Enfilade

The 2011 ASECS Conference takes place in Vancouver, British Columbia, March 17-21. Proposals for panels are due by May 1. Details and a form for submitting a session for consideration can be found here»

The Sporting Eighteenth Century
Special Issue of The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Proposals due by 15 May 2010

2012 will witness the third London Olympics. This event seems an appropriate moment to consider the totality of cultural, social, political and economic relations that sport helps organize and sometimes challenge. The enlightenment period sees new ways of debating the significance of sport internationally. Sport is one of the most inter-disciplinary of topics, engaging the attention of  poets, painters, social scientists and historians. Proposals are sought for contributions to a special edition of The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (formerly known as the British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies) to appear in 2012 on the subject of sport in the Eighteenth-Century. (Those unfamiliar with the Journal should note that it is concerned with a long eighteenth century from 1650-1820.) The editors  (Dr Conrad Brunström, Department of English, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland; Dr. Tanya Cassidy, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario; and Dr. Martha K. Zebrowski, Department of Political Science, Columbia University) of this edition represent three different disciplines and three different national traditions and it is hoped that this interdisciplinary and cultural diversity will be reflected in the range of submissions. Topics may include but are not limited to the following: (more…)

The 2011 College Art Association conference takes place in New York, February 9-12. The HECAA session will be chaired by Kristel Smentek and Meredith Martin. Also included here are various sessions related to the eighteenth century. The full Call for Participation is available at the CAA site. Proposals are due by 3 May 2010.

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The Global Eighteenth Century (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)

Kristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Meredith Martin, Wellesley College. Mail to: Kristel Smentek, Dept. of Architecture, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Ave., 10-303c, Cambridge, MA 02139; or email smentek@mit.edu and mmartin@wellesley.edu

Contemporary debates on globalization have encouraged us  to examine eighteenth-century art and design from an intercultural perspective. We invite papers that address the circulation of peoples and things—between India, Africa, Europe, Asia, and beyond—and explore the mutually transformative potential of such encounters. Topics to be addressed might include visual appropriation and translation, markets, collecting and display, and the political and diplomatic uses of objects. We especially encourage methodologically innovative approaches to analyzing these artistic exchanges and their historical specificity.

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Imitation, Copy, Reproduction, Replication, Repetition, and Appropriation

Malcolm Baker, University of California, Riverside, Dept. of the History of Art, 235 Arts Bldg., Riverside, CA 92521, mcbaker@ucr.edu; and Paul Duro, University of Rochester, Dept. of Art and Art History, 425 Morey Hall, Rochester, NY 14627, paul.duro@rochester.edu

Despite a growing body of recent work, imitation is still commonly confused with copying, to the detriment of the many forms of repetition that are thereby negatively contrasted with notions of originality and authenticity. Yet within some categories of artistic production—including that of the Renaissance bronze statuette—there is no “original.” We seek papers on any aspect of imitation, copying, reproduction, replication, repetition, and appropriation, whether drawn from art theory, practice, criticism, or historiography. These might include case studies that have implications for our wider understanding of these terms or discussions of key texts in which such terms have been formulated. Our goal is to disconnect the association between imitation and copying and to question the value of originality as the sole means to understand the artwork.

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New Approaches to the Study of Fashion and Costume in Western Art, 1650–1900

Helen Burnham, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Justine DeYoung. Mail to: Helen Burnham, Dept. of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02115; or email: HBurnham@mfa.org and justine.deyoung@gmail.com

This panel seeks to foster discussion of the significance of dress to the making of art and its reception from the late seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, while encouraging panelists to reflect on questions raised by recent scholarship (e.g., gender and identity, the politics of dress, and the economics of fashion). Papers that focus on particular moments or themes in the history of Western art and dress are welcome and might include, for example, studies in portraiture or patronage; exotic or historic costume in painting or sculpture; symbolic and theatrical dress in art; certain media or techniques and their perception in dress-oriented terms; or fashion and modernity. Preference will be given to those proposals that take into account the discourse (e.g., aesthetic debates, criticism, instructions to artists) surrounding dress or fashion in art.

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From Physiognomy to Portraiture

Deborah Dorotinsky, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, Mexico City; deborah.dorotinsky@gmail.com

This session will explore the relationship between scientific knowledge production about population groups in the Americas (indigenous, blacks, and other minorities) and their documentation through drawings, prints, paintings, plaster casts, sculpture, and photographs between the sixteenth and the twenty-first century. Papers should address images that concentrate on body form, and particularly on portraiture as a means of addressing diversity, alleged abnormality, and other concepts in the range of criminal anthropological theory, racialist theories, eugenics, and biotypology. How does the canon set forth by academic portraiture foster the inquiry into the human head as indexical of moral and racial traits? How did local art academies and scientific institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean respond to the need for these images? How did they foster nationalist discourses and ideology? How do gender issues bare on the syntax and style of these images? How do present day visual culture and art differentiate from these discourses on race to deal with diversity?

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Architecture and Space in the Early Modern Ibero-American World

Jesús Escobar, Northwestern University; and Michael Schreffler, Virginia Commonwealth University/CASVA. Mail to: Michael Schreffler, CASVA, National Gallery of Art, 2000B S. Club Dr., Landover, MD 20785

From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Spain, Portugal, and their American dominions were sites of great innovation in architecture and urbanism. Recent scholarship in these fields has erased modern geographical borders and embraced the cosmopolitanism of the Ibero-American world. Some of these studies have focused on models of stylistic hybridity, but less attention has been paid to theoretical considerations of space as a reflection of political will and might. This session seeks to build upon the recent literature by exploring the nexus of architecture, space, and politics, the latter understood here to encompass aspects of political theory as well as the practices of imperial administration in the early modern Ibero-American world. We especially encourage papers that situate studies of key monuments, sites, or cities in their socio-political and intellectual contexts whether through case studies or considerations of methodology and historiography.

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Luxury and Consumption in Early Modern Northern European Art

Wayne Franits, Syracuse University, Dept. of Art and Music Histories, Ste. 308 Bowne Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244-1200; wefranit@syr.edu

In recent years, a large number of historical studies, including books by Simon Schama, Lynda Levy Peck, Woodruff Smith, and Jan de Vries, have explored evolving concepts of luxury and consumption in Northern Europe during the early-modern era. Yet, the ramifications of this scholarship for early modern Northern European art have not been sufficiently investigated. This is regrettable since art works of the period frequently feature luxurious objects and often enjoyed the status of luxury commodities themselves, owing to the high prices they commanded. This session solicits proposals for papers concerning ever-changing concepts of luxury and consumption in relation to art, such as the depiction of material culture, the function of “old” and “new” perceptions of luxury in the contemporary reception of art works, the commodity status of art works; the rituals wherein they were potentially deployed, and the social traits and status of those who “consumed” them.

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Recurating: New Practices in Exhibition Making

Betti-Sue Hertz, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103

Approaches to organizing exhibitions shifted in the 1960s as postminimal, conceptual, performative, and political art practices challenged traditions in the relationship between the art object and the viewer. In the past twenty years, curatorial practice has become a highly self-conscious activity, fueled by a deepening archive of precedents providing a springboard for new inventive possibilities. Taking this history into consideration, this session will focus on a new vision for curatorship, where the preexisting exhibition becomes a destabilized object or entity for curatorial consideration. What value can new presentations add to an exhibition conceived and constructed by an originating curator in an earlier historical moment? What new contemporary interpretive meanings become available when the original presentation of an exhibition is adapted, rearranged, changed, or expanded to correspond with new formulations of the object/audience relationship? How does recycling, rearranging, repackaging, and redirecting, as methodologies for recurating fully realized exhibitions, reflect current innovative practices in art and design?

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Dissemination: Prints, Publishing, and the Early Modern Arts in Europe

Sheila McTighe, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, Somerset House, the Strand, London WC2R 0RN, UK; sheila.mctighe@courtauld.ac.uk

The publication of artists’ biographies across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries changed forever the relation between artists and their posterity and between innovation and the emulation of past art, as well as relations between individual works of art and the collected oeuvre of an artist. As with printed texts, the publishing of printed images changed the trajectory of artistic careers and shaped new, international publics for the arts. This session invites studies of any aspect of the world of printed texts and printed images in the early modern period. Papers that address the concept of print culture are particularly welcome, as are studies that cut across the boundaries that divide the study of prints from the study of cultural history and visual culture as a whole.

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Radical Neo: The Past in the Present in British Art  and Design (Historians of British Art)

Jason Rosenfeld, Marymount Manhattan College, New York; and Tim Barringer, Yale University. Mail to: Jason Rosenfeld, Dept. of Art History, Marymount Manhattan College, 221 E. 71st St., New York, NY 10021; or email: jrosenfeld@mmm.edu

British art has been at its most compelling when mobilizing the past to critique or reformulate current practices. From eighteenth-century Neo-Classicism through the Gothic revival, Pre-Raphaelites, Arts and Crafts Movement, Primitivism, and Neo-Romanticism, the resurgence of interest in a cultural moment in the past, and its related visual style, formed the basis for radical new creativity. We invite papers on any period that discuss the revival of art, architecture, or theory from an earlier age. In addition to fine arts and architecture, the fields of fashion, graphic and product design, food, and popular entertainment fall within our remit.

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Seeing through the Medium (Historians of British Art, shorter session)

Imogen Hart, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Yale Center for British Art; and Catherine Roach, Postdoctoral Associate, Department of the History of Art, Cornell University; imogen.hart@yale.edu and cr342@cornell.edu

A central but challenging question for art history is the relationship between objects and their audiences. This issue, like most of the questions faced by the discipline, is usually addressed in terms of individual media. Yet how might the study of the historical interpretation of objects complicate current academic divisions by media? Recent scholarship testifies to the breadth of British artistic production, yet histories that focus on different media do not always speak to one another, with the result that an integrated picture of the arts of a period often proves elusive. While a specialist understanding of specific media may be essential to a thorough study of the process and experience of making, a broader, more inclusive approach may be more appropriate to a study of the ways in which contemporaries engaged with objects. Recent scholarly interventions such as the Henry Moore Institute and J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition and catalogue Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts and Caroline Arscott’s book William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings offer models of how art historians might engage in cross-media analysis. This panel seeks papers focusing on British art of any period, including colonial contexts, that address the question of reception and cut across current scholarly divisions, especially between the “fine” and “decorative” arts.

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Rococo, Late-Rococo, Post-Rococo, New Rococo: Art, Theory, and Historiography

Katie Scott, The Courtauld Institute of Art; and Melissa Hyde, University of Florida; Email: mlhyde@ymail.com

This session invites contributions on the continuing debate about the periodicity of the Rococo, style moderne of the early decades of Louis XV’s reign. Was Rococo always already late—the end of Gothic or the Baroque—or, on the contrary, radically modern? Our working hypothesis is that time or periodicity, rather than form, constitutes the problem of the Rococo. We hope to prompt inquiry into the wide range of meanings (cultural, political, gendered, etc.) that attach to a visual language that lacks theoretical and historical anchorage and which undergoes conscious revival in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, usually as pastiche. Papers might consider issues of contrivance, reproduction, simulation, dissemination, the fake, and the souvenir, or take up questions  of when and under what conditions the Rococo is revived. In addition to papers on designed objects and representations, we welcome reflections on the critical fortunes and historiography of the Rococo.

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Collectors, Dealers, and Designers in Modern Asia: Historiographical Categories Revisited

Mercedes Volait, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, InVisu, 2, rue Vivienne, Paris 75002, France; mercedes.volait@inha.fr

This session focuses on connoisseurs who played a pivotal role in the development of cross-cultural exchanges between Asia and the West from the eighteenth century on. At the edges of Western imperial territories and institutions, local collectors, dealers, designers, and patrons embodied the complexities of a process that involved as much mixing and negotiating as separation, division, or resistance. Border-crossings of all sorts—geographical, sociocultural, and religious—intensified as the century progressed, not only transforming Asia, but also European formulations of identity and knowledge. In both places, new sets of relations to art and architecture, as well as interactions between art, heritage and design developed. By shedding light on the ambivalent condition of colonial “in-between-ness” and processes of self-invention in imperial contexts, the panel seeks to address the problematic place assigned to the history of modern “Islamic art and architecture” in conventional art history.

From the INHA site:

Pouvoirs visionnaires de l’allégorie: arts, théâtre et littérature
Journée d’études organisée par l’Université de Haute-Alsace et les Musées de Belfort, 30 September 2010

Proposals due by 15 May 2010

L’allégorie est fondamentalement inactuelle.
-Walter Benjamin

Allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de 7 années de ma vie artistique. Le sous-titre du célèbre tableau de Gustave Courbet L’atelier du peintre n’a pas fini de nous interroger en ce qu’il fixe étrangement le rapport de l’iconologie à la parole, de l’image à la rhétorique et à la répartition des rôles. Une telle assertion est à l’aune de cette journée d’études qui entend réunir des chercheurs pour éprouver les enjeux de ce titre en forme d’énigme.

L’allégorie change selon ses modes de représentation, elle est une « métafigure » pour reprendre l’expression de Pascal Maillard. L’allégorie n’est pas seulement un ornement rhétorique mais une forme d’imagination expressive qui contient et véhicule une vision du monde fondée sur un principe d’analogie (comme dans la gravure de Dürer, Melancholia) et qui conditionne une modalité particulière des rapports humains. Forme d’investigation et d’interprétation dont les modalités évoluent selon les périodes, les arts et les supports, l’allégorie est « un compromis fragile ». Rationnelle autant que conflictuelle, « elle rassemble pour mieux séparer. « Alchimie d’un invisible, poursuit Françoise Divorne dans Le sens voilé, elle se masque sur le mode d’un conflit puisqu’elle implique deux significations rivales voire contradictoires ». L’allégorie fait un double usage du détournement et des voiles – objets de théâtre et attributs de l’histoire de l’art propices aux changements et aux ruses de l’identité comme des personnes. Paradoxe donc de l’allégorie dont les artifices ne se dissimulent pas : le contraire du mensonge serait donc moins la vérité que le dévoilement du secret qu’il entend recouvrir ?

À quoi se reconnaît l’allégorie en littérature, au théâtre et en art ? Quelles sont les procédures opératoires que l’allégorie emprunte et les stratégies interprétatives qu’elle nécessite, sont-elles dépendantes d’une période ou d’un mode d’expression ? Un genre littéraire, théâtral et artistique est-il particulièrement apte à produire ses propres systèmes allégoriques ? Comment comprendre l’allégorie aujourd’hui après le structuralisme et dans la pensée post-moderne ? A-t-elle dans son inactualité fondamentale que remarquait Walter Benjamin les moyens de se renouveler ? Que ce soit en peinture, en sculpture, en poésie ou au théâtre, l’allégorie repose sur des principes de mise en scène et de dramaturgie qui donnent lieu à une distribution imaginaire des rôles.

Sans se restreindre ou se limiter à une période précise, on se demandera dans quelle mesure les éléments dramatiques de l’allégorie vont de pair avec un mouvement de pensée dont on essaiera de mettre en évidence la portée et les spécificités dans des périodes volontairement diversifiées.

La journée aura lieu au musée d’Histoire de Belfort à la Citadelle et donnera lieu à une présentation des collections du Musée des Beaux-Arts dont le parcours thématique s’ouvre sur une salle consacrée à l’allégorie.

Merci d’adresser vos propositions à Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre (frederique.toudoire@uha.fr) et Nicolas Surlapierre (nsurlapierre@mairie-belfort.fr) avant le 15 mai 2010.

I just stumbled across this CFP this morning; unfortunately, the deadline for submissions is today. [Note: the due date has been extended to 12 April]

Recycling Luxury and Waste in the Long 18th Century: The ‘Afterlife of Used Things’ in Britain and France
Université Paris Diderot, 22-23 June 2010

Proposals due by 12 April 2010

The 2010 conference on the afterlife of used things in the long 18th century will expand on the 2009 ‘cycles of novelty’ symposium, which had explored some of the many aspects of recycling in particular in relation to art and literature. This year’s conference will focus on recycling in relation to social, economic and material practices in the long 18th century and will broaden its geographical boundaries to include France.

We invite participants to study the versatile practices of recycling and refashioning that shaped the eighteenth-century world of goods with particular emphasis on the double question of waste and luxury. Thus the refashioning of old objects into new desirable ones, the thriving second-hand market often fuelled by the luxury trades and the problem of “waste management” in societies characterized by increased opulence are among the questions that the conference will seek to explore. The management of resources (both natural and man-made), their scarcity and their uses will also be central to the conference and we welcome papers exploring the topography or geographical circulation of goods and resources involved by practices of recycling. We also hope to somewhat chart the processes of valuation/devaluation and re-evaluation through which both fashionable luxury objects and discarded material went through and invite contributors to submit papers focusing on the cultural uses and values of objects/materials along the various stages of this process.

Conference papers can be in English or in French. We are in contact with several publishers to get a selection of papers from this year’s and last year’s conferences published. This publication will be in English. Please send your proposals (max 300 words) to the organisers by 12th April 2010 at the following addresses:
ariane.fennetaux@univ-paris-diderot.fr
amelie.junqua@u-picardie.fr

Organisers:
Ariane Fennetaux, Université Paris-Diderot, Paris 7
Amélie Junqua, Université de Picardie Jules Verne
Sophie Vasset, Université Paris-Diderot, Paris 7

History in Travel Narrative, 1589-1826
Paris, Sorbonne nouvelle, 11-12 December 2010

Proposals due by 15 June 2010

Joint conference organised by PRISMES (CREA XVIII, Epistémè), Sorbonne nouvelle, and CIERL, Québec

This conference will examine the representation of history in travel narrative. A European’s perception of countries and peoples with no ‘history’ is not the same as that of ‘civilised’ nations. What model of historical change do travel narratives project—history as a decline from some mythical or mythicised origin, cyclical history, history as the unfolding of a providential design, as progress? The evolution of those categories over the period considered will be investigated; this period stretches from 1589, which saw the publication of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, to 1826, when William Ellis’s Narrative of a Tour through Hawaii came out.

What is the influence of historiography at any given time on the representation of history as experience in travel literature? How does travel narrative validate its status as historiography? From a more anthropological viewpoint, does the discovery of new or different spaces or places shape the perception and construction of time? Is there any interaction between the conception of space and that of time, between the depiction of spaces and that of time, especially of the time needed for the evolution of manners, customs and institutions which differ from those familiar to the traveller? Does this entail a relativisation of time? How does a European (or Europeanised) nation’s past constrain the analysis of the fabric and customs of the areas visited? Is the historicisation of lived experience limited? What is the impact of measuring instruments on this experience and the account thereof. Those are some of the questions which will be addressed in this conference. Voyages from and to Great Britain will be of particular, but not exclusive, interest.

Please send proposals—200-250 words—for papers not exceeding 30 minutes before 15 June 2010 to Isabelle Bour (Isabelle.Bour@univ-paris3.fr), Line Cottegnies (Line.Cottegnies@univ-paris3.fr) and Thierry Belleguic (Thierry.Belleguic@lit.ulaval.ca).

Call for Papers: Special Issue of The Journal of British Studies on Queer History
Articles for Consideration Due by 1 November 2010

The Journal of British Studies is calling for papers on all aspects of British queer history. Articles can be from the medieval period to the present day. This is for a special issue to be published in late 2011 or early 2012, to be guest edited by Brian Lewis (McGill University). Articles should be 10,000-12,000 words long, follow the JBS format, and be submitted by November 1, 2010.  For more information, see the journal’s website or contact the editors at jbs.history@mcgill.ca or Brian Lewis at brian.lewis@mcgill.ca.

France, Great Britain, Ireland:
Cultural Transfers & the Circulation of Knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment
University of Limerick, 25-26 June 2010

Proposals due by 29 March 2010

In 2008 the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society, the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, and La Société Française d’Étude du Dix-Huitième siècle launched a joint research programme on cultural transfers between their three countries in the Enlightenment period. This initiative has resulted in conferences at L’Université Paris Diderot – Paris VII (in 2008) and the University of York (in 2009).

The third of these conferences will be hosted by the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society and will take place at the University of Limerick, Ireland, from 25 to 26 June 2010. The conference will run in parallel with the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society’s annual conference. Proposals for twenty-minute papers are invited for papers (in Irish, English or French) on the theme of the conference, but particularly on

• the individuals and groups involved in transfers, who could be called the ‘importers’ or ‘purveyors’ of foreign ideas and who acted as cultural intermediaries; these may include politicians, diplomats, travellers, savants, authors, artists, booksellers
• the transfer of cultural items – books, newspapers, works of art, and other objects – and their impact
• the transfer of literary, philosophical, political or aesthetic models in processes of cultural legitimisation
• transfer processes through imitation, translation or adaptation
• the effect of such transfers on the construction of national identities throughout the century: the invention of a past, a language, or a national history; it could be interesting to examine transfers in relation to mutual power play, wars and imperialist ambitions.

Postgraduate students are particularly encouraged to offer papers. Proposals should be submitted (preferably by email) to the conference organiser (david.fleming@ul.ie) before Friday, 29 March 2010. Proposals should include the title of the paper and a 250-word abstract. Prospective speakers will be notified of a decision by 30 April 2010.

The Stimulated Body and the Arts:
The Nervous System and Nervousness in the History of Aesthetics
Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease, Durham University, 17-18 February 2011

Proposals due by 31 July 2010

This conference will discuss the history of the relationship between aesthetics and medical understandings of the body. Today’s vogue for neurological accounts of artistic emotions has a long pedigree. Since G.S. Rousseau’s pioneering work underlined the importance of models of the nervous system in eighteenth-century aesthetics, the examination of physiological explanations in aesthetics has become a highly productive field of interdisciplinary research. Drawing on this background, the conference aims to illuminate the influence that different medical models of physiology and the nervous system have had on theories of aesthetic experience. How have aesthetic concepts (for instance, imagination or genius) be grounded medically? What effect did the shift from animal spirits to modern neurophysiology have on aesthetics?

The medical effects of culture were not always regarded as positive. The second focus of the conference will be the supposed ability of excessive reading, music and so on to ‘over-stimulate’ nerves and cause nervousness, mental and physical illness, homosexuality and even death. It will consider questions regarding the effects of various theories of neuropathology and psychopathology on the concept of pathological culture. What kinds of culture could lead to such over-stimulation? How was this medical critique of culture related to moral objections and changes in gender relations, politics and society? How was it linked to medical concern about lack of attention and willpower?

This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars working in a wide range of fields, including not only the history of medicine but also in subjects such as art history, languages and musicology. Abstracts for 20-minute papers (maximum 250 words) should be submitted electronically to the organisers by 31 July 2010 at the following address: James.kennaway@durham.ac.uk

Organisers: Dr James Kennaway, Professor Holger Maehle, Dr Lutz Sauerteig.

An interesting-looking conference that comes on the heels of the Met’s exhibition, Watteau, Music, and Theater — as listed at Fabula: la recherche en littérature:

Watteau au confluent des arts: Caractères de la danse
Université de Valenciennes, 9-10 December 2010

Proposals due by 15 April 2010

Le dessin – aujourd’hui disparu, mais connu par de bonnes reproductions – du compositeur Jean-Féry Rebel (1666-1747) par Antoine Watteau montre un artiste sûr de son art et des principes qui le gouvernent. L’homme était petit mais trapu et doté, si l’on en croit le dessin (la gravure qu’en a tirée Moyreau gomme quelque peu cet aspect), d’une énergie et d’une détermination peu communes. Le regard dominateur tourné vers le spectateur, il compose : la main gauche posée sur les touches du clavecin, la main droite, qui, dirait-on, connaît peu l’hésitation, en train de noter sa composition. En 1715, au moment où Watteau a pu lui être présenté, Rebel publie les Caractères de la Danse, tentative de distillation et de codification de ce qui, dans la musique de chacune des danses les plus répandues de son temps, en constitue l’élément le plus déterminant. La polysémie du terme saute aux yeux : les ” caractères “, c’est à la fois les notes mêmes, compris dans le sens typographique que leur attribuait encore Rousseau dans le Dictionnaire de musique ; la quintessence sonore, les caractéristiques rythmiques des différentes danses ; et les caractérisations psychologiques et typologiques qui s’en dégagent, et qui font qu’une danse a entre autres vocations celle de proposer le portrait d’un être ou d’un sentiment. La création de cette oeuvre, dont le succès fut grand et durable, coincide avec la maturité artistique de Watteau et avec l’élaboration de l’esthétique qui anime ses fêtes galantes. On y danse souvent, et la danse y est encore présente quand on ne fait que marcher, bouger, avancer, se mouvoir : on ne cesse d’évoluer sur scène. Il est vrai qu’on ignore le plus souvent le sens exact de ces mouvements chez Watteau, qui refuse de les inscrire dans une narration intelligible ou du moins vérifiable. Mais si leur signification demeure vague, leur caractère ne l’est pas. Rebel ne procède pas autrement. Il entreprend la séparation de la danse d’avec les chorégraphies qui la liaient au théâtre, et qui la faisaient dépendre des histoires présentées dans les comédies-ballets, les opéras-ballets et les tragédies en musique. Là où Lully, Molière et Quinault avaient poussé la danse à s’intégrer dans des actions où elle était à la fois indispensable et secondaire, Rebel lui rend sa primauté en la rendant abstraite. Il est possible que le même phénomène se produise, en ce qui concerne un mouvement qui tend sans cesse vers la danse, dans les fêtes galantes de Watteau, ces jouissances d’autant plus jouées et irréelles qu’elles sont, à leur tour, abstraites, et déliées des attaches de la linéarité. (more…)