it swept under the carpet? Does this canon formation in art history differ from other disciplines, such as classics and archaeology? Where has the ‘Super-Enlightenment’ left its traces in art historical thinking?

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Seeing and Hearing the ‘Beyond’: Art, Music, and Mysticism in the Long 19th Century
Michelle Foot (University of Edinburgh), mfoot@exseed.ed.ac.uk; and Corrinne Chong (Independent Researcher), corrinnecareens@gmail.com

This interdisciplinary session will explore the dialogue between art and music in addressing the subject of mysticism in the long 19th century (1789–1918). To counteract the positivist current that gained momentum during the period, artistic circles gravitated towards mystical means that initiated the beholder and listener into truths that transcended the world of external appearances. The session seeks to gauge the scope of different interpretations of mysticism and to illuminate how an exchange between art and music may unveil an underlying stream of metaphysical, supernatural, and spiritual ideas over the course of the century.

The multiple facets of mysticism manifested across a diverse range of styles, aesthetics, and movements. As esotericism saturated America, Europe and Britain, the Romantics and Symbolists responded to mystical beliefs expressed in Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism, Theosophy and Occultism, while drawing on exposures to Eastern religions. Reinterpretations of pagan mysticism prompted the rediscovery of Folkloric primitivism. Meanwhile, Catholic and evangelical revivals, alongside renewed interest in Medievalism, revitalised Christian themes. In practice, the proliferation of occult revivals at the fin-de-siècle permeated the thematic programmes of artists and composers. Wagner’s operas underscored the link between music, myth, and mysticism through the synthesis of the arts: the Gesamtkunstwerk. Subsequently, Syncretism in mystical philosophies was paralleled by formal correspondences in the visual arts, especially in their ‘rhythmical’ qualities. Synesthesia would instigate the development of abstraction.

This session invites submissions that extend these ideas by investigating how the interconnectedness between art and music was able to evoke and be inspired by mysticism. Papers drawn from other periods that examine the origins, and newer forms of mystical appropriations, will be considered, and those which incorporate perspectives across the spectrum of visual culture and musicology are particularly welcome.

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Soundscapes: New Challenges, New Horizons
Margit Thøfner (University of East Anglia), m.thofner@uea.ac.uk; and Tim Shephard (Sheffield University)

There is a long and fruitful scholarly tradition of exploring the relationships between art and music. Amongst other things, the study of both entails working with objects, spaces and practices that are profoundly embodied, sensory and emotional. To work with and between art and music means becoming acutely attuned to the visceral as much as to the analytical. Yet there is still more to be gained. Recently, when commenting on the relationship between art history and musicology, Jonathan Hicks speculated that ‘it may be precisely in attending to the locations of expressive culture—whether noisy, spectacular, or a combination of these and more—that our disciplines might find most common ground’.

Our strand will explore this proposition. What may be learned from focusing on how music and sound—or even the silent evocation of sound—is framed by places, spaces, objects, rituals and other performative contexts and vice versa? More broadly, how does this common ground helps us to map out and explore the problems and challenges currently facing art historians who work with music and musicologists working with art? For example, is it still a problem that many of our current methods of enquiry have come from studies of European modernism? What happens when they are applied to earlier periods and/or different cultural contexts? We welcome papers that address these and cognate issues, whether by engaging with broader methodological problems or by exploring specific soundscapes from any period and anywhere.

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Textility
Mechthild Fend (UCL), m.fend@ucl.ac.uk; and Anne Lafont (Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris), anne.lafont@inha.fr

Technologies associated with textile production—such as weaving, knitting, spinning, embroidering or dying—have often served as models for processes of art making and colouring. Painting and weaving have been aligned since antiquity, during the early modern period the mythical weaver Arachne could serve as an allegory of colourist painting, and dying became a model to think through colour printing. In the 19th-century, architectural theorist Gottfried Semper declared weaving an ur-technology that is the basis of all building work, and artists such as Millet, Van Gogh, or Liebermann drew, in their paintings and graphic work, comparisons between weaving and assembling brush strokes or between spinning and drawing lines. This panel would like to newly explore such associations of textile production with artistic processes by joining them with recent anthropological theorisations of the ‘Textility of making’ (Tim Ingold) or with approaches that ‘look for the traces of the process that generated the work’ (Jean-Paul Leclercq). By doing so, it proposes to raise the question of the ways in which a focus on textility might pose a challenge to notions of the agency of objects. At the same time, it would also like to reconnect with earlier feminist approaches to textiles and textile production that aimed to destabilise traditional hierarchies of media by highlighting not only women’s involvement in textile production but also the paradigmatic character of techniques such as weaving. Finally, we are interested in the way in which crafted fabrics serve as models for the human body and its visualisation, be it in the use of metaphors like ‘tissue’ or the association of dyes and body colour. We invite papers dealing with art theory or art practices and forms of fabrication (including, but not restricted to, textiles) that mobilise and reflect ‘textility’ as a theoretical proposition.

This panel is ‘looking out’ as it engages with interdisciplinary methodologies and encourages global perspectives on fabrics and their fabrication as models for thinking about practices of making. In addition to the academic session we are planning a panel visit to the V&A Textile Collections at the Clothworkers’ Centre at Olympia, in collaboration with Lesley Miller, Senior Curator (Textiles) at V&A.

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The National in Discourses of Sculpture in the Long Modern Period (c. 1750–1950)
Tomas Macsotay (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), tomas.macsotay@upf.edu; and Roberto Ferrari (Columbia University, New York), rcf2123@columbia.edu

Are specific histories of national ‘schools’ of sculpture premised by the codifying of national identities? What role has been reserved for modern European languages and their historical networks of cultural transfer in enabling or inhibiting this circulation of nationalism in sculpture criticism? From the veneration of Greek art by Winckelmann, to the Romantic idea of a Northern spirit in the work of Thorvaldsen; from the imperial narratives of display at the World’s Fairs, to constructions of allegory in French Third Republic art; from monuments to fallen heroes after World War I, to Greenberg’s and Read’s critical biases for national sculptors—varieties of imaginary geographies in the long modern period have congealed into a fitful history where sculpture is entrenched in projections of the national. Discourses of exclusion and inclusion became part of how sculptors were trained, public spaces were ornamented, and audiences were taught to read sculpture. These discourses also played a role in the strengthening (and dissimulation) of increasingly border-crossing networks of industrial production, globalised art trade, and patterns of urban infrastructure and design.

This panel seeks papers that offer critical explorations of the national and its tentative ties to the cosmopolitan in sculptural discourse, or consider a transdisciplinary dialogue between sculpture and its texts (e.g. art school writings, criticism, memoirs and biographies, etc.). We particularly welcome papers addressing the role of translation and circulation in fledgling modern criticism, as well as papers engaging recent accounts of cultural transfer in the construction of national and modern artistic identifiers (e.g. Michel Espagne, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel).

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The Weaver’s Workshop: Materiality, Craft, and Efficacies in the Art of Tapestry
Katja Schmitz-von Ledebur (Kaiserliche Schatzkammer Wien), katja.ledebur@khm.at

Tapestry is a complex and expensive medium. From the Middle Ages production of tapestry incorporated precious stuffs, including silk, fine wool, gold, and silver thread. To this rich materiality it added a complicated and costly manufacturing process that involved diverse media (drawing and weaving), and which therefore required multi-professional teams of artists, both local and international, to endow these artefacts with a variety of motifs in elaborate compositions. At its peak in the Renaissance and the Baroque, production was both local and international, the complexity of the product necessitating the support of an international network of workshops and agents acting on behalf of customers all over Europe and beyond.

Tapestry is easily folded or rolled up, making the work of art highly mobile. Owners were thus able to present tapestries in different places and for a host of diverse occasions. It thus lent itself to a variety of purposes, both public and private, as both symbol and sign and as instrument and image of power and object of desire. Tapestry was thus an exceptional mobile that invites questions about the relationship between technology, power, propaganda, representation, and aesthetics

This session will investigate specific aspects of tapestry, both as an artwork and as a high-end product of industrial production via discussion that is interdisciplinary in its look out. We invite papers that consider the development and innovations in tapestry production arising from changes in technology and in aesthetic taste, such as, for example, colour treat. Papers could ask, for example, what kinds of technological challenges were involved in Raphael’s ‘Italian’ designs for the Brussels workshops or, more generally, how weavers responded to changes in disegno. We are also interested in the question of how such alterations impacted on the function of tapestries, whether they were the cause of the declining interest in and status of tapestry as art in industrial revolution, and how we can explain tapestry’s revival in Modernism.