Enfilade

Sessions of potential interest for folks working on the eighteenth century (see especially the panel chaired by Emma Barker and Carla Benzan); full offersings are available here:

Association for Art Historians Annual Conference
Goldsmiths, University of London, 6–8 April 2022

Proposals due by 1 November 2021

The Association for Art History’s 2022 Annual Conference will take place in London at the world renowned art college, Goldsmiths. Over the three days of the conference, there will be up to 36 live parallel sessions with 4, 6, or 8 papers delivered in each session. All sessions are open to 25-minute paper proposals. Please email your proposal directly to the convenor, including in your proposal a clear paper title, a short abstract (max 250 words), your name, and email. The deadline for paper proposals is 1 November 2021.

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The Artist’s Friend
Jamin An (University of Arkansas, Fayetteville) and Anne Rana (Independent Art Historian), theartistsfriend2022@gmail.com

Being identified as a great friend of artists, or ‘artist’s friend’, often elevates ancillary art historical figures, past and present. For some collectors, critics, curators, dealers—consider broadly drawn examples like Giorgio Vasari, Alain Locke, Gertrude Stein, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Okwui Enwezor or Geeta Kapur—friendship has represented a deep connection with a particular artist or signaled bonds of loyalty and support with many. Notwithstanding its assumed virtue and frequent invocation, the idea of the ‘artist’s friend’ has escaped meaningful definition.

This panel seeks to undertake a critical analysis of the ‘artist’s friend’, examining case studies that leverage friendship as a conceptual model of relation between artists and non-artists. Our inquiry aims to engage the broad theoretical terrain of friendship: its nature and value, the reciprocal self-knowledge and self-formation it cultivates, and the moral quandaries it raises. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions across geography and chronology, and encourage papers that help us consider such questions as:
• What are defining features of friendship with the artist? How is ‘friend’ distinct from positions such as muse, lover, donor, or patron?
• A friend is said to be ‘another self.’ How might we understand artistic identity or the status of the artist from the standpoint of figures who are considered the ‘artist’s friend’?
• When partiality is an essential feature of friendship, how does friendship enrich or complicate scholarship, curating, or criticism, conventionally predicated on distance and impartiality?
• How do friendship’s ethical and moral commitments intersect with the cultural field’s conditions of production, circulation, and legitimation?

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Critical Perspectives on Disability in Art and Visual Culture
Lynn M. Somers (Independent Scholar), lmsomers@mac.com, @lynn_somers

Critical disability studies over the last thirty years have examined systems of power that shape codes of representation within images, objects, collections, and by extension, prevailing historiographies that define the limits of acceptability among human bodies, or what Tobin Siebers calls the ideology of ability. Advancing a theory of complex embodiment, he writes that disability, as a critical social concept, “enlarges our vision of human variation and difference, and puts forward perspectives that test presuppositions dear to the history of aesthetics” (2010: 3). The materiality of art is invested in affective embodiment, and from the classical period onward, historical narratives are rife with bodies deemed beautiful, perfect, and proportionate to their built environments. Although in the 19th and 20th centuries bodily discourses began shifting toward fragmentation, prostheses, and pain, those representations were labeled degenerate by oppressive political institutions. Interdisciplinary and intersectional disability studies—for example, “crip time” (McRuer, 2018) and “misfitting” (Garland-Thomson, 2011)—posit disability as a cultural minority identity (in opposition to medical models centered on individual pathology). These analytics expand the ways artists and scholars approach embodiment as an elastic human continuum. Two volumes on art history and disability (Routledge, 2016, 2021) offer important global correctives to ideologies of agency that have devalued disparate, contingent, and nonconforming embodied subjectivities. This session welcomes transdisciplinary studies of art in all media that (re)figure disability and theoretical approaches that look to enact radical change, reparation, or reforms to sociopolitical and aesthetic constructions of disability at both historical and contemporary moments.

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Towards an Affective History of Art: Vision, Sensation, Emotion
Emma Barker (Open University), emma.barker@open.ac.uk; and Carla Benzan (Open University), carla.benzan@open.ac.uk

Art-historical considerations of instinctive, non-rational forms of human experience tend in two directions. On the one hand, there are contributions that examine the representation of emotion in works of art, as exemplified by the essay collection, Representing Emotions (ed. Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills, 2005). Following a broadly historicist agenda, such contributions are predicated on the assumption that emotions can only be accessed in mediated form, through representational codes. On the other hand, since the publication of David Freedberg’s The Power of Images (1989), scholars have become increasingly concerned with the intense, even visceral, experiences that works of art can elicit from the beholder. Closely associated with the so-called ‘affective turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, this type of approach asserts the primacy of the material and experiential over cultural frameworks. Attempts to bridge the gap between representation and experience by scholars working in the sub-discipline known as the history of the emotions have as yet made only limited use of visual sources (see, for example, the special issue of Cultural History, 7:2, 2018).

This session seeks to build on these various developments in order to realise the as yet unfulfilled promise of an affective history of art. It aims to bridge the gap identified above by investigating the interaction between works of art and beholders with reference not only to visual strategies and sensory experiences but also to discursive articulations and cultural formations. We especially welcome contributions that analyse such interactions with close reference to historically-specific vocabularies of affective experience in the broad period from around 1400 to 1900, such as the humours, passions, sentiments or emotions. Contributions may seek to examine claims for the compelling power of canonical works or, alternatively, to account for the emotional impact of works that no longer move the beholder as they once did. The central aim is to illuminate the changing role that art and visual culture have played in the understanding of affective experience over time.

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Global Anatomies
Keren Hammerschlag (Australian National University), keren.hammerschlag@anu.edu.au; and Natasha Ruiz-Gómez (University of Essex), natashar@essex.ac.uk

Spanning from Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica in the sixteenth century through to Henry Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body in the nineteenth, European anatomical illustration has a venerated history that has been documented, studied and made the subject of major exhibitions. A few names dominate the historical record—Leonardo da Vinci, William Hunter, George Stubbs, Frank Netter—all men, all white. In the case of some of the most lavishly illustrated anatomical atlases, only the names of the doctors who directed the production are remembered; the men and women who produced the images are relegated to the footnotes, while the names of those pictured are entirely lost to history. The aim of this panel is to re-evaluate and decentre Western anatomical image-making traditions by bringing them into dialogue with different national, cultural and religious understandings of the inside of the human body. These may include Asian, Latin American and Islamic medical and scientific image-making traditions, among others. By developing accounts of human anatomy and its depiction that are global in outlook and scope, we hope to be able to address the following questions: what does anatomical imagery, broadly conceived, reveal about the people who produced it and about how they thought of particular bodies and body types? Is anatomy universal, local or individual? Is the anatomical body stable or shifting? Areas of inquiry may include but are not limited to anatomy and typology; mobility; geography; power; ideology; colonialism; slavery; race; gender; and (the body’s) borders.

From ArtHist.net:

Milan in a European Context: Tradition, Persistence, and Innovation in Artistic Craftsmanship and in Building and Architectural Production between the Napoleonic Era and the Restoration
Accademia di Architettura, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Mendrisio, 24–25 February 2022

Proposals due by 31 October 2021

International study seminar organised by Romain Iliou (AHTTEP, ENSA Paris-La Villette), Serena Quagliaroli (Università della Svizzera italiana, Accademia di Architettura, Archivio del Moderno) and Stefania Ventra (Università della Svizzera italiana, Accademia di Architettura, Archivio del Moderno). Promoted by the Università della Svizzera italiana, Accademia di Architettura, Archivio del Moderno and HICSA, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

With Milan proclaimed first the capital of the Cisalpine Republic in 1797 (from 1802, Italian Republic) and then in 1805 the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, the city was challenged to reconsider and rebuild its image and its urban spaces in order to adapt them to its new role. Part of a network of capitals responding to a single central power, both political and cultural, Milan experienced a period that featured significant incentives for public and private architectural building works and for the transformation of urban spaces. These conditions make the Lombard capital a privileged context in which to investigate the multiple forms of organization of artisanal and artistic work, as well as the circulation of people and materials. The seminar aims to reflect on the dialectic between the new status quo and the centuries-old stratified traditions inherent to the Milanese territory, also taking into consideration the Restoration period, when, in the new political-administrative structure of the Lombard-Veneto Kingdom, Milan, while remaining the capital, found itself in a new context that established a variety of artistic geographies.

The workshop aims to provide a meeting point for ongoing research that analyses the organization and definition of professions, materials, tools and the techniques of artistic craftsmanship, and of building and architectural production and design. It will reflect both on the transformations and the phenomena of continuity and persistence that characterize the city of Milan between the Napoleonic era and the Restoration, in an artistic, architectural, social, and economic context, with regard to the political administrative management of urban spaces and links with the surrounding territory.

Events in Milan can be better understood if placed in dialectical comparison with what occurred in other cities in both Italy and Europe: contributions will be welcomed, therefore, which, in a comparative perspective, present case studies aimed at exploring other urban realities. Particular attention might be paid to the relationship between Milan and the Canton of Ticino and to the changes that this centuries-old bond underwent over the period of time under consideration.

Proposals for contributions must concern one or more of the following topics, with particular attention to the connections with events relating to government policies, to administration and to the organization of the artistic and cultural system:

Artistic craftsmanship, building and architectural production, and society: Actors and materials
• What are the particularities of the considered period in the context of the commissioning, design and organization of the building works that redefined the space of the city?
• What was the impact on the shape of the city of an artisanal presence, with its workshops, warehouses, transport networks, and economic activities?
• Alongside architects and engineers, which other professional figures emerge from archival documents and sources? What was their status, their education and training, what were their forms of aggregation and organization? What was the impact of the presence of workers from Ticino?
• What materials were used, what were their trade routes and the supply chains for their production processes? What were the mechanisms of exchange and circulation?

Tradition, continuity, and innovation
• New materials, new techniques, and new construction ambitions, linked to market and bureaucratic requirements, joined the established crafts, practices and knowledge. This created a new form of professionalism which needed not only know-how but also the ability to organize, to establish relationships and to mediate between different skills and different social contexts.
• How did education and training change and how did these subordinate practices establish a relationship with academic artistic and architectural teaching, its programs based on consolidated tradition? What skills and techniques were available as part of artisanal training? How, from a historiographical point of view, can we trace the changes and innovations in production techniques, which are often not codified? And how did the survival of traditional practices and figures fit in with the new context? How and to what extent did political authority intervene in the regulation and systemisation of professions and the transmission of knowledge? Was innovation actively encouraged or, on the contrary, were disincentives employed?

Territory, materials, and techniques
• In addition to insights into the processes of the acquisition of technical knowledge, at the centre of the investigation lie tools and materials: were there tools designed to standardize and serialize work? Can divisions be found in the broad sphere of materials between those intended for the public and those intended for the private sector, or can their interactions be investigated? What is the contribution made to artisanal and building production by surrogate materials and materials designed for ephemeral projects?
• Other issues contributors are invited to explore include the importation, exportation, and adaptation of models, techniques and solutions, as well as the relationship between the city and the territory: what impact did the availability or lack of materials and infrastructures have on what was built?

It is planned that the workshop will be held in a blended format with a mix of online and on-site presentations on 24–25 February 2022 at Accademia di Architettura, Mendrisio (CH). Depending on the evolution of the international health situation, the organisers will endeavour to guarantee the best solution in compliance with national recommendations. Proposals (in Italian, French, or English) should be sent to workshop.artigianato2022@gmail.com in the form of abstracts (300–500 words) and be accompanied by a short biographical presentation (150–200 words) by 31 October 2021. The selection will be communicated by 30 November 2021.