Call for Papers | UAAC/AAUC 2022
From UAAC/AAUC:
Universities Art Association of Canada / l’association d’art des universités du Canada
In person, University of Toronto, 27–29 October 2022, and online, 4 November 2022
Proposals due by 30 June 2022
Each fall, UAAC-AAUC hosts Canada’s professional conference for visual arts-based research by art historians, professors, artists, curators, and cultural workers. This year’s conference includes three days of in-person meetings at the University of Toronto and one day of online panels.
Submit proposals by using the Call for Papers Proposal Form. Proposals are sent directly to the chair(s) of the session. The deadline for submission is 30 June 2022.
A very limited selection of sessions potentially related to the eighteenth century, including the HECAA panel, is provided below. The full listing is available here.
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26 Made Up: An Art History of Cosmetics (in person)
Hana Nikcevic (University of Toronto) and Tara Allen-Flanagan (Independent scholar), hana.nikcevic@utoronto.ca and tara.allen-flanagan@mail.mcgill.ca
Art has been acknowledged for centuries as the business of deception and artifice—spanning trompe l’oeil to parafiction—but it shares this storied past with a less-celebrated, heavily-gendered counterpart: cosmetics. Fascination with feminine art/artifice underpins the corpus of toilette paintings, but in these portrayals as in later iterations—from Boucher’s Pompadour to Vogue Beauty Secrets—the face-painter’s agency has been, through analogy with the artist, variably recouped and contested. Cosmetics likewise represent the spoils and vectors of globalization and imperialism; if Queen Elizabeth I’s chalky visage, asserted through portraiture, already reflected and advanced England’s imperial efforts, Angela Rosenthal confirmed the eighteenth-century coalescence of racial theory and complexion. This session interrogates cosmetics’ aesthetics, asking after global and historical conflations of and disparities between art and make-up; cosmetics’ conflicting capacities to subjugate and subvert; the entwined histories of beauty, complexion, racialization, imperialism, and oppression; and, most broadly, the understudied visual and material cultures of cosmetics.
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27 Monuments and Their Futures in North America (in person)
Cody Barteet (Western University), cbarteet@uwo.ca
Recently, monuments have received significant attention. Whether connected to their removal, conservation, and construction, individuals and organizations have used monuments to promote varying ideological concepts. In Canada, most of this conversation has been limited to the removal and vandalism of monuments associated with the long colonial legacy and its impact on Indigenous peoples. However, this conversation changed radically in late January 2022 when the so-called Freedom Convoy descended upon Ottawa to protest existing COVID-19 policies. During the occupation, several of Ottawa’s monuments were vandalized including those to Terry Fox and to fallen Canadian soldiers. Unlike previous vandalisms in Canada, the backlash against their defacement was immediate and universal. Informed by this shifting context concerning monuments, this panels queries the future and purposes of monuments through diverse methodologies: nationalism, racism, environmentalism, etc. In so doing this panel analyzes the current “monument discourse” and queries the needs and purposes of monuments.
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28 ‘My Strength, My Comfort, My Intense Delight’: Women, Art, and Lifewriting in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (in person)
Charles Reeve (OCAD University), creeve@ocadu.ca
Like her contemporary Eugène Delacroix, British watercolourist Elizabeth Murray left the ‘West’ in the early 1800s for the ‘Orient’, recording her adventures in extensive writings and images. However, while Delacroix’s journals and notebooks became widely celebrated, Murray’s account slid into obscurity—even though Delacroix’s journey lasted only six months and generated two articles, while Murray’s time in the region prompted her two-volume autobiography Sixteen Years of an Artist’s Life in Morocco, Spain, and the Canary Islands. Moreover, accounts by other women from that century—Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Elizabeth Butler—similarly languished, creating the sense that this era’s female artists neither left home nor published autobiographies. This panel aims to explode this misapprehension by convening discussions of lifewriting by women artists of the 1800s and earlier. We welcome proposals regarding all lifewriting forms (e.g. diaries, letters), with particular interest in accounts originating outside normative ‘Western’ narratives, and/or regarding now-obscure autobiographies.
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54 HECAA Open Session (online)
Christina Smylitopoulos (University of Guelph), csmylito@uoguelph.ca
HECAA works to stimulate, foster, and disseminate knowledge of all aspects of eighteenth-century visual culture. This open session welcomes papers that examine any aspect of art and visual culture from the 1680s to the 1830s. Special consideration will be given to proposals that demonstrate innovation in theoretical and/or methodological approaches.
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63 Women and the Arts in the Early Modern Period (online)
Andrea Morgan (Independent scholar), 14acm5@queensu.ca
Women have long faced challenges in pursuit of their engagement with the visual arts. While upper-class and aristocratic early modern women were often encouraged to dabble in or have some familiarity with the arts to make them amiable and polite companions, they were rarely afforded the same opportunities as their male counterparts. Yet, women such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Angelica Kauffmann excelled in their professional practice; still others persisted but remain relegated to the realm of the ‘amateur’. This panel seeks papers that highlight the life and work of both professional female artists as well as those lesser known, including women who worked in media other than painting. This session also encourages explorations of alternative ways women engaged with the art world in the early modern period, whether that be through art collecting or curating, broadly defined, and women in the commercial world who worked as art dealers or suppliers.
Call for Papers | Engraving Dance, Music, Science, and Geography
From ArtHist.net:
Engraving Dance, Music, Science, and Geography: Crafts, Trades, and the Dissemination of Knowledge in the 18th Century
INHA, Paris, 21–22 November 2022
Organized by Pauline Chevalier and Johanna Daniel
Proposals due by 1 July 2022
The expression danse gravée has long designated the dance notation practices of the 18th century, since the diffusion of the Feuillet notation from 1700. The repertoire of engraved contredanses, published and distributed in the form of collections, small notebooks or booklets, notably from the 1760s and the Répertoire des bals by de La Cuisse, is relatively well known. However, the technique itself, the networks of collaboration between engravers and dance masters remain little studied: engravers in music, in mathematics, in geography, masters in writing, are also engravers in dance, when it is not the dance masters themselves who practice intaglio. The place of women engravers, editors, and booksellers (Mme Castagnery) will be widely discussed during these days. The aim here is to understand the way in which choreographic practices in the 18th century fit into a network of printmaking know-how, professional and amateur practices, by questioning the modalities of dance engraving in a wider field of technical engraving, in geography, in science, or in music. The commissions made by dance masters to certain engravers also indicate a desire to move from a technical image to an artistic one, shaping works with sometimes very different costs and uses. Particular attention will be paid to the French and British contexts and to the circulation of plates and models from one side of the Channel to the other.
These days intend to bring together scholars from different disciplines who share the same field of research around printmaking, beyond the choreographic field. As there are very few works on printmaking in dance, these two days will also be considered as moments of collective reflection to which researchers not working specifically on choreographic practices are warmly invited.
We would indeed like to cross the experiences related to the following fields (for the 18th century):
• Dance and Music: musical scores, engraved dances, music, and movement notation
• Geography: engraving and editing of maps
• Science, mathematics: illustration of scientific books
• Writing, calligraphy: engraved books of writing patterns
• and more broadly everything related to the transmission of technical knowledge through images
• Techniques of printmaking and typography
The contributions may thus relate to one or more of the following areas (non-exhaustive):
– The techniques of engraving in geography. Several engravers in dance in the second half of the 18th century were first engravers in maps and plans. The engraving in geography responds to precise stages of production (engraving of figures, before the letter) which seem to have been taken up again for a part of the engraved dances of the 18th century. In addition to a terminology that sometimes designates the figures drawn by the ‘plans of the dance’, it will be a question of analyzing the specific relationship maintained between printmaking in geography and printmaking in dance.
– The networks of engravers in science and especially in mathematics. The development of manuals and works of physical or mathematical ‘recreation’ required the use of engravers whose expertise sometimes extended beyond technical engraving. We will try to understand the processes of specialization of certain engravers who also contributed to dance engraving, bringing with them a way of drawing and arranging the scores.
– Engravers. Dance collections from the second half of the 18th century frequently mention engravers (sometimes the engraver of the figures is not mentioned, only the engraver in writing is indicated). Contributions on the status and techniques of engraving in script are highly desirable.
– Music engraving in France and in England, and its technical evolution. The use of tin and punches for engraving in music seems to have inspired technical evolutions in dance engraving. It may be useful to revisit this English innovation of the 1730s in order to understand how the techniques (and costs) of choreographic printmaking benefited from the expertise of musical printmaking.
– Preparatory drawings. Very few preparatory drawings for engraved scores have been preserved, for many reasons. However, the collaboration between dance masters and engravers may have necessitated the transmission of drawings for the ‘traits’ of the dance when a distinction is regularly made between the author of the dance, the author of the notation and the engraver. Working from other examples, outside of the choreographic field, we would like to examine the intermediate sources and materials for the creation of technical prints.
– The networks of collaborations between actors. The sheets of engraved dances are the fruit of collaborations of a quite important number of actors (master of dance and musicians, amateur and professional dancers, engravers specialized in writing or in music printmaking), publishers, printers, and merchants-bookshops. Some publishing companies are the subject of a company creation. Contributions highlighting the networks of collaborations mobilized for the production of scientific works, musical collections or geographical maps are particularly welcome.
– The amateur practices of engraving and the training of engravers. The analysis of dance scores from the 1770s and, for example, the collections of contredanses published by Bouin attest to the technical progress of Mlle Bouin, the publisher’s daughter, whose first creations proved to be very clumsy. Some dance masters, like Landrin or Rameau, ensure themselves the execution of the engravings of their works, without being professional engravers. The analysis of the biographical paths and of the modalities of learning engraving also allows us to shed light on the exponential development of a publishing enterprise that required the rapid publication (sometimes weekly) of scores.
– The place of women printmakers. If we know relatively well the important feminization of engraving practices in music, the more general share of women in the printmaking world, in France and in England, is the subject of very recent works questioning both the training networks and the mechanisms of emancipation according to family contexts. The case of female printmakers shows quite different biographical paths: daughters, wives or widows of printmakers and/or publishers, they can also have an independent activity, emancipated from the family framework. Particular attention will be paid to this particular place of women in fine and technical printmaking.
– The status of the print and the relationship to the printer-bookkeepers. The full use of copperplate printing for the publication of an edition of Raoul-Auger Feuillet’s Chorégraphie, taken up by Malpied, for example, seems to bypass the corporation of printer-booksellers by proposing works that do not use the letterpress. The cost and technical difficulties of such undertakings (numerous pages of text directly engraved on copperplate), question the motivations of the authors, the bypassing of publishing practices and auctoriality.
– The phenomena of series in the publishing and engraved cartography. In the second half of the 18th century, dance engraving developed through the publication of single scores, gathered in collections and volumes, with tables sold independently, bound series and is a phenomenon that is not specific to the choreographic field. The cheap publication of series and collections of prints outside of choreographic scores will be analyzed through specific examples (booksellers, publishers…)
– The use of renowned engravers and the production of fine images. The publication of Kellom Tomlinson’s The Art of Dancing in 1735, or Guillaume’s Almanach dansant in 1769, reveals practices that go beyond technical printmaking by using renowned engravers and sometimes by assuming the production of images whose aesthetic quality exceeds their didactic virtues. This practice thus makes it possible to shed light on the editorial (and even financial) stakes of such publications.
Proposals for papers, not exceeding one page, followed by a brief bio-bibliographic presentation, should be sent before 1 July 2022 to the following email addresses: pauline.chevalier@inha.fr and johanna.daniel@inha.fr. For accepted proposals, travel, and accommodation expenses will be covered by INHA.
Organization
Pauline Chevalier (INHA) Johanna Daniel (INHA)
Scientific Committee
• Ilaria Andreoli (INHA)
• Mathias Auclair (BnF)
• Laurent Barré (CND)
• Pascale Cugy (University of Rennes 2)
• Marie Glon (University of Lille)
• Joël Huthwohl (BnF)
• Sandrine Nugue (ENSBA Lyon)
• Juliette Robain (INHA)
• Laurent Sebillotte (CND)
This conference is part of a wider research program on dance drawings and notations — Chorégraphies: Écriture et dessin, signe et image dans les processus de création et de transmission chorégraphiques, XVe–XXIe siècles
Indicative Bibliography
BOUCHON, Marie-Françoise, “La Contredanse comme jeu social au XVIIIe siècle”, Analyse musicale, n°69, 4e trimestre 2012, p. 80–86.
CLAYTON Tim, COOK Karen Severud, and KRETSCHMER Ingrid, “Reproduction of Maps,” in Matthew H. Edney and Mary Sponberg Pedley (eds.), Cartography in the European Enlightenment , 4, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, coll. “The history of cartography,” 2020, vol. 2/2, p. 1238–1265.
DEVRIES-LESURE, Annik, Dictionnaire des éditeurs de musique français, vol.1 : Des origines à environ 1820, Geneva, Minkoff, 1979.
DEVRIES-LESURE, Annik, L’édition musicale dans la presse Parisienne au XVIIIe siècle, catalog des annonces, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2005.
FAU, Elisabeth, La gravure de musique à Paris, des origines à la Révolution (1660–1789), Paris, Ecole des Chartes, 1978.
GLON, Marie, “Inventing a Scriptural Technique in the Eighteenth Century: ‘Choreography or the Art of Describing Dance’,” Artefact [Online], 4 | 2016, online 7 July 2017.
GLON, Marie, Les Lumières chorégraphiques. Les maîtres de danse européens au cœur d’un phénomène éditorial (1700–1760), history thesis, ed. Georges Vigarello, EHESS, 2014.
GLON, Marie. “The materiality of theory. Print practices and the construction of meaning through Kellom Tomlinson’s The Art of Dancing Explain’d (1735). Re-thinking practice and theory, Jun 2007, Pantin, France. pp. 190–195.
GRANGER, Sylvie, Dancing in Enlightenment France, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2019.
GUILCHER, Jean-Michel, La Contredanse et les renouvellements de la danse française, Paris / La Haye, Mouton, 1969, republished under the title La Contredanse, Un Tournant dans l’histoire française de la danse, text corrected and completed by Naïk Raviart, preface by Yves Guilcher, Brussels, Complexe / CND, 2003.
LANCELOT, Francine (dir.), La Belle Dance, Catalogue raisonné des chorégraphies françaises en notation Feuillet fait en l’an 1995, Paris, Van Dieren, 1996.
MILLIOT, Sylvette, “Marie-Anne Castagneri. marchand de musique au XVIIIe siècle (1722–1787)”, Revue de Musicologie, vol. 52, no 2, 1966, p. 185–195. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/927569
NORDERA, Marina, “La réduction de la danse en art (XVe–XVIIIe siècle)”, in Hélène Vérin and Pascal Dubourg Glatigny (dir.), Réduire en art : La technologie de la Renaissance aux Lumières, Paris, Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, coll. ” Hors collection “, 2018, p. 269–291. Online: http://books.openedition.org/editionsmsh/10161
Pedley Mary Sponberg, “The map trade in Paris, 1650–1825,” Imago Mundi, vol. 33, no 1, January 1981, p. 33–45. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/03085698108592513
Pedley Mary Sponberg, The commerce of cartography: making and marketing maps in eighteenth-century France and England, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, series “The Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr. lectures in the history of cartography,” 2005, vol. 1/.
SMITH, Marc, “Les modèles d’apprentissage de l’écriture en France depuis la Renaissance”, Apprendre, 2020, p. 167–179.
STEIN Perrin (ed.), Artists and amateurs: etching in eighteenth-century France, New York, MET, 2013. Online: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/The_Art_of_Etching_in_Eighteenth_Century_France
Call for Articles | Fall 2023 Issue of J18: Cold
Victor Marie Picot, after Philippe de Loutherbourg, Winter, 1784, stipple and etching
(London: The British Museum)
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From the Call for Proposals for J18:
Journal18, Issue #16 (Fall 2023) — Cold
Issue edited by Michael Yonan, University of California, Davis
Proposals due by 15 September 2022; finished articles will be due by 31 March 2023
Feeling cool is increasingly a great privilege in our warming world. Cold weather arrives later each winter and departs sooner, lengthening warm seasons across the globe and reducing the cooler periods necessary to the planet’s healthy functioning. One need not be terribly old to have recollections of cooler times. Accompanying changes to global mean temperatures are erratic and often dangerous weather patterns, melting icecaps, rising seas, stronger storms, droughts, and other environmental transformations that, in sum, represent an existential problem for humankind.
The cause of these changes is the consumption of fossil fuels, which transformed human life profoundly in the pursuit of modernity. The origin of this transformation falls squarely in the eighteenth century; indeed the terminus post quem for measuring human effects on global temperatures is the year 1800. Recognizing this draws attention to a truth little noticed in art-historical scholarship: eighteenth-century art was made for a colder world than the one we now inhabit.
This special issue of Journal18 invites contributions that address the relationship between temperature and the art of the long eighteenth century. It seeks to insert eighteenth-century visual and material culture into the growing literature on historical climatology. The 1700s are the final century of the Little Ice Age, a climatological phenomenon characterized by lower global mean temperatures that took place between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What are the implications of this climatological context for the narratives we tell about eighteenth-century art? How did an Enlightenment understanding of temperature inflect the period’s art? And do the conditions of eighteenth-century life, as filtered through the period’s artistic production, help us understand why the world became warmer?
Potential topics include the relationship between architecture and temperature, including the technologies used to keep buildings warm or cool; the material culture of gauging temperature (thermometers, barometers, hygrometers, etc.); pictorial representations of extreme climates, e.g., the tropics or the Arctic; the relationship between theories of climate and the representation of peoples; clothing and body temperature; the sub-Arctic north as a cultural space; and the visualization of industrialization. Particularly welcome are essays from a technical art history perspective that address challenges to conserving eighteenth-century things in a warming world.
To submit a proposal, send an abstract (250 words) and brief biography by 15 September 2022 to the following two addresses: editor@journal18.org and meyonan@ucdavis.edu. Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes) and will be due by 31 March 2023 for publication later that year. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.
Call for Articles | William Hogarth and Cinema
Paul Sandby, Satire with Hogarth as a Magic Lantern Projecting a Parody of his ‘Paul before Felix’, 1753, etching
(London: British Museum, Cc,3.12)
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From the Call for Papers:
William Hogarth and Cinema
Special issue of Ecrans (Spring 2024), edited by Marie Gueden and Pierre Von-Ow
Abstracts due by 5 September 2022; drafts due by 30 March 2023
According to Sergei Eisenstein, “Diderot talked about cinema.” It could likewise be suggested that the eighteenth-century artist William Hogarth (1697–1764) inaugurated cinematic discourse. Through his visual and theoretical work, Hogarth offers a crucial contribution to the narrative and aesthetic reflections that predate—and somehow anticipate—the invention of cinema. Eisenstein did indeed comment upon and commend Hogarth’s visual productions (praising in particular his stage-like compositions and visual narratives articulated in sequences of images). The Russian filmmaker admired his English predecessor’s artistic theory, preoccupied with the movement of bodies and gazes: Eisenstein appropriated the idea of a “line of beauty” developed in Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty in his directing and editing. Yet, the filmic potentialities of Hogarth’s work and ideas still await extended critical and scholarly attention. The artist’s name appears sporadically in film studies that mention his influence for set designs—especially in Hollywood where Fritz Lang, Mark Robson, and Stanley Kubrick, among others, drew from Hogarth’s works to stage their historical films—and on the legacy of his artistic writings in film theory and criticism. The abundant art historical literature devoted to Hogarth, however, rarely evokes the artist’s cinematographic legacy. A special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Ecrans (No. 20, Spring 2024), to be published in French and English, seeks to explore the largely understudied connections between William Hogarth and global and expanded cinema.
We invite papers on topics that may include (but are not limited to):
• Pre-cinema, with particular emphasis on magic lanterns and early cinema, for example, filmed tableaux vivants
• William Hogarth in Hollywood, especially in the studios’ archives
• The temporality of images and sequencing of visual narratives
• Graphic novels, illustrated journals, and cartoons
• Adaptations of literary ‘Progresses’ between prints, paintings, theatre, performance, film, TV series, etc.
• Case studies from global cinema, including art documentaries
• Experimental cinema, particularly the challenging of narrative linearity
• The legacy of Hogarth’s satirical work in comedy, including productions featuring Hogarth as a character of fiction
• The legacy of Hogarth’s artistic theory and his “line of beauty” in film theory (for example through various visual shorthand systems) and criticism
• Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial currents in the reception of Hogarth’s work
Please submit a proposal by 5 September 2022 in English or French (up to 400 words), as well as a short bio, to the guest editors of this special issue: Marie Gueden (marie.gueden@univ-lyon2.fr) and Pierre Von-Ow (pierre.von-ow@yale.edu). Final papers should not exceed 8000 words. First drafts expected on 30 March 2023 for publication in April 2024. Feel free to contact us if any questions should arise before submitting your proposal. More information about Ecrans is available here.
Call for Papers | Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear
From ArtHist.net:
Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 13–14 October 2022
Proposals due by 19 June 2022
The exhibition Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear (V&A, 19 March — 6 November 2022) serves as a catalyst for a two-day symposium exploring how masculinity has been fashioned and refashioned from Renaissance Europe to the global contemporary.
The symposium—organised by the V&A Research Institute in collaboration with the Centre for Fashion Curation and the Masculinities Research Hub at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London— invites scholars, curators, and practitioners from the fields of fashion, art history, performance, material culture, and gender studies to propose papers that respond to the themes and key concepts addressed in the exhibition. We welcome proposals from researchers at all stages of their career and practitioners engaging with the themes expressed in the call. Proposals comprising a 250-word abstract and 150-word biography should be sent to m.franceschini@vam.ac.uk by 19th June 2022.
Call for Papers | Early Modern Women on Politics and Ethics
From ArtHist.net:
Early Modern Women on Politics and Ethics
University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 5–7 October 2023
Proposal due by 1 February 2023
In Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, Aristotle conceived ethics and politics to be both interrelated and exclusively male endeavors. This notion continued to be influential in the early modern period (c. 1500–1800). Yet in recent decades, feminist scholarship has showed that throughout the early modern world numerous women nonetheless discussed, developed, and challenged politics and ethics in profound and often surprising ways.
The conference Early Modern Women on Politics and Ethics is organized by the Early Modern Seminar and the research network Philosophy in Other Words, at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. It is dedicated to early modern women’s engagement with politics and ethics as philosophers, authors, critics, translators, editors, artists, patrons, salonnières, pamphleteers, political agents, letter writers, etcetera. Multidisciplinary in scope, the conference will bring together scholars working in various scientific fields. We especially welcome contributions that concern underexplored geographical contexts, languages, and traditions.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to
• Marginalized voices in politics and ethics
• Genres of political and ethical writing
• Representations of political and moral authority
• Subversive political and ethical thought
• Global perspectives on politics and ethics
• Public and private agency
• Material aspects of politics and ethics
• Reception and circulation of political and ethical thought
• Ethics and politics of sexuality
• Politics and ethics in religious contexts
Confirmed Keynotes
• Unn Falkeid, University of Oslo
• Carin Franzén, Stockholm University
• Dena Goodman, University of Michigan
• Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin, Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University
• Melissa E. Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania
To submit, please send a 300-word proposal for a 20-minute paper and a brief biographical note to earlymodern@lir.gu.se by 1 February 2023. Notice of acceptance will be given by 1 March 2023.
Organizing Committee
Maria Johansen, Cecilia Rosengren, Matilda Amundsen Bergström, Alexandra Herlitz, Philip Lavender
Call for Articles | Thresholds 51: Heat
From Thresholds:
Thresholds 51: Heat
Edited by Hampton Smith and Zachariah DeGiulio
Submissions are due by 1 June 2022
Thresholds is the annual peer-reviewed journal produced by the MIT Department of Architecture, held in over 150 university art & architecture libraries around the world. Content features leading scholars and practitioners from the fields of architecture, art, and culture.
Heat is elusive: always on the move, always fugitive. Though we have many signs of its presence—sweating, ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media, sitting under the shade, catching fire—heat itself largely evades conventional forms of representation. As the transference of energy from one system to another, heat radiates and penetrates. Immanent and intense, heat binds and nourishes as much as it reshapes or destroys. While helping us navigate the material world as tool, medium, and affect, heat forces us to come to terms with the fragility of the systems in which we take part. And though temperature is regularly mapped across graphs and thermometers, the feeling of heat is often so localized and so personal that it evades historic perception altogether. Even if we know things are hotter now than they were yesterday, where is heat within art and architecture practice?
Thresholds 51: Heat takes enthalpy—the thermodynamic property that comprises heat, pressure, and volume to effect chemical state change—as its guiding principle. We seek scholarly writing, artistic interventions, and criticism from art, architecture, and related fields to apply pressure within the volume to effect disciplinary state change. We aim to discover the ways art and architecture have historically navigated, wielded, and avoided heat.
Courtyard buildings across the Islamic world produce thermal delight; Mande blacksmiths carefully wield heat to make iron tools for repairing and nourishing communities; museum conservators curate temperature-controlled environments for artworks; Yurok practices of fire stewardship regulate natural rhythms of growth and decay. And though thermodynamic flux underlies such practices of making and maintenance, heat just as frequently effaces or prevents knowledge production—think of the conflagration of the University of Cape Town’s special collections or mold consuming boxes of archival material.
Recognizing that heat has never been evenly felt, from the violently racialized fictions of the ‘torrid zone’ to the lack of adequate shade in urban communities, we are particularly invested in alternative architectural or aesthetic mobilizations of heat—in the contestation of thermal violence, in the activation of ritual, or in the warmth of community, desire, and lust. A critical account of heat within art and architecture must attend to its use as a medium and structure of violence, while nevertheless exploring how ‘feeling the heat’ productively links scales of being, practices, and types of labor.
Please send all submissions to the editors via email at thresh@mit.edu with the subject heading THAT’S HOT. Essay submissions should be in English, approximately 3000 words, and formatted in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style. Submission should include a brief cover letter, contact information, and bio of 50–75 words for each author. Text should be submitted in MS Word. Images should be submitted at 72 dpi as uncompressed TIFF files. Other creative proposals, including, but certainly not limited to, performances, poetry, and film are not limited in size or medium. All scholarly submissions are subject to peer review.
Call for Papers | Shipwrecks in Art, History, and Archaeology
From ArtHist.net:
Resurfacing: Shipwrecks in Art, History, and Archaeology
The Warburg Institute, The Royal Museums Greenwich, London, 11–12 November 2022
Proposals due by 27 May 2022
Organized by Caspar Pearson, Johannes von Müller, Andrew Choong Han Lin, and Imogen Tedbury
Every sea voyage entails the possibility of disaster. This makes the motif of the shipwreck a highly significant symbol, to which its popularity as an artistic subject in the early modern period attests. Today, the potential symbolism of a shipwreck and its contents remains key to marine archaeology. Since Plato, the ship can act as a metaphor for a state and consequently a state can also invest itself into its ships—and its shipwrecks. Examples like the Mary Rose (1545) or the Titanic (1912) demonstrate how these structures can, in the public imagination, become era-defining symbols of certain technological or social achievements. Archaeology can reveal wondrous relics of a wreck’s active life, a snapshot of the past frozen in the moment of the vessel’s abrupt end.
The shipwreck, already a versatile metaphor, can therefore also serve as a figure for history itself. In his architectural treatise, Alberti, who dabbled in nautical archaeology when he attempted to raise an ancient ship from the bed Lake Nemi, discusses Vitruvius as one of the few survivors of a shipwrecked antiquity. In turn, Winckelmann likens the ruins of classical artworks to the fragments of a ship that can never be seen in its entirety. In these two key moments in the history of art history, the figure of the ship signifies the suspension of time, and the shipwreck, in consequence, marks the end of an era. Perhaps it is for this reason that Jacob Burckhardt would eventually conceive of the scholar drifting upon vast seas of past and present turmoil.
As the horizons of art history have expanded beyond their former Eurocentric focus, increasing interest in processes of exchange, trade and migration have also led to the discovery of sunken treasures that are now claimed as objects of study. In this context, the shipwreck may eventually reveal itself as a guiding principle for art history written on the fragmented grounds of surviving data. This conviction, however, demands to take into account the systemic suppression of marginalised histories, gradually resurfacing and challenging scholars to review their standpoint.
Considerations like these spark a variety of questions. What meaning does the figure of the shipwreck hold for art history, archaeology and related disciplines? Are the vessels lost at sea merely shattered cabinets of forgotten wonders that are now resurfacing? Or does the interest in them which art historians and archaeologists share with maritime historians, literary scholars and artists hold the potential to recalibrate an understanding of the knowledge produced in confrontation with material objects of both past and diverse aesthetics? And how do questions such as these resonate in a moment in which the dangers of the voyage by sea are very real and not metaphorical at all for hundreds of thousands who desperately try to cross the bodies of water separating the Global South from the Global North?
This two-day conference, held on 11 and 12 November 2022 in London at the Warburg Institute and the Royal Museums Greenwich, invites scholars from a variety of fields—art history, archaeology, history of ideas, literary studies, and others—in order to discuss the following topics and more:
a) material and epistemic cultures of shipwrecks
b) the shipwreck as a subject in the arts of the past and the present alike
c) the shipwreck as a metaphor as which it runs through histories of both literature and scholarship
d) the shipwreck as a potential paradigm for an expansion of subject areas in art history, archaeology and related fields.
Please send a proposal of 300 words max. together with a short CV to caspar.pearson@warburg.sas.ac.uk by 27 May 2022.
Organisers
Dr Caspar Pearson (The Warburg Institute), Dr Johannes von Müller (Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel), Andrew Choong Han Lin, and Dr Imogen Tedbury (The Royal Museums Greenwich)
Call for Papers | The Science of Taste in the 18th Century
From Fabula.org (which also includes the accompanying bibliography) . . .
La Science du Goût au XVIIIe Siècle
Special issue of Revue Internationale d’étude du dix-huitième siècle (RIEDS), edited by Guilhem Armand and Emmanuelle Sempère
Proposals due by 1 June 2022; completed essays due by 1 November 2022
« Ce sens, ce don de discerner nos aliments, a produit dans toutes les langues connues, la métaphore qui exprime par le mot goût, le sentiment des beautés et des défauts dans tous les arts »
–Voltaire, « Goût (Gramm. Litterat. & Philos.) », Encyclopédie, vol. VII (1757).
« Une espèce de toucher plus fin, plus subtil »
–Jaucourt, « Goût (Physiolog.) », Ibid.
Ce siècle, qui est celui de l’Encyclopédie, qui, en quelque sorte, s’ouvre avec l’ennoblissement de la science par Fontenelle qui parvient dans le même temps à en faire un objet de plaisir, et se clôt avec La Physiologie du goût, n’est-il pas celui où tente de s’élaborer une véritable science du goût ?
Le 18e siècle – ou, plus largement, le grand âge classique – est en effet la grande période de théorisation du goût, mais la labilité du terme rend en même temps la notion rétive à toute tentative de définition stricte. Pourquoi désigner de l’un des cinq sens ce qui flatte l’oreille (un air), charme la vue (un tableau), plaît à l’esprit ou au cœur ? Pourquoi même désigner d’un sens corporel ce qui stimule l’esprit ou heurte les règles sociales ? Enfin, pourquoi parmi ces cinq sens choisir l’un des moins « nobles », et peut-être le moins attendu (et non pas l’odorat, l’expression « avoir le nez fin » étant attestée depuis au moins 1694) ? Car il convient de noter que les choses de la table et tout ce qui s’y rapporte relèvent du péché de gourmandise dont, rappellent médecins et théologiens de l’époque, on est puni par l’indisposition ou la maladie. Or, il n’est peut-être pas indifférent que cette association entre un sens et un jugement se cristallise à une époque où la gourmandise commence à être réhabilitée, où la gastronomie naît et acquiert progressivement ses lettres de noblesse, tandis que les belles lettres deviennent littérature. Au même moment, un domaine du savoir se dégage au croisement des disciplines artistiques et de la philosophie : l’esthétique. Le goût, ce serait donc ce terme qui permet d’évoquer à la fois une sensation, une émotion et un jugement, une intuition et une théorie.
Durant cette même période, ce que l’on appelle le goût français se répand dans toute l’Europe et même au-delà, pour devenir durablement synonyme du bon goût. La notion revient sans cesse, pour définir une convenance sociale dans les apparences, caractériser une posture, un langage, une réussite ou un échec littéraire, théâtral, artistique, mais aussi tout simplement pour désigner la saveur d’un mets. Le goût cristallise aussi des enjeux politiques et entretient des liens forts avec les notions d’esprit des nations et de génie : c’est peut-être ce qui explique l’intérêt grandissant des Lumières pour ce concept difficile, cousin du je-ne-sais-quoi, et la multiplication des tentatives de définition qu’il suscite, voire des querelles, au moment même où s’élabore la science esthétique, où le mot et l’idée d’original changent de statut, où la notion d’expérience humaine s’individualise. La question du goût se pose de façon d’autant plus intéressante que la littérature fait une place de plus en plus grande à une vie psychique clairement ancrée dans la vie physique. Cette science du goût qui s’élabore se situe ainsi au cœur du partage des savoirs qui caractérise le 18e siècle : au confluent de différents domaines, elle s’en enrichit, non sans éviter le risque d’une certaine confusion.
La question du goût au 18e siècle a fait principalement l’objet de deux types d’approche, résonnant avec l’analogie étudiée dans l’article du même nom dans l’Encyclopédie de Diderot et D’Alembert : le goût comme sens physique, renvoyant à la gourmandise, et le goût en lien avec l’esthétique au moment où cette science émerge. Les travaux de Jean-Claude Bonnet – du numéro 15 de DHS à son ouvrage La Gourmandise et la faim, 2015 – ainsi que ceux de Béatrice Fink, et d’historiens comme Philippe Meyzie (Lumières n° 11 « La Gourmandise entre péché et plaisir ») ont enrichi et affiné notre connaissance de la réhabilitation du péché de gourmandise, de la transformation des arts culinaires en ce qui s’appellera bientôt la gastronomie (1801), des débats techniques, médicaux et philosophiques. Si quelques travaux comme ceux de Frédéric Charbonneau (L’École de la gourmandise, 2008) font le lien entre esthétique – et en particulier littérature – et gourmandise, les deux domaines restent le plus souvent distincts. Cependant, les positions et postures des auteurs du 18e siècle en matière de morale et d’esthétique sont de plus en plus interrogées aujourd’hui sous l’angle d’une sensibilité concrète, voire d’une physiologie. Depuis les travaux d’Alain Corbin, les « cultures sensibles » sont devenues un objet historique et plus généralement l’anthropologie sensorielle très active outre-Atlantique depuis les travaux de Howes et de Classen trouve un assez large écho dans l’ensemble des sciences humaines. Ces approches sont d’autant plus pertinentes pour le goût qu’il engage une sensorialité dite « basse » en dépit des opérations de symbolisation dont il fait l’objet – l’homologie avec le jugement de valeur en est une. Force est en effet de constater que si le goût participe, tout comme la vue, des deux ordres de la sensibilité que constituent la morale et la sensation, il conduit bien davantage, ou plus directement, dans les ressacs de la sensation et de ses ressorts physiologiques. Serait-ce à dire que le « goût » le plus « sublime » relèverait de ce qu’il y a de plus matériel en nous[1] ? On pourrait en prendre pour preuve les coups de boutoir dont le Neveu attaque l’édifice du bon goût et qui bouleversent l’ordre moral et esthétique du Philosophe de la Satire seconde. Lequel confesse une forme de dégoût : « Je commençais à supporter avec peine la présence d’un homme qui discutait une action horrible, un exécrable forfait, comme un connaisseur en peinture ou en poésie examine les beautés d’un ouvrage de goût[2] ». Celui qui mange mal (ou peu, ou trop) et celui qui mange bien (à satiété, en bonne compagnie, avec mesure et choix) dessinent ainsi les contours de goûts concurrents, qui questionnent et mettent à mal les idéaux de sociabilité et d’universalité.
Le goût s’envisage avec profit par son envers, ou son dessous, qu’il s’agisse du “mauvais goût” ou du “dégoût”. Le premier a été envisagé par Jennifer Tsien relativement à l’esthétique du 18ème siècle (Le Mauvais goût des autres, 2017) et par Carine Barbafieri et Jean-Christophe Abramovici sous un angle résolument transversal (L’Invention du mauvais goût à l’âge classique, 2013). Le second a fait l’objet d’une journée d’étude en mai 2019 à l’Université d’Aix Marseille (« Le Dégoût : vécu, perception, représentations et histoire »).
C’est à la fois dans la lignée de ces travaux récents ou plus anciens, et dans une perspective renouvelée, que se situe cet appel. La richesse et la diversification des travaux sur le goût dans ces dernières décennies montrent à quel point les enjeux du goût débordent les questions purement esthétiques ou idéologiques. Cet appel à communication voudrait donc envisager la catégorie du goût non plus seulement dans ses fonctions normatives ou axiologiques, ou dans ses dimensions sociologiques ou esthétiques, mais aussi en tant que catégorie épistémique et scientifique. Il s’agira d’interroger la notion de “goût” au 18e dans le champ des savoirs, pour mieux comprendre les enjeux heuristiques et méthodologiques que les philosophes, écrivains, artistes, savants et amateurs ont voulu lui prêter.
Ce dossier de RIEDS s’intéressera donc au goût sous toutes les formes et dans tous les sens que lui donne le XVIIIe siècle, mais en mettant en particulier l’accent sur le lien entre les deux termes de la métaphore, les deux sens du goût, et en postulant que ce lien n’est pas seulement de l’ordre de l’histoire esthétique ou des mentalités. La labilité des notions de bon et de mauvais goût, l’empirisme qui préside au choix du terme goût pour parler de préférence esthétique et, parallèlement, l’ambiguïté qui caractérise la gastronomie encore naissante et pas encore ainsi nommée doivent avoir partie liée. C’est pourquoi nous envisageons l’angle de la science du goût, qui permet de s’intéresser au lien qu’opère cette notion entre l’intuitif et le rationnel : le goût apparaît en effet comme un point de jonction important entre une appréhension concrète – induite par le sens premier – et une signification plus abstraite, en quelque sorte à l’image de ce lien permanent entre arts et théories, fiction et savoir, qui est au cœur des écrits des Lumières. Le goût, devenu objet d’un discours savant, cristallise en effet les différends philosophiques de toute farine. Prise entre les feux du rationalisme et de la subjectivité, de la physiologie et de la morale, la science du goût ne risque-t-elle pas la contradiction ? Et ne cristalliserait-elle pas ainsi une « révolution morale » (au sens de K.A. Appiah[3]) ?
Si Kant ou Burke ont tenté de revisiter l’idée que l’esthétique pourrait se passer d’un rapport direct et sensitif, voire sensuel, aux objets, n’est-ce pas qu’il y avait bien, chez tant d’autres théoriciens, notamment les Encyclopédistes (Diderot et Jaucourt, en particulier), en partant de la physiologie, un matérialisme sourd travaillant cet ennoblissement du sens ? Mais le point de départ physiologiste n’est pas nécessairement matérialiste et peut abonder d’autres théories, comme celles du médecin et écrivain Tiphaigne de La Roche, qui tenta une solution hybride (sinon incertaine, voire confuse) de matérialisme spiritualiste.
En forçant le trait, un hiatus se dessine entre une conception subjectiviste du goût, sur lequel elle fait peser un risque d’obscurité, d’illégitimité, de solipsisme, et une conception sensitive et physiologique qui voudrait gommer la labilité du jugement de goût dans une perspective positive et scientifique. À cette aune doublement complexe, les goûts et les dégoûts des savants, des artistes et des écrivains de la période, ne nous parlent plus seulement de leur sensibilité, mais peuvent informer une histoire émotionnelle des mentalités, qui pourra s’appuyer sur les travaux de Françoise Waquet[4]. Aussi, l’examen de l’hypothèse d’une science du goût en construction au fil du siècle pourra-t-il se doubler d’une réflexion sur le savoir que nous construisons nous-mêmes sur le goût que les hommes et les femmes des Lumières ont manifesté, sans le théoriser, mais en l’expérimentant sans relâche et de multiples façons, pour une science mêlée, dont on rappellera qu’elle ne s’inféode pas à l’objectivité moderne.
Les contributions (en histoire des idées, histoire et théories de l’art, littérature, histoire culturelle) pourront aborder les axes suivants :
Les savoirs sur le goût: la critique a déjà défriché toute cette littérature autour de la gourmandise et du goût au sens physiologique, ainsi que les nombreux textes théoriques tels que les préfaces de manuels culinaires (J.-C. Bonnet, B. Fink), les ouvrages de médecine, les traités savants sur l’agronomie (on pense évidemment à Parmentier), et les correspondances d’auteurs qui révèlent goûts et dégoûts, excès et régimes. Si on prolonge l’enquête, ces textes peuvent-ils se lire comme le lieu où se pense le passage du sens matériel à sa symbolisation, où s’interroge le lien entre la perception subjective du goût et le défi théorique tendant à une forme d’universalisme ? Que nous disent, par exemple, les plaisirs d’Émilie du Châtelet ou les raffinements libertins du rapport entre l’individuel et le politique ?
Matérialité du goût et sensualisme. Comment s’articulent les théories du goût (dans tous les sens) et le sensualisme des Lumières ? Qu’impliquent les bouleversements épistémiques touchant la sensation sur la définition du jugement de goût ? Le goût peut-il relever de la pure matière ? Un savoir abstrait peut-il se passer d’un rapport direct, sensitif, voire sensuel aux objets ? Du côté de l’esthétique, il s’agira de s’intéresser à ce glissement du je-ne-sais-quoi à l’originalité, à ce moment où le goût déborde les règles de la Technè. On pourra s’intéresser aux arts d’agrément, aux querelles esthétiques, à la question de la permanence ou de l’universalité du grand goût par rapport aux théories relativistes, ainsi qu’aux questionnements sur la postérité.
Les goûteurs et les dégoûtants : sociologie et anthropologie du goût. À cette époque où se redéfinit le sublime, où l’association du beau et du bien se trouve remise en question, où les frontières du bon et du mauvais goût semblent mouvantes, c’est aussi fondamentalement le rapport du goût à la morale qui se trouve questionné, dans un siècle qui désire certes détacher la science et la philosophie d’un certain nombre de préoccupations théologiques, mais pour y fonder une éthique. Comment redéfinir le goût dans la perspective éthique des Lumières, qui s’affronte aux valeurs humanistes, aux aspirations de l’individualité et de l’harmonie sociale, à l’idée du génie des nations, aux acquis du relativisme et de l’universalisme ?
Modalités de soumission
Les propositions d’article sont à envoyer avant le 1er juin 2022, sous la forme d’un résumé ne dépassant pas 500 mots, en français ou en anglais, accompagné d’une brève notice bio-bibliographique, aux deux adresses suivantes : guilhem.armand@univ-reunion.fr et sempere@unistra.fr. Après accord du comité scientifique, les propositions retenues seront attendues pour le 1er novembre 2022. Les articles feront entre 30.000 et 45.000 caractères espaces comprises et pourront conformément aux normes de la revue être rédigés en français ou en anglais ; ils seront accompagnés d’un résumé en 500 caractères maximum, espaces comprises, et d’une biobibliographie des auteurs en 300 caractères espaces comprises.
Call for Papers | Images & Institutions, Early Modern Scientific Societies
From ArtHist.net:
Images and Institutions: The Visual Culture of Early Modern Scientific Societies
Accademia dei Lincei, Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR), and the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, 14–16 September 2022
Organized by Katherine Reinhart and Matthijs Jonker
Proposals due by 15 May 2022
One of the most important developments in early modern science was the foundation of institutions for collaborative research and the publication of knowledge, such as the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome (1603), the Accademia del Cimento in Florence (1657), the Royal Society in London (1660), the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris (1666), and the Scientific Academy of St Petersburg (1725). The communication of knowledge was integral to early modern processes of knowledge production in these new sites of collaborative science. Within these institutions, knowledge was not only acquired and disseminated orally and textually, but also visually. From drawings which circulated in society meetings to the printed plates in their published books, images across all media were vital to the developing practices of early modern science.
A growing body of scholarship has convincingly shown the importance of images and image-making practices to early modern knowledge production. Scholars have shown, for instance, that early modern botanists, zoologists, and physicians used drawings and prints as visual narratives to prove an argument or the existence of a species, as substitutes for the objects described, as mnemonic aids, or as tools themselves (Dackerman, Daston, Kusukawa). Research has also been done showing the important relationships between artists, natural philosophers and their collections (Baldriga, Egmond, Tongiorgi Tomasi). However, these studies have focused on single institutions or individual practitioners, and we still lack a comprehensive and comparative understanding of the relationships between visual culture and the developing practices of collaborative science.
Therefore, this project, Images and Institutions, seeks to fill that gap by bringing together an international team of historians of art and science for a three-day symposium in Rome to gain a larger picture of these relationships. Within these early institutions, images functioned in diverse ways: they communicated new ideas, recorded new phenomena, demonstrated new instruments, and stood in for missing specimens. They expressed theories, clarified arguments, organized concepts, and persuaded colleagues. Some images were created from nature or ad vivum, while others portrayed scientific ideas allegorically. In bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, this symposium will reevaluate the functions of images and image-making practices that were integral to the advancement of early modern science within its formative institutions. The symposium contributes to widening disciplinary boundaries by bringing scholars from different fields into conversation and by having a wide geographical perspective.
We are interested in how images and image-making practices contributed to the collective and collaborative production and dissemination of knowledge in scientific institutions from the 16th until the 18th century. Central questions for this symposium include: What common visual practices were shared among these institutions, and importantly, where did they diverge? How did differing national artistic contexts impact the visual culture of scientific institutions? And how did these relationships shift over time with new enlightenment societies founded in the 18th century? By comparing these institutions, this symposium will explore the ways in which images and image-making practices were integral to the advancement of early modern collaborative science.
The symposium will consist of 30-minute papers, which will be the basis for a published edited volume. The symposium will take place on 14–16 September 2022 in Rome, and some travel and lodging assistance is available. Scholars of art history, visual studies, and history of science and knowledge from all career phases are encouraged to apply. We welcome abstracts which explore visual strategies in early modern collaborative science, particularly in the context of Spain, Germany, Eastern Europe, as well as non-European regions.
To apply, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a brief (2-page) CV to secretary@knir.it with the subject line: ‘Images and Institutions’. The deadline for abstracts is 15 May 2022. Applicants will be notified in early June. For queries, please contact Katherine Reinhart (kmreinhart@wisc.edu) or Matthijs Jonker (m.jonker@knir.it).
Scientific Committee
Irene Baldriga (Sapienza, Università di Roma), Sietske Fransen (Bibliotheca Hertziana), Matthijs Jonker (KNIR), and Katherine Reinhart (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
This symposium is made possible with support from the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR), Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, the Accademia dei Lincei (IT), the Association for Art History (UK), the Society for Renaissance Studies (UK), and The Huizinga Institute RNW History and Philosophy of Science (NL).
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