Enfilade

In addition to the regular session chaired by Julie Codell on ‘Parallel Lines Converging: Art, Design, and Fashion Histories’, the Historians of British Art is sponsoring a 90-minute session on ‘British Visual Culture and the Levant’ at the annual meeting of the College Art Association in New York, 13-16 February 2013. Whereas the deadline for proposals for regular sessions was May 4, the due date for this panel is not until September 1. Moreover, as an additional, short session, not subject to the regular CAA purview, neither CAA membership nor CAA conference registration is required for speakers or for those attending the panel. All participants are, however, required to be members of HBA. Please direct any questions to the chairs, Eleanor Hughes and Christine Riding. -CH

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CAA 2013 | HBA Affiliate Session: British Visual Culture and the Levant, 1600-1830
New York, 13-16 February 2013

Proposals due by 1 September 2012

This panel aims to address a variety of ways in which interactions between Britain and the Levant were reflected in contemporary visual and material culture during the two centuries before professional artists such as John Frederick Lewis and David Roberts began traveling to Egypt and the Holy Land in search of subject matter. The Levant is here defined as the countries of the eastern Mediterranean–roughly corresponding to present-day Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Libya–which for much of the period fell under the control of the Ottoman Empire. We welcome papers addressing a wide range of topics, including illustrated travel accounts, the exchange of commodities and customs, scholarly expeditions and the rediscovery of classical and biblical sites, the reception and use of middle-eastern imagery by British artists, and the geo-political importance of the region as mediated in visual representations, as well as those that might address broader questions relating to imperialism and orientalism.

Please submit a CV and a 250-word abstract to Eleanor Hughes (eleanor.hughes@yale.edu) and Christine Riding (criding@nmm.ac.uk).

As noted at L’ApAhAu (my apologies for the short notice) . . .

Diderot – Le Génie des Lumières: Nature, Normes, Transgressions
Halle, 27-29 June 2013

Proposal due by 15 July 2012

Colloque international à l’occasion du 300e anniversaire de Denis Diderot
Comité d’organisation: Konstanze Baron, Robert Fajen, Heinz Thoma

A l’élaboration de la notion de génie moderne, Diderot a sans doute apporté une contribution décisive: d’un côté, il semble reconnaître la pluralité et la valeur relative des « génies » dont il cherche à déterminer l’origine physiologique et l’application pratique; d’un autre côté – et la plupart du temps –  le génie, chez lui, fait figure d’exception: c’est un « ressort de la nature » qui permet aux individus d’exception de créer des oeuvres hors norme. En soulignant soit la sensibilité, soit le sang-froid de l’esprit observateur, Diderot insiste sur le don de la nature qui met le génie en état de transcender les conventions humaines en créant ses propres lois. En liant le génie à l’enthousiasme et aux « grandes passions », il en fait une force tout à fait ambiguë, non exempte de qualités diaboliques: l’homme (ou bien la femme) de génie est capable d’exceller dans le bien aussi bien que dans le mal.

Ainsi, la réflexion de Diderot sur le génie ne se limite pas au seul domaine esthétique. Elle fait, tout au contraire, partie intégrante de l’oeuvre philosophique et littéraire de Diderot dans la mesure où celle-ci se préoccupe du rapport entre l’art et la nature, l’individu et la norme, la règle et sa transgression. En tant que telle, la notion de génie participe aux ambivalences et aux tournures dialectiques qui donnent à la pensée de Diderot son caractère distinct. Ce qui intéresse, par exemple, Diderot moraliste, c’est le rapport du génie aux règles et aux conventions de la société. Dans Le Neveu de Rameau, Diderot entame une réflexion sur le génie où l’art et la morale, la dimension éthique et artistique de la vie des « grands hommes » entrent en opposition fondamentale. L’ambiguïté morale du génie ne cesse d’ailleurs de hanter Diderot qui se dit fasciné par la « méchanceté sublime ». Dans la philosophie de la nature, par contre, il met l’accent sur les conditions subjectives de l’investigation scientifique et expérimentale. Dans les Pensées sur l’Interprétation de la Nature, la nature (soi-disant objective) trouve son complément théorique dans l’expérience subjective du philosophe. En même temps, Diderot admet l’importance des dispositions objectives (talent, intuition, esprit de divination etc.) du philosophe. Dans Jacques le Fataliste et son maître, cette même dialectique entre la nature et son interprétation est portée à son comble lorsque l’ingéniosité du narrateur (voire des narrateurs) se trouve en compétition directe avec celle – non moins romanesque – de la nature-même.

En mettant en relief la notion de « génie », la conférence se propose d’explorer une notion-clé de l’oeuvre de Diderot qui permettra en même temps de cerner des tendances générales, voire typiques de la pensée de Diderot ainsi que des Lumières. Il s’agira donc de caractériser la pensée de Diderot : quel est le rapport entre la disposition naturelle, l’héritage physiologique et même génétique d’un côté et la liberté créatrice de l’autre? Comment Diderot conçoit-il le rapport entre l’art et la nature, les facultés innées et la possibilité du changement, voire de l’innovation? Le génie confirme-t-il ou met-il en question le déterminisme matérialiste ? Quel est le rapport entre l’originalité et la norme dans la pensée de Diderot ? de situer cette pensée dans son contexte tant bien historique que contemporain: Quelle est l’influence de la pensée antique et classique dans la pensée de Diderot ? Quel rôle a joué pour Diderot la conception anglaise (Shaftesbury) ou espagnole (Gracián) du génie / de l’ingenium ? Quelle est la réception de la pensée de Diderot en Allemagne, p.ex. auprès des auteurs du Sturm und Drang ? Dans le contexte français et européen, la pensée de Diderot incarne-t-elle la norme ou plutôt l’exception ? Qu’en est-il, en d’autres termes, de la représentativité de Diderot ? Tout ceci s’effectuera en vue d’un troisième objectif, à savoir  de tenter une réflexion nouvelle sur la notion des Lumières : la philosophie des Lumières est-elle dominée par la norme, ou admet-elle l’exception ? Quel est le rôle de l’originalité dans la pensée des Lumières? En quoi les théories (esthétiques) du dix-huitième siècle sont-elles vraiment créatrices, en quoi ne font-elles que prolonger des débats plus anciens?Sujets d’investigation possibles:

• Caractère(s) de Diderot : le grand homme, l’homme sans caractère, etc.
• La théorie esthétique des Lumières: entre « imitation » et « inspiration »
• Enthousiasme, énergie, intuition: au-delà du déterminisme mécaniste
• L’exception et la norme : le statut de l’individu / du bizarre / de l’original
• L’art et la nature de l’invention (technique)
• Figures mythiques, interprétations modernes de l’ingenium / du démon
• Morale et esthétique : l’ingénieux n’est pas l’ingénu…

Veuillez envoyer votre proposition de communication (min. 300 mots) jusqu’au 15 juillet 2012 à l’adresse suivante : konstanze.baron@izea.uni-halle.de

From AAH:

39th Annual Association of Art Historians Conference
University of Reading, 11-13 April 2013

Proposals due by 12 November 2012

AAH2013 will represent the interests of an expansive art-
historical community by covering all branches of its discipline/s and the range of its visual cultures. Academic sessions will reflect a broad chronological range, as well as a wide geographical one. We will address topics of methodological, historiographical, and interdisciplinary interest as well as ones that open up debates
about the future of the discipline/s.

Keynote Speakers: Adrian Forty (Professor of Architectural History, The Bartlett, University College London) and Okwui Enwezor (Curator and Director of Haus der Kunst, Munich)

If you would like to propose a paper for one of the sessions listed below, please follow the proposal guidelines outlined on the paper proposal form.

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The following selections might be relevant for dixhuitièmistes. A full list of panels along with descriptions is available here (as a PDF file).

• (In)formal Networks and the Professionalisation of Art and Design History: Conversations with art and design historians
Liz Bruchet (Voices in Art History) and Joanne Gooding (Design History Society)

• Painted Gladiatrices: Women, art and the 18th-century social arena
Heather Carroll and Lauren Puzier (Sotheby’s)

• Landscape and Economy
Kevin Chua (Texas Tech University) and Ross Barrett (University of North Carolina)

• Poster Session
Susan Grange (Independent) and Lawrence Buttigieg (Independent)

• The Art History of the Animal
Alastair Harden (University of Reading)

• Ceremonial and the City
Caroline Arscott (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Pat Hardy (Museum of London)

• Rhythm in Art and Life
Michelle Ying-Ling Huang (Hong Kong Baptist University) and Charlotte de Mille (Courtauld Institute of Art)

• ‘Action Painting’: The theatrical and the dramatic in narrative art
Mark Ledbury (University of Sydney) and Andrei Pop (University of Basel)

• Shut your Eyes! Iconophobia in the modern era
Sarah Lippert (University of Michigan-Flint)

• The Permanence of the Transient: Precariousness in art
Camila Maroja (Duke University) and Caroline Menezes (University of the Arts – UAL)

• The Knowing Gaze: The shifting role of the connoisseur and connoisseurship in art and its histories
Jordan Mearns (University of Edinburgh Jordan) and Tom Denman (University of Reading)

• Into the Light: The changing significance of light in art, design and architecture
Melissa Miles (Monash University)

• The Imaginary Drinker: Bodies and beverages in art and society
Frédérique Desbuissons (Institut national d’histoire de l’art) and Edward Payne (Courtauld Institute of Art)

• From Utopian Teleologies to Sporadic Historiographies: ‘Interfaces’ of art and cybernetics
Maia Toteva (Montana State University) and Jennifer Way (University of North Texas)

• Twitchers: Birds and art
Tracey Warr (Oxford Brookes University), Paul Kilsby (Oxford Brookes University), and Clair Chinnery (Oxford Brookes University)

• Photography and the Histories of Sculpture: What role has photography played in forming sculpture’s place in art history?
Lisa Le Feuvre (Henry Moore Institute) and Jon Wood (Henry Moore Institute)

• Student Session: Collaboration
Sibyl Fisher (University of Leeds)

• Visualising Architecture: Fictive buildings c.1300 – c.1750
Amanda Lillie (University of York)

• Sculpture and the Sea: Figureheads and ship sculpture
Alison Yarrington (University of Hull), Douglas Hamilton (University of Hull and Maritime Historical Studies Centre), and Julia Kelly (University of Hull)

• Museums & Exhibitions Session: Curating the Book: Exhibiting books, archives and manuscripts
Layla Bloom (Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds) and Ben Thomas (University of Kent)

2013 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Cleveland, 4-7 April 2013

Proposals due by 15 September 2012

The 2013 ASECS conference takes place in Cleveland, 4-7 April. Along with our annual luncheon and business meeting, HECAA will be represented by two panels chaired by Christopher Johns and Heather McPherson. In addition to these, a wide selection of sessions that might be relevant for HECAA members are also included below. A full list of panels is available here.

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Anne Schroder New Scholar’s Session (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)

Christopher M.S. Johns, 1112 Wildwind Ct., Nashville, TN 37209; Tel: (615) 516 9337; Christopher.Johns@vanderbilt.edu

Named in honor of the late Anne Schroder, this seminar will feature outstanding new research by emerging scholars.

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Interiors as Space and Image (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)

Heather McPherson, Dept. of Art and Art History, 113 HUM , 900 13th St. South, U. of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294; Tel: (205) 934-4942, Fax: (205)-996-6986; hmcphers@uab.edu

In recent years scholars have reconsidered the significance of the eighteenth-century interior as a complex site of social interaction and nexus of display associated with daily life, exhibition practices, and conspicuous consumption. This session invites papers on eighteenth-century interiors as actual spaces experienced in multiple ways (socially, aesthetically, temporally, etc.) OR as represented in paintings, prints, or other art forms. Topics might include functions of different types of interior spaces, furnishings, decorative arts, display of artworks or other objects, etc. in any geographical area during the long eighteenth century.

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As noted at Le Blog de L’ApAhAu:

Dictionnaire des créatures mythiques, légendaires et improbables des voyageurs
Proposals due 15 August 2012; completed entries for approved topics due 31 January 2013

Le but de ce dictionnaire serait, dans la lignée du numéro spécial consacré par la revue Chemin d’étoiles, dirigée par  Emeric Fisset et Julie Boch, au Bestaire des voyageurs, de présenter les créatures humaines et animales, aperçues, décrites, imaginées, rêvées ou fantasmées par les voyageurs de l’Antiquité au XXIe siècle.

Parmi ces créatures et parmi une liste non exhaustive figureront le Géant patagon, le nain fuégien, le Lapon, le Hottentot, le Niam-Niam, l’Amazone, le Sciopode, le Blemye, le Garamante, le Monoculus, la Sirène, le Kraken, le Lézard du Cap, la Vache marine, l’Ile baleine… Les notices devront allier informations scientifiques et anecdotes. Le style devra être vif, alerte, éviter le jargon. Le lecteur devra pouvoir en même temps se cultiver et se distraire.

Il s’agira pour chacune d’entre elles de remonter à ses origines, de présenter ses représentations, de mettre en évidence leur évolution et leur fortune, dans la culture populaire, dans la culture littéraire et dans la culture scientifique ; dans l’imaginaire des voyageurs comme dans l’imaginaire collectif appréhendé de manière plus globale.

Toutes les personnes désireuses de rédiger une ou plusieurs notices sont priées de m’indiquer la ou les notices sur lesquelles elles souhaiteraient travailler, au plus tard au 15 août, afin que Valérie Dumeige et moi-même puissions établir la liste des entrées. Une fois celle-ci établie et les notices confirmées avec chaque auteur, les textes, établis suivant le protocole indiqué ci-dessous, devront m’être adressés au plus tard le 31 janvier 2013 par courriel à l’adresse suivante : dominiquelanni@yahoo.fr (more…)

From CELL:

The Permissive Archive: A CELL Conference
Queen Mary, University of London, early November 2012

Proposals due by 31 July 2012

For ten years, the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters has pioneered original archival research that illuminates the past for the benefit of the modern research community, and beyond. To celebrate this anniversary, in early November 2012 we will be holding a conference examining the future of the ‘Permissive Archive’. The scope of archival history is broad, and this conference seeks presentations from a wide range of work which opens up archives – not only by bringing to light objects and texts that have lain hidden, but by demystifying and demonstrating the skills needed to make new histories. Too long associated with settled dust, archival research will be championed as engaged and engaging: a rigorous but permissive field.

We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of early modern archival work, manuscript or print, covering the period 1500 – 1800. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The shape of the archive – ideology and interpretation
• The permissive archive: its definition and its past, present and future
• Alternatives to the permissive archive
• Archival research as discovery or construction
• The archive which challenges or disrupts
• Uncatalogued material – how to find it, how to access it, how to use it
• New findings
• Success and failure
• Broken or dispersed collections
• The archive and the environment
• The archivist and the historian
• The ethics of the archive
• The comedy of the archive
• Order and anarchy

Please send 300-word proposals to hjgrahammatheson@gmail.com by 31 July 2012. Submissions are not limited to the 25-minute paper. CELL will be holding a work-shop on the use of archival materials, and we are keen to hear from scholars with ideas for alternative presentations such as group sessions, trips or guided walks. Submissions will be peer-reviewed by Professor Lisa Jardine.

From The Courtauld:

Fourth Early Modern Symposium: Art and Its Afterlives
The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 17 November 2012

Proposals due by 1 July 2012

Karen Knorr, The Green Bedroom of Louis XVI. © Eric Franck Fine Art

Art and Its Afterlives aims to address the ways in which the work of art continues to resonate after its creation. While much art history takes as its focus the initial facture of the work of art, this one-day symposium explores what happens to early modern art after the moment of its making. How did early modern works continue to be created in their display, preservation, and reception from the moment of their creation on? Papers will examine how art is shaped by its afterlives – whether these collect, curate, cut up, cut out, copy or correct it – and the ways in which art both persists and changes through time as a material object, a field of generative meaning, and a subject of debate and interpretation. Material, technical and social histories as well as theoretical approaches drawn from the discipline of art history and other fields of the humanities
are welcome. Accounts from curatorial practice and the field
of museology are also encouraged. (more…)

As noted at Le Blog de L’ApAhAu:

L’œuvre d’art entre ambition identitaire et aspiration à l’universel
Institut Catholique de Paris (ICP), 5-6 April 2013

Proposals due by 31 July 2012

Institut Catholique de Paris, founded in 1875

L’œuvre d’art et le sens qu’on lui donne sont porteurs d’une tension : la création est tout à la fois symbole d’une identité culturelle spécifique et dépositaire d’un message d’ordre universel. Ce phénomène s’accentue dans le contexte contemporain de mondialisation des échanges où l’art semble constituer plus que jamais un repère stable dans un monde au caractère mouvant parfois perçu comme inquiétant. Le propos de ce colloque est d’explorer, dans une perspective historique, cette dialectique identité / universalité de l’œuvre d’art par le biais de trois thématiques :

• L’étude des œuvres hybrides, combinant ostensiblement différentes traditions artistiques, culturelles, techniques… et les conséquences de l’intégration de nouveaux modèles sur la formation d’une identité culturelle.

• La thématique du transfert : voyages d’artistes, circulation d’œuvres, décentrement des foyers artistiques… : autant d’éléments aux conséquences majeures sur la création de nouvelles formes d’art, sur leur appropriation et la portée du sens qui s’y attache.

• La question muséale avec le contraste entre un spectaculaire développement du nombre de musées à vocation plus ou moins universelle et les difficultés croissantes liées à la circulation et à la propriété des œuvres, considérées tantôt comme des marqueurs identitaires nationaux tantôt comme des icônes universelles.

Le colloque se tiendra sur deux jours dans les locaux de l’ICP. Les propositions de candidatures devront être envoyées avant le 31 juillet 2012 à l’adresse suivante : colloqueicp-2013@yahoo.fr. Elles comporteront un exposé du projet de communication 1500 signes environ ainsi qu’un bref CV ou résumé biographique. La durée des communications est fixée à 20 mn.

From the conference website:

Politeness & Prurience: Situating Transgressive Sexualities in the Long Eighteenth Century
History of Art Department, the University of Edinburgh, 2-3 September 2013

Proposals due by 10 September 2012

Embedded within the narrative of John Cleland’s infamous novel Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), is a vignette which affronts the moral compass of even the tale’s sexually promiscuous protagonist. Having attended a ‘drag masquerade’, Fanny bears witness, through a convenient crack in a wall, to a sodomitical act, which she finds ‘not only universally odious but absurd’. Despite her apparent condemnation, Fanny pruriently watches on. In its dichotomous nature, Fanny’s reaction – suggestive of both outrage and intrigue – mirrors reactions to homosexuality in the eighteenth-century and its subsequent historiography, wherein it is treated at once as a site of fascination, but considered separately from the history of normative sexualities. Situated as it is, within this feast of heterosexual eroticism, Fanny Hill’s same-sex love scene may seem incongruous. Cleland’s text however, proffers a way to approach homosexuality as both explicitly aberrant and problematic, but still located within the general lexicon of eighteenth-century sexual congress. By the same token, Cleland offers a model for resituating the homosexual narrative within a wider historiography of sexuality, where its relationality to dominant modes, not its difference from them, might fruitfully be used as a way to re-evaluate transgressive sexualities during the period.

In his 2006 article ‘Queering Horace Walpole’ George Haggerty advocates an approach to the history of sexuality wherein the search for a ‘concrete account of same-sex sexual behaviour’ is rejected, forcing the historian ‘to look elsewhere in almost every case’. Accordingly, this conference will privilege the assessment of cultural evocations of the ‘other eighteenth century’; the transgressive will be identified as, and sought within, dominant modes of eighteenth-century culture and its discourses. In the realm of visual culture, transgressive and deviant sexualities have previously been interpreted as autonomous and distinct from these prevailing modes. Hogarth’s famous print-series A Harlot’s Progress (1732) and A Rake’s Progress (1735) have been interpreted simplistically – in accordance with their appellation – as ‘modern moral subjects’. As such they have routinely been presented as providing antitheses to a broadly defined exemplar of ideal polite culture. Such a prima facie interpretation however, boldly precludes the rich scopophilic potential provided by scenes of prostitution and illicit sexuality, locating it instead within the polite framework of moralising art. Like Fanny, the viewer of such images is at once repulsed and titillated. Yet Hogarth’s satirical oeuvre is not merely a visualisation of moral imperatives central to polite culture, but a vivid visualisation of a real section of contemporary society. In reintegrating these apparently oppositional forms of behaviour a clearer picture of eighteenth-century society and culture emerges. Hogarth’s images may therefore be viewed not as simply the commentary on the mores of an apparently ‘polite’ society via the representation of its very opposite, but, analogous to David Halperin’s definition of ‘queer’ in Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (1997), as ‘a positionality vis à vis the normative’.

In an attempt to highlight underwritten facets of contemporary sexuality, texts such as G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter’s Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (1987) which label themselves as examining the ‘other’ or ‘underworld’ have instead further problematised the role and import of such histories to wider eighteenth-century culture. The aim of this conference is therefore not to present illicit sexuality as an underbelly to a dominant polite culture, but to reconcile the ‘two eighteenth centuries’ that have for too long been presented as the subject of two discrete discourses – politeness and prurience. As well as dealing with the interface between politeness and prurience as it appears throughout eighteenth-century visual, material and literary culture more generally, specific topics for papers could include:
• Bodies – the venereal body, castrati, physicalities, sadomasochism
• Settings – home and abroad, urban centres, rural backwaters
• Spaces – the architectural exterior and the private interior, the bagnio, the brothel, the masquerade
• Gaze/Experience – viewing sexualities, the keyhole testimony, description and biography
• Material Evidence – the objects of sexuality, dress, sex aids, collections, erotica
• Masculinities and Femininities – gender roles, reversals and subversions
• Modes of the illicit – sodomitical, Sapphic, pathological, pederastic, extra-marital, rape
• Public & Private – reception/reaction, fear/celebration, homophobia, display, expression
• Language – parlance, designation, rumour, slander, code

We invite abstracts of no more than 500 words to Dr. Viccy Coltman, Head of History of Art, Jordan Mearns & Freya Gowrley at politeness.prurience@gmail.com by 10 Sept 2012. Website: http://www.politenessandprurience.com