Enfilade

From ArtHist.net (which also includes the French version). . .

About Time: Temporality in American Art and Visual Culture
Université de Paris, 4–5 November 2021

Organized by Hélène Valance and Tatsiana Zhurauliova

Proposals due by 30 June 2021

From Afro-futurism to memorials and monuments, from dystopian prophecies to the celebration of an eternal return of American ‘greatness’, American culture is and has always been deeply engaged with the notion of time. This symposium will consider time as it relates specifically to the visual arts of the United States, from the 17th to the 21st century. In doing so, it will unveil time as a fundamental dimension to American culture, despite a long tradition emphasizing the centrality of space.

Over the past decades, a number of historical studies have demonstrated that time is not a straightforward or neutral framework. From discussing the emergence of standardized, rationalized time as concomitant with the rise of industrialization, to analysing the temporalities of colonialism, these studies have shown that the concept of time is historically determined and that it constantly evolves under the pressures of technological, social, and economic factors. Yet in the field of art history, and especially U.S. art history, studies devoted to time as it relates to the visual arts remain comparatively limited in scope and number. This symposium will address this absence by taking a long view at the development of the concept of time in American art and visual culture.

We invite contributions from scholars whose research focuses on the variety of strategies, devices, and formulations that artists used for the concept of time in their work. The symposium will investigate the historical dimensions of such issues as the temporalities of art making and art perception; the idea of the image as a way of arresting time or, on the contrary, time as an integral dimension of the artwork; notions of memory and anticipation; art as a bridge between the past and the future; the circulation and evolving reception of artworks over time; archives and historiographies; the development of timelines of art history or, on the contrary, the concept of art’s ahistoricity. Such comprehensive consideration of the notion of time seems to have particular urgency today, at a moment of intense reckoning with the enduring legacies of the past and the arresting inability to imagine the future, threatened by the climate crisis and the global pandemic.

Please send a proposal (500 words maximum) and a short CV to about.time.symposium@gmail.com by 30 June 2021. Selected contributors will be notified by 25 July 2021.

The conference is organized by Hélène Valance, associate professor of American studies at Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté and CNRS research fellow at LARCA, Université de Paris, and Tatsiana Zhurauliova, associate researcher at LARCA, Université de Paris.

While CAA isn’t scheduled to finalize decisions until August, we have, on the affiliate end, been selected to represent ASECS at the 2022 annual conference of the College Art Association in Chicago next February. With hopes of soliciting a wide range of papers and participants, we’re circulating this call for papers early. Please send a CV and an abstract (300 words) for 18-minute papers to jgermann@ithaca.edu and CraigAshleyHanson@gmail.com by Friday, 10 September 2021. Presenters will need to be members in good standing of both CAA and ASECS. We’re happy to answer questions.  –Jennifer Germann and Craig Hanson

Constructing Art History in and through 18th-Century Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
ASECS Affiliate Session, College Art Association, Chicago, 16–19 February 2022 (format TBD)
Chaired by Jennifer Germann (Ithaca College) and Craig Hanson (Calvin University)

 Proposals due by 10 September 2021

Frontispiece from J. Barrow, Dictionarium Polygraphicum: Or, The Whole Body of Arts Regularly Digested (London: Printed for C. Hitch and C. Davis in Pater-Noster Row, and S. Austen in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1735). Getty Research Institute.

Notwithstanding an impressive body of scholarship addressing eighteenth-century encyclopedias generally—particularly Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia and the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert—art history as a discipline has yet to produce anything like a comprehensive account of how various artistic discourses of the period were shaped by such reference works—either by ambitious universal dictionaries or by more focused, specialized volumes. In fact, however, the long eighteenth century saw the publication and often significant distribution of a wide range of art and architectural dictionaries, books like Filippo Baldinucci’s Vocabolario toscano dell’arte del disegno (1681), Neve’s The City and Country Purchaser’s and Builder’s Dictionary (1703), John Barrow’s Dictionarium Polygraphicum (1735), François Marie de Marsy’s Dictionnaire abrégé de peinture et d’architecture (1746), Joachim Christoph Gottsched’s Handlexicon, oder, kurzgefasstes Wörterbuch der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste (1760), and Diego Antonio Rejon de Silva’s Diccionario de las nobles artes para instrucción de los aficionados, y uso de los profesores (1788).

This panel invites papers that explore how dictionaries and encyclopedias (broadly defined) mediated and shaped the emerging field of art history for both artistically sophisticated readers and a wider general audience. How were these texts used in the past (and by whom) and how might art historians engage them productively today? And what to make of how these texts have worked to legitimate some objects of art historical inquiry, even as the omissions have also profoundly shaped the field?

For all our twenty-first-century hopes of advancing a comprehensive, global scope, how effectively might any reference work, dependent upon existing scholarship, break from the biases and narratives that have dominated art history as an academic discipline? Should such works continue to be produced and, crucially, in what form? Narrowly focused papers are welcome so long as they also position their subjects within a larger framework. Contributions that reconsider well-known eighteenth-century publications (including universal dictionaries) as well as essays addressing underexplored reference books are encouraged.

From ArtHist.net:

Imperial Material: Napoleon’s Legacy in Culture, Art, and Heritage, 1821–2021
Online, 3 September 2021

Organized by Matilda Greig and Nicole Cochrane

Proposals due by 12 July 2021

Napoleon Bonaparte died exactly two hundred years ago on a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He had spent the last six years of his life in exile on St Helena, removed from political and military power, in the unusual situation of being able to try to shape and preserve his own posthumous legacy. He was, in a way, phenomenally successful. Napoleon is an instantly recognisable name to this day, and despite growing efforts in recent years to critically revise his reputation and highlight his role in issues such as the reinstatement of slavery, he has largely managed to escape the same level of historical censure as other infamous military dictators. This is perhaps partly because his name has become such an adaptable brand, standing for an entire era of people, places, and events, as well as a full two centuries’ worth of art, craft, and consumer commodities. While other events marking the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death have weighed his contributions to legislative, political, and military reform, less work has been done to confront his vast material, visual, and cultural legacy.

Napoleon’s death in 1821 prompted a frenzy of creation and circulation of materials relating to him, a whirling international trade in objects, images, texts and memorabilia which has essentially never since ceased. Death masks were made, shipped to Europe, waylaid, stolen, copied, and taken around Latin America by one of his doctors. Portraits were exchanged and exhibited, caricatures continued to abound, and actors took on the mantle of the Emperor from the stage to the film set. Personal items belonging to Napoleon were gifted to friends and family, collected by his admirers, and displayed at public exhibitions around the world: his horse, the key to his room, his toothbrush. These items make national headline news to this day when they are rediscovered, are sold for monumental sums to contemporary collectors and serve as key advertising strategies for museums. Napoleonic items can be official or personal, serious or comical, luxury or disposable: the former emperor can be equally thought of as a monumental Neoclassical marvel in white marble, as Joaquin Phoenix, or as a tiny cartoon figure astride a fat pony—yet little work has so far been done to bring together these diverse cultural histories in conversation.

We therefore invite researchers of all disciplines, and museum and heritage professionals, to reflect on the enduring material and visual legacy of Napoleon, what our interpretation and use of it means for the future as well as how it affects our understanding of the past.

Possible themes for papers include:
• Napoleon in theatre, TV and film; in music; in poetry; in art, sculpture and drawing; in books, ephemera, printing, paratext
• Napoleon in exhibitions and museums: museum histories, interpretations of collections, and how objects are presented to the public, including in past, present and future events; how Napoleon is used in marketing strategies or public engagement
• Private collecting and the choices and agency of collectors, including by historians; the memorabilia trade both in the 19th century and up to today; Napoleonic tourism and the creation, looting or buying of souvenirs from significant places
• Gender, sexuality, and Napoleonic memory; involvement of women as collectors, curators, consumers
• Race and empire: critical histories and commentaries on Napoleonic representations
• Medical histories of Napoleonic objects
• Dress, fashion, appearance
• Home décor
• Religion and the macabre
• Animals and Napoleonic symbolism
• The ‘golden’ or ‘rosy’ vs. ‘black’ legend of Napoleon and ongoing critical interpretations
• Comedy and ridicule
• Romanticisation, neoclassical heroism, masculinity
• Circulation and object histories
• Re-enactment
• Public commemoration; plaques, monuments, iconoclasm
• Napoleon and antiquity

Please submit abstracts for short 15-minute papers, along with a short bio, to ImpMatWorkshop@gmail.com by 12 July 2021. (Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words.) Following the workshop, we plan to pursue the publication of selected papers as a collected edition.

Convenors
Dr Matilda Greig (Cardiff University)
Dr Nicole Cochrane (University of Exeter)

The first installment of HECAA’s Zoom Event Series will feature a roundtable on Piranesi studies, moderated by Jeanne Britton and Zoe Langer, both affiliated with the Digital Piranesi Project at the University of South Carolina.

New Approaches to Piranesi: A Virtual Roundtable
Online, 16 July 2021

Organized by Jeanne Britton and Zoe Langer

Proposals due by 16 June 2021

We are seeking proposals for a virtual roundtable of lightning talks on interdisciplinary approaches to the works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). Recent scholarship by Heather Hyde Minor, Carolyn Yerkes, and Susan Dixon, as well as the current bestselling novel Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, have started to open the field of Piranesi Studies to new avenues of research and potentially wider audiences. This roundtable will consist of short presentations of 5–7 minutes followed by ample time for discussion. We hope the proposed format will encourage lively conversation and prompt new critical perspectives that will continue to broaden the interpretation of Piranesi’s works. We welcome topics that include but are not limited to eclecticism, globalism, reception, book history, biographical studies, cartography, collecting, translation, digital humanities, theater, fashion, music, archaeology, and the history of science. We are especially interested in hearing from graduate students, early-career scholars, and professionals engaged in a wide range of disciplinary fields and methods.

Please send an abstract of 150 words, a brief biography, and current contact information. Submissions should be sent to digitalpiranesi@gmail.com by Wednesday, 16 June 2021. Decisions will be sent on Friday, 18 June.

Sponsored by HECAA (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture)

J. T. Smith, The Entrance of Stroud, a Village near Egham, Surry, from Twenty Rural Landscapes from Nature, 1795, etching
(London: British Museum 1860,1208.72)

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From the Mellon Centre and the British Library:

Graphic Landscape: The Landscape Print Series in Britain, c. 1775–1850
Online, Paul Mellon Centre and the British Library, 2–11 November 2021

Proposals due by 1 July 2021

Organized by Mark Hallett and Felicity Myrone

Landscape and topographical print series proliferated in the late eighteenth century and in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the format seems to have enjoyed an artistic and commercial boom in this period. The British Museum, the British Library and the Yale Center for British Art hold rich collections of such series, in various formats. Some, like Turner’s Liber Studiorum (1807–19) and Constable’s English Landscape Scenery (1830–33) are extremely well known. Many others, however, have still to receive sustained and critical attention. This programme of four online seminars, to take place in the first two weeks of November 2021, is designed to look afresh at the late Georgian and early Victorian landscape print series and to stimulate new research on this important strand of graphic art.

Across the programme, we will seek to question the assumptions that are typically brought to bear on such material. Why were print series produced? Who produced them, and what was their appeal? Why did they so regularly focus on landscape and topographical subjects? What were the commercial stakes in producing prints in series? How did they work as pictorial sequences, and how did they shape contemporary artistic practice? Is it possible to interrogate the full compass of such works—how many series were initiated, how many completed, and which survive? Were particular formats and subjects specific to printmaking in Britain, and how does this compare to the production of print series in the rest of the world? Finally, what do these series tell us about the categories of artist and of landscape art in the Romantic period?

This programme of seminars, which is being convened by Mark Hallett and Felicity Myrone, will seek to be broad and interdisciplinary in approach. We hope to showcase new research on print culture and publishing and to present new ways of thinking about how and why the ‘big names’ of the period such as Turner, Constable, Girtin and Cotman stand out (or not) in this context. We would hope that the subject will appeal to scholars of publishing, literature, and book history, as well as to landscape art historians.

We welcome proposals for 15-minute papers that take a variety of approaches. These might offer close readings of individual sets of such prints, whether familiar or obscure. We are just as interested in approaches that look at these kinds of graphic series from a broader perspective, and that address their production, consumption and appeal within the wider realms of print publishing, print culture, publishing, antiquarianism and artistic practice. Similarly, we encourage proposals that place such series in the context of eighteenth/nineteenth-century debates about rural, regional, metropolitan and imperial identity, and in relation to recent discussions on the environment and the Anthropocene.

William Crotch, THE BRILL HILLS, from WOODPERRY, near OXFORD. Pubd. Septr. 1. 1810, by J. Girtin, Engraver, Printer & Publisher, 11, Charles Street, Soho Square (London: British Library, K.Top.35.39)

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Most of all, we encourage original, scholarly and creative approaches that allow us to see the landscape print series in new ways, and to place such work in productive dialogue with the other kinds of contemporary landscape imagery—painted, water-coloured, or drawn—with which we may now be more familiar. The British Library’s recently uploaded gallery of images from the King’s Topographical Collection may provide inspiration.

This series has been organised as part of the Paul Mellon Centre’s ‘Generation Landscape’ research project, and in collaboration with the British Library. It is convened by Mark Hallett and Felicity Myrone. Presentations are planned to take place online on the afternoons of Tuesday, 2 November; Thursday, 4 November; Tuesday, 9 November; and Thursday, 11 November 2021.

To propose a paper, please email an abstract of 300 words or fewer and a 50-word biography in a single Word document to Shauna Blanchfield at sblanchfield@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk by midnight on Thursday, 1 July 2021.

From the Call for Papers for this conference, envisioned to include both in-person and online components:

Discovering Dalmatia VII — Travel Stories: The Grand Tour, Travellers, Itineraries, Travelogues
The Institute of Art History – The Cvito Fisković Centre in Split, 9–11 December 2021

Abstracts due by 15 July 2021

A call for papers for an international conference organized as part of a week of events in scholarship and research

Over the course of time, the aims of the journeys discussed in travel writing underwent numerous changes. This, in turn, had an impact on the creation of travel itineraries. At times, the factors driving these changes were the dominant layers of a history that travellers wished to read in a particular space, such as that of antiquity or the Middle Ages. At others, itineraries were shaped by the limits of the journeys undertaken, which over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries gradually extended ever further towards the East. Between the eastern and the western portions of the Grand Tour itinerary lies Dalmatia, a historical region through which—due to centuries of Venetian-Ottoman wars—the border between the eastern and western worlds ran. The spatial features that had a strong pull on travellers to Dalmatia, drawing them to this region to capture it in words and images, frequently remained the same; nevertheless, travellers recognised and uncovered new layers of interest within them.

The Grand Tour in Dalmatia is the central theme of this conference, but it is not the only one. In addition to inviting researchers working on travel writing, travel itineraries, and travelogues that shed light on the role that Dalmatia played as a destination for study trips, we also invite all those working on the topics of travellers-researchers and study trip itineraries. We also invite researchers undertaking comparative studies that consider various records of a particular space through a range of different media. Finally, this call for papers is also open to those working on the development of digital research tools and resources for travelogues, as well as the visualization of study trip itineraries.

We therefore invite professionals of various backgrounds, whose research addresses the topics this conference covers, to send a 250-word abstract (for a 20-minute paper) and a short CV, both in English, to discoveringdalmatia@gmail.com. The closing date is 15 July 2021.

In the light of current uncertainties, we plan to host the conference both live in Split and via online platforms to facilitate international participation. Registration will take place on the evening of the 8th of December, the closing address will take place on the 11th of December, and the hosts will organise coffee and refreshments for the conference participants during breaks. No participation fee will be charged for this conference. The organisers do not cover travel and accommodation costs. The organisers can help participants to find reasonably-priced accommodation in the historical city centre. The duration of a spoken contribution should not exceed 20 minutes. Contributions will be divided into sections according to topics. Each section will be followed by a discussion. We propose to publish a collection of papers from the conference.

Scientific Committee
• Joško Belamarić (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
• Katrina O’Loughlin (Brunel University London)
• Ana Šverko (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
• Colin Thom (The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London)
• Elke Katharina Wittich (Leibniz Universität Hannover)

Organizing Committee
• Joško Belamarić (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
• Ana Ćurić (Institute of Art History)
• Matko Matija Marušić (Independent Researcher)
• Sarah Rengel (Independent Researcher)
• Ana Šverko (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)