Enfilade

From the Call for Articles:

Academic Research and the Contemporary Museum (working title)
Collection of essays edited by Dr Nicola Pickering, to be published by Routledge

Proposals due by 30 November 2020

This publication intends to re-establish the importance of focused and supported academic object-based research in museum practice and encourage a more robust debate within the museums sector surrounding the requirement and benefits of this work. It aims to reveal how new and creative academic research can be of value to audience-focused outcomes and public engagement work in museums, something that has not received the attention it should have up to now.

In this publication ‘academic research’ will be considered as activity of a scholarly nature, involving in- depth study of museum objects, drawing heavily on the examination of primary and secondary sources, and undertaken by subject-specialists using methodologies drawn from academic disciplines. This book will offer a unique opportunity for readers to see how new academic research can successfully inform visitor-centred practices in museums, and public outcomes for non-specialists, rather than remain the preserve of elitist curators and be produced for limited and privileged audiences.

This book will contain case studies that highlight the value of skilfully and appropriately transferring and translating academic research into public-facing projects and outcomes in the museums sector. Sympathetically integrated into public interpretation and education projects, and astutely linked to contemporary issues, new object-focused and audience-focused academic research can assist in widening access and participation and contribute to museum work in areas such as wellbeing, accessibility, social justice and sustainable funding. Thus, it can complement and bolster visitor-centred approaches, rather than work in opposition to them. It is hoped that the case studies collected in this volume will show that primary research and object-based scholarship in curatorial practice, which focuses on the needs of audiences, as well as collaborations with academics and academic organisations, can enhance the public impact and wider appeal of museums.

Case studies that feature examples of object-focussed research drawing on alternative theories (for example post-colonial, feminist, critical race, post-human and environmental theories) will highlight how museums can reinterpret objects from multiple and new perspectives. This might then show how new, or a wider range of, audiences may then be engaged in the work of the museum through the curatorial, learning, engagement and community projects that draw on this fresh research. Such activity can assist in widening access and participation and contribute to museum work in areas such as wellbeing, accessibility, social justice and sustainable funding.

Case Studies Sought

Case studies—each approximately 5,000-6,000 words—of successful and innovative methodologies, practices and projects in which new and creative academic object-based research has been employed to enhance public-facing outcomes are sought for this publication.

This book aims to discuss the controversies and extend the current debate regarding curatorial approaches. Thus, case studies should discuss new ways of thinking about the role of content specialists or expertise and academic research in museums, and highlight new and creative uses of academic research in collections-based projects. Case studies might be examples of innovative and imaginative undertakings, methodologies and practices, those highlighting the value of transferring and translating academic research into public-facing projects and outcomes in the museums and heritage sector. The case studies will come together to show why this is so important, how to approach such activities, and the benefits of pursuing such projects.

The case studies should help to show how new, or a wider range of, audiences may then be engaged in the work of the museum through the curatorial, learning, engagement and community projects that draw on this fresh research. If possible, the benefits of primary research and content-focussed scholarship to successful measurable outcomes (increased visitor numbers, greater visitor engagement, raised income through commercial activities, sponsorship or grant awards, changes in diversity of audiences) should be highlighted in the case studies.

Case studies that contribute to the current debate surrounding curatorial practice, museum management and public engagement will be positively received.

The necessity of strong partnerships and interdisciplinary working might be highlighted: successful case studies in which academic staff have worked alongside museum staff to achieve innovative outcomes are sought. In doing so it is hoped this publication will assist in showing how scholarly research can be made accessible to the general public in an effective way, and help museum professionals, academics and students to see how this might be done well. Potential ways that external partnerships and internal expertise within museum and heritage organisations might be developed and maintained could be discussed in the case studies.

We are seeking case studies from any country, from a variety of types of museum (national, trust/charity, independent, local authority, university), and it is hoped they will feature a range of collection objects, subject matters, spaces, locations and budgets. Examples from museums outside of the UK and those that have an international dimension or show engagement with source communities from around the world are actively sought.

Your case study must fall into one of the following five categories:
o University museums and academic partnerships with museums.
o Public–privatepartnerships.
o Untold stories (e.g. gender and sexuality / under-represented, disenfranchised and marginalised groups / post-colonial interpretation).
o Retold stores and contemporary issues (e.g. community stories, lost and forgotten stories, audience interest reinvigorated).
o Difficult spaces and projects undertaken on small and restricted budgets (e.g. at local authority museums, independent museums).

The case study chapters will be presented thematically, examining specific research themes as outlined above. The case studies will combine to show the variety of primary, object-focused and academic research that is being undertaken in museums in projects that have visitor-focused outcomes.

Required
• Summary of your proposed contribution (no more than one side of A4).
• A list of any suggested illustrations, tables etc.
• Author CV (and list of previous published material if applicable).

MuseumResearchContributions@gmail.com

Deadline
Midday on Monday, 30th November 2020.

More information is available here.
.

Two Freemasons, modelled by Johann Joachim Kändler, Meissen, ca. 1744; hard-paste porcelain, enamels, and gold; 23 × 24 × 15 cm
(New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Irwin Untermeyer, 1964. 64.101.112)

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

From the Call for Papers:

Reframing Eighteenth-Century European Ceramics
The French Porcelain Society Journal 9 (2022)

Proposals due by 1 February 2021; completed articles due by 1 September 2021

The French Porcelain Society Journal is the leading academic, peer-reviewed English-language publication on European ceramics and their histories, illustrated in full colour. Over recent years we have broadened our mandate to encompass all European ceramics from 1450 to 1950. Our next issue, volume IX, to be published in 2022, will concentrate on the eighteenth-century, which saw the discovery of ‘white gold’ (porcelain manufactured in Europe), embraced a widespread interest in the Age of Enlightenment, coupled with rising political upheavals and a consumer revolution for the luxury goods market. Yet what role did ceramics play within this? Can we rethink the traditional roles of the patron, the consumer, and the collector? What impact did the social construction of gender, race, and class have on ceramic production, design, markets, and use? Beyond their technological developments, how did ceramics reflect and respond to the significant artistic, cultural, social, economic, spiritual, and political matters of their time? This forthcoming issue of FPS Journal will challenge us to rethink accepted definitions by presenting works that demonstrate the tremendous variety of subjects and purposes of European ceramics. We are seeking articles that reframe our traditional perceptions, paying attention to materials and environments that re-evaluate conventional approaches to ceramic history, and welcome proposals that introduce historically under-represented objects or subjects. Articles are not restricted to French porcelain but may also include Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, English, Scandinavian, German, and Austrian porcelain and earthenware.

Topics for consideration may include but are not limited to the following:
• Displaying ceramics in eighteenth-century and later interiors, exhibiting practices and architectural spaces
• Ceramics in eighteenth-century literature
• Socio-economic factors influencing eighteenth-century ceramic design or production
• Intersections between ceramics and the history of dining and food culture
• Recycling and repurposing eighteenth-century ceramics
• Collaboration and competition between factories
• Ceramics, politics and nationalism
• Patronage
• Ceramics, science and enlightenment
• Originality and invention in manufacture and design
• Eighteenth-century ceramics and visual culture
• Ceramic encounters between cultures through colonization, migration, trade, and war
• Eighteenth-century ceramics and the museum, acquisition, and display
• Ceramics and the art market
• Collecting ceramics in the eighteenth century
• Collecting eighteenth-century ceramics after 1800

Submissions in the first instance should be a summary of no more than 500 words, with a brief description of the argument, a historiography and a note of the research tools and sources used. Articles must be original; we do not accept modified versions of articles published elsewhere electronically or in print. Please include a brief biography. The journal accepts articles in French as well as in English. The volume will comprise about 15 articles that will be peer reviewed by the editorial board and the FPS council of academic and museum specialists which includes: Dame Rosalind Savill, DBE, FBA, FSA (Curator Emeritus, The Wallace Collection, London); Oliver Fairclough, FSA; John Whitehead, FSA; Errol Manners, FSA; Patricia Ferguson; Dr. Diana Davis; and Dr. Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth (Visiting Research Fellow University of Leeds and Curator, Victoria & Albert Museum). Articles should be between 4,000 and 8,000 words in length excluding endnotes. Up to 15 high-resolution images per article will be accepted.

Please send abstracts as an e-mail attachment to Patricia Ferguson, patricia.f.ferguson@gmail.com; Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth c.mccaffrey-howarth@leeds.ac.uk; and Diana Davis diana_davis@hotmail.co.uk by 1 February 2021. If your abstract is accepted, articles and images will be due by 1 September 2021. Publication is provisional on satisfactory peer review. For further details, please see the FPS website.

From ArtHist.net:

On Portraiture: Theory, Practice, and Fiction — From Francisco de Holanda to Susan Sontag
University of Lisbon, 26–28 April 2021

Proposals due by 30 November 2020

Centro de investigação e de estudos em belas-artes (CIEBA) – Artistic Studies Research Centre, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon

This colloquium intends to discuss the theory and practice of artistic, historical, anthropological, social, and political experience on the topic of portraiture, as well as the fictional dimension contained within it. Located at the intersection of several disciplinary fields, the discussion(s) and papers will address the portrait as a concept, theme, process, object (monument and document), and device, in its multiple developments and in its successive conceptual, technological, and contextual updates. More than defining a temporal framework, the subtitle—From Francisco de Holanda to Susan Sontag —underscores the dynamic porosity on the researched topic in the fields of art and literature, as well as, in its mutual reversibility.

Francisco de Holanda, humanist and 16th-century Portuguese artist, is the author of Do Tirar pelo Natural [On Portraiture], the first treatise dedicated to portraiture in early modern Europe, which he concluded in 1549, in the decade following his return from a trip to Italy undertaken in 1538 to 1540, as member of the embassy of Ambassador D. Pedro de Mascarenhas. One objective for Holanda was to meet Michelangelo Buonarroti, in addition to observing and drawing fortresses and the most outstanding works of art across Italy. Upon his return, Holanda undertook writing Da Pintura Antiga [On Ancient Painting], concluded on October 13 (St. Lucas Day) 1548, as it is written at the end of Book II, followed by his second treatise, Do Tirar polo Natural [On Portraiture]. These two works were prepared for publication and were even translated into Spanish in 1563, by his friend, the Portuguese painter Manuel Denis. These treatises, written almost simultaneously, would only see publication, in Portuguese and Spanish, only in the 19th century. At the end of the Do Tirar polo Natural, Holanda states that the text was completed on January 3rd, 1549, only a few months after the completion of the two Books of Da Pintura Antiga. In fulfilment of John B. Bury’s ground-breaking research, a bilingual edition of this portrait treatise, published by Paul Holberton Publishing in London, will be presented during this Congress.

Indeed, the two great pillars of Francisco de Holanda’s theory of art—the imitation of himself, nature, and antiquity on one hand, and idea, on the other—have, precisely, as a point of departure, the artist’s creative process which Holanda discusses in his first two treatises. The importance of Do Tirar polo Natural for the theory of art, which Holanda explains and abundantly illustrates in his two books in On Ancient Painting, as well as in his drawings and illuminated albums, especially in As Antigualhas [On the Antique], makes Holanda’s need to write a portrait treatise fully justified. As an autonomous work, Do Tirar polo Natural complements Da Pintura Antiga. This treatise’s structure, in the form of dialogues, follows the model used in Book II of Diálogos em Roma [Dialogues in Rome], but here, instead of many interlocutors, is reduced to conversations between two protagonists, Brás Pereira and Feramando, the disciple and master, as well as the alter ego of Holanda. The themes and issues defined in Do Tirar polo Natural extend, deepen, and, above all, specify in detail questions regarding portraiture, themes related to the representation of the human figure which Holanda took up in Chapters 38 to 41 in Book I of Da Pintura Antiga. These chapters lack the decisive contributions, which throughout the eleven, small dialogues of Do Tirar polo Natural, Holanda describes as precepts for a painter to ‘portray’ or ‘paint from life’ the ‘persona’ of a sitter. In Do Tirar, Holanda distinguishes the portrait as distinctive from other representations of the human figure.

In The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag begins with documentation related to three historical figures from the 18th century, expanding them into a fictional extension where they appear as characters or doubles; emerging as figures stabilized in the credibility of portraits, thus questioning their presence throughout the history of art and the history of images. These figures are the diplomat, collector, and volcanologist William Hamilton; his wife Emma Hamilton, lover of Admiral Nelson and the muse of the painter George Romney; and Admiral Nelson. The portraits directly refer to those of William Hamilton, made by Joshua Reynolds, and those of Emma Hamilton, made by George Romney and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. The questions asked regard the genesis of the sensitive body, in the example of the statue of Condillac, and the metamorphosis of the statue in the myth of Pygmalion; the metamorphosis of beings in the morphological accidents of the earth and in natural objects that retain their name and history; the ideal portrait; the impossibility of describing the beauty of a face or a body, delegated to the rhetorical artifice of metaphor; the portrait as a theme and as a model; the genre of statues: action and stillness, narcissism and modesty; effigies: symbolic death; cameos: miniaturization of the portrait, living picture: representation staged inside a box or in a place surrounded by the frames of the paintings; the body in pose: support and object of the representation of a representation; the body as the embodiment of the work; the ephemerality of the body and the perpetuity of the portrait; the figure, the portrait and the recognition that erases or illuminates the name. And the ruin of it all, because ruin is the inevitable destiny of human bodies and their representations, some and others relegated to the future of our time.

In conjunction with these topics the main thematic lines of the colloquium are defined as:
• The portrait as a place and the place of the portrait in the visual culture of all periods
• Time and trans-temporality in and of the portrait
• The portrait as theory and the theories of the portrait
• The portrait as fiction

In the transversality of these lines, the following sub-themes are proposed:
The body and the portrait; Portrait: presence and representation; Portrait, self-portrait and self-representation; The expanded portrait: media, intermediary and mediation; Portrait: iconism, symbolism and similarity; Metonymic portrait; Portrait galleries; The portrait as a connotative place; The double and the portrait; The portrait and the mask; Portrait and genre: the collector and the collection; Portrait and gender: the artist and the model; Portrait: celebration and power; Portrait: celebration of anonymity; Portrait: show and monstrosity; The statistical portrait; Avatar: copy without original; The Impossible Portrait; The composite portrait; Portrait: the desecration of the body.

Keynote speakers will be selected according to the sessions formed from the submitted proposals and the thematic lines of this congress. The official languages are Portuguese, English, French, Italian, and Spanish.

All those interested in participating must send an abstract of up to 400 words, including title, name, affiliation, and text, along with a brief curriculum summary of 50 words maximum by 30 November 2020. Proposals should be submitted in doc. file from Office Word, according to the template available HERE and sent to onportraiture.congress@belasartes.ulisboa.pt. The email’s subject and the attached file should be designated as follows: NAME_SURNAME_TITLE OF PAPER. Results will be released by 31 December 2020.

Authors from selected papers are invited to participate in an optional pitch session (5 min/5 slides), which will take place on 15 January 2021 between 14.00 and 19.00 (in Lisbon).