Enfilade

From the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz:

The Substance of Sacred Place: An Interdisciplinary Workshop on Locative Materiality
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, Florence, 20-21 June 2013

Proposals due by 30 November 2012

Organised by Laura Veneskey and Annette Hoffmann

The study of holy places has long been a central concern of not only the humanities, but also the social sciences. Much of this body of scholarship has focused on pilgrimage and sacred centers, either as theoretical constructions or as concrete places, such as Jerusalem, Mecca or Benares. These subjects have been explored, on the one hand, through the study of ritual and liturgy, and on the other, through various modes of representation, be they architectural, cartographic, iconic, or textual. Complementary to these lines of inquiry, we invite papers that explore the material and tactile dimensions of locative sacrality across religious traditions. How is a sense of place communicable through physical means? What can a consideration of matter tell us about the often fraught relationship between the tangible world and its representation?

We seek analyses of all materials evocative of a particular sacred milieu, not only earth, dust, stone, but also wood, metal, pigments, oil, or water. Presentations exploring either the substances and places themselves or textual and iconic depictions thereof are equally welcome. We invite papers from all disciplines on any locale conceived of as sacred, whether scriptural, pilgrim, monastic, ascetic, or cultic, between antiquity and the early modern period. The workshop is aimed at young researchers, and is intended to bring together graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and those in the early stages of their teaching or professional careers. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

– Sacred landscapes (deserts, mountains, caves, etc.)
– The material dimensions of topographic representation (iconic or textual)
– Earthen, geographic, and locative relics
– Transportable versus site-specific sanctity
– The physicality of built environments and places of worship

Interested applicants should send a current c.v. and an abstract of no more than 250 words (for presentations of twenty minutes) to hoffmann@khi.fi.it and lv2308@columbia.edu). Proposals must be received by date 30th November 2012.

Graduate Student Conference: Mapping Discursive Geographies
University of Arizona, Tucson, 1 February 2013

Proposals due by 20 November 2012

The Art History Graduate Student Association at the University of Arizona is pleased to announce its twenty-third annual symposium, Mapping Discursive Geographies, which will take place February 1, 2013 at the University of Arizona Student Union, Santa Rita Room. The keynote speaker for this year’s symposium is Dr. Stella Nair from the University of California, Los Angeles.

The goal of this symposium is to explore the relationship between geography and art, art history, and curatorial practices, within the context of recent scholarship on natural and artificial landscapes, landscape aesthetics, earth works, land preservation and degradation, hybridities of art and science, disputed and fraught boundaries, the distribution of resources, and immigration. This symposium hopes to provide a forum to address how geography is a cultural process which can be instrumental in the formation of identity.

Some ideas to consider are: how do national and social identities become inscribed in the terrain? How do visual representations of terrestrial and corporeal spatiality construct meaning? How have shifts in geographies changed the production, exhibition, and/or consumption of artistic, curatorial practices and art historical discourse? Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

1. Site specificity, locality, and intervention
2. Construction of mythology and symbolism in the landscape
3. National/corporeal identities
4. Physical or intangible borders between nations/individuals and issues of ownership and sovereignty
5. Commercialization, consumerism, and tourism
6. Historic and contemporary cartographic or locational practices

Graduate students in art history and relating disciplines are invited  to submit a 300-word abstract and curriculum vita to AHGSA.org@gmail.com by November 20, 2012. Applicants will receive notification via email of the committee’s decisions by December 12, 2012. To learn more about the Art History Graduate Student Association at the University of Arizona, please visit  www.cfa.arizona.edu/ahgsa/.

From The Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware:

Embodied Objects: Material Culture Studies in Three Dimensions
Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, 20 April 2013

Proposals due by 30 November 2012

The Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware invites submissions for papers to be given at the Eleventh Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars.

The objects we create, manipulate, and consume mediate our experience with the world. We seek a broad range of papers that highlight the intersection between objects and humans, things and people. We’re interested in how three-dimensional objects act as extensions of ourselves, provide repositories for memory, help stabilize identity, interrupt our sense of scale and space, give permanence to relationships, and mirror human forms. Papers may also address how objects mediate human sensory experience and create aesthetic meaning. We encourage papers that reflect upon and promote an interdisciplinary discussion on the state of material culture studies today.

Disciplines represented at past symposia include American studies, anthropology, archaeology, consumer studies, English, gender studies, history, museum studies, and the histories of art, architecture, design, and technology. We welcome proposals from graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and those just beginning their teaching or professional careers.

Format

The symposium will consist of nine presentations divided into three panels. Each presentation is strictly limited to eighteen minutes, and each panel is followed by comments from established scholars in the field. There will be two morning sessions and one afternoon session, with breaks for discussion following each session and during lunch. Participants will also have the opportunity to tour Winterthur’s unparalleled collection of early American decorative arts and to engage in a roundtable discussion on Friday, April 19. Travel grants of up to $300 will be available for presenters.

Submissions

The proposal should be no more than 300 words and should clearly indicate the focus of your object-based research, the critical approach you take toward that research, and the significance of your research beyond the academy. While the audience for the symposium consists mainly of university and college faculty and graduate students, we encourage broader participation. In evaluating proposals, we will give preference to those papers that keep a more diverse audience in mind.

Send your proposal, with a current c.v. of no more than two pages, to emerging.scholars@gmail.com. Proposals must be received by 5 p.m. on November 30, 2012. Speakers will be notified of the vetting committee’s decision in January 2013. Confirmed speakers will be asked to provide symposium organizers with digital images for use in publicity and are required to submit a final draft of their papers by March 11, 2013.

Conference Co-Chairs: Liz Jones and  Amy Torbert

From LUCAS:

Death: The Cultural Meaning of the End of Life (LUCAS Graduate Conference)
Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, 24–25 January 2013

Proposals due by 15 November 2012

Keynote Speakers: Joanna Woodall (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Rosi Braidotti (University of Utrecht)

Death is a defining factor in the explorations of our subjectivity, art, history, politics, and many other aspects of our social interactions and perceptions of the world. In the modern age, conceptions of death have continued to shift and evolve, yet our perceptions are still fueled by an instinctive fear of the end of life.

In recent decades, we have rebelled against the threat of death by inventing new technologies and medicines that have drastically increased our life expectancy—diseases and disabilities are gradually disappearing. Some believe that one day we will completely conquer the aging process, and ultimately death. Life can now be seen as a new form of commodity, a material object that we can trade, sell, or buy.

Despite our attempts to shut-out death or overcome its inevitability, the end of life has remained a visible and unavoidable aspect of our society. From antiquity to the present day, perceptions of death have been represented through various different mediums: visual culture, art, literature, music, historical writing, cinema, religious symbols, national anniversaries, and public expressions of mourning.

This conference aims to explore how death has been represented and conceptualized, from classical antiquity to the modern age, and the extent to which our perceptions and understandings of death have changed (or remained the same) over time. The wide scope of this theme reflects the historical range of LUCAS’s (previously called LUICD) three research programs (Classics and Classical Civilization, Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Modern and Contemporary Studies), as well as the intercontinental and interdisciplinary focus of many of the institute’s research projects. (more…)

From The Wallace Collection:

The Louvre before the Louvre: Artisans, Artists, Academies
The Wallace Collection, London, 5 July 2013

Proposals due by 15 January 2013

Pedestal clock, ca. 1712- 20. Attributed to André-Charles Boulle. Jacques-Augustin Thury, movement maker (Wallace Collection)

Now one of the world’s best-known museums, the Louvre was once a vast artistic and cultural centre of a different kind. The Louvre before the Louvre will delve into the fascinating but little known period of the Louvre’s history from 1643 to 1793, exploring the role this space played in the histories of art production and artistic sociability in early modern Paris.

Even before Louis XIV moved the Court from the Louvre to Versailles in 1682, the Louvre had already become the centre of artistic, creative, and intellectual energy in Paris. Artists and artisans of all trades – from watch-makers to history painters – were given lodgings and studio space in the same wings and corridors that accommodated cultural organs like the Menus Plaisirs du Roi (responsible for state festivities and spectacles), the royal printing press, and the royal academies (Painting and Sculpture, Architecture, Inscriptions, Science, and the Académie Française). As the palace expanded over the next two centuries, the Louvre complex (the building and surrounding streets) came to be dominated by this growing community of artists, artisans, men of letters, and their aristocratic patrons, inhabiting this space and living out their daily lives together.

The Louvre before the Louvre will reconstruct and re-evaluate this space of artistic sociability. As dust billowed and paint dripped in artists’ studios, theoretical debates were thrashed out in the academies, and groundbreaking technologies were designed in artisans’ workshops, the Louvre became a fertile ground for collaboration, the results of which are evident in many objects (e.g. by Boulle, Oppenordt, Oeben, Boucher, Oudry, Girardon, Coysevox, to name a few) now in the Wallace Collection where this conference will take place.

Seeking a more intimate understanding of the artistic and intellectual ‘neighbourhood’ of the Louvre and its effect on art and design in the period, we invite papers that explore the Louvre’s rich history, art, material objects, spaces, and social interactions during the 17th and 18th centuries. Suggested topics may include but are not limited to:

• Artistic and intellectual circles — The workings of the Royal Academies and their academicians

• Living in the Louvre — Artists’ logements/studios; social order and daily life; professional/social interactions; individual and collaborative practice

• Form and function of Louvre spaces — Key sites: Galerie d’Apollon, Salon Carré, Grande Galerie, theatres, chapels, etc.

• Patronage networks — Patrons and collectors in the Louvre

• Decoration and display — Furnishing and decoration by Louvre inhabitants; displays of collections; exhibitions

• Louvre experiences — Written and visual descriptions of life in the Louvre

• Finding boundaries — Where did the artistic communities of the Louvre begin and end? How did one ‘belong’ to the Louvre community? What did it mean to do so?

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to amelia.f.jackson@gmail.com (Queen Mary University of London) and hannah.williams@hoa.ox.ac.uk (University of Oxford) by 15 January 2012.

From the conference website:

Imagined Worlds: Worldmaking in Arts and Literature
University of Helsinki, Finland, 21-23 August 2013

Proposals due by 30 January 2013

The conference Imagined Worlds will focus on the imagined worlds created by artistic and literary works. To think of such works in terms of ‘worlds’ (or the mental representations they create in the minds of their audience) means concentrating on the representational dimensions of art and literature. The idea of worldmaking opens new perspectives in the study of art forms and their genres. It was formulated in philosophical terms by Nelson Goodman in Ways of Worldmaking (1978). His approach encompassed a broad spectrum of worldmaking across all art forms, sciences and cultural discourses and emphasized the idea that we create worlds on the basis of already existing ones. Worlds are built from the world(s) of our experience and cultural models or from already existing imagined worlds through various types of transformations.

Recent studies in cognitive narratology where questions related to how readers build up story worlds have opened a new field of study which can also function as a starting point for broader visions of the cultural imagining of worlds: ‘mapping words onto worlds’ to make sense of textual worlds can be more broadly understood as mapping signs onto worlds. Like texts, art and images do not merely mirror the world but also investigate ways of worldmaking.

Worldmaking also relates to the ideas of the works of art and literature we embrace. Asking the question ‘When is art?’ permits one to see different anachronisms and the messy temporalities of images. How an object or event functions as a work of art can explain how it may contribute to a vision and to the making of a world. (more…)

Conference call for papers:

Third Annual Art History Festival — The Ephemeral
Fontainebleau, 31 May — 2 June 2013

Proposals due by 31 December 2012

Château de Fontainebleau (Wikimedia Commons)

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he Ministry of Culture and Communications, the National Institute of Art History and the Chateau of Fontainebleau, with the support of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research are jointly organising the third Art History Festival. Originally conceived as a meeting point and knowledge crossroads, these three days will include conferences, debates, concerts, exhibitions, film shows, lectures and meetings in the chateau and at several sites in the town of Fontainebleau. The Festival explores a different theme every year, in 2013 it will be The Ephemeral and there will be three annual meetings: The Art History Forum, a rendezvous for all the latest news in the world of the arts; the Book Salon and art reviews; and Art & Camera, a wide-ranging look at cinema and art and future prospects.

The Festival also includes training offerings for art history teachers in schools in the form of Spring University sessions and training workshops provided and supported by the Ministry of Education.All these events are viewed from the perspective of a guest country: in 2013 this guest country will be the United Kingdom. Work involving British research or concentrating wholly or partly on the United Kingdom will be particularly welcome. This Call for Papers is intended for preferably French-speaking, experienced and novice French and foreign researchers. Contributions by young researchers, conservation specialists or restorers will be given especially careful consideration.

The Ephemeral

Art first manifested itself in the earliest standing stones or paintings as an attempt to either amplify the ephemeral (festive celebrations, temporary body ornamentation, etc.) or to defy it (by seeking to capture the fleeting nature of movement as in parietal art; or as an attempt to leave a durable, even eternal mark by building monumental structures for instance).The history of art therefore swings between permanence and transience, between two opposite extremes: the monumental and performance, the stillness of an image and art that focuses on moving images, a fixed gaze and a gaze that lingers as time passes (ephemeral sequence). (more…)

Restoration Knowledge: Reception Models for Museology and Art History
Sapienza — University of Rome, April 2013

Proposals due by 30 October 2012

It seems to be essential, at this moment, to confirm that which not long ago may have been considered paradoxical,  that is to say the need to interpret the history of restoration, of conservation, of safeguard, as a process closely related to art history, art criticism and the history of museum institutions. Furthermore, in order to cope with various different shifts, one feels the necessity to go back to the beginning and analyse the subject from different angles, alternating philological analysis with different historiographical sources and traditions in order to be able to interpret  art works in the context of their true historical stratification so that theoretical, practical and scientific considerations can also gain meaning in the light of the operative, cultural and institutional positions referred to.

The conference, foreseen for April 2013, has the purpose of presenting research revealing the dynamic, reciprocally influential relationship between historic-artistic forms of thought, museum history and safeguard of the patrimony and history of restoration, being a pause for reflection after about fifteen years of studies carried out in the context of Projects of Important National Interest (PRIN), nationally coordinated by the Sapienza University of Rome, in collaboration with the Historical Archive and Data Bank of Italian Restorers (Giovanni Secco Suardo Association) for the project named Culture of restoration and restorers: reception models for museology and ancient and modern art history.

Contributions on the following subjects are required:

1. Works and References Considerations focusing on conservation matters of single works or decorative complexes proving to be particularly significant as examples of how restoration choices are intimately connected to changes of reception, critical acclaim and increased knowledge of that work. Furthermore it could be useful to consider art criticism history texts as reference for restoration history and visa versa.

2. Roles and Biographies Contributions dedicated to connoisseurs, art historians, scholars, scientific experts, restorers who have had to deal with the problem of restoration from a theoretical and practical point of view, in relation, or not, to a specific institutional situation.

3. Museums Contributions in order to understand if some museums have had a precise role in the guidelines of the restoration and conservation  policy and, this being the case, how much these guidelines have met with the planning and installation criteria applied.

Those interested are invited to send, by the 30th October 2012, a brief abstract of the contribution they wish to propose (maximum 2.000 characters, spaces included), sending it to convegnorestauro2013@gmail.com. Abstracts and papers will be accepted in both English and Italian. By the 30 November 2012, after a selection carried out by the scientific committee, possible acceptance of the proposal will be communicated by e-mail.

Conference Curators
Maria Beatrice Failla (Turin University)
Susanne Adina Meyer (Macerata University)
Chiara Piva (Ca’ Foscari University Venice)

Scientific Committee: Giuseppe Basile, Olivier Bonfait, Giorgio Bonsanti, Gisella Capponi, Silvia Cecchini, Marco Ciatti, Gianluigi Colalucci, Paola D’Alconzo, Helen Glanville, Michela di Macco, Massimo Ferretti, Carlo Giantomassi, Donata Levi, Mario Micheli, Marina Righetti, Lidia Rissotto, Pilar Roig Picazo, Orietta Rossi Pinelli, Ursula Schaedler-Saub, Lanfranco Secco Suardo, Bruno Toscano, Nathalie Volle

From the conference website:

Alternative Enlightenments: An Interdisciplinary Conference in the Humanities
Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, 26-28 April 2013

Proposals due by 1 December 2012

Keynote Speakers

Wijnand Mijnhardt, Professor of History and Director of the Descartes Centre, University of Utrecht
Felicity Nussbaum, Professor of English, UCLA

From Kant’s seminal essay “What is Enlightenment?” through the manifold critical responses of the twentieth century, the ambiguity of a term designating both a paradigmatic approach to human intellect or autonomy, and a specific historical period, remains. How distinct is the concept of Enlightenment from the era of European history long taken to have discovered or invented it? This symposium proposes an examination of Enlightenments in the plural, welcoming both revisionary accounts of the Age of Enlightenment and explorations of Enlightenment in other times and places.

With an eye to translating the idea of Enlightenment, scholars have traced its many national and regional varieties. Discussions of an Ionian or an Athenian Enlightenment, of movements of Enlightenment in the medieval caliphate or the Ottoman Empire, share the contemporary intellectual landscape with debates on the continuing relevance of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the current global order. We are interested in the way the term has been borrowed and translated, creating a constellation of “Enlightenments” bound together by family resemblances. Is there still a singular project of Enlightenment (i.e. the critique of received ideas and inherited values, in particular religious ones; the promotion of rational or empirical methods; the creation of cosmopolitan and secular spaces), or has the term broken out of its historical mold to designate a more fluid set of cultural projects and practices?

Where do we stand today with regard to the Enlightenment? After all, the continuation of a politics and practice of Enlightenment may depend on the spatial and temporal translations we propose to explore. Such displacements give new life to the idea of Enlightenment, even as the term is contested, criticized and transformed.

Topics of interest include:

• Ionian / Athenian Enlightenment
• Secularism, materialism, the immanent frame
• Literatures of Worldliness in East and West: Renaissance, Tanzimat, Arab and Near Eastern Enlightenments
• Orientalism and Occidentalism
• Diplomacy, correspondence, the figure of the court philosopher
• What is Enlightenment: Kant, Foucault and beyond
• (The) Enlightenment in the Americas
• The public and the private: cross-cultural studies of an Enlightenment distinction
• Travel literature, satire, and utopian fiction
• Nineteenth century national Enlightenments, nationalism vs. internationalism
• Enlightenment and Empire
• The rhetoric of Enlightenment in geopolitics, the claims of the West
• Material culture, exchange, circulation, accumulation, dispersal
• Enlightenment and its others: mysticism, hermeticism and the arcane
• The metaphorics of Enlightenment: illumination, dawn, twilight and dusk
• Where do we stand today with regard to (the) Enlightenment? Critical theory / social and political practice

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to wcoker@bilkent.edu.tr by 1 December 2012.

From the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain:

Transitory, Transportable, and Transformable: Temporary Conditions in Architecture
London, 18 May 2013

Proposals due by 15 October 2012

Proposals are invited for papers addressing the theme of Temporary Conditions in Architecture to be presented at the 2013 Annual Symposium of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, to be held at Alan Baxter Associates, 75 Cowcross Street, London  EC1M 6EL, on Saturday 18 May 2013.

Architecture is generally regarded as being, for the most part, permanent, static and immutable. However some significant buildings are intended to be temporary, whereas others are designed to be moved from one location to another or even to be flexible enough to alter their form and appearance as the result of changing requirements. This symposium intends to explore the temporary condition in architecture and to question whether architecture needs to be either permanent, static or immutable.

Transitory: Many buildings are short-lived, but few of them are regarded as serious architecture. In 1661, triumphal arches were erected for Charles II’s coronation procession from the City of London to Westminster. Constructed largely of timber, plaster and canvas, they were architecturally elaborate yet intentionally impermanent, only to be soon swept away. Political expediency, no doubt, necessitated their quick erection, otherwise they might have been built in stone and, like Temple Bar (1670-72), still stand today, albeit not in its original location. Modern materials allow for the quick and permanent erection of buildings such as Team 4’s prize-winning Reliance Controls Electronics Factory at Swindon (1967). Yet despite the longevity of its materials, this building was intentionally short-lived and, having served its purpose, was demolished in 1991. Only the ‘thirty-year rule’ saved it from being listed, as it might well have been. Papers could consider whether the lack of permanence in architecture diminishes its value or, on the other hand, whether the permanence which listing building legislation imposes and implies, ultimately benefits it.

Transportable: The Crystal Palace (1851) was first erected, in Hyde Park, as a temporary building but was soon transported to Sydenham where it was re-erected. This was made possible by its pre-fabricated, component-based assembly process. This thinking allowed pre-fabricated buildings to be sent out across the world by the European colonial powers in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whether these be William Slater’s cast-iron church for the Ecclesiologists (1853-56) or Jean Prouvé’s steel barracks for the French army (1939), the use of transportable architecture to establish and promote religious or military, and therefore political control, was the same. Conversely, the practice of retrieving and displaying spolia as a demonstration of political control, such as Napoleon’s relocation to the Arc de Triomphe, in 1797, of the quadriga from St Mark’s Basilica, Venice, shows that architecture can be as easily brought home as it can be sent out. Papers, therefore, might like to investigate the use of transportable architecture as both a vehicle and an affirmation of colonisation and the influence which these buildings had on the national architecture, culture and society of the colony and the coloniser alike.

Transformable: If the Pyramids are regarded as the ultimate expression of permanence in architecture, then the Pompidou Centre, as originally conceived in 1971, might be the antithesis. For here the floors could move, the envelope could be reassembled, and the exposed services regularly modified. Although the floors, in the end, remained static, the building has been noticeably transformed over the years. Today, ‘Legacy’ is one of the key-words for the London 2012 Olympics. Yet few of the buildings destined to remain will be left in their original condition; many will be transformed. The side wings will be loped off Zaha Hadid’s swimming pool and the upper stage will be removed from Populous’s stadium. In considering legacy, papers might ask whether there is a real architectural legacy in such a situation and whether those few buildings which will emerge unscathed, such as, hopefully, Hopkins Architects’ velodrome, will provide the only true reminder of the Olympics.

Abstracts of not more than 250 words should be sent to Professor Neil Jackson at the School of Architecture, University of Liverpool, Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZN or e-mailed to neil.jackson@liverpool.ac.uk no later than 15 October 2012. Authors will be advised by 3 December 2012 whether or not their paper has been selected.