Exhibition | San Antonio 1718: Art from Viceregal Mexico
José de Páez, Mexican Castes (Castas mexicanas), (15 total), ‘1. De Español, e India, produce mestizo’, oil on canvas, 1780
(Private Collection)
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From the San Antonio Museum of Art:
San Antonio 1718: Art from Viceregal Mexico, A Tricentennial Exhibition
San Antonio Museum of Art, 17 February 2018 — 13 May 2018
Three hundred years ago the city of San Antonio was founded as a strategic outpost of presidios defending the colonial interests of northern New Spain and missions advancing Christian conversion. The city’s missions bear architectural witness to the time of their founding, but few have walked these sites without wondering who once lived there, what they saw, valued, and thought. San Antonio 1718: Art from Viceregal Mexico tells the story of the city’s first century through more than one hundred landscapes, portraits, narrative paintings, sculptures, and devotional and decorative objects, many of them never before exhibited in the United States. The exhibition is organized in three sections: People and Places, The Cycle of Life, and The Church.
San Antonio 1718 includes portraits of political and economic power, Spanish viceroys and military leaders who helped shape the destiny of the city. It explores the intrepid Franciscan missionaries who spearheaded the evangelization of the region, including Fray Antonio Margil de Jésus, known as the ‘Patron Saint of Texas’, and the religious figures who anchored their teachings such as the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception and her American manifestation, the Virgin of Guadalupe. Many works are more personal: portraits of poised young women whose marriages will solidify status, aspirational paintings of young families at home, nuns depicted at the threshold of their vows or at their death, intimate miniatures of lovers and soldiers, post-mortem portraits of infants. Throughout, the works invoke the lineage and authority of mainland Spain, while revealing the lives and times of San Antonio’s earliest inhabitants.
Celebrating the city’s deep Hispanic roots and cultural ties with Mexico, San Antonio 1718 features works by New Spain’s most talented eighteenth-century artists, including Cristόbal de Villalpando (1649–1714), Miguel Cabrera (1695–1768), and José de Páez (1720–1790), as well as pieces by talented unknown vernacular artists.
Marion Oettinger, ed., with essays by Jaime Cuadriello, Cristina Cruz González, Ray Hernández-Durán, Katherine Luber, and Gerald Poyo, San Antonio 1718: Art from Mexico (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2018), 288 pages, ISBN: 9781595348340, $33.
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Note (added 19 February 2018) — The original posting did not include the catalogue details.
Call for Articles | Stay Still: Tableau Vivant
From the Call for Papers:
Stay Still: Past, Present, and Practice of the Tableau Vivant
RACAR Special Issue, October 2019
Guest Edited by Mélanie Boucher and Ersy Contogouris
Proposals due by 1 February 2018; final essays will be due by 15 August 2018
Jules-Ernest Livernois, Mrs. Ed Foley’s Statuary Group, 1893 © Jules-Ernest Livernois/Library and Archives Canada/PA-024050.
While the conceptualization and modern incarnation of the tableau vivant are rooted in eighteenth-century Europe, its origins can be traced back to antique pantomime and to royal entrances in the early modern period. Presented first at the theatre, and then in private settings, for the pleasure and education of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, the tableau vivant quickly migrated to other areas of the world, including North America. It decisively marked the beginning of photography and was fundamental to pictorialism and early cinema. Its practice was abandoned during the first half of the twentieth century, then re- emerged in 1960s experimental cinema, while its mise-en-scène and its exploration of immobility were exploited in contemporary art during this same period. The use of the term ‘tableau vivant’ to refer to contemporary artistic performances appeared in the mid-1990s, and probably stemmed from the interest then shown for Vanessa Becroft’s practice. In the early 2000s, the markedly growing engagement with the tableau vivant, the re-enactment of performances, and their presentation over long periods of time, in turn deeply impacted on museum practices. If it is in literature studies that reflexive analyses of the tableau vivant first appeared, recent scholarship—whether informed by literature, theatre, cinema, the visual arts, museology, or other fields of knowledge—is contributing to the rediscovery of the tableau vivant and to its recognition as a hybrid practice, the study of which can be productive in different areas.
The tableau vivant raises various issues that relate to its mechanisms of presentation as a performance, among them, theatrical, narrative, spatial, pictorial, and temporal. It also engages with social and political issues such as gender, race, sexuality, class, and the relationship of the subject to the material world. As an object that is collected and exhibited, it is inscribed in the history of analogical museography, but also raises present-day issues linked to conservation and exhibition. As an artistic practice today, it enters into dialogue with other forms of appropriation and relates to practices of re-enactment, reconstitution, remake, citation, and remixing that are particularly popular in contemporary art as well as in other areas of art and culture. What sets it apart from these other practices, its characteristic of immobility, in turn brings into play its own set of theoretical and interpretative questions.
By looking at the tableau vivant from a variety of standpoints, this special issue of RACAR aims to contribute to the knowledge and to the current thinking on this subject. We welcome historical or theoretical pieces that address either specific works or more general concerns relating to the tableau vivant; accounts of artistic and museological practices; as well as portfolios. The call is open to topics relating to all historical periods, all geographical and cultural areas, and all artistic media.
To this end, we are soliciting three types of proposals, in either French or English: articles (maximum 7,500 words, including notes), accounts of practices (maximum 3,500 words, including notes), and portfolios (maximum 10 images and 1,000 words, including notes). The articles and accounts of practices will be submitted to double-blind peer review. Please submit your proposals of a maximum of 250 words and a short CV before February 1, 2018, to Mélanie Boucher, Université du Québec, (melanie.boucher@uqo.ca) and Ersy Contogouris, Université de Montréal (ersy.contogouris@umontreal.ca).
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