Enfilade

This working group will meet at the RBS-Mellon Conference Bibliography among the Disciplines in October 2017.

Resembling Science: The Unruly Object across the Disciplines
Philadelphia, 12–15 October 2017

Proposals due by 25 October 2016

Organizers: Meghan Doherty (Berea College), Dahlia Porter (University of North Texas), and Courtney Roby (Cornell University)

The task of transforming observation and experience into representational media is a constant concern in the long history of scientific knowledge. We might even argue that the history of of consolidating and communicating scientific thought is structured by a tension between two kinds of unruly objects: the objects we seek to represent, and the objects produced by representational media. Scientific media instantiate a wide range of representational modes, from drawings, tables, and diagrams to printed text and script in various languages. In this working group, we will examine the strategies deployed by writers and artists to transform material objects—whether a body, a specimen, a machine, or an observed phenomena—into knowledge that could be shared and disseminated materially as image, text, and/or book.

This working group will meet for four sessions over three days (see schedule below) to discuss the tension between the unruly material object and the equally unruly materiality of the objects used to represent it. In so doing, we seek to promote conversations about the tools, practices, and processes of scientific knowledge making across modern disciplinary divisions. What verbal and visual strategies are used to discipline objects of scientific study? How do the conventions of description and depiction render objects knowable to particular communities, or within a specific cultural context? Within any given context, is it possible to identify a ‘visual grammar’, or ‘regime of description’, on which scientific knowledge depends? How does the combination of text and image forward, or disrupt, the communication of scientific ideas? What methods of analysis or interpretive approaches might advance the study of images, texts, and objects across the history of science?

Interested scholars, librarians, curators, and members of the book trade are invited to send statements of interest describing a particular representational problem or proposing a case study that exemplifies the materiality of scientific knowledge. Statements may address any national tradition or time period from antiquity to the present; those focused on non-western representational traditions are particularly welcome.

Participants should be able to commit to attending all sessions of the working group:
Thursday, 12 October 2017, 2:00–5:00
Friday, 13 October 2017, 1:45–3:15
Saturday, 14 October 2017, 10:45–12:15

Participants should further be able to commit to meeting again within one year after the conference to work toward the final publication of the results of the working group. In their statements of interest, participants should indicate their availability to meet during the year following the conference (e.g., will you be abroad—if so, when, and do you anticipate that you will have sufficient internet connectivity to meet virtually?).

In order to be considered please submit proposals for participation by 25 October 2016 here. Proposals should include a statement of interest of no more than 250 words, outlining your relevant research, what you hope to contribute toward the group, and what you hope to take away from it.

Bibliography among the Disciplines, a four-day international conference, will bring together scholarly professionals poised to address current problems pertaining to the study of textual artifacts that cross scholarly, pedagogical, professional, and curatorial domains. The conference will explore theories and methods common to the object-oriented disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology, but new to bibliography. The program aims to promote focused cross-disciplinary exchange and future scholarly collaborations. Bibliography among the Disciplines is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and organized by the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.

Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 1776 to the Present
Special Issue of The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 11.2 (June 2018)
Guest Editors: Li-hsin Hsu and Andrew Taylor

Articles due by 30 June 2017

This special issue The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture seeks essays of 6,000 to 10,000 words engaged in debate around historical, cultural, and literary issues in the Atlantic World. Whilst national narratives have often sought to assert the truth of universal values, a more self-conscious focus upon the methodological framework of the transnational Atlantic world concerns itself explicitly with ways in which diverse and competing local or national paradigms might contest the kinds of ideological assumptions that underwrite narratives of progress, civilisation and modernity. The editors are keen to receive submissions that explore what happens when the assumptions of a nationalistic model of doing literary and cultural criticism, in which geography is allegorised as the autonomous locus of all possible meaning, are challenged by forms of encounter and contagion that disrupt and expand our frames of interpretation. How might the Atlantic space map a series of textual disruptions and contagions during the period? In what ways does transatlanticism open up possibilities for thinking about literary comparison as a critical practice? How do the crossings of people, objects and ideas complicate our sense of literary and intellectual inheritance? What kinds of relationship does the Atlantic world have with other spatial paradigms—the Pacific, the Orient, Australasia? The essays in this special issue seek to explore the meshed networks of interaction—aesthetic, ideological, material—that constitute the space of Atlantic exchange. This, we hope, will result in a wide-ranging, geographically diverse collection that displays much of the best research being undertaken in this exciting and vibrant field.

Possible areas of interest may include, but are not limited to:
• ecology and landscape
• migration and travel
• nature and nation
• Asia/Orientalism and transatlanticism
• social reform
• class and conflict
• gender and sexuality
• art and aesthetics
• slavery and empire
• science and technology
• nationalism and cosmopolitanism

The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (www.wreview.org) is a Scopus-indexed journal of interdisciplinary nature based in the Department of English, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. Please follow the submission guidelines to submit articles online by 30 June 2017.

Li-hsin Hsu is Assistant Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. She holds a PhD in Transatlantic Romanticism from the University of Edinburgh and specialises in transatlantic studies, ecocriticism, and Orientalism. She received the 2014 Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) Scholar in Amherst Award and has published in journals such as Symbiosis: A Transatlantic Journal and The Emily Dickinson Journal.

Andrew Taylor is Senior Lecturer and Head of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He specialises in 19th- and 20th-century North American literature and intellectual history and has an interest in the intersection of historiography and contemporary American fiction. He’s the author of Henry James and the Father Question (Cambridge UP, 2002), Thinking America: New England Intellectuals and the Varieties of American Experience (U of New Hampshire P, 2010), and co-author of Thomas Pynchon (Manchester UP, 2013). He’s the co-editor of several books including Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (Johns Hopkins UP, 2007), Stanley Cavell: Literature, Philosophy, Criticism (Manchester UP, 2012), and Stanley Cavell, Literature and Film: The Idea of America (Routledge, 2013). An awardee of the Leverhulme Trust Project Grant, Dr Taylor is a series editor of the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures, published by Edinburgh UP.

From H-ArtHist (7 September 2016). . .

Art for the Powerful, Multiple Objects: Medals and Tokens
in Europe from the Renaissance to the First World War
Art du puissant, objet multiple: Médailles et jetons en
Europe, de la Renaissance à la Première Guerre mondiale
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 30 March — 1 April 2017

Proposals due by 6 November 2016

The medal was revived in the princely courts of fifteenth-century Italy as a commemorative art and quickly adopted by sovereigns across Europe. Medals, tokens, and other metallic objects devoid of fiduciary value became more and more widespread and benefitted from several peaks of popularity in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, as illustrated by the metallic histories of Louis XIV or Napoleon, a format adopted by others as far afield as the Tsar of Russia. Whilst changes in taste led the medal to be seen as in or out of fashion at different moments, it has continued to maintain its essentially commemorative function and has been used to express the ideals of all manner of political regimes from monarchies to republics.

This symposium seeks to explore the specificity of a form of official art that associates image and text, producing objects whose message is also partially conveyed by the hierarchy of values intrinsic to the metals used, from the noblest gold to more modest alloys. As objects that can be reproduced, that are easily portable and largely distributed, their biographies also tend to be quite distinct from that of other types of art objects. An initial specificity is that of the role of the engraver whose function oscillates between that of an artist, an artisan, and an agent of a commissioning power. His artistic practice can be considered in some sense as paradoxical in so much as it is constrained by the conventions of the medium and by the outline of the project which his talent is called on to convey in material form. This opens up to the question of the expressive aims of this official art that seeks to capture and commemorate History as it happens, fortifying the glory of the commissioning party. Indeed, medals and tokens represent the result of the interplay of the different actors who contribute to their elaboration: from the initial idea developed by a commissioning power and affiliated scholars, to the drawing of a model, to the production and diffusion of the multiple editions of the final product. Medals also need to be considered as part of a wide range of visual productions that share a common language dedicated to reinforcing the powers in place. Finally, greater attention needs to be paid to the manner in which these objects (and their models) have circulated, in particular by considering the development of a market for modern and contemporary medals and their status in the make-up of private and public coin collections. This may also be an opportunity to consider the reciprocal influence between the evolution of the taste and interest of collectors and production styles, techniques, and themes through time.

This conference will showcase current research that can provide an alternative to a very dispersed historiography dominated by the genre of the catalogue. We hope that a comparative effort, with cases from across Europe, in a large chronological frame will help to establish an interdisciplinary approach to the production and circulation of medals and similar objects; one that reflects their complex nature and the specificity of their biographies. We welcome perspectives from a range of disciplines and research perspectives including art history, social and political history, numismatics, material culture studies, etc.

Proposal of no more than 400 words should be sent accompanied by a short CV before the 6th of November 2016 to the following address: colloquemedailles2017@gmail.com. Each presentation should aim to be no longer than 20 minutes, and the conference papers will be published. Languages are French and English. The organizing committee will give notice of acceptance by mid December 2016.

Organizing Committee
Felicity Bodenstein, docteur en Histoire de l’art, Kunsthistorisches
Institut, Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut
Thomas Cocano, doctorant en Histoire, EPHE
Ludovic Jouvet, doctorant en Histoire de l’art, Université de Bourgogne/ INHA
Katia Schaal, doctorante en Histoire de l’art, École du Louvre / Université de Poitiers / INHA
Sabrina Valin, doctorante en Histoire de l’art, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense

Scientific Committee
Marc Bompaire, directeur d’études, EPHE
Béatrice Coullaré, chargée de conservation, Monnaie de Paris
Frédérique Duyrat, directrice du département des Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques, BnF
Victor Hundsbuckler, conservateur du patrimoine, responsable de la Conservation, Monnaie de Paris
Thierry Sarmant, conservateur en chef, Service historique de la Défense à Vincennes
Philippe Thiébaut, conservateur général du patrimoine, conseiller scientifique, INHA
Inès Villela-Petit, conservatrice du patrimoine, département des Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques, BnF

Institutional Partners
Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (École doctorale 395, Milieux, cultures et sociétés du passé et du présent – Laboratoire du HAR, Histoire des Arts et des Représentations)
École pratique des hautes études (EPHE)
Monnaie de Paris
Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)
Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA)

Just a reminder that that the due date for ASECS 2017 proposals is next Thursday (15 September). Send them in!

2017 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, 30 March — 2 April 2017

Proposals due by 15 September 2016

Proposals for papers at the at the 48th annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, are now being accepted. Proposals should be sent directly to the session chairs no later than 15 September 2016. Along with our annual luncheon and business meeting, HECAA will be represented with the Anne Schroder New Scholars’ Session, chaired by Jessica Fripp. A selection of other sessions that might be relevant for HECAA members is also included here»

This working group will meet at the RBS-Mellon Conference Bibliography among the Disciplines in October 2017.

Color Printing and the Global Eighteenth Century
Philadelphia, 12–15 October 2017

Proposals due by 25 October 2016

Organizers: Marie-Stephanie Delamaire (Winterthur Museum) and Jeannie Kenmotsu (Royal Ontario Museum)

The long eighteenth century was a period of major breakthroughs in the domain of color printing in several parts of the world. In Asia and Europe, various relief and intaglio techniques were adapted to full color printing and achieved widespread uses in the visual arts. Multiple-block color printing techniques were explored in seventeenth-century Chinese painting manuals; these relief techniques were later seen in Japanese sheet prints and illustrated books on a far greater scale in the eighteenth century, from the poetry anthologies illustrated by Katsuma Ryūsui to Suzuki Harunobu’s vividly colored ‘brocade pictures’. Printing à la poupée was practiced in the Low Countries, Italy, Britain, and France among others for decorative printing as well as lavishly illustrated botanical and ornithological volumes such as those of Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Jacob Christoph Le Blon and his successors experimented with multiple-plate intaglio printing, and produced color prints in collaboration with leading artists.

Although scholars have increasingly studied eighteenth-century knowledge of the properties, meanings, and uses of colors, the materials and practices involved in the production and reception of color-printed images have received comparatively less attention. This project will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines and fields (printing history, book history, critical bibliography, history of art, history of technology, etc.) to explore the proliferation of color-printed images in the long eighteenth century. How do we understand the emergence of widespread color-printing practices across the globe approximately at the same time? What were the economic, social, or political factors that facilitated color printing as a major medium for visual creation? What were the taxonomic, semantic, and aesthetic consequences of printing in color as opposed to hand painting in color? We encourage submissions that engage with the specific material practices of color-printed images that emerged in Europe and Asia between the second half of the seventeenth century up to the early nineteenth century, while reflecting on the broader questions they raise with regards to our knowledge of the period and the validity of current approaches.

Possible topics might include but are not limited to: the production and consumption of color-printed images; color printing as a mode of cultural exchange; the materiality of color printmaking and the production of knowledge (including, but not limited to, spheres of natural history, the fine arts, mapmaking, color theory, and connoisseurship etc.); book illustration versus sheet prints; the relationship between printing in color and painting; conservation issues particular to color-printed  works as they relate to methods and approaches to historical inquiry; changes in disciplinary perspectives concerning color printing and the eighteen century.

Participants should be able to commit to attending all sessions of the working group:
Thursday, 12 October 2017, 2:00–5:00pm
Friday, 13 October 2017, 10:45am–12:15pm
Saturday, 14 October 2017, 8:30–10:00am

Participants should further be able to commit to meeting again one year after the conference to work toward a publication of the results of the working group. In their statements of interest, participants should indicate their availability to meet during the year following the conference (e.g., will you be abroad—if so, when, and do you anticipate that you will have sufficient internet connectivity to meet virtually?).

In order to be considered please submit proposals for participation by 25 October 2016 here. Proposals should include a brief 2-page CV and a statement of interest of no more than 500 words, outlining your relevant research, what you hope to contribute toward the group, and what you hope to take away from it (including potential project ideas you hope the group may pursue).

Bibliography Among the Disciplines, a four-day international conference, will bring together scholarly professionals poised to address current problems pertaining to the study of textual artifacts that cross scholarly, pedagogical, professional, and curatorial domains. The conference will explore theories and methods common to the object-oriented disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology, but new to bibliography. The program aims to promote focused cross-disciplinary exchange and future scholarly collaborations. Bibliography Among the Disciplines is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and organized by the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.

Here are some of the intriguing thematic offerings proposed for the Association of Art Historians 2017 conference that could include eighteenth-century papers. Be sure to consult the conference website for things I’ve overlooked. –CH

43rd Annual AAH Conference and Bookfair
Loughborough University, 6–8 April 2017

Proposals due by 7 November 2016

AAH2017 will celebrate the expansive spectrum of histories, theories and practices that characterize art historical research today. Internationally, the field of art history is eclectic and inclusive, reaching across geopolitical, cultural and disciplinary divides to extend our understanding of the visual and material culture of many diverse periods and places. At Loughborough, we are engaged with art history, contemporary practice and visual culture, linking arts-based research with advances in design, technology, media and communication, centred on the development of more sustainable and equitable global communities.

Please email your paper proposals straight  to the session convenor(s). Provide a title and abstract for a 25 minute paper (max 250 words). Include your name, affiliation and email. Your paper title should be concise and accurately reflect what the paper is about (it should ‘say what it does on the tin’) because the title is what appears most first and foremost online, in social media and in the printed programme.

Keynote Speakers
Amelia Jones (Robert A. Day Professor in Art and Design and Vice-Dean of Critical Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design) and Mark Hallett (Director of studies at the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art)

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Session 1 | 50 Years On: Art History in the UK since the 1960s
Geoff Quilley, University of Sussex, g.quilley@sussex.ac.uk
Meaghan Clarke, University of Sussex, m.e.clarke@sussex.ac.uk
Francesco Ventrella, University of Sussex, fv37@sussex.ac.uk

The current decade marks the 50th anniversary of many Art History departments across the UK. It was not until the 1960s that the majority of Art History departments still functioning today were instituted. This was not merely coincidental, but was part of the seismic shift in post-war higher education that saw the wave of building of new universities. The consequent democratisation of the teaching of Art History in 1960s Britain had enormous impact both on the politics of the discipline and also on its place within an overall higher education ‘framework’. This session will seek to revisit that ‘new vision’ for Art History within 1960s culture, by reflecting on the history of Art History over the past 50 years, and focusing on its role within UK higher education, and educational philosophy and policy more generally. This might consider several inter-related sets of issues, including: the mutual impact and influences between the new departments and the old institutions, and how they might have prepared the terrain for the ‘New Art History’; how Art History intersected with the teaching of art and design; the relation of Art History to other disciplines, both established and new. What were the effects of the influx of Art History degrees on related professional environments such as museums? Did public perceptions of the discipline change as an effect of its popularisation through the media? And what has been, and continues to be, the public role of Art History, and how has this changed over the past half-century?

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Session 3 | Art History as Créolité/Creolising Art History
Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Florida International University, Miami, alpesh.patel@fiu.edu

As part of the three-day workshop titled ‘Créolité and Creolisation’, which took place on St Lucia as one of the platforms of Documenta 11 (2002), participants explored the genealogy of terms such as ‘creolization’ and ‘Créolité’, and their potential to describe phenomena beyond their historically and geographically specific origins (however slippery they are). Surprisingly, there has been little engagement with the potential of creolisation as a way of doing or writing art histories differently since that time. This session aims to redress this lacuna.

Stuart Hall, one of the workshop participants, writes that what distinguishes creolisation from hybridity or diaspora is that it refers to a process of cultural mixings that are a result of slavery, plantation culture, and colonialism. Yet, Martinican-born poet and theoretician Édouard Glissant notes that creolisation can refer to a broader set of sociocultural processes not only in the Caribbean but also ‘all the world’ (Tout-monde). Drawing on Hall and Glissant, Irit Rogoff suggests that créolité can more broadly reference the construction of a literary or artistic project out of creolising processes.

What would it mean to re-imagine art history as Créolité? That is, hegemonic Western art history has created in its wake an array of ‘other’ art histories connected to regions such as Latin America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and South Asia to name a few. Of special interest in this session is not only considering such regional art histories as relational to each other, but also exploring how other constructions of identity—such as gender, sexuality, race, and class—are intertwined with them. Papers exploring contemporary and historical periods are both welcome; and those critically examining Glissant’s terms—such as ‘opacity’ and ‘globality’—to bear on the session theme are especially encouraged.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Session 7 | Catastrophism and the Ecology of Art in Pre- and Early Modern Europe
Joanne W Anderson, The Warburg Institute, Joanne.anderson@sas.ac.uk
Jill Harrison, The Open University, Jill.harrison@open.ac.uk

Floods, fires, earthquakes, famines and plagues were catastrophic events in pre- and early modern Europe. They impacted heavily on environment and society by devastating resources, levelling infrastructure and displacing or destroying communities. The residual presence of such events in the cultural memory could be long term and institutionalised. As Erling Skaug has recently argued (2013) in relation to change in Giotto’s late oeuvre, ‘disasters of a certain magnitude tend to cause breaks and abrupt changes in a historical course—for better or worse.’

Catastrophism is an emerging and productive way of thinking about art’s relationship to climate and environment, and the circumstances of its production and interpretation. But it also has a venerable tradition within the discipline of art history itself. From Winckelmann’s climate theory in relation to the stylistic development of Greek sculpture (1755) to Millard Meiss’s theories about the Black Death and its instigation of an archaising pictorial system (1951), the ecology of visual representation is a persistent framework for critical enquiry. It has the potential to align local events with universal histories, for example a synecdoche for the Apocalypse or the Great Flood.

This panel welcomes papers that explore catastrophes of art in the classical sense. By focusing on pre- and early modern Europe, it aims to push art historians to rethink the role of such events in our understanding of art and its production. It will seek to discuss and offer fresh perspectives on the concept of catastrophism and its relevance for the ecology of art.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Session 8 | Changing Regimes of Art Education: An International Look at Art History, Pedagogy, and Power Knowledge
Elke Krasny, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, elke.krasny@gmail.com
Barbara Mahlknecht, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, b.mahlknecht@akbild.ac.at

Art education is part of the archives of regimes of power knowledge. Despite the important role art education holds for producing and reproducing knowledge of art history and artistic practice, it has so far remained an understudied area in critical art history writing. The session’s focus is on the critical analysis of art history education at university and art academy level internationally. While art and art history are commonly understood as fields of global knowledge production and circulation, art education is still connected to the nation state and the changing regimes of its ideologies, economies, and politics. The session therefore asks to what extent the nation state is still the core structure forming canonical art histories and art education pedagogies? It also raises the question to what extent art history education is transformed via international, transnational, and global exchange. Some of the questions concern how art history education was formed by imperial and colonial regimes, totalitarian and fascist regimes at times of war, and the contemporary neoliberal regime in which both the global South and the global North are implicated.

The session invites papers giving case studies from different places and specific time periods. Of particular interest are transitional periods revealing the change from one regime to another. The focus is on the formation and institutional recognition of art history education in relation to art history’s critical history writing and the analysis of the archives of regimes of power knowledge.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Session 10 | Damaged Art and the Question of Value
Kathryn Brown, Loughborough University, kathrynjbrown@mac.com

While entropy has often been used by artists as an aesthetic strategy, this session examines the values that attach to artworks that are damaged in the process of their execution, or that have been broken, vandalised, discarded, or otherwise rendered unfit for their original design or purpose. What aesthetic, historical and financial values attach to such works, and are those values divergent or mutually reinforcing? While ancient statuary is exhibited in fragments, what is the display value of more recent works that have not benefitted from restoration? For some collectors, prints pulled from cancelled plates are prized objects, while, for others, such works are considered counterfeit. Artists complain of failures to maintain the condition of public art that no longer meets their original conception and, in some cases, recommend destruction of that work.

Such examples problematise the values that attach to the material qualities of art objects and the ways in which such qualities relate to artistic intention and audience expectations throughout time. This session asks why some works have been considered worthy of restoration while others have been ignored? Might the preservation of damage to an object have evidential value that outweighs the restoration of that object’s material appearance? What types of destruction befall conceptual and performance artworks? From the activities of the Salvage Art Institute to the exhibition of paintings and sculptures marred by war, accident, or neglect, this session uses the concept of damage to investigate values that attach to the production, display, preservation, and financial value of artworks.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Session 19 | Modern Lives – Modern Legends: Artist Anecdotes since the 18th Century
Hans Christian Hones, The Warburg Institute (Bilderfahrzeuge Project), hoenes@bilderfahrzeuge.org
Anna Frasca-Rath, University of Vienna, anna.sophie.rath@univie.ac.at

In John Nichols’ Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth (1785), one reads of how the painter died in the arms of his servant, his demise the result of overindulging in beefsteak. Seventy years later, a biography of John Flaxman tells of how the artist, in his childhood, showed his drawings to a famous painter—who asked if they were meant to represent flounders.

These are just two examples for a little-known tendency in the artistic literature of the 18th and 19th century: the re-adaptation of traditional anecdotes which had been repeated countless times since the trecento. Nichols’ story clearly refers ironically to Vasari’s description of Leonardo’s death in the arms of the French King, and Flaxman’s ‘flounders’ are an equally ironic take on the legend of Giotto’s discovery by Cimabue. Far from simply providing entertainment, they were also an opportunity for succinct commentary on the respective artist’s work—the ‘Englishness’ of Hogarth and the ‘flatness’ of Flaxman.

This panel explores these revisions and re-adaptations of traditional artist anecdotes and their function in the art theoretical debates of their time. What was the purpose of such re-writings? How does this flood of new anecdotes relate and react to the rise of ‘scholarly’ biographical writing? Which art-theoretical subtexts were carried in these ironic deflections from tradition? And how do they intersect with the equally prominent rise of depictions of anecdotal scenes from artists’ lives—Giotto painting sheep being just the most prominent example? Papers examine these and other questions in a broad geographical context between the 18th and 20th century.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Session 25 | Prints in Books: The Materiality, Art History and Collection of Illustrations
Elizabeth Savage, Cambridge University, leu21@cam.ac.uk

Book illustrations, especially from the hand-press period (1450–1830), are an essential but traditionally overlooked source of art historical information. Although the hierarchies of fine art over popular art are dissolving, and modern disciplinary distinctions between text and image (or art and book) are giving way to cross-disciplinary and holistic approaches to printed material, printed images that happen to be inside books often fall outside the remits of art historical, literary, bibliographical and material research.

One reason is that practical and academic barriers impede access to the art historical information that book illustrations can provide. Due to incompatible cataloguing standards adopted by libraries and art museums, researchers can struggle to identify book illustrations across collections. Cataloguing protocols may reduce hundreds of significant woodcuts in a book to the single word ‘illustrated’; some world-leading graphic art digitisation initiatives exclude book illustrations. As the global digitised corpus expands, will book illustrations be more represented in print scholarship or will they continue to fall into the gap between art and book? As material objects and visual resources, should they be considered bibliographical, art historical or iconographical material? And how do such classifications influence their interpretation?

This interdisciplinary panel seeks to establish a platform for discussion about the position of printed book illustrations in graphic art scholarship. Theoretical and object-based papers related to any aspect of collecting, cataloguing and interpreting printed book illustrations, broadly defined, are welcome, as are papers that explore the materiality, iconography, historiography or art history of printed pictures inside books.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Session 30 | Sculpture in Motion
Martina Droth, Yale Center for British Art, martina.droth@yale.edu
Sarah Victoria Turner, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, svturner@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk

Sculpture is generally static. It tends to be thought of as solid, inert, and physically grounded. These qualities are deeply associated with some of its most traditional functions—to commemorate, memorialise, and provide permanent public symbols. But throughout its history, sculpture’s immobility has been held in tension with the fantasy of its potential motion and animation. This tension plays out in the dualities of its association with life and death. The potential of the statue coming to life, as in the Pygmalion myth, has been a constant reference point for sculpture and how it is written about.

This interdisciplinary session seeks to examine the various ways in which sculpture has been put in motion, literally or metaphorically, and to consider what drives this desire to animate sculpture. Areas of possible investigation include the devices and artistic strategies that induce motion or an illusion of life—for example, turning statues on rotating pedestals; viewing statues by candlelight; the tinting and colouring of sculpture to create life-like effects; sophisticated technologies and mechanical devices such as animatronics, automata, and kinetics; the ‘living statue’ and the tableau vivant; bringing sculpture to life in text; the suggestion of movement in photographs of sculpture; the appearance of sculpture in film. Proposals may address any period or area of sculpture, and can present case-studies or broader reflections.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Session 31 | Speculative Libraries
Nick Thurston, University of Leeds, n.thurston@leeds.ac.uk

The symbolic status of ‘the library’—be it in the image of the great libraries of antiquity, the monastic libraries of the Middle Ages or the public libraries of Victorian Britain—has served as both a metaphor and allegory for knowledge, wealth, devotion and permanence. Yet all contemporary libraries are having their rationales, architecture, labour practices and holdings radically changed by the growth of networked computing and information science. What are the many and changing relationships between art practice, art’s discourses and libraries? And where, from the first proto-libraries of Sumer to counter-cultural archives of grey or illegal material, do we see the logic of the library reaching beyond the confines of libraries-as-such?

I invite submissions from historians, theorists and makers who can address these questions directly and who work within or across the fields of architecture studies, art history, art & design and library & information science. Our aim will be to take seriously all aspects of library culture and library-making as they relate to art, including: holdings, collections policies, librarianship, furniture, architecture and the role of libraries within their communities. From Martha Rosler Library (2005–6) to the open-access file-sharing on aaaaarg.fail, a trend can be traced for making libraries as or within contemporary art projects. As such, through this session’s broad discussion I hope we will also foster a sub-focus on the history, theory and techniques of speculative library-making, considered as the practice of constructing real or imaginary libraries as an artistic act.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Session 32 | Standing Stones and the Origins of Architectural Modernity  
Ralph Ghoche, Barnard College, Columbia University, rghoche@barnard.edu
Christina Contandriopoulos, UQAM University

Standing stones (menhirs) have captivated the imagination of architects and archaeologists since their rediscovery in the 17th century. By the 19th century, these primitive monuments were accorded a prominent place in the new narratives of architectural history, generating countless debates over their origin and function. Indeed, they emboldened many architects to challenge the prevailing neoclassical histories of architecture by moving the point of origin from the so-called ‘civilised’ societies of classical Greece and Rome, back to the ritualistic practices of Celts, Druids and Gauls. The interest in indigenous monuments was no less potent for architects in the 20th century. In the writings of Le Corbusier, Sigfried Giedion and Aldo van Eyck, here too these stone were employed as testaments of wholly distinct historical trajectories.

This session focuses on the impact of standing stones and primitive, indigenous monuments on architecture from the 17th to the 20th centuries. The question can be explored from multiple perspectives. From an historiographical standpoint, we are interested in the way that these stones informed new historical narratives in architecture. How was the new awareness of these stones employed to challenge Greco-Roman models? From the perspective of architectural production, how did they impact the primitive sensibilities of modernist architects? To be sure, the mute and enigmatic quality of menhirs provided Modernists powerful precedents for their own experiments in abstract signification. As prehistorical monuments, standing stones would seem to have provided designers with a way of achieving an emancipated architecture, free of the burdens of history.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Session 35 | Textile, Art & Design: Reciprocity and Development
Alice Kettle, Manchester Metropolitan University, a.kettle@mmu.ac.uk
Uthra Rajgopal, Manchester Metropolitan University, u.rajgopal@mmu.ac.uk

The reciprocity and division of textiles and the fine arts are in continual negotiation. This session examines the nexus between the fine and decorative arts, craft making and commercial production. Many artists of the 20th century such as Abakanowicz, Dali, Delaunay, Matisse, Moore, Parker, Picasso, Paolozzi and Warhol (to name but a few) have been celebrated for their collaborations in sculpture and/or pattern making, but this approach presents one avenue of the artist’s intervention in textiles. This session will consider a wider view, asking how contributions of textile designers and artists working across a spectrum of geographical and historical periods, such as those working in Spitalfields, Lyon, Japan or India for example, or designers such as Dora Batty, Marian Clayden, Marion Dorn, Bernat Klein or John Piper influenced and collaborated with artists, fashion designers and art movements or contributed to the synergy of these practices.

In this session we welcome papers from academics, researchers, textile artists, textile and fashion historians, curators and archivists. The term textile can be interpreted in its widest sense. Suggestions for proposals of papers or panel discussions include but are not limited:
• The evolution and circulation of a particular motif in woven or printed textiles
• Artists/designers and textiles: an exploration of their oeuvre through pattern making
• The influence of textile designers in art/dress/fashion history
• Historical and contemporary collaborations between artists and textile designers

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Session 37 | The Power of Plasticity
Rowan Bailey, University of Huddersfield, r.bailey@hud.ac.uk
Sheila Gaffney, Leeds College of Art, sheila.gaffney@leeds-art.ac.uk

Plasticity is a powerful yet elusive concept of formation in the histories, theories and practices of making. In its traditional sense, it has been synonymised with the noun ‘plastic’—the plastic arts of sculpture and architecture within the modern schema—and the adjective ‘plastic’—the material and aesthetic registrations of a state of being malleable, pliant, ductile and adaptable. More recently, plasticity has gained cultural currency in science as a tool for articulating the brain’s thinking activity. The reception of plasticity within the histories of art, visual and material culture thus covers a broad and diverse spectrum. It not only refers to a condition of aptitude within the mind of the practitioner—derived from the Greek plassein: ‘to mould or form’—it also registers the transformation of materials from the molecular to the microscopic, the psychic to the aesthetic.

Whether operating through different tropes of formation in art historical/art writing, as material transformations in and through the making process, or as environmental states for the production and reception of form, this session seeks to explore the varied use, application and agency of the term ‘plasticity’ in a trans-disciplinary expanded field.

The panel proposes to address three dimensions to plasticity and their potential intra-relations, reflecting on objects of visual and material culture to bring about new configurations of plastic thinking in practice. Contributions that move beyond this framework are also welcome:

• Plasticity as a dynamic condition for the production and reception of form
• Plasticity and the transformation of materials
• Plasticity as a thinking tool in art, visual and material culture

From the conference website:

New Scholarship in British Art History: Discoveries at the NCMA
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 27–28 January 2017

Proposals due by 15 September 2016

Attributed to John Hoppner, The Honorable Sherson (Raleigh: NCMA, G.28.2.43).

A two-day symposium, in collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, hosted alongside the upcoming exhibition History and Mystery: Discoveries in the NCMA British Collection.

The question of what makes the British Isles ‘British’ is particularly relevant given recent political events, such as the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. Using the North Carolina Museum of Art’s British collections as inspiration, this New Scholars Conference explores the ways in which we can examine ‘English’ and ‘British’ works of art. Particularly, this topic raises questions about the ways Britain can be viewed, either as inward looking and/or in dialogue with the wider world.

We encourage topics ranging from traditional categories of British art, such as portraiture, to new investigations into the mobility of artists and styles, as well as issues of race, class, and gender. The aim of this conference is to explore how innovative scholarship and new narratives can help expand the larger discipline of British studies. This conference is intended for graduate students, recent doctoral graduates, and post-doctoral scholars. We strongly suggest that speakers consider their papers in relation to the British collections at the NCMA, whose works of art range from 1580 to 1850.

We invite 20-minute papers on topics including (but not limited to) the following:
• English Portraiture
• Britain’s Relationship to the World
• Post-Reformation Effects on the Arts
• Influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds
• British Notions of Territory
• Architecture in the English Context
• Race, Gender, and Class in Art
• Formation of the British Academy
• The Immigrant Artist
• The British Family in Art
• Foreign Influences in British Art
• Imagery of Travel and Exchange

Please send an abstract (250 words) and a CV to Miranda Elston (mlelston@email.unc.edu) by 15 September 2016 with the email heading ‘NCMA New Scholarship in British Art History’ and your Name, Affiliated Institution, and Paper Title in the email. Speakers will be informed via email by October 1, 2016.

From the conference website:

Art and the Environment in Britain, 1700–Today
Université Rennes 2 Haute Bretagne, 2–3 March 2017

Proposals due by 3 September 2016

The concern of artists for the fate of their environment—understood as the natural world in which they breathe, live, and create—is often thought to be a relatively recent phenomenon. The term ‘environmental art’ was indeed coined in the 1960s, while more recently eco-art has been used to refer to the rise of ecological awareness and pressing concerns for sustainability, with a more specifically political and activist take on environmental art. Recent exhibitions in Britain, such as Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet, 1969–2009 at the Barbican and Earth: Art of a Changing World at the Royal Academy, both held in 2009, or Art and Climate Change presented in 2006 and 2007 in London and Liverpool, along with the Art & Environment conference held at Tate Britain in 2010, testify to this recent interest in environmentally-conscious practices. Contemporary artistic practices directly engage with the environment, thus displaying multi-faceted relationships between British visual arts and the surrounding world of trees, plants, animals, and even sounds.

However, the contemporary focus on preservation and political activism should not obfuscate the fact that the interaction between Britons and their environment has a much older history. Visual artists from earlier periods also had something to say, both in pictures and in related writings, about their place as humans cohabiting with non-humans, both animate and inanimate, in a physical world whose boundaries were relentlessly pushed back and transformed. As explorers and scientists uncovered new areas—from the far reaches of the earth to that of human ancestry—these artists reacted to an expanding environment that elicited all kinds of emotions, from excitement and wonder to, all too quickly, anxiety and a sense of loss. The British countryside, largely mediated by the visual representations of eighteenth-century landscape painters, has now become artistic heritage, part of a national identity defined by an osmotic relationship with exceptionally hospitable surroundings. The way eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists represented—and, in the case of landscape gardeners, actively refashioned—a natural world on which cities impinged at a quickening pace in fact often bore the mark of an awareness that what they contemplated and plundered for ideas and ideals was in constant flux. The advent of the Industrial Revolution was to be one of the most decisive illustrations of the transformative power of man over a land so far presented as a timeless Eden. Brought up with the Enlightenment notion that emotional engagement was mandatory for any self-regarding man of feeling, British artists were the prime observers of and witnesses to the alterations that humankind imposed on the natural substrate that ensured its maintenance. Just as their productions betrayed the preoccupations of their times, their personal takes on the relationship between humans and their environment, disseminated through visual representations, contributed to shaping contemporary debates.

The word environment as in ‘nature, or conditions in which a person or thing live’ did not appear until 1827, at which time it was used by the reformer Thomas Carlyle to translate the German Umgebung. The much older verb ‘to environ’, in use in the English language since the late fourteenth century, had come from the French environner and conjured up the image of a circle with a centre around which other elements turned, or veered. For centuries, the centre of this circle was firmly believed to be humankind. Yet, as Keith Thomas has made it quite clear in Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (1983), man’s theologically grounded belief in his total dominion over nature was gradually, over the course of the three centuries spanned by the British historian’s study, dented by “new arguments,” “new conditions,” and “new sensibilities.” As what Thomas called the “dethronement of man” had started a century earlier at the very least, Charles Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species was to provide the final nail with which to close the coffin of a certain human uniqueness tightly shut. Closer to us, the momentous post-human turn in the humanities—an umbrella term that encompasses an amazing variety of paradigm shifts—currently contributes to reinforcing the idea that humans live in a symbiotic environment characterised by a porous line with non-human animals and machines, and where New Materialist theories such as Jane Bennett’s go as far as claiming agency for ‘things’ such as food, commodities, electricity, and minerals. Part of our scientific committee, T. J. Demos advocates the definition of a post-anthropocentric political ecology. His very latest book, Decolonizing Nature, Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, published in 2016, posits that creativity, and more specifically contemporary art, are instrumental in developing this less possessive relationship to nature.

Whether one thinks of environment as context, setting, climate change, green spaces or sounds, today’s epistemology invites us to rethink man’s relation to the external world to the extent that the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ coalesce, nature and culture merge, man and animal are reconfigured. How have British artists responded to these shifting perceptions of the world around them, of this great swirling circle of life and non life in which they found—or imagined—themselves diversely positioned, for a long time at the centre, then in a more undefined place—at the margin even? How has art itself positioned itself in this newly defined environment? A precursor to such interrogations, environmental art was early on intended as a decidedly extensive term, which, due to the American influence of Robert Smithson, came to encompass both sites and non-sites, both the pastoral and the urban. With the introduction of Environmental art departments in British art schools in the 1980s, the environment has been understood by artists as all the different contexts available to them outside of the gallery. We see this conference as an ideal opportunity to highlight these tensions between different definitions and to look into terminologies, as well as historical variations; to explore the links between representation and preservation; the way British artists have represented animals, natural elements, and the climate, and their preoccupation with environmental aesthetics and the altered positioning of humankind in the world, in a British context. Abstracts of about 400 words should be uploaded, along with a short biographical note, to the conference webpage.

Organizers
Laurent Châtel (csti-HDEA EA 4086, Paris Sorbonne), Charlotte Gould (Prismes, Sorbonne Nouvelle), and Sophie Mesplède (ACE EA 1796, Université Rennes 2)

Scientific Committee
Laurent Châtel, Sophie Mesplède, and Charlotte Gould
T. J. Demos, Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture, and Director of the Centre for Creative Ecologies, UC Santa Cruz
Anne Helmreich, Dean of the TCU College of Fine Arts, Fort Worth, Texas
Marie-Madeleine Martinet, Emeritus Professor of British Visual Culture, Sorbonne, Paris
Corinne Silva, Artist and Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication, UCL
Anne Goarzin, Professor of Irish Literature and Visual Culture, Rennes II University

Save

Save