Enfilade

A late addition to the CAA 2015 sessions:

The Materiality of Art and Experience in the Eighteenth Century
ASECS Session at the 103rd Annual Conference of the College Art Association
New York, 11–14 February 2015

Proposals due by 1 July 2014

The recent interdisciplinary ‘material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences has, according to anthropologist Daniel Miller, followed two distinct paths. The first is to emphasize artifacts, to create object theories in which things are investigated as they relate to social processes. The second is a more totalizing conception of materiality, one far broader in its implications. It encompasses consciousness, knowledge, history, theory, and sensation and conceives all of them as rooted in material conditions: the immaterial is expressed materially and accessible only through it. Materiality enables the structures of human experience to exist. Art History has largely followed the first path in its interrogation of objects and their social meanings. This panel asks what can be gained by following the second. How did the materiality of eighteenth-century art, its physical presence and its capacity to elicit an embodied relation to a viewer, shape or determine human experience? How did art objects broadly defined engage the eighteenth-century material world? How did new and coveted materials alter the experience of eighteenth-century collectors, connoisseurs, antiquarians, and others who engaged with art? And more broadly still, how did eighteenth-century art make the immaterial material?

Please send an abstract and C.V. to Michael Yonan (yonanm@missouri.edu) and Kristel Smentek (smentek@mit.edu) by July 1, 2014.

As posted at H-ArtHist:

Object Fantasies: Forms and Fictions
Munich, 7–9 October 2015

Proposals due by 31 July 2014

Interdisciplinary Conference of the Junior Research Group Premodern Objects: An Archaeology of Experience (Elite Network of Bavaria / Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich)

In modern understanding, the word ‘object’ signifies something material, spatially defined and functionally determined. These notions are accentuated by the word objectivity, which defines an ideal, systematic mode of grasping objects as ‘subjects’ that presumably operate neutrally and scientifically. In contrast, the Latin word
‘fantasia’ has, since antiquity, signified an apparition or the ability to imagine something that can equally be an image, a concept or, also, an object.

The conference takes the latter alternative meaning, that is, the non-objective experience of objects as well as recent positions of thing studies as the basis for inquiry into the creative act in the reception and construction of objects. How, for instance, do the object fantasies let the borders between object categories or objects and creatures blur? What role do they—equally nourished by illusion and experience—play in the perception and handling of material objects? To what degree do perceptions of and references to objects have a lasting effect on the conception and creation of other material objects or fictional objects in images and texts? And finally: What correlation exists between the creative handling of the objectual, the self-perception of subjects and the concrete and imaginary conditions of their social lives? The conference will pursue these as well as other lines of questioning of different formal as well as fictional possibilities in the creation of objects. Welcome are papers from all fields of human sciences on individual objects, object categories and systems, objects in images and texts, objects with images and script as well as object theories. The travel and accommodation costs of the speakers will be covered. The conference serves as a preparation for an anthology on the same topic. Working languages are English, German, French and Italian. Please send a one page abstract and a short CV by July 31, 2014 to objektfantasien@kunstgeschichte.uni-muenchen.de.

From Winterthur:

Sewell C. Biggs Winterthur Furniture Forum
New York Furniture: From New Netherlands to Empire State
Winterthur, Wilmington, Delaware, 4–7 March 2015

Proposals due by 1 September 2014

Chest, 1700–35. Bequest of Henry Francis du Pont 1958.1144. Photo by Gavin Ashworth

Winterthur solicits paper proposals for the 2015 Sewell C. Biggs Winterthur Furniture Forum From New Netherlands to Empire State: New York Furniture, to be held March 4–7, 2015, at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, Winterthur, Delaware.

This forum will focus on the multifaceted furniture of New York and adjacent communities in New Jersey and Connecticut with talks that explore Dutch origins, English styling, and the ascendancy of designs marketed by nationally known manufacturers. Especially welcome are topics with an end date before 1870 that examine: expressions of ethnic and cultural identity in the production and consumption of furniture; links between the cabinetmaking and building trades and the architectural settings of furniture; labor and shop practices; mass production, the introduction of new designs and international marketing strategies. Other topics are also encouraged.

Proposals for presentations 30 minutes in length should include a brief letter of interest, one-page abstract, and short cv and may be e-mailed to: jlane@winterthur.org or mailed to: Furniture Forum 2015, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, 5105 Kennett Pike, Winterthur, DE 19735.

I’ve no idea how flexible the end date of 1700 is for the larger Palatium project, but I imagine this workshop will be of interest to many readers. -CH

From the Call for Papers:

Making Room for Order: Court Ordinances as a Source
for Understanding Space at Early Modern Princely Residences
Kalmar Castle, Sweden, 2–3 October 2014

Proposals due by 22 June 2014

Organized by ESF Research Networking Programme PALATIUM with Linnaeus University, Kalmar

One of the obvious sources when analysing how space was used at early modern royal residences are court ordinances. These are however far from as clear‐cut as they may seem. In several instances we can see how a world of order emerges that can easily be an illusion. Court ordinances are thus a rich material to use, but a source that poses a number of important methodological questions. The value of court ordinances has long been apparent. Already in 1761 Friedrich Carl Moser used court ordinances while compiling his work Teutsches Hof‐Recht. A more scholarly approach came later however. In 1905 and 1907 Arthur Kern published Deutsche Hofordnungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. This was an important step in making court ordinances accessible for research. After Kern various court ordinances have been published for principalities such as Kleve, Aragon, Brandenburg and Burgundy.

For court studies, the analysis of court ordinances has been indispensable. In his groundbreaking research on early modern courts, David Starkey made extensive use of the Eltham Ordinances. The possible Burgundian influences on the late Plantagenet English court, through court ordinances, is an on‐going debate. In later years two important scholarly works on early modern court ordinances have been published. The first, edited by Werner Paravicini, was Höfe und Hofordnungen 1200–1600 in 1999. This was the result of a conference in 1996 by the Residenzen‐Kommission. The second large volume, Zu Diensten Ihrer Majestät: Hofordnungen und Instruktionsbücher am frühneuzeitlichen Wiener Hof, was published in 2011 by Jakob Wührer and Martin Scheutz.

Thus, some scholars have highlighted court ordinances recently. They have however not focussed specifically on royal residences and the interplay between architecture and court life. This leaves a fruitful and rich vein for PALATIUM to tap into. The workshop in Kalmar is aimed at analysing from a methodological standpoint how we can understand the uses and ideas of space at court by deploying court ordinances as a source. It will be necessary to include not just court ordinances proper but also instructions and similar sources. The differences between court ordinances, instructions and other court laws/regulations were fluid at the time and this should be reflected in the discussions.

Naturally court ordinances have methodological issues. Why was a court ordinance drawn up? Was the aim to enforce economy at court or to enhance magnificence? The information we can draw from court ordinances depends to a large degree on such reasons. A number of evident questions to discuss leap to mind. Can we see how the shift from peripatetic to more sedentary courts is reflected in court ordinances? Will court ordinance reflect specific palaces rather than a generic group of royal residences for a prince?

Another obvious issue is how court ordinances both reflect reality and norms. Can we see if court ordinances were translated verbatim without any consideration for spatial differences between courts? Would court ordinances be switched from one architectural setting to another? Did this result in changes in architectural layout? What happened if a new court ordinance clashed with the existing palace plan? Yet another issue concerns whether we can see how different court ordinances influence each other? The example of Burgundy and the court of Edward IV have already been mentioned. Were certain court ordinances especially influential?

The interplay between the spatial reality and court ordinances must always be kept in mind. Perhaps we can deduce what a lost court ordinance looked like by using the architectural material, which can indicate both functions and shifts in those functions.

Papers will be organised around the following three topics:

I. Space and Function: Norm versus Reality
Court ordinances are interesting on two levels. First, they tell us something about prevailing ideas and attitudes within courtly society at the time. Second, they might tell us something about how reality was organised. The second half is, however, far from straightforward. As a normative source, court ordinances pose special problems. How certain can we be that ordinances paint a true picture of how space was used at court? We need case studies that analyse how far the norm was realised. What can ordinances really tell us about the use of certain spaces at certain ceremonies?

II. Invention or Tradition?
Did court ordinances actually introduce real change in how space was organised at princely courts? Can we see if court ordinances precede or follow real changes in palatial space? Perhaps a court ordinance merely reflected already existing usage rather than introducing new ways? Might court ordinances act as a conservative force?

III. A Source Leaving the Residence Partly in Shadow?
An evident methodological issue when using court ordinance is whether there are spaces at royal palaces that fall outside court ordinances? Will certain areas not be covered? Will the hunt, gardens or the menagerie be outside the usual scope? Does that mean that these areas were less constricted by ceremony and regulation? (more…)

As posted at H-ArtHist (click the link for the German version). . . 

Exhibiting Art for Sale: The Commercial Gallery Space from the 18th Century to the Present
Technische Universität Berlin, 29 November 2014

Proposals due by 10 July 2014

Those who exhibit art for sale will carefully consider the manner in which the objects are presented. Many such concepts are based on the evocation of a historic context: dealers in old master paintings, for instance, tend to show their selection in period frames and with furniture which stems from the same epoch as the exhibits. Galleries of contemporary art, on the other hand, often present their shows in so-called white cubes, futuristic spaces that avoid all periodization, thus suggesting the timeless appeal of the art they offer for sale. Other galleries again choose to dramatize their setting with unexpected, contrasting combinations of objects originating from different periods and a variety of regions.

The commercial gallery thus provides a space where the significance of art is set in complex relation to its market value. This rarely considered subject will be explored by the 3rd Workshop of the Forum Art and Market, TU Berlin. By investigating the strategies of cooperating and competing agents, this conference not only aims to reveal modes of presentation typical for specific periods; it also seeks to address the changing concepts of selling exhibitions as a reflection of the art market’s history from the 18th century to the present day.

Proposals for contributions may for instance address the following aspects:
• the presentations of objects and the design of selling exhibitions (frames and bases, lighting, furniture, wall colours and covering, arrangement of exhibits, the size of spaces and their succession, show cases, shop windows, etc.) in art galleries, auction houses, academies, art fairs, museums and exhibition spaces managed by art associations
• the (changing) purposes of exhibitions in the art trade (such as providing information, education and pleasure, adding value, enabling pricing and sales) and the visitors they address
• the marketing and reception of such presentations in word and image (catalogues, advertisements, published reviews, artists’ notes, correspondence, etc.), also in comparison with non-commercial art exhibitions

Conference languages are German and English. Please send proposals (maximum 2000 characters), and a brief curriculum by 10 July 2014 to: exhibitingartforsale@gmail.com. Additional information on the conference cycle of the Forum Art and Market and its annual workshops may be found here.

Convenors: Dorothee Wimmer, Johannes Nathan, and Bénédicte Savoy, assisted by Lukas Fuchsgruber

While the main deadline for submitting paper proposals for consideration for CAA 2015 passed earlier this month, here’s a late due date for a 90-minute session sponsored by the Historians of British Art:

CAA 2015 Session | Home Subjects: Domestic Space and the Arts in Britain, 1753–1900
College Art Association Conference, New York, 11–14 February 2015

Proposals due by 15 August 2014

Session chairs:
Dr. Melinda McCurdy (Associate Curator of British Art, Huntington Art Collections), mmccurdy@huntington.org
Dr. Morna O’Neill (Wake Forest University), morna.oneill@gmail.com
Dr. Anne Nellis Richter (independent scholar and adjunct instructor, American University), anne.nellis@gmail.com

Home Subjects is a new research working group which aims to illuminate the domestic display of art in Britain. Our goal is to examine the home as a place to view and exhibit works of art within the historical context of the long nineteenth century. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of the house itself and notions of ‘domesticity’ as important touchstones in British culture. At the same time, art historians have tended to focus on a history of British art premised on the display of art in public; according to this important narrative, British art developed in relationship to the public sphere in the eighteenth century. Art institutions and exhibitions asserted the importance of the display of art in forming audiences into publics in cultural and political terms. Such efforts continued in the ‘exhibition age’ of the nineteenth century, when display of artwork in museums, galleries, and special exhibitions solidified the important role given to art in articulating a public sphere. This narrative overlooks the continuation of older paradigms of display, especially those premised on the private and domestic audience for works of art. Within this context, the country house takes it place alongside the townhouse as an important venue for the display of art. We aim to explore this ‘counter-narrative’ of the home as the ideal place to view works of art, a view which permeated all areas of art and design and which persisted throughout the nineteenth century, despite the prevailing narrative of the development of public museums.

Also at stake in this project is a reconsideration of domesticity and its relationship to modernity. Important recent scholarship has illuminated some of the ways in which entrenched narratives of modernity and artistic modernism were defined in opposition to the domestic sphere. In a typical avant-garde gambit, artists distinguished works of art from objects of interior decoration by rejecting the private and the domestic. This session aims to bring together scholars whose work addresses this topic in order to posit a new trajectory for modernity, one that can be traced through the private, domestic sphere.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
• the display of easel painting and its relationship to the domestic interior
• decorative arts, their status as works of art and relationship to interior decoration
• domestic architecture and museum/gallery architecture, both public and private
• collecting and taste
• the interrelationship between private and public modes of display and decoration

Proposal abstracts should be no more than 500 words, and should be accompanied by a current 2-page c.v. and must be received by email to homesubjects@gmail.com by August 15, 2014. Please also include a mailing address, telephone number, and email.

As posted at H-ArtHist:

The Material Culture of Magic
Book Project Edited by Antje Bosselmann-Ruickbie and Leo Ruickbie

Proposals due by 1 August 2014

Magic is a wide field of research comprising what we might call the occult, paranormal events, anomalous experience, spirituality and other phenomena throughout human history. However, research has often been focused more narrowly on the historical analysis of written sources, or the anthropology and occasionally sociology of practitioners and their communities, for example. What is often overlooked are the physical artefacts of magic themselves.

In all areas of research, ‘material culture’ is becoming increasingly important—the ‘material turn’ as it has been labelled. This is particularly the case for disciplines that traditionally have not focused on object studies but on theory such as historical or social sciences. However, it is self-evident that the objects emerging from a culture provide valuable information on societies and their history. This is also and particularly the case for magic and related phenomena. Magic, especially, became divorced from its concrete expressions as academic study focused on problems of rationality and functionalist explanation. (more…)

As posted at H-ArtHist:

The Ends of American Art
Stanford University, 7–8 November 2014

Proposals due by 9 June 2014

The Art & Art History Department at Stanford University invites submissions from advanced graduate students for a unique opportunity to share your work in a collaborative setting with leading scholars of American art and visual culture. The Ends of American Art International Conference is designed to explore new possibilities for
thinking about, performing, producing, and writing the history of American art.  It will meditate on the ‘ends of American Art’ by questioning whether certain longstanding tropes within the field may now be outmoded (e.g. nationalism, American art as a history of painting and sculpture). Looking forward, we will also ponder what the new goals (or ‘ends’) of the field should be in the 21st century.

The two-day event will feature papers by senior scholars as well as two ‘workshop’ panels in which selected graduate students will present a 5-minute presentation of their project using only 1 slide. These workshops are designed to both gain a sense of the current landscape of the field and to offer participating students feedback from a diverse interdisciplinary audience in a workshop context.

Conference Features for Selected Participants
• Round-trip airfare to SFO International Airport, lodging while in Palo Alto, and ground transportation during the conference
• Opportunity to workshop your project in a collaborative setting with leading scholars from multiple fields
• Opportunity to witness the current shape of scholarship in American Art and Visual Culture as animated in the work of other advanced graduate students in the U.S. and abroad
• Be among the first scholars to view the Anderson Collection of American Art soon to be installed in a new building next to Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center
•Participate in the live webcast of the conference, which will feature real-time forums online in addition to the discussions taking place at Stanford

Eligibility
• Dissertation project must address issues in American art and visual culture, broadly defined in terms of historical period and interpretive approach (projects from all disciplines are welcome and encouraged)
• Students must be in the writing stage of the dissertation (ABD status or equivalent)

Requirement for Submission
1. CV (including university affiliation, contact information for Dissertation Committee Chair, and expected date of completion)
2. 250-word abstract of your project
3. 1 image that will be the subject of your 5-minute presentation

Please send all documents to ebennet@stanford.edu by 9 June 2014.

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

The International Thread: Lace and Commerce in Eighteenth-Century Europe
ISECS Congress, Rotterdam, 26–31 July 2015

Proposals due by 15 June 2014

Chairs: Tara Zanardi, (Department of Art & Art History Hunter College/CUNY 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065; tzanardi@hunter.cuny.edu), and Michael Yonan, (Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Missouri, 21 Parker Hall, Columbia, MO, 65211; yonanm@missouri.edu)

Enormous amounts of lace flooded the marketplaces of eighteenth-century Europe, which fostered a vibrant international trade. This marketplace centered on competition between the Low Countries (especially the regions that now comprise Belgium) and northern France, two areas that included Europe’s most technically accomplished lacemaking centers, including Alençon, Argentan, Brussels, Mechlin, and Valenciennes. These towns exported huge quantities of lace to an international clientele and competed with locally manufactured lace. Our panel seeks papers that examine how lace operated within eighteenth-century mercantile networks, economic systems, and black markets. What were the trade factors that affected the distribution of lace, both locally and globally, and how did those factors affect working conditions, design choices, and the objects created? How did these market conditions affect what lace was used for, be it garments, decorative items, or household textiles? Topics might include treatments of lace and lace making in gendered terms, as statements of regional or national pride, labor practices in lacemaking, techniques and materials, and the industry’s global ambitions. Interdisciplinary papers are especially welcome.

As noted at The History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland (among other places) . . .

Intersections: Yearbook for Early Modern Studies 2017
The Global Republic of Sacred Things: The Circulation of Religious Art in the Early Modern World

Proposals due by 30 June 2014

Sixteenth-century Europe was a time when monarchial territories were redrawn, permanent schisms split a single church, and sustained, repeated circumnavigation of the globe was achieved for the first time. The ‘globalization’ of the early modern world expanded and transformed the ‘Republic of Things’. While there has been an increasing literature on biographies and itineraries of objects, European religious overseas networks, often at the heart of Protestant Reformation and post-Tridentine political, geographical and theological reform, have received considerably less attention to date. How, for example, did points of contact by agent, merchant and missionary impact the early modern imagination as a social practice? And how did the journeys of images, artifacts, and precious cargoes across intersecting networks affect their value and use? Previously, these webs of communication
bore only incidental information about the material cultures their presence at the frontiers of known lands stimulated at home and abroad. Further still, as European systems largely governed by and for Europeans, the things that linked religious and commercial networks have the potential to offer insight into Europe’s initial attempts to grapple with long-distance contact zones. In a challenge to models of individual organizations, cultural comparisons, and post-colonial theories of industrialized societies, this volume seeks to consider how a sacred Republic of Things—material residues of global encounter most broadly conceived (masterpieces, decorative art and functional objects)—can cast light on the dramatis personae of the fifteenth- to eighteenth-centuries as they came to terms with an expanding world.

Objects should give some evidence of the interaction of Europe with Asia, Africa or the Americas, and religious ‘things’, or objects of devotion, that have not yet had their moment in the sun are ideal. We are particularly interested in the production of artisanal cultures, local accommodation via technologies and materials, shifting currencies of value and objects used against the grain of their intended purpose. Issues at stake could include, but need not be limited to, the globalization of different types of religious subjects or objects, the use of new media (either alone or in conjunction with others), mimesis and memory, spolia and translation, commoditization and mobility.

Working Schedule
Proposals are due June 30, 2014.
Applicants will be notified no later than July 31, 2014.
First drafts of papers (approximately 8,000 words, including endnotes) will be expected by December 15, 2015.
An intensive workshop (pending funding) will take place the week of January 18, 2016.
Final papers should be sent to the editors by July 1, 2016.
Publication is scheduled for 2017.

Please send proposals (PDF format preferred) before June 30, 2014 to both editors (Prof. Dr. Christine Göttler, Prof. Dr. Mia M. Mochizuki)
with:
1. A one-page abstract (300 words) with at least one exemplary image
2. A curriculum vitae (maximum two pages)
christine.goettler@ikg.unibe.ch
mia.mochizuki@nyu.edu