Enfilade

From H-ArtHist:

Antoine Galland et l’Orient des Savants
Société Asiatique, Paris, 3–4 December 2015

Proposals due by 31 May 2015

Parmi les savants qui ont marqué l’histoire de l’orientalisme, Antoine Galland (1646–1715) représente sans doute l’une des figures les plus remarquables et les plus attachantes.  Il a laissé un nombre important de travaux, a tenu au quotidien un  journal et accompli  de longs voyages dans l’empire ottoman. Mais il suffit ici de rappeler deux écrits, assez différents l’un de l’autre, pour donner une idée de sa culture, de sa vision et de son impact sur ses contemporains: d’une part, son «Discours pour servir de préface», dans  la Bibliothèque orientale, ou Dictionnaire universel contenant généralement tout ce qui regarde la connaissance des peuples de l’Orient, ouvrage de référence de Barthélemy d’Herbelot (m. 1695), publié après deux années de travail en 1697 par Antoine Galland (voir http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k82422h); d’autre part, ses Mille et une nuits, Contes arabes, dont il a assuré la première traduction de 1704 à 1717 dans une langue européenne. Sa participation à la Bibliothèque orientale marque son implication profonde dans le tissu savant de l’époque, et sa préface fournit une très belle synthèse de l’ouvrage encyclopédique, signifiant l’ampleur de son érudition.

Elle indique aussi cependant ses engagements personnels à propos des religions ou de l’histoire de l’humanité, ou plus simplement à propos du rôle de la poésie, comme lorsqu’il écrit : « Et l’on peut compter comme une marque de la délicatesse de leur esprit, le nombre considérable de leurs poètes (…) Car en quelque nation que ce soit, la poésie a cela par-dessus la prose, qu’elle s’exprime plus noblement (…) ». En ce qui concerne sa traduction des Mille et une nuits, il n’est pas besoin de s’étendre sur son impact, qui a affecté très rapidement toute l’Europe du XVIIIe siècle.

Les compétences et les intérêts d’Antoine Galland pour l’Orient ont été en effet multiples, et c’est cette multiplicité que ce colloque entend traiter, non seulement avec le monde arabe, turc ou persan, mais bien au-delà, y compris par exemple le monde grec, à travers les médailles, ou le monde arménien à travers les manuscrits, ou bien encore à travers des phénomènes de société passés d’Orient en Occident, comme le café. Ajoutons à cela que rien ne qualifiait au départ Antoine Galland, né à Rollot en Picardie d’une famille des plus modestes,  à devenir au terme de sa carrière professeur au Collège royal et membre de l’Académie.

Cela permet de proposer un certain nombre de thèmes pour intervenir à ce colloque : Devenir orientaliste au XVIIe siècle (qui ? comment ?); les voyages de Galland et son journal ; ses travaux sur les textes narratifs (Kalîla et Dimna, Mille et une nuits) ; ses traités et anthologie (De l’origine et du progrès du café, Les paroles remarquables) ; la collecte des médailles et manuscrits ; la Bibliothèque orientale et l’érudition ; les Académies, les sociétés savantes et leurs organes de diffusion.

Les propositions de communication de dix à vingt lignes, accompagnées d’une brève présentation du conférencier (fonctions, coordonnées, bibliographie), doivent être envoyées sous forme d’un fichier texte word ou équivalent avant le 31 mai sur l’adresse: antoinegalland2015@gmail.com. Elles seront évaluées avant le 30 juin et une réponse sera envoyée au plus tard à cette date à tous les participants. La durée de chaque communication est de 20 mn. Les frais éventuels de transport et de séjour sont à la charge des participants. Pour plus d’informations n’hésitez pas à contacter: antoinegalland2015@gmail.com.

From H-ArtHist:

The Mediality of Sugar
Edited by Nadja Gernalzick, and Joseph Imorde

Proposals due by 1 June 2015; completed essays due by 30 November 2015

“Sugar is not a vegetable.” Other than as a natural substance, sugar—the food—may be conceptualized as a medium, or so the quotation from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) suggests. This call for contributions proposes a conceptualization of food as medium and takes the mediality of food by the example of sugar as a point of departure. Cane sugar has certainly mediatized and modified many peoples, cultures, and political or economic systems, in colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and in today’s world of a global food industry. In literature or works of the visual arts, sugar has a distinct iconography and is found in manifold metaphorical and figural uses. Examples are James Grainger’s georgic poem The Sugar-Cane of 1764, Phillis Wheatley’s brief “On Being Brought from Africa to America” of 1773, Jean Toomer’s modernist prose Cane of 1923, Edwidge Danticat’s historical novel The Farming of Bones of 1998, or Kara Walker’s sculpture with social intervention A Subtlety; or, The Marvelous Sugar Baby of 2014.

If sugar is read as a medium, the appearance of sugar in a novel, for instance, is a case of intermedial reference. Walker’s sculpture may be media combination, in the media-theoretical differentiations argued by Irina Rajewsky, among others. It may be that it has only become possible to recognize sugar and other foods as media since the technology and design that is part of any agri’culture’ and food production has today become obvious, or, readily observable to the consumer. In a communication studies model of mediality, food may be conceptualized as a message from the producer to the consumer. Sugar, as food, carries manifold significations regarding class, gender, race, sexuality, and other categories of identification. (more…)

Art, Anatomy, and Medicine since 1700
Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina, 31 March — 1 April 2016

Proposals due by 1 July 2015

The symposium organizer seeks proposals for papers that address visual, theoretical, cultural, historical and/or contemporary connections, relationships, conflicts and/or collaborations among the visual arts, anatomy/dissection, and medicine from the eighteenth century to the present. Participants may be historians of art, medicine, science or technology, art educators, medical professionals, artists (who may propose to contextualize their own work), etc. Successful papers may also be invited for publication in an edited volume of the same theme.

Broad topics may include (but are certainly not limited to):
· The role of anatomy in artists’ training (past, present and/or future)
· Artists’ roles in the creation/dissemination of anatomical knowledge
· Artistic representation of anatomical and medical professionals
· Anatomical and medical models: from écorché figures to nano-imagery
· Anatomy as art, art as anatomy
· Anatomical displays, exhibitions (e.g. Body Worlds), and collections: from curious to educational to controversial
· Corpses, dissection and grave-robbing in art, literature and medical history
· Imaging bodily surface and anatomical depth: from sculpture to M.R.I.s and beyond
· Beyond human, superhuman, inhuman(e)?: technological ‘improvements’, additions and extensions of human anatomy from prosthetics/implants to Google glasses
· Zombies and vampires, and the creative/fantastic defiance of or resistance to anatomical, medical and worldly reality
· The evolutionary human in art and science: looking backward and looking ahead
· Parts vs. whole: the functions of specificity and generality in aesthetics and visual medical information

Please send cover letter, abstract (no more than 3 pages, double-spaced typed), and CV to:
Dr. Andrew Graciano, Associate Professor of Art History and Associate Director
School of Visual Art & Design
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
or by email to: graciano@mailbox.sc.edu

From H-ArtHist:

Art and Art History Libraries
2016 Issue of Perspective: La Revue de l’INHA

Proposals due by 15 June 2015; finished papers due by 1 June 2016

The next special issue of Perspective (the journal of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art) will focus on topics relating to art and art-history libraries and their specificity as bibliographic, artistic, and documentary resources. We will examine these places, which make information pertaining to our discipline available to artists and researchers, while at the same time endeavoring to conserve their collections of texts and images. This double purpose requires examining the practices and profiles of users, the way in which people visit these institutions, either by consulting the images in reading rooms or websites (consultation of reproductions as opposed to reading monographs, digital access to works, etc.), and also a study of their collections: in addition to books and magazines, art libraries also preserve prints, photographs, manuscripts, artist books, etc.

The interest of such a project for an art-historical review lies partly in the difficulty in defining the exact scope of an art library. However, the planned reopening by the INHA in 2016 of the Salle Labrouste, which will house one of the most important art libraries in the world in terms of its number of volumes, its symbolic importance, and its accessibility, offers a unique opportunity for a collective historical and aesthetic reflection on the forms and ambitions of these collections of art and knowledge, past and present. Nevertheless, this issue will not be limited exclusively to the example of the INHA. On the contrary, consistent with the editorial philosophy of Perspective,
the volume will contain articles that cover a historical range in their study of art libraries in general and present the most innovative studies from an international standpoint. At the same time, we aim to publish original papers on the place of the library in the work of artists and architects.

We would like to suggest several potentially interesting paths, without excluding others: issues related to the conservation and dissemination of ephemera and small publications such as invitation cards, almanacs, booklets, announcements, etc.; the study of exceptional bibliophiles such as, for example, Doucet, Wyder, and Oechslin; the correlation between library holdings and research topics (the Mesnil collection given to the Warburg Institute and research projects at University College, London in the 2000s); the study of art libraries during wartime similar to research on artworks plundered during such extreme periods; evaluation of the losses and gains following the merger of disparate collections originally belonging to art schools, museums, universities (for example, the INHA Library); the particular fate of iconographic documentation (Bildarchiv Foto Marburg); the recent foundation of specialized research centers with libraries created from scratch like the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal; and also the inclusion of various media resources, including recordings, such as oral archives at the British Library (artists’ interviews) or performance videos in the Kandinsky Library of the Centre Georges Pompidou. Finally, projects are certainly needed from the perspective of the history of art education, on specialized establishments for art craftsmen such as the Bibliotheque Forney and the Ratti Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, without neglecting the opportunity offered by digital technology in new ways of disseminating collections.

The proposals could range from a synthetic short article focusing on a specific aspect of the art library, or on relations between art and the library in a given period and in a particular geographic area (25,000 characters), to a detailed and multidisciplinary study of a moment in art library history, or even the problematization of their absence in time and space (45,000 characters).

The intention of this call for papers is not to cover all possible topics exhaustively: all proposals are welcome. However, within the framework of an art-historical review dedicated to recent international research in the field, we wish to emphasize historical and aesthetic approaches, rather than research relevant to library studies proper. Projects in whatever language—Perspective takes responsibility for translations—will be reviewed by the scientific committee consisting of Laurent Baridon, Ewa Bobrowska, Anne-Élisabeth Buxtorf, Penelope Curtis, Godehard Janzig, Thomas Kirchner, Rémi Labrusse, Anne Lafont, Johanne Lamoureux, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Michel Melot, Pierre-Michel Menger, Philippe Saunier, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Valérie Sueur-Hermel, Veerle Thielemans and Bernard Vouilloux.

Please submit your proposals (2000–3000 character summary and a 2–3 line biography) to revue-perspective@inha.fr up to and including June 15, 2015. Full texts of accepted contributions will need to be sent by June 1, 2016.

From AAH:

Creating Markets, Collecting Art
Christie’s King Street, London, 14–15 July 2016

Proposals due by 1 June 2015

To commemorate the traditional founding date of Christie’s auction house in 1766, a two-day conference, 14–15 July 2016, will be held at Christie’s King Street, focusing on the theme of Creating Markets and Collecting Art.

Christie’s Education is known for its collaborative and cross-disciplinary approach to the study of works of art through its Master’s programmes in the History of Art and its Markets, Art-world Practice and Art, Law and Business internationally. This conference hopes to explore this cross-disciplinary area, looking at the interrelationship of commerce, collecting and the academy.

Sessions should engage with current scholarship on any aspect of the art market, in particular on creating markets, collecting, regulation and cultural heritage, from the eighteenth century to the present day, and in all geographical regions. Session proposals may address the following:
• the role of the intermediary in the structure of art ecosystems
• the economics of taste and its relationship to value(s)
• how artefacts are transformed into works of art by the market and by enthusiasts and collectors
• the role of regulation and the law
• the auction house as cultural space
• current theoretical debates surrounding ‘aura’ and the making/meaning of authenticity

Session proposals should include a title and abstract (maximum 250 words), the contact details of the convenor(s) and a brief biography. Please submit the Session Proposal Form by e-mail to the Conference Secretary (aking@christies.com) by 1st June 2015. This will be followed by a Call for Papers in July 2015.

Below is the general Call for Papers for the 2016 meeting in Beijing of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), along with details for the session on “The Other and the Foreign.” Many of the 21 sessions will be of interest and the full CFPs is available here.

34th CIHA World Congress of Art History: Terms
Beijing, 15–22 September 2016

Proposals due by 30 June 2015

The Chinese CIHA Committee will host the 34th CIHA World Congress of Art History in Beijing and invites art historians from all over the world to attend and discuss Terms. Scholars from a vast cross-section of disciplines and fields of professional interest are called upon to discuss together ways of seeing, describing, analyzing, and classifying art works. The topics are divided into 21 sections. The sections should enable comparisons to be made between different viewpoints and methods. Each panel will compose a program reflecting the CIHA’s commitment to the idea of diversity, which should allow talks on different genres, epochs, and countries to be brought together. Please submit the abstract of your paper directly to the chairs with a copy to info@ciha2016.org before 30 June 2015.

Session 14: The Other and the Foreign: Contact, Curiosity, and Creative Exchange

Session Chairs
Petra Chu, Seton Hall University, New Jersey (petra.chu@shu.ed)
DING Ning, Peking University, Beijing (dingning@pku.edu.cn)
LIANG Shuhan (Junior Chair), Peking Univeristy, Beijing (liangtiantian@hotmail.com)
Respondent
Jennifer Milam, Sydney University (jennifer.milam@sydney.edu.au)

This session is concerned with the representation of the ‘other’ and the ‘foreign’ in art as well as with the reception of ‘other’ and ‘foreign’ art forms. It acknowledges that, in a global world, the notion of ‘othering’ is not restricted to the geographically or ethnically distant (‘foreign’), but occurs within one’s own (geographically defined) culture between different social classes, genders, age groups, and religious affiliations. More generally, the session focuses on the phenomenon of artistic encounter and exchange. While its parameters are worldwide, papers on all topics related to the ‘other’/’foreign’ are solicited in as far as they pertain to the creation and reception of art and/or the transmission of creative ideas. Papers on the contacts between specific regions or the role and place of individual artists in the process of artistic exchange are welcomed.

Questions to be addressed may include but are not limited to the following:
• Can we distinguish universal paradigms for the ways in which ‘the other’ is represented in art, globally?
• In the global history of art, how have animals been used as devices for ‘othering’, not solely as subject matter, but as a means through which artists and their audiences engage with the nature of self—other relationships?
• How can we improve our theoretical models of the reception of foreign and, more generally, ‘other’ art?’
• Are there degrees of ‘otherness,‘ and if so, can we measure them? Can a work produced within one’s own (geographically defined) culture be just as ‘other’ as, or more so than, a work produced in a ‘foreign’ culture?
• How can we theorize ‘artistic exchange?’
• How do we define ‘hybridity’ in art? Is more than one definition possible?
• What is the relation/difference between exchanges between cultural centers and those that happen at peripheries, specifically in connection with ‘hybrid’ art forms?
• To what extent can artistic differences and sameness be accounted for through geography?

An addition to the CAA 2016 sessions:

ASECS Panel on Eros and Enlightenment at the
104th Annual Conference of the College Art Association
Washington, D.C., 3–6 February 2016

Proposals due by 31 May 2015

Session Chairs:
Nina Dubin, University of Illinois at Chicago (dubin@uic.edu)
Hérica Valladares, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (herica.valladares@gmail.com)

What would it mean to consider the eighteenth century through the lens of its evolving discourse on love? The explosion of a novel-reading public; the Enlightenment’s often nervous inquiry into love’s place among the ‘moral sentiments’ and its status in relation to the equally unstable category of friendship; the expansion of epistolary culture and the attendant vogue for love letter pictures; the libertine conceptualization of love as a ‘commerce’; homoeroticism as a cultural leitmotif; the ubiquitous presence of Cupid, even in such unexpected contexts as financial literature; the fixation on ancient notions of eros, from Ovid’s persistently popular Ars Amatoria to the unearthed remains of erotic frescoes: these and other phenomena suggest that love played a central yet complicated role in period self-imaginings, in ways that iconographic accounts of the era’s visual arts have perhaps not fully registered. This ASECS-sponsored panel seeks papers on all aspects of visual and material culture that expand, challenge, and enliven our understanding of eros in the eighteenth century.

Please email a title, abstract (1–2 pages, double-spaced) and brief CV (1–2 pages) to the panel chairs by May 31.

From the University of Warwick:

Visual Print Culture in Europe, 1500–1850: Techniques, Genres, Imagery, and Markets
University of Warwick at Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, Venice, 5–6 December 2015

Proposals due by 1 June 2015

Under Napoleon’s Empire we find London acting as a hub for printing caricatures of Napoleon in a range of languages, and with a number of distinctive styles. The print Die Universalmonarchie (pictured to the right) claims, for example, to have been published by Boydell & Co. in London in 1815, but the Boydells were based at Cheapside, not—as the print states—at Pall Mall (once the location of the late Josiah Boydell’s famous Shakespeare Gallery). The publication information would seem to be spurious, and the British Museum suggests that it was likely published in Paris. Is this print, then, German, French, or even possibly English? Who exactly is its market? How far is its imagery tailored to a particular ‘national’ audience and in what ways might it be distinctively comprehensible to such an audience? Besides London, what other European hubs were important, at what moments and why?

Visual Print Culture in Europe 1500–1850 aims to draw together scholars with a range of disciplinary skills to discuss the methods, representational forms, and distribution of and audience for visual print media in Europe between 1500 and 1850. Its seeks to de-nationalize the study of visual print culture, and to explore the extent to which interactions between engravers and printers, artists and consumers in Europe, and a range of common representational practices produced a genuinely European visual print culture—with local modulations, but nonetheless with a common core.

Papers can draw on a range of disciplinary backgrounds in exploring the exchange of techniques and processes, the analysis of imagery, and the identification of markets, and in analysing the conditions under which particular generic forms crossed or failed to cross national boundaries. Although the emphasis is on European visual print culture, the impact of that culture on, and its interaction with, the wider world is also of interest. The conference language will be English. The conference may be able to provide some financial assistance to those whose home institutions are unable to support their attendance, especially postgraduate students.

The conference organisers—acting under the European History Research Centre—are Mark Philp (History, EHRC Director, Warwick mark.philp@warwick.ac.uk), Kate Astbury (French Studies, Warwick), Mark Knights (History, Warwick), and David Taylor (English, Warwick). Proposals for papers should be submitted to t.smith.2@warwick.ac.uk by June 1st 2015, but please feel free to contact Mark Philp in advance with any queries.

2016 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Pittsburgh, 31 March — 3 April 2016

Session Proposals due by 1 June 2015

Proposals for panels at the at the 47th annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, to take place in Pittsburgh, are now being accepted. Please complete the form (available as a Word document) and email it to asecs@wfu.edu.

From H-ArtHist:

Reconsidering the Rococo: 18th to 21st Centuries / Penser le Rococo (XVIIIe–XXIe Siècle)
University of Lausanne, 5–6 November 2015

Proposals due by 30 June 2015

This symposium will be held alongside Agents and Agency of Rocaille Ornament (Les acteurs de la rocaille) organised at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris from 1st to 3rd October 2015.

Despite the scepticism or irony which it provokes, the notion of the Rococo occupies a central position within the historiography of 18th-century art. It structures our understanding of this epoch and determines the way in which we see it. This symposium, planned as an answer to the stimulating research of the last twenty years on the Rococo, aims at an epistemological reflection on a protean notion which was progressively defined as a style during the 19th century.

The Rococo—which is often associated with the supposed frivolity of the 18th century—is regularly described as a capricious, sensual, anti-vitruvian artistic phenomenon without any coherent theoretical grounding. Alternately presented as progressive—even transgressive—or retrograde, profane or religious, the Rococo is always a place of contradictions. In order to avoid its moral, political and cultural connotations, some art historians attempt to define it only by its formal aspects. In the history of styles, the Rococo is often set against Neoclassicism and entertains an unclear relationship with the Baroque. Is it fundamentally different from the latter? Might it be the Baroque’s last phase, its fulfilment or its decline? Its origin is also the object of vivid debate: while it is generally agreed that the Rococo first appeared in France, some authors have stated that it only reached its full development in Germany.

This symposium therefore favours a critical approach to this notion, urging contributors to reconsider how it emerged, how it was formed and diffused. What were the first manifestations of the Rococo, on what preconceived ideas was it founded, and how did it become a formal and aesthetic canon? Which sources did it draw upon? What ideas and categories have been used to structure it? How were the boundaries of the Rococo established? The different objects which have been brought together through this classification can be linked to many discourses of their time, notably those concerning the inventio and the caprice. However, those same objects also caused many reactions: a large proportion of these, from the 18th century on, were negative, as is exemplified in famous texts by Abbé Le Blanc and Cochin. How have art historians interpreted these discourses? What simplifications, anachronisms, projections or prejudices does this attempt to describe 18th-century art reflect? How has the context in which interpreters have written about the Rococo oriented the formulation of narratives during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries? How have the ideas upon which their work is founded inflected the production of imitations of 18th-century objects? How have these revivals, in turn, acted upon our understanding of the Rococo?

These questions—as well as many other similar ones—can be used as a framework for the presentations. As the reader will have understood by now, this symposium will not attempt to define the characteristics of a style, nor to determine an essence of the Rococo but to reflect on the manner in which a notion has been—and continues to be—perceived. Proposals of up to 300 words—to which a brief resumé and a list of publications should be joined— can be sent to carl.magnusson@unil.ch and paulinart@yahoo.fr until 30th June 2015. Travel and lodging expenses will be covered by the University of Lausanne.

Scientific Organisers
Carl Magnusson (University of Lausanne)
Marie-Pauline Martin (University of Aix-Marseille, CNRS TELEMME UMR 7303)

Scientific Committee
Jan Blanc (University of Geneva)
Frédéric Dassas (Musée du Louvre, Department of Decorative Arts)
Michaël Decrossas (Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris)
Peter Fuhring (Custodia Foundation, Paris)
Christian Michel (University of Lausanne)