Enfilade

Now accepting proposals for this panel for next year’s ISECS Congress in Rotterdam:

Alternative Markets and Visual Culture in Eighteenth-Century France
ISECS Congress, Rotterdam, 26–31 July 2015

Proposals due by 12 January 2015 (though earlier submissions encouraged)

Organiser: Dr. Esther Bell (Curator in Charge, European Paintings, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) and Dr. Jessica Fripp (Post-doctoral Fellow in Visual and Material Culture, Parsons The New School for Design)

Academic artistic practice in the eighteenth century was at odds with the growing commercial culture of the period. From its foundation, the Royal Academy prohibited its members from dealing in art, an offense that was deemed cause for expulsion by 1777. Critics similarly looked down on painting for profit. In 1747, La Font de Saint Yenne had harsh words for artists who chose the more financially lucrative practice of portraiture over the more noble art of history painting. Diderot suggested that Fragonard’s turn away from history painting was caused by “l’appas du gain.”

Of course, even artists who appeared to resist the lure of monetary wealth were embedded in complex systems of exchange based on other forms of capital. This panel seeks to explore alternative markets of exchange that developed around the production of eighteenth-century visual culture and the forms of symbolic capital artists could accumulate. Papers might address topic such as: the role of collecting works by one’s contemporaries, friendship networks between artists and artists and patrons, celebrity as currency, gift exchange and favors, artistic dynasties and family allegiances. We especially encourage papers that demonstrate exchange across France’s borders, including its colonies or other European entities.

Information on how to submit abstracts can be found here»

Making A Home: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Domestic Interior
University of Sussex, Brighton, 7–8 May 2015

Proposals due by 30 November 2014

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Flora Dennis, Senior Lecturer, Art History, University of Sussex

I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.
—Maya Angelou

The late Maya Angelou once wrote, “The ache for home lives in all of us.” This nostalgia for home—be it a physical space or geographical place, a moment in time, a person / people, or a state of mind—continues to be of central interest to artists, writers, and thinkers. Crossing lines between the private and public spheres, and extending
into important explorations of nationhood and belonging, different areas of research into the home seek to expand our understanding of how physical space has been used, transformed, and conceptualised throughout history. Some aspects of this pursuit include less-tangible features: Interactions between people, objects and spaces; the complex process of memory-making; the role of sentiment; and creating a sense of belonging can transform a dwelling into a home. In turn, these interactions have the power to transform the individual and the home, and to shape a sense of identity, whether as an individual, family, or nation.

This two-day interdisciplinary conference invites proposals from doctoral students and early career researchers for 20-minute papers that explore the question of what makes a home, and how homes make us. Papers may consider homes both past and present and from a variety of perspectives such as material culture studies, art history, gender
studies, anthropology, postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and geography. Topics may include, though are not limited to:
• Historical constructions of home
• Public versus private spaces/spheres
• Domestic production and consumption
• Notions of domesticity, gender and identity
• Representations of home in art, music and literature
• Religion, ritual and belief in the home
• Institutional or non-familial homes
• Historic homes and heritage sites
• Architecture and interior design
• Sociability and sociality
• Ideas of nation / nationhood
• Diaspora and belonging
• Colonial and postcolonial histories

Please email an abstract of no more than 250 words to Michele Robinson and Emma Doubt at MakingAHome2015@gmail.com by 30 November 2014. Along with your abstract please include your name, institution, paper title and brief biography. Successful applicants will be notified by 1 February 2015. All speakers will be invited to attend a complimentary dinner in Brighton the evening of 7 May 2015.

Now accepting proposals for this panel for next year’s ISECS Congress in Rotterdam:

Pictures in Motion: Portraiture around the World during the Long Eighteenth Century
ISECS Congress, Rotterdam, 26–31 July 2015

Proposals due by 12 January 2015 (though earlier submissions encouraged)

Organiser: Jennifer Germann, jgermann@ithaca.edu

Portraits and portraitists moved between courts, capitals, nations, and colonies in an ebb and flow that followed the tides of imperialism, markets, and diplomacy. Indeed, while portraits were understood as emphasizing the unique individual who could be regarded as a ‘defined location’ at the heart of the image, these representations frequently gesture to the world beyond the sitter to situate and elevate him or her. Portraiture was a dynamic artistic practice throughout the long eighteenth century due, in part, to the various exchanges that portraits occasioned and pictured. This panel turns its attention to the practice of portraiture and to portraits produced during this period with an emphasis on their global circulation. What motivations, rewards, and disincentives existed for artists who traveled for their work? What artistic and cultural exchanges were occasioned by this movement? How were portraits used to facilitate other transactions, whether mercantile or diplomatic? In what sense can we understand portrait production as a global phenomenon, as opposed to an international or cosmopolitan one and distinct from national schools? How does portraiture help us understand what it meant to be global in the eighteenth century? Topics might include the exchange between distinct traditions of portraiture in terms of approaches and conventions, the use of portraits in diplomacy (as, for example, in marriage arrangements), and artists who traveled for and in search of clients. Interdisciplinary papers are welcome with an emphasis on cultural exchange through portraits and global portrait practices. Submissions concentrating on the late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century are particularly encouraged.

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Portraiture as Interaction: The Spaces and Interfaces of the British Portrait
The Huntington, San Marino, California, 11–12 December 2015

Proposals due by 7 November 2014

A symposium jointly organized by the Yale Center for British Art, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Huntington

This symposium has been inspired by the important collections of British portraits at the Huntington Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, and by an upsurge of scholarly interest in the interactive nature of portraiture—both in its intrinsic character and as a curatorial construct.

Portraiture implies an interaction between the sitter and the spectator. It often rehearses an interaction between two or more protagonists and regularly focuses on the interaction between the person(s) represented and his, her, or their surroundings. Portraits—of husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, friends, and colleagues—are often depicted by artists and arranged by curators so as to interact with each other in meaningful ways. As they are created, and once they are completed, portraits (and the figures they represent) interact with their settings: with the studio, the exhibition space, the domestic interior, the public building or square; and with the objects, people, and spaces found in those settings. The same portrait, or portraits of the same sitter, can also find themselves interacting with each other across different media—paint, print, sculpture, and more.

Furthermore, curators are continually thinking about the ways in which the portraits they display—and the individuals these pictures portray—will relate with each other across and around a gallery. The Thornton Portrait Gallery at the Huntington and the galleries at the Yale Center for British Art exemplify portraiture’s continuing forms of interaction: implied and actual, pictorial and physical, and formal and figural.

This two-day international symposium will use the rich collections at the Center and the Huntington Art Gallery and the different concepts of interaction outlined above as points of departure and return, in order to open up new approaches to the history and workings of British portraiture up to the present. Participants will be encouraged to offer original and innovative readings of individual portraits, groups of portraits, portrait galleries, and portraiture as a genre. Talks that respond explicitly to works in the collections of the Huntington and the Center are particularly encouraged.

We invite proposals for thirty-five to forty-minute papers on this theme from scholars working in any discipline. Cross-disciplinary and comparative studies are particularly welcome. Please e-mail abstracts of no more than three hundred words, along with a short CV, to ycba.research@yale.edu. The deadline for proposals is November 7, 2014.

Travel and accommodations will be provided for speakers arriving from outside the Los Angeles area, and meals will be provided for all.

By my hasty count, 11 of the 34 sessions proposed for the Association of Art Historians 2015 conference could include eighteenth-century papers. Be sure to consult the conference website for things I’ve overlooked. –CH

41st Annual AAH Conference and Bookfair
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (SCVA), University of East Anglia, Norwich, 9–11 April 2015

Proposals due by 10 November 2014

The AAH 2015 conference and bookfair will be located in the famous Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (SCVA), designed by Norman Foster and a finalist for the museum of the year. It holds a fascinating collection of work and hosts a range of exhibitions. SCVA is part of the University of East Anglia (UEA) and situated on the UEA campus. The conference will start on Thursday 9 April at various venues in Norwich city centre, and then remain at SCVA for Friday and Saturday.  The SCVA building will be the main hub of the event, in which registration, refreshments and sessions take place.

Founded in 1965, the Department of Art History and World Art Studies is a member of the Sainsbury Institute for Art at the University of East Anglia. The Department has become known for its commitment to geographical and historical inclusivity, and to collaborative and cross-disciplinary scholarship.

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Session 3 | The Art History of Architectural History
Session Convenors: Mark Crinson, University of Manchester, mark.crinson@manchester.ac.uk; and Richard Williams, University of Edinburgh, r.j.williams@ed.ac.uk

Art history and architectural history are sister disciplines… or are they? How many art history departments regard architectural history as a core component of their provision? What might art history students miss if architectural history were not part of their curricula? Perhaps art objects and architectural objects are so radically different their study cannot be shared. Or perhaps there are modes of enquiry that can be developed to mutual benefit.

This session reviews the art history/architectural history relationship in several ways. One way is to excavate those moments when art and architectural history were tightly bound together: in the very formation of art history as a discipline, for example, when both art and architecture were natural objects of study.

Other ways might be: investigations of the parallel developments of formalism in art and architectural history; of architectural history’s relation to the ‘new art history’; of the ways in which architectural history might adopt recent developments in object studies, global art history, and art writing.

Academics dealing with contemporary architecture find themselves wrestling with debates that in other disciplines may be more abstract or indirect: How does money or power represent itself in visual form? How does the general public (whoever they may be) understand form? How does government use aesthetics to communicate? All of these things are, and always have been, live in architecture. Perhaps this might be part of a case for making architectural history more central to art history. If so, what implications would it have for our curricula and our pedagogy?

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Session 6 | British Art through Its Exhibition Histories, 1760 to Now
Session Convenors: Mark Hallett, Sarah Victoria Turner, and Martina Droth, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, svturner@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk

How have histories of British art been shaped, defined and contested by and through exhibitions? Taking a broad historical perspective, and responding to an upsurge of interest in the study of exhibition histories in recent years, this session will explore the varied exhibition cultures of British art from 1760—the year that saw the first annual exhibition of contemporary British painting, sculpture and printmaking—through to today.

This session does not seek to offer a chronological history of exhibitions but rather a series of critical propositions that take exhibitions and exhibition culture as a lens through which to examine the history, presentation, marketing and reception of British art, both in the UK and internationally. How have exhibitions shaped or disputed the artistic canon, defined particular artistic groupings, or articulated distinctive histories of British art? How have they contributed to new kinds of critical and art-historical writing about British painting, sculpture, graphic and multi-media arts?

We welcome proposals that explore exhibitions of British art in a variety of contexts, at either a national or international level, including: case studies of individual exhibitions or series of displays; monographic or thematic exhibitions; the phenomenon of travelling exhibitions, both historically and today; exhibitions in public, private and commercial spaces.

Papers might examine the role of agencies, institutions and funding bodies; exhibitions as a tool for shaping a canon; exhibitions and changing notions of ‘Britishness’; the display of British art and artists in different international contexts. We seek papers that will interrogate and analyse the dynamic, transformative and sometimes challenging relationship of British art to its exhibition histories across different periods.

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Session 13 | Flow in World Art, 1500–1750
Session Convenor: Margit Thøfner, University of East Anglia, m.thofner@uea.ac.uk

This session considers the notion of flow in the early modern period in the broadest possible terms. During this time, most parts of the globe became connected by shipping lanes. The already steady trickle of people, objects and ideas across the continents and oceans became a full flow. That waterways could both conjoin and divide was evident in a manner that it had never been before. At the same time, liquids such as sap, mercury, lava, semen, milk and blood came under intense interrogation, in moral, political, theological and scientific terms.

What consequences did this fascination with fluidity have for the arts? Depicting flow is of necessity an act of fixing runniness. Liquids may work as boundaries but, at the same time, they are boundless. How did early modern artists and artisans address this paradox? How did they show fluidity, whether of persons, ideas or substances?

The aim of this session is to consider, compare and contrast how image-makers from across the world tackled such problems. Our ultimate goal is to determine whether, how and why the concept of flow changed visually under the manifold pressures of early colonialism. We welcome contributions focused anywhere in the world within the given dates and we are particularly interested in examples where two or more pictorial or artefactual traditions are brought together. We hope to publish selected papers from this session in a dedicated issue of the journal World Art.

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Session 14 | From Distaste to Mockery: The City and Its Architectures Ridiculed
Session Convenor: Michela Rosso, Politecnico di Torino, michela.rosso@polito.it

Since the origins of the contemporary age, the rise of a mass public and a reconfigured public sphere, along with the diffusion of the popular press, have deeply affected the way in which the city and its architectures are interpreted and judged. Among the genres addressing the modern city, some emerge that seem to be highly effective in disseminating the architectural culture, displaying its distortions or singling out its vulnerable features through the deployment of humour. As part of a media-saturated public culture, humour is both a practice of social communication and a plausible portrayal of society, illuminating the ambivalences of modern life and uncovering the shock provoked by processes of modernisation.

This session’s aim is to inaugurate a catalogue of the comic as applied to the spatial criticism of the city, its artefacts and its leading professionals—architects, artists and builders. Punch’s sharp satire of the first World Exhibition, William H Robinson’s caricatures of modernist housing, Tati’s parody of the Corbusian villa, and Dunn’s architecturally situated cartoons for The New Yorker are some of the renowned entries in this possible catalogue. By absorbing the disturbing effects of modernisation and turning them into laughter, they give voice to a diverse range of feelings and social reactions, from distaste to overt dissent.

This session invites case studies that explore the reception of architectural facts through the distinct codes of humour, verbal as well as visual, in any place and time, between 1750 and today, and focusing on any medium from literature to cinema, television and cartoons.

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Sesison 17 | Materialising Modern Identities: Architectural Sculpture after 1750
Session Convenors: Katie Faulkner, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, katie.r.faulkner@gmail.com; and Ayla Lepine, University of Essex, ayla.lepine@gmail.com

In recent years, sculpture studies within art and architectural history have grown exponentially, increasingly taking diverse themes into account including materiality, gender, postcolonialism and affect. In the rapid transformations of state power and imperial activity in the 18th century, through into the post-revolutionary political atmosphere of the 19th century, nations appeared to sponsor the celebration of the public citizen and actively projected imperial stability in the midst of change and resistance. Despite its association with permanence, sculpture was charged with representing change: materialising new identities and formulating representational traditions.

Architectural sculpture in particular marked sites of urban modernity, such as stations, cultural institutions, civic landmarks and sacred structures; these large and prestigious commissions often sparked public debate around identity and artistic production. As the onset and outcomes of the First World War shaped the power and politics of cultural memory, sculpture took centre stage, with new responsibilities amongst global tensions. Interwar architectural sculpture negotiated and articulated increasing anxieties regarding ornament, historicism, modernism and minimalism. With the arrival of modernism worldwide, some believed architectural sculpture was anathema. Others looked to it as the vehicle to facilitate and embody vitality in bold new architectural experimentation. Architectural sculpture was a crucible for artistic and wider cultural dialogue concerning modern life and modern subjects.

We invite proposals for papers that explore architectural sculpture and identity in a global context between 1750 and the present. Potential themes include: collaboration and networks between architects and sculptors; materiality, production and reproduction; modernism and tradition; beauty and ugliness; figuration and abstraction; style and historicism; form, function and ornament; spectacle and the everyday; memory and ritual; nationhood and transnationalism; and empire and its afterlives.

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Session 22 | Navigating the Pacific: Latin America and Asia in Conversation
Session Convenors: Kathryn Santner and Paul Merchant, St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, kathryn.santner@gmail.com and pm437@cam.ac.uk

The critical role of Asia in the history of Latin American art has often been overlooked; recent scholarship has, however, begun to reassess this longstanding cultural engagement. This session will examine the significance of Asia–Latin America exchange from its earliest days via the Manila Galleon and Portuguese trade networks through to the present day.

Iberian trade brought luxury goods—porcelain, lacquerware, folding screens, ivories, and inlaid furniture—to the Americas, where they were adapted and incorporated into local artistic practice, spawning new art forms like the biombo. The decline of the galleon trade after 1815 did not mark the end of this transpacific relationship; ensuing centuries brought successive waves of Asian immigrants to Latin America – notably the Chinese to Peru and the Japanese to Brazil.

In the wake of this diaspora, artists have recently begun to explore Asian identity in Latin America, notably in several successful documentary and fiction film productions from the region. The presence, for the first time, of a Latin American pavilion at the Beijing Art Expo 2013 also points to the increasing recognition of a centuries-old dialogue in the visual arts. So too does the ‘Latin American Artists in Asia’ network, whose members practise in fields from sculpture to photography and digital art. This session will cover a broad historical period, and adopt a variety of methodological approaches. Key issues to be considered include (post) national identity, materiality and its relationship to place, and the opportunities and complications offered by digital technologies.

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Session 23 | Petits-maîtres: ‘Minor’ Genres and Their Meanings in Post-Revolutionary France
Session Convenor: Richard Taws, University College London, r.taws@ucl.ac.uk

While studies of French art of the late 18th and early 19th centuries have historically tended to privilege the work of a few prominent artists, increased attention has been paid more recently to artists working in less prestigious genres, in other media, and to those who helped disseminate their work. This session focuses on, among others, the genre painters and miniaturists, flower and animal painters, landscapists and portraitists, and printmakers of all types who were active in France from the beginning of the French Revolution through to the end of the July Monarchy.

In the aftermath of the Revolution, a diverse range of artists working in ‘minor’ genres negotiated the shifting parameters of artistic practice, documenting (some more explicitly than others) a modern world subject to rapid social and political change. Meanwhile, new venues for the display and dissemination of art, alongside technical innovations in printmaking, created novel opportunities for reproductive image-makers and publishers. Consequently, this session also welcomes papers that address the implications of the circulation, sale and display of prints by, and after, so-called petits-maîtres, the lives of images in reproduction, and the practices of replication, remediation and recontextualisation to which they were subject.

How did the new political, social and commercial circumstances of early 19th-century France enable or constrain artistic practices of this kind, and how might they be understood in terms of evolving hierarchies of class or gender? How did art made during this period relate to other techniques, institutions, spectacles, careers, audiences or social practices?

While this session encourages papers that focus closely on lesser-known artists or works, it is also hoped that speakers will take the opportunity to situate their subjects imaginatively within broader tendencies in early 19th-century visual culture.

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Session 24 | Portraiture and the Unworthy Subject in the Early Modern World
Session Convenor: Carmen Fracchia, Birkbeck, University of London, c.fracchia@bbk.ac.uk

In the early modern period, the production of portraiture was governed by restrictive conventions. According to the first European treatise on portraiture since antiquity (Francisco de Holanda’s Do tirar polo natural [On Taking Portraits from Life], 1548), the essence of the genre was the worthy sitter’s moral or intellectual prestige. Thus, the main function of the portrait image was to immortalise the worthy elite, with the implicit moral understanding that there could be no room for the portrayal of the unworthy subject. What are the political and visual implications of this belief about portraiture? What are the notions of human diversity that prevent the portrayal of undeserving subjects? How are these concepts negotiated in the production of the portrait image outside Europe?

This session aims to build on research by historians of art, literature and the colonial world, and work on slave narratives that illuminate the paradoxical nature of ‘slave portraits’ in the Atlantic World. It intends to explore a wider spectrum of what were considered ‘unworthy subjects’, and the complexity of the mutually exclusive categories of ‘portraiture’ and ‘undeserving subject’. It also seeks to tackle the oxymoronic categories of ‘self-portraiture’ and ‘unworthy subject’, and investigate how notions of human diversity might challenge the boundaries of traditional portraiture and self-portraiture.

Contributions are invited that address the portrayal of ‘undeserving people’ across different media and cultures in the early modern world, as well as the historical context of social inferiority and the ‘undeserving’ between the 15th and the 18th centuries.

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Session 28 | Surface Affects and Shiny Things: Bringing Meaning to Light
Session Convenors: Nic Maffei, Victoria Mitchell and Marcia Pointon, Norwich University of the Arts n.maffei@nua.ac.uk, v.mitchell@nua.ac.uk and m.r.pointon@manchester.ac.uk

The visual qualities of a surface that shines are such as to attract or distract the eyes, which themselves are often attributed with gleaming, shining or glinting. The silkiness of high polish invites tactile attention too, or deters for fear of spoiling. Shine may materialise through use or careful positioning of an object. It is often not inherent in a material but may be derived from working up a shine. Within art, design and architecture, materials (metal, plastic, glass, fabric, wood, paint) and processes, often labour-intensive (polishing, burnishing, glazing), can combine to reveal shine. The manifestations of shininess can imply bodies in motion and individual subjectivity, while the gloss of film or magazines points to a more socially pervasive ‘look’. Although dependent on specular-reflective properties of light and absorbency of materials, reflective patina or sheen is often intentionally sought, in order to generate affect or effect.

This session addresses the cultural, historical, critical and often paradoxical meanings of ‘shine’ as this pertains to the making, using or viewing of objects and surfaces. Depending on context, shininess might suggest religious or poetic allusion, sensory engagement, luminosity, spectacle, desire, cheapness, cleanliness, protection, health, wealth and perhaps also disgust (as in the surface of slime). Shininess was held in high regard in Byzantine and Anglo-Saxon art, as also for many designers of the mid-20th century. Spurred on by fashion, the superficial nature of shininess has been linked to postmodern theory on late-capitalism. We seek papers that engage with such issues in relation to any period, reflecting a range of practices and perspectives.

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Session 29 | Things and Their Ideas: Exchanges in the Visual and Material Cultures of Islamicate Asia
Session Convenors: Sussan Babaie, The Courtauld Institute of Art, sussan.babaie@courtauld.ac.uk; and
Elizabeth Lambourn, De Montfort University, Leicester, elambourn@dmu.ac.uk

In recent decades, the theoretical turn to cross-culturality has produced important reflections on the global in art history. A persistent feature of such trans-regional explorations remains nevertheless rooted in networks that implicate Europe in some prominent way: the Mediterranean exchanges are invariably about Europe and the Muslim cultures, the European interests in chinoiserie that skip the vast inter-Asian land and water routes of exchange, or post-colonial interests that reflect, in the end, more on the European colonist than on the Asian colonised.

This session takes the global from the vantage point of the centrality of the Asian nexus in producing its principal vectors in pre-colonial times. It invites innovative approaches that focus on the specificities of, and excavate deeply into, isolated ‘things’ or a cluster of desirable things. It asks for trans-disciplinary reflections on the mechanisms of exchange and transmission of ideas, through art and material culture, in between the local histories and global networks across regions where Islamic cultural modes were dominant or influential, throughout the Asian landmass. Collecting or commissioning of cut precious stones, of album and manuscript paintings, of embroidered textiles and inlaid objects, of garden designs and tomb edifices, and the collection and circulation of animalia; with such topics, we hope the papers in this session will bring fullness to our understanding of things as a way to access their global implications through an Islamicate Asian lens.

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Session 30 | Thinking Images
Session Convenors: Hanneke Grootenboer, Anita Paz and Lucy Whelan, University of Oxford, lucy.whelan@trinity.ox.ac.uk

This session explores the rising interest in art as a mode of thinking, apparent in academic writing as well as artistic practice. Images have long been seen as thought-provoking or as tools for contemplation. However, recent years have revealed a shift towards giving art works agency to think. Cézanne and Klee famously declared that they thought through painting, while Jean-Luc Godard claimed cinema as a mode of thinking. More recently, Jacques Rancière declared photography as thoughtful, while Ron Burnett’s How Images Think links the digital image’s thinking power to the technology from which it derives.

This session will examine how images might be capable of thinking. Questions to be pursued include: By what mechanisms do images think? What visual language do they use or create? How do they shape thought? How is a mode of thought specific to a particular medium—film (stills), installation art, sculpture—or a particular culture—Chinese Ming painting, Buddhist imagery? What are the political implications of ascribing thought processes to visual materials? This session intends to establish a genealogy of the thinking image, and encourages papers addressing these and related questions through a variety of approaches, media and ideas.

From New College, Oxford:

James Gillray@200: Caricaturist without a Conscience?
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 28 March 2015

Proposals due by 15 November 2014

James Gillray’s reputation in the two centuries since his death has been as varied and layered as his prints. Trained at the Royal Academy, he failed at reproductive printmaking, yet became, according to the late-eighteenth-century Weimar journal London und Paris, one of the greatest European artists of the era. Napoleon, from his exile on St Helena, allegedly remarked that Gillray’s prints did more to run him out of power than all the armies of Europe. In England, patriots had hired him to propagandize against the French and touted him as a great national voice, but he was an unreliable gun-for-hire. At a large public banquet, during the heat of anti-Revolutionary war fever, he even raised a toast to his fellow artist, the regicide, Jacques-Louis David. Gillray produced a highly individual, highly schooled, and often outlandish body of work with no clear moral compass that undermines the legend of the caricaturist as the voice and heart of the people, so that the late Richard Godfrey described him as a caricaturist without a conscience. Following 2001 and 2004 retrospectives in London and New York, and fuelled by scholarship of a new generation of thinkers, our era’s Gillray is just now coming into focus.

To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Gillray’s death, and in conjunction with the Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition, Love Bites: Caricatures of James Gillray (26 March – 21 June 2015), based on New College’s outstanding collection, we are organizing a one-day symposium at the Ashmolean Museum to hear and see the latest Gillray scholarship.

We seek proposals papers that address any aspect of Gillray’s work or that consider artistic duty or purposeful negligence of duty in the period around 1800. Comparative, formal, contextual, and theoretical approaches to Gillray and our theme are all welcome. Proposals should be a maximum of 200 words and be accompanied by a short bibliographical statement.

Organised by Todd Porterfield (Université de Montréal), Martin Myrone (Tate Britain), and Michael Burden (New College, Oxford), with Ersy Contogouris (Université de Montréal)

All enquiries should be addressed initially to the New College Dean’s Secretary, Jacqui Julier, jacqui.julier@new.ox.ac.uk, to whom all abstracts should be submitted by 15 November 2014. The programme will be announced on 21 November 2014.

From INHA:

L’image Railleuse: La satire dans l’art et la culture visuelle, du 18e siècle à nos jours
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 25–27 June 2015

Proposals due by 30 October 2014

Colloque international organisé par l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, l’Université du Québec à Montréal et le LARHRA UMR 5190 de Lyon

La satire, soit l’attaque moqueuse, contestataire ou réformatrice d’un individu, d’un groupe, d’une époque, voire de toute une culture, constitue l’une des armes privilégiées de la fonction critique des images et, au-delà, de l’ensemble des artefacts visuels. Se constituant en genre littéraire dès l’Antiquité, la satire a gagné les beaux-arts et les arts graphiques à l’âge classique, seule ou en conjonction avec l’écrit. Ce sont toutefois les médias modernes—édition, presse, expositions, télévision, internet—qui, en élargissant progressivement sa sphère d’influence, ont renouvelé ses formes et ses objectifs, et augmenté leur efficacité. Autorisant une diffusion planétaire et presque instantanée des images satiriques, internet et les technologies numériques n’ont pas seulement transformé la matérialité et les moyens d’action de cette imagerie et leurs effets socio-politiques, ils ont aussi affecté les formes de la recherche sur le satirique en donnant accès de plus en plus rapidement à des corpus extrêmement vastes. La satire est ainsi partout, et aucun acteur ni canal de diffusion ne peut prétendre désormais en contrôler ses usages généralisés.

Ce colloque porte sur la satire visuelle du 18e siècle à nos jours, entendue comme genre aussi bien que comme registre, selon que l’on s’intéresse à un type de représentations (caricaturale, en particulier) ou à une veine (le satirique) traversant de multiples champs, parmi lesquels celui de l’art contemporain. Envisagée dans sa visualité même, elle recouvre des objets, particuliers ou partagés, des mécanismes et des effets spécifiques que nous souhaitons interroger à partir des études visuelles.

Les propositions d’intervention de 30 minutes seront adressées avant le 30 octobre 2014 à frederique.desbuissons@inha.fr afin d’être examinées par le comité scientifique. Elles comprendront 500 mots maximum et seront accompagnées d’une courte bio-bibliographie.

Pour lire l’intégralité de l’appel à contributions, cliquez ici.

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Note (added 2 October 2014) — Here’s the English version:

Satire—which can be understood as the mocking, contesting or reforming prosecution of an individual, a group, an era, or an entire culture—is one of the main weapons of the critical function of images and, more broadly, of visual artefacts. Emerging as a literary genre in Antiquity, satire joined the fine arts, and particularly the graphic arts, in the early modern era, either on its own or in connection with the written word. Modern media—publishing, the press, exhibitions, television and the Internet—have progressively widened its sphere of influence, renewing its forms and objectives and increasing its efficacy. Enabling the worldwide and nearly instantaneous dissemination of satiric images, the Internet and digital media have not only transformed the materiality and means of this imagery and its socio-political effects, they have also had an impact on the forms that research can take with respect to the satiric, by giving ever swifter access to an ever-wider range of bodies of work. Satire is thus everywhere, and no actor nor platform of dissemination can now claim to control its generalized usages.

The subject of this conference is visual satire from the eighteenth century to today. Visual satire is understood not only as genre but also as a register, depending on whether one is interested in a type of representation (caricatural, in particular) or as a vein (the satiric) that crosses several fields, among which that of contemporary art. Satire, envisaged in its visuality, ranges across individual or shared objects, specific mechanisms and effects that we hope to question from the perspective of visual studies.

We welcome proposals for papers that address, but that need not necessarily be limited to, the following thematic strands :

1. Historiographical perspectives

How can we think about and construct a history of visual satire within the history of art and visual studies? Studies in caricature and graphic satire have been delineated by a number of (?) researchers and approaches, the limits of which are fairly precise and have contributed to the establishment of a pluridisciplinary set of tools that have tended to become normative. Following the first large inventory projects (Champfleury, Wright, Stephens and George) and studies centred on perception and psychoanalysis (as just one example, Gombrich and Kris), international research, based around the university, the museum, among collectors and archives, has given us results that typically align with a certain range of objectives: the publication of monographs and studies that focus on artistic procedure, on iconology, on political discourse or on the sociology of artists. It might be important to identify the characteristics of this wide range of approaches in order to understand the disciplinary impact they have had. In this international framework, do linguistic, territorial and ideological borders play a role? Beyond this, we might reflect on the impact of this work on our critical and historical consideration of the satiric as it manifests itself in contemporary art. In short: what does satire do, what has satire done to art history—and vice-versa?

2. Norms and inventivity : the creativity of the satirical

While it is possible to understand how the satirical and the caricatural have been used throughout the history of art, the integration of this artistic undertaking—or should we speak of process, mode, genre?—nevertheless sets up certain challenges for research. These challenges arise when we think through artists’ manipulation of cognitive and narrative elements (in the articulation of figural representation with the possibilities of narrative structure, for example). It might be useful, then, to think of visual satire as a form of inventivity that connects to a wider form of social behaviour, one that might index a satiric field in which a number of expressive forms, among them those of the visual arts, have their place. If satire can be linked to the parameters of normativity in a given society or period (parameters that might in turn be malleable according to shifting social contexts), might it be possible to consider the satiric or caricatural endeavour as the site of meta-representational undertakings? Can we connect the satiric endeavour to precise historical conditions?

3. Parody of art and autonomy of the satiric genre

Satire and caricature were part of artists’ graphic practices since well before the eighteenth century. Whether created as exercises or for private recreation, they often represent the personal sphere or the artistic community. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, the satire of art becomes a genre in its own right and conquers a public that is all the more far-reaching(?) as access to contemporary art becomes democratized. At the same time, it becomes a set of recurring themes and processes, notably at the end of the century and even more so among certain avant-gardes of the twentieth century, modern or post-modern. What is the importance of this phenomenon? What does satire do to art, notably in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and what does art do to satire, especially in the twentieth and twenty-first? What are satire’s objectives, its publics, and to what aims?

4. The satiric body and violence

Satire cannot be reduced to a figure of rhetoric and to visual objects. Because it is a form of social and political action, its efficacy (whether rhetorical, effective or fantasized) makes it a weapon directed towards whatever it mocks. Its violence is deployed on three levels: it is made thematic in its motifs, instrumentalized so that its targets can be attacked, and shared with those who see it. Satire used against real persons, or against targets that are more collective and abstract (institutions, political ideas, social events, etc.) and that are almost always represented by characters or types, affects its spectators before it reaches those it targets. The corporeal dimension thus plays an important role in the workings of satire. It is sometimes put into play by caricature’s expressive deformation, thus leading to a somatism and a materialism of critical laughter. The modalities of this satirical violence will be the starting point for studies that can explore any of the paths it takes, or that can focus on the relationship between the strategies used and their resulting effects, as much for satire’s victim as for its spectator.

5. Materials and dissemination of satire

The efflorescence of the satiric genre is closely linked to the emergence of new means of reproduction and dissemination: engraving in the sixteenth century, the trade in prints, the introduction of lithography and the renewal of wood-engraving at the turn of the nineteenth century, photo-montage, etc. It seems nonetheless useful to develop a critique of the reality of such a deterministic account, both with respect to the periods just mentioned as well as in the case of more recent developments. More importantly, it seems important to measure the effects of dissemination on the modalities of reception. Several contemporary examples have shown the extent to which the Internet platform is itself a component of such a reception. In what terms is it necessary to consider this phenomenon? Does it have an impact on artists working today?

6. The configurations of the visual

Visual satire, as opposed to its literary counterpart, has elicited only too few historical and theoretical studies. What accounts for this contrasted situation? Is it because the reading of an image can be assimilated to that of a text? Is it because its elucidation is often determined by accompanying texts (dialogues, legends and other paratexts)? If so, how can we explain the ambiguity of satiric images, their semantic instability that means that the same figure can lead to highly divergent interpretations? Is this because the phenomenon is of the order of the visual, or is it due to something that might be fundamental to the satiric genre as a whole? These questions could be addressed through the study of visual and discursive configurations that are set in play in the field of satire.

On June 25th, a joint “Bande dessinée and satire” session will be presented in collaboration with the International Bande Dessinée Society and the International Comics and Graphic Novel Society. Proposals for papers, not to exceed 30 minutes, should be sent by October 30, 2014, to frederique.desbuissons@inha.fr in order to be sent to the Conference review board for evaluation. Proposals should be a maximum of 500 words in length and accompanied by a short bio-bibliography.

Heroes – Heroizations – Heroisms
Transformations and Conjunctures from Antiquity to the Modern Day
Freiburg, 19–20 Nov 2015

Proposals due by 15 November 2014

The discussion in history and the cultural sciences usually views heroic figures and their deeds as manifestations of human autonomy and agency. The planned conference confronts this viewpoint with the question of how the heroic is intertwined with material objects across various epochs and cultures. The goal is to gain a new perspective on assumptions concerning heroic agency and inquire into the relevance of current theoretical approaches (such as actor network theory, assemblage theory, new materialism) for discussions on the heroic as well as on the challenge the heroic presents for the material turn.

By virtue of their physicality, heroic figures themselves have a material dimension that influences their actions. But the capacity for heroic agency is also linked to the world of things and determined in a positive and a negative sense by artefacts and other objects, technologies, and media as well as their structures. The basic thesis of the conference is that the capacity for heroic agency manifests itself in charged assemblages of human and nonhuman protagonists, in the complex interactions between heroic figures and the influence of things they make use of, take action against, or even fuse with: from Hercules’ club to “machine heroes.” The conference invites papers focused on history, society, aesthetics, and the media that explore the following central aspects of this premise:

1) Things as conditions, extensions, and potentialisations of heroic agency: How dependent are heroic figures on their material attributes (weapons, armour, other implements)? Are things what make the hero into a hero in the first place? What material attributes are associated with the charisma of heroic figures? How and under what conditions do things and technologies serve to extend or augment the capacity for heroic agency? When and how do such extensions become catalysts for characterising the heroic? Is it possible to make out historical trends for such processes?

2) Things as resistance to and limitation of heroic agency: Under what circumstances are the possibilities of heroic agency limited by material circumstances? What natural objects or artefacts must heroes clash with to prove their exceptional abilities? What does it mean when heroes are confronted with the agency of artefacts or natural objects? How do technological and scientific innovations affect the possibilities of heroic agency (e.g., weapons of mass destruction or surveillance technologies that limit autonomous agency)? Which technologies tend to promote individual heroism and which collective heroism? Under what social or political conditions did or does this happen? Can heroism be paid for or rewarded by material means?

3) Things as modifications, optimisations, or substitutions of the hero’s body: How does the materiality of the hero’s own body limit his or her capacity for agency, and how is it possible to compensate for this limitation through modification of the hero’s body? How far do imagination and reality go in this respect? When and with what consequences for our understanding of the heroic does the body of the hero finally itself become a thing (machine heroes, cyborgisation) and at what point is the hero substituted entirely by things (drones instead of soldiers)?

4) Things as heroes: Can nonhuman agency be heroised or become the hero’s antagonist? Under what circumstances and with what intentions are things themselves heroised in reality or in the imagination?

The conference will be held in English and German (with translations).

Please send your abstract of up to 300 words by 15 November 2014 to info@sfb948.uni-freiburg.de.

From the Call for Papers:

Femmes à la cour de France. Statuts et fonctions (Moyen Âge – XIXe siècle)
Institut d’études avancées, Paris, 8–9 October 2015

Proposals due by 31 January 2015

Colloque international organisé par Cour de France.fr avec le soutien de l’Institut Émilie du Châtelet, l’Université américaine de Paris et l’Institut d’études avancées de Paris.

Ce colloque international, pluridisciplinaire et transchronologique a pour objet le statut et les fonctions des femmes de la cour de France : les dames des suites d’honneur, les épouses des grands officiers et ministres, les officiers féminins des maisons royales, les marchandes et autres femmes qui ont séjourné de manière régulière ou irrégulière à la cour. Ce sont ainsi des femmes au service de la famille royale, installées dans les différents degrés de la hiérarchie curiale, que nous proposons d’étudier. Car si les reines et princesses ont bénéficié d’une attention soutenue tout au long des siècles et ont fait l’objet de nombreuses études, la recherche au sujet des femmes qui séjournent avec elles à la cour présente encore de nombreuses lacunes.

Nous proposons d’étudier l’évolution de leur présence à la cour et les fonctions qu’elles y occupaient ainsi que l’impact de leur présence sur les structures et la vie quotidienne de l’entourage royal. Les engagements des femmes, leurs objectifs, leurs stratégies et leur marge de manœuvre, constituent un autre volet de la thématique, comme leur rôle dans la gestion des intérêts familiaux et des carrières curiales ainsi que leur mécénat architectural, artistique et culturel. Nous nous interrogeons aussi sur la représentation et l’imaginaire qui s’attache aux femmes de la cour dans la littérature et l’historiographie. Enfin, des études comparatives concernant d’autres cours européennes permettent d’élargir la perspective et de cerner la particularité de leur situation à la cour de France.

Les propositions de contribution peuvent s’inscrire dans quatre thématiques :

Structures, charges et fonctions

Des enquêtes sur l’évolution de la présence féminine à la cour et la forme que prit cette présence sont au cœur de ce premier volet. L’évolution des maisons féminines de la cour et des charges occupées par des femmes n’est connue que partiellement, comme les responsabilités et les privilèges attachés aux charges féminines. Des études à ces sujets permettront de mieux comprendre la structure curiale et la place des femmes dans celle-ci.

À côté des charges officielles ont existé des « fonctions officieuses » qui n’ont laissé que peu de traces dans les archives de l’administration royale. On trouve à la cour aussi des femmes qui ne sont pas intégrées dans les maisons royales, mais qui y séjournent fréquemment ou de manière quasi permanente (épouses d’officiers et de domestiques, marchandes, prostituées…). Leurs conditions de vie et la règlementation royale à leur sujet font partie des thématiques abordées dans ce premier volet.

Alliances, réseaux et cérémonial

L’intégration des femmes à la cour va souvent de pair avec un engagement en faveur de leur famille, leur clientèle, leur « parti » (qu’il soit religieux ou politique) et leur pays d’origine. On les trouve à toute époque aussi parmi les mécontents, les opposants à la politique royale, qui établissent parfois leur quartier général dans une des maisons féminines de la cour.

Notre intérêt porte prioritairement sur la manière dont les femmes profitèrent des opportunités offertes par la cour et les résistances ou obstacles auxquels elles pouvaient se heurter. Les mariages dont la cour était le théâtre font partie de ce volet ; il s’agit d’un terrain particulièrement fertile pour étudier l’exogamie de l’aristocratie et ses effets, des mariages internationaux qui dominent au plus haut niveau aux « mésalliances », qui ont laissé de nombreuses traces dans les écrits des contemporains.

Étroitement lié à la question des mariages est le sujet du rang des femmes dans la société curiale dont la définition varie d’une époque à l’autre et qui a un impact important sur l’étiquette et le cérémonial. Des études récentes ont renouvelé la recherche dans ce domaine et ont démontré que, loin d’être un détail pittoresque de la vie curiale, les rituels du quotidien servent à organiser et à faire fonctionner l’État monarchique. En suivant cette approche, nous souhaitons donner une place importante aux enquêtes qui concernent la place des femmes dans le cérémonial de cour et son évolution.

Art, religion et culture matérielle

La question du mécénat artistique et architectural des femmes de la cour constitue un autre volet des sujets abordés, comme la question des espaces occupés par elles et le décor qui les caractérise. Le mécénat des femmes a laissé de nombreuses traces dans les châteaux et palais, leur participation à l’organisation de festivités et de passe-temps divers (jeux, musique, chasse, danse, théâtre, académies …) une riche documentation. Des études à ce sujet font partie de ce volet, comme des enquêtes qui concernent l’engagement religieux des femmes, non seulement en ce qui concerne le mécénat, la charité et la fondation d’établissements religieux, mais aussi en ce qui concerne leur engagement au sein de courants spirituels plus ou moins contestataires. Ce volet peut concerner également le rôle de la religion dans l’éducation des jeunes femmes à la cour.

Les femmes de la cour interviennent aussi dans la culture matérielle du quotidien. En témoignent les marchandes et fournisseuses de la cour, dont certaines comme Rose Bertin ont suscité un vif intérêt. La cour en tant que moteur économique et centre de consommation et de production a également fait l’objet de recherches ; moins connue est la place que les femmes de l’entourage royal ont prise dans ce domaine.

Historiographie, représentation et mise en perspective

Dès le XVe siècle, des ambassadeurs et visiteurs étrangers soulignent qu’aucune cour européenne n’accorde autant de libertés aux femmes que celle de France : liberté de parole et de comportement. Mais est-ce que cette observation reflète la réalité ou s’agit-il d’une idée préconçue, inscrite dans le registre des stéréotypes nationaux ? Des études présentant la situation des femmes dans d’autres cours européennes peuvent apporter des éclairages à ce sujet, comme les caractéristiques de ce discours et le contexte social et culturel dans lequel il émerge et évolue.

Les femmes de la cour ont laissé de nombreux témoignages écrits sur la vie curiale. Cette production très hétéroclite comprend des lais, des romans, de la poésie, des mémoires et des correspondances, voire même des ouvrages critiques et des pamphlets. Leurs œuvres rejoignent le vaste corpus des écrits sur la cour émanant d’historiens et de contemporains qui, entre critique et vénération, ont dressé un portrait très contrasté des femmes de l’entourage royal. L’historiographie de la cour et la place des femmes dans celle-ci ainsi que la vision donnée par elles-mêmes présentent encore de nombreuses zones d’ombre qu’il est possible d’éclairer dans le cadre de ce colloque.

Les propositions de communications

Nous vous prions de nous faire parvenir un dossier de 2 à 3 pages qui présente la thématique de votre intervention (avec quelques informations sur les archives/sources utilisées) et une courte présentation de vous-même avant le 31 janvier 2015 à :
zumkolk@cour-de-france.fr
kathleen.wilson-chevalier@wanadoo.fr

Comité scientifique

Fanny Cosandey, maître de conférences en histoire moderne, EHESS, CRH-LaDéHiS
Jean-François Dubost, professeur d’histoire moderne, université Paris Est Créteil Val-de-Marne
Sheila ffolliott, professeur émérite en histoire de l’art, George Mason University, ancienne présidente de la Sixteenth Century Society, trustee du Medici Archive Project
Murielle Gaude-Ferragu, maître de conférences en histoire médiévale, Université Paris 13
Henriette Goldwyn, professeur de littérature, université de New York
Katrin Keller, enseignant-chercheur en histoire moderne, université de Vienne
Jacques Paviot, professeur d’histoire médiévale, université Paris Est Créteil-Val de Marne
Mary Sheriff, professeur d’histoire de l’art moderne, université de North Carolina

Organisateurs

Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, professeur, The American University of Paris / Cour de France.fr
Caroline zum Kolk, chargée de mission, Institut d’études avancées de Paris / Cour de France.fr Pauline Ferrier, doctorante, université Paris-Sorbonne (Centre Roland Mousnier, UMR 8596) / Cour de France.fr
Flavie Leroux, doctorante, EHESS / Cour de France.fr

From Candide: Journal for Architectural Knowledge:

Streitsache: Architecture as Matter of Contention
Aachen University, 29–31 January 2015

Proposals due by 20 September 2014

From January 29 to 31, 2015 the second Candide Conference will take place at RWTH Aachen University. The peer-reviewed Candide: Journal for Architectural Knowledge was founded in 2009 and publishes contributions on the knowledge of architecture. The best papers presented in the conference will be published in a forthcoming issue.

The interdisciplinary conference Streitsache: Architecture as Matter of Contention intends to probe the complex relation between architecture and conflict. There are numerous instances in which architectural objects become objects of conflict, ‘bones of contention, a Streitsache. Conceiving of architecture as a Streitsache generates new architectural knowledge, including knowledge on the interactions that emerge from and through the objects of contention. Architectural things, whether in the form of architectural details, buildings or entire cities, are actors whose agency becomes manifest in conflictual processes. The field of politics and the negotiation of law is constituted through and by them. As thresholds Streitsachen are politically operative because they render conflicts visible and negotiable. The debates surrounding the Stuttgart 21 project, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, or Les Halles in Paris could serve as recent examples.

The aim of the conference is to expand the scope of thinking about architecture, its function and character, into fields of the theory of law and political philosophy. As agents of the political, ’things of contention render plurality and heterogeneous interests visible and negotiable. Architecture’s dissension opens up a new space for collective thinking and action. The conference is interdisciplinary and addresses scholars and practitioners from the fields of architecture, art, political sciences, legal studies, cultural studies, anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural technology studies, and media philosophy.

The structure of the conference follows the phases of architectural processes in which matters of contention become visible and negotiable: a) design, planning, and implementation b) judgment and critique c) negotiation and settlement.

a) Conflicts arise because of sketches, plans, models, construction site protocols, budgets, legal rules, and press releases. How and through which circumstances does architecture turn into a matter of contention? What precisely is the disputed subject? How can we frame the design process as a sequence and as a negotiation of difference between agencies, both human and non-human? What kind of architectural knowledge becomes manifest in a concrete dispute?

b) Matters of contention generate their own social spaces. They are the sites where a contending community—and therewith the precondition for the political—emerges. How do disputing actors appropriate architecture? What modifications do contested things undergo during the conflictual relation? How do values become comprehensible and negotiable during a conflict? How do processes of selection function and how are verdicts reached? How do architectural objects become instruments that trigger or resolve conflicts?

c) Architectural matters of contention not only promote bellicose polemics but also social knowledge, which is implemented in processes of negotiation and arbitration. How does architecture function as a repository of or evidence of past conflicts? How can knowledge gained from past conflicts be used to create strategies to prevent future conflicts? Does it make sense to think the culture of architecture as a culture of contention?

We welcome submissions of case studies, historical and theoretical reflections dealing with particular projects, built architectures and specific disputes. The working languages at the conference will be German and English. Please send an abstract (max. 500 words) and a short CV before September 20, 2014 to: candide@theorie.arch.rwth-aachen.de.