Enfilade

From Le Blog de L’ApAhAu:

Penser le génie à travers ses usages / The Uses of Genius
Special Issue of L’Esprit Créateur (Johns Hopkins University Press), Fall 2015

Proposals due by 30 June 2014

Le génie est, depuis la première modernité, l’une des notions par lesquelles se construit la valeur des œuvres d’art et des innovations scientifiques, de même que celle de leurs agents (artistes, poètes, scientifiques, philosophes, inventeurs, grandes figures de toutes sortes). À ce titre, le génie permet d’ancrer le sentiment d’appartenance des communautés autour d’une instance de valorisation qui leur est universellement reconnue, sur laquelle peuvent être fondées les hiérarchies culturelles, les mécanismes d’admiration et d’émulation, les stratégies de recyclage du passé, la constitution projective de la postérité, etc. Bref, malgré son extrême singularité, le génie permet de fonder du commun. Ainsi, cette figure peut être envisagée non pas comme un naturel inné dont on pourrait s’employer à comprendre la cause (transcendantale ou physiologique), mais plutôt comme une construction historique et culturelle correspondant à différents usages.

C’est précisément ces usages du génie que nous proposons d’interroger, dans le cadre d’un numéro collectif de la revue L’Esprit créateur (Johns Hopkins University Press) dont la publication est prévue pour l’automne 2015.

Plus particulièrement, les propositions attendues s’intéresseront au statut problématique que possède la notion de génie au sein des discours dans lesquels elle se trouve impliquée, du Moyen Âge aux vingtième et vingt-et-unième siècles français. Il s’agira non seulement de souligner la variété des constructions dont le génie a fait l’objet dans son histoire, mais aussi d’insister sur les utilisations particulières de cette notion en fonction des contextes de son élaboration (disciplines, pratiques de valorisation, querelles et débats ; enjeux politiques, économiques, sociologiques, linguistiques, littéraires, philosophiques, esthétiques, etc.). Loin de relever de l’évidence, le génie demande au contraire à être sans cesse redéfini selon les circonstances dans lesquelles il est convoqué. Nous ne chercherons donc pas à saisir l’essence du génie, mais plutôt à interroger les modalités même de cette utilisation. Pour ce faire, nous proposons d’aborder le génie dans la longue durée, de façon à mettre en évidence la pluralité des champs dans lesquels la notion est investie. Nous inscrivons cette longue durée dans le contexte français (ce qui n’exclut pas de considérer les phénomènes de transferts culturels), non seulement parce que l’histoire française du génie a été négligée jusqu’à présent par la critique, mais aussi pour nous permettre de mesurer les conséquences de cette spécificité dans l’élaboration des discours.

Plusieurs angles d’approche peuvent être envisagés (mais la liste n’est pas exhaustive) :

• Quelles sont les modalités du rapport entre la singularité du génie et la communauté à laquelle il appartient selon une époque/région/circonstance donnée ?
• Comment (dispositif publicitaire, acteurs, public, médias, etc.) et à quelles fins ont été construites dans leur temps les grandes figures du génie ?
• Comment se constitue le rapport du génie à la norme et à ses éventuelles transgressions, aux usages et aux innovations, à la règle et au dérèglement sous toutes ses formes ?
• Y a-t-il une éthique propre au génie ?
• Comment les différentes formes d’art représentent-elles le génie ?
• Quel(s) génie(s) aujourd’hui et pourquoi?

Les propositions d’articles d’une page maximum, accompagnées d’une brève bio-bibliographie pourront nous être adressées par mél aux adresses suivantes : ann.jefferson@new.ox.ac.uk & jean-alexandre.perras@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk avant le 30 juin 2014. La date limite pour la remise des articles est le 31 décembre 2014.

Responsables du numéro
Ann Jefferson, Professor of French, New College, Oxford
Jean-Alexandre Perras, Postdoctoral fellow, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford

The 2015 ASECS Conference takes place in Los Angeles, March 19–22. Proposals for panels are due by June 1. Details and a form for submitting a session for consideration can be found here»

As posted at H-ArtHist:

Diocletian’s Palace in the Works of Adam, Clérisseau, and Cassas
Institute of Art History – Center Cvito Fiskovic, Split, Croatia, 27–29 November 2014

Proposals due by 30 June 2014

The Grand Tour, as an educational rite of passage, reached its peak in the 18th century, widening its travelling radius outside of Rome and Italy onto further parts of the Roman Empire, among which Dalmatia held a prominent position. The international interdisciplinary conference on architecture, urban planning, and architectural decoration aims to explore the role of Diocletian’s Palace in the work of Robert Adam, Charles-Louis Clérisseau, and Louis-François Cassas, as well as the influence of Diocletian’s palace on the development of European neoclassicism.

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers. Each proposal should consist of a 250-word abstract and short biographical statement. Proposals are due by 30/06/2014 (with notification of acceptance by 15/07/2014). Direct proposals and questions as a PDF attachment to asverko@ipu.hr.

Important information
• There is no conference fee.
• Accommodation for the participants can be arranged at organizer’s expense.
• The organizers are not able to pay for the travel expense of the participants.
• Conference languages: English and French.
• The length of spoken contribution should not exceed 20 minutes. Contributions will be divided into sections according to their topics. Each section will be followed by discussion.
• Papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Please send final written version (both in English or French) by 31/01/2015.

Scientific Committee
Joško Belamaric (Institute of Art History – Centre Cvito Fiskovic Split)
Milan Pelc (Institute of Art History Zagreb)
Pierre Pinon (ENSA de Paris-Belleville, École de Chaillot, Institut
national d’Histoire de l’Art Paris)
John A. Pinto (Princeton University)
Ana Sverko (Institute of Art History – Centre Cvito Fiskovic Split)

Organizing Committee
Joško Belamaric (Institute of Art History – Centre Cvito Fiskovic Split)
Milan Pelc (Institute of Art History Zagreb)
Ana Sverko (Institute of Art History – Centre Cvito Fiskovic Split)

From the Call for Papers:

Animating the Eighteenth-Century Country House
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 5–6 March 2015

Proposals due by 14 July 2014

Organised by the Paul Mellon Centre, the National Gallery, and Birkbeck, University of London

When we visit a Georgian country house, wander through its interiors, and stop to look across a rope at a particular arrangement of pictures and furniture, it is common to experience the sense we are looking at a snapshot of the past, a frozen moment of time. This impression of the country house as a static, unchanging environment belies a crucial aspect of such properties: the fact that, during the eighteenth century itself, they were continually in flux and being fashioned and experienced anew. Recent research encourages us to think afresh about such issues. Sources such as diaries, letters, inventories, catalogues and account books show country-house objects being inherited, gifted, purchased, removed and relocated, and provide evidence that the spaces in which such objects were located were subject to constant development and reconceptualization. Accordingly, this conference will focus on the Georgian country house as an environment that was always evolving, and that was animated by the interaction between objects and people.

This conference will look at the ways in which objects, when placed on display within a particular space—a room, a corridor, a garden—entered into different kinds of dialogue with the contents, decoration and associations of that environment, all of which were subject to change and adaptation. It will also explore the ways in which the evolving spaces of the country house, and the forms of display found within them, were experienced—by those who lived in the house, by those who visited as tourists or invited guests, and by those who engaged vicariously through the process of ‘armchair travel’, reading guidebooks and other contemporary accounts.

This two-day event, which will include a half-day visit to a local property, aims to bring together scholars from a variety of fields with the objective of animating the eighteenth-century country house. Proposals for contributions are welcomed from art historians and historians working on all aspects of the eighteenth-century country house, including architecture, painting, sculpture, the decorative arts and garden history.

We particularly welcome proposals for papers exploring the following topics:
•    Acquisition: the purchase, commissioning, inheritance, gifting of works of art, furniture, books and other materials.
•    Display: picture hangs; room arrangements and decorative schemes; the organisation of art collections within and between different properties owned by the same family; garden design and layout.
•    The country house as lived environment: the lived experience of the country house as a family home; as a site of hospitality; as a space in which artists may have worked.
•    The country house as tourist destination: country house tourism; visitor experience; the multifarious literature related to country houses, including guidebooks, regional guidebooks, and periodical articles.

Abstracts for 25-minute conference papers should be no longer than 300 words in length, and should be accompanied by a short biography (of no more than 100 words) detailing any work or recent publications of particular relevance. Please send abstracts and biographies by Monday 14 July to:
Amelia Smith, The National Gallery/Birkbeck, University of London, amelia.smith@ng-london.org.uk.

Faith, Politics, and the Arts: Early Modern Transfers between Catholic and Protestant Cultures
Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, 9–11 March 2015

Proposals due by 22 May 2014

The search for transcendental systems of belief that provide orientation in the confused realities of everyday life is an anthropological constant which characterizes contemporary multi-cultural communities just as much as the no less troubled societies of the past. Religion can inform political decisions, sustain certain forms of government, underpin or destabilize the social order. The conference Faith, Politics, and the Arts will explore the role of the arts as a means for shaping and interpreting the interrelation of religion and politics. Conference papers are intended to focus on Catholic and Protestant cultures in the Early Modern period (1517– ca. 1800). Central questions to be addressed are: How did Catholic and Protestant cultures visualize the relationship between God, ruler and subjects // spiritual and temporal power? In what ways and to what ends did the art production of Protestant cultures appropriate and modify visual formulae developed for Catholic societies (and vice versa)? To what extent did such transfers promote or undermine religious tolerance?

We invite proposals for papers from a wide range of disciplines engaging with the visual arts as well as architecture, drama, fashion, and material culture. Among others, topics may include: religious imagery in the palaces of political leaders; political elements in the pictorial programme, design and layout of churches and chapels; prints commenting on religiously motivated conflicts; diplomatic gifts between Catholic and Protestant powers; images promoting religious tolerance; theatre productions touching on confessional issues; the staging of the Eucharist and of religious processions; frontispieces to theological treatises; prints with satires on fashions associated with the ‘foreign’ religion etc.

Abstracts may be submitted in German, English, Italian, and French. Please send an abstract for a 30-minute paper plus a short CV to PD Dr. Christina Strunck (strunck@staff.uni-marburg.de) and Julia Bender-Helfenstein, M. A. (benderhelfenstein@googlemail.com) by May 22, 2014.

From Brill’s latest Art and Architecture Catalog:

Brill’s Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets is a peer-reviewed book series dedicated to original scholarship on the social, cultural, and economic mechanisms underlying the circulation of art. Over the last two decades interest in the formation, display, and dissolution of art collections increased tremendously; art markets, trade routes, and dealer networks became a rich field of interdisciplinary inquiry. Scholarship brought forth a lot of information about the flamboyant personalities to whom the possession of art was a lifestyle; regarding the ‘social life of things’, i.e. the provenance of individual artworks, many research gaps could be closed.

This shift in scholarly attention from the production side to the consumption side of the art world is also reflected in the emergence of specialized post-graduate courses offered by a number of institutions internationally, as well as an ever-increasing stream of exhibitions, conferences, and publications devoted to the subject. Brill’s book series accommodates scholarly monographs, collections of essays, conference proceedings, and works of reference that engage in the broadly defined topic of art markets and collecting practices throughout history.

We invite scholars to submit their English language manuscript proposal for the new book series to Liesbeth Hugenholtz, Acquisitions Editor Art at Brill (hugenholtz@brill.com) or to the series editor Christian Huemer
(chuemer@getty.edu).

Editor-in-Chief
Christian Huemer, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Editorial Board
Malcolm Baker (University of California, Riverside),
Ursula Frohne (University of Cologne), Hans van Miegroet (Duke
University, Durham), Inge Reist (Frick Collection, New York), Adriana
Turpin (Institut d’Études Supérieures des Arts, London), Filip Vermeylen
(Erasmus University, Rotterdam)

From the Call for Papers:

Travel and the Country House: Places, Cultures, and Practices
University of Northampton, 15–16 September 2014

Proposals due by 19 May 2014

Keynote speakers include Roey Sweet (University of Leicester) and Margot Finn (UCL).

Travel has long played a vital role in shaping the country house, opening up horizons and exposing both house and owner to a variety of external influences. Travel impacted upon values, tastes, material culture and money, and helped to articulate the flow of ideas, information, goods and capital. The importance of the Grand Tour and Empire to the country house has long been recognised, but domestic tourism and travel for more mundane purposes—to visit family or friends, engage in political life or go to town—were also significant. In this conference, we wish to explore a wide range of travel experiences and consider how these impacted on the country house. How were travel choices made and how were impacts articulated? How did new influences mesh with existing tastes and goods? What impact did its status as a place to visit have upon the country house? And how do we communicate the importance of travel to those visiting country houses today?

We invite papers on all aspects of travel and the country house, but would especially welcome those which focus on:
• Geographies of travel: the Grand Tour, colonies and empire, and domestic and everyday travel
• The view from abroad: foreign visitors to British country houses
• Royal progresses and prodigy houses
• Travelling for business and pleasure: court and parliament; tours and spas
• Travel and material culture: how different places were brought into the country house through objects
• Travel and taste: the impact of travel on architecture, collecting, design and
• Visiting the country house: receiving guests and staying with friends or family
• The practicalities of travel: stables, coaches and horses; trains, ships and boats; servants and guides; accommodation, meals and sleeping
• Travel and publishing: journals, guidebooks and maps
• Travel as a theme in country house interpretation/presentation today

If you would like to present a paper, then please send a 300 word abstract to Prof Jon Stobart: jon.stobart@northampton.ac.uk by 19th May 2014.

As noted at The University of York’s British Art Research:

Fashion, Function and Ornament: Accessorising the Long Eighteenth Century
York Hilton Hotel and Fairfax House, York, 19 September 2014

Proposals due by 28 July 2014

In fashion the term ‘accessory’ covers a wide range of items such as gloves, sashes, reticules, spectacles, watches, parasols, and potentially many other articles. Accessories can be seen as marginal to the nature of fashion, but historically they have played a key role in shaping the character of men’s and women’s fashions, combining ornament and function and giving scope for the expression of individual and collective identities. The era from the late Stuart to the early Victorian period saw the accessory achieve new prominence as a fashion statement, an expression of wealth, status and taste, and a desirable object of consumption, possession and display.

This symposium aims to bring together interested parties from curatorial, conservation, academic and other backgrounds with an interest in fashion, textiles, clothing and related topics to explore the nature and significance of accessories in the history of fashion from c.1660 to c.1840. Relevant topics to be addressed in contributions to the symposium may include (but would certainly not be limited to) the gender, class and identity dimensions of the accessory, collecting and collections cultures of consumerism and consumption, style, fashion and ornament, exoticism and the antique in accessory design and ornament, and the accessory in the visual and literary culture of the ‘long eighteenth century’.

Proposals are invited for symposium contributions not exceeding 20 minutes in length. Please send outlines of c.200 words to fairfaxhousesymposium@gmail.com by Monday 28 July 2014. Please direct any queries about the symposium to the same email address.

Made People: The Beauty of the Body in Art and Cosmetics—An Academic Workshop in Two Parts

Made People I: Make-up
Freie Universität Berlin, 26–27 June 2015
Made People II: Makeover
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz,Max-Planck-Institut, 20–21 November 2015

Proposals due by 31 July 2014

Since antiquity, beauty has been regarded as a work of art in which nature plays a role not so much as a holistic model and ideal but as a basic substance and an ‘assembly kit’. This concept of composite beauty bears the reservation that beauty as an entity only exists in an incomplete form in nature. It suggests that work can be performed on the human body, both to improve and to correct it. The initial hypothesis is that such work represents a concept combining artistic, cosmetic and medical practices that sees the techniques of art in a fundamental field of tension vis-à-vis the substances provided by nature.

Even more than in painting and sculpting, both of which pursued a demonstration of their autonomy and perfection in estheticizing nature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a supposed inadequacy of what nature had to offer became a lasting point of friction and even the sole legitimisation in the practice of putting on make-up or doing one’s hair and in more recent beauty surgery. While the impression of naturalness remained virulent as a measurement and an ideal, as it also  does in art that continuous to pursue imitatio, the boundary to reality simultaneously became permeable, so that beauty could literally assume the role of a second nature and the stylist could turn into an alter deus.

Designed as an interdisciplinary event, the workshop explores the norms and techniques of such an estheticizing treatment of nature in the fields of art, cosmetics and plastic surgery regarding physical beauty and the instruments and guiding principles of its creation or enhancement. In two sessions, it traces the various degrees of cosmetic and artistic treatment of and intervention in the natural body from antiquity to the present, examining its superficial make-up on the one hand and its far-reaching makeover on the other. Here, special attention is given to the techniques of estheticization, the processes of selection and synthesis as well as the modification or modelling of parts of the body with respect to both colours and shapes. Such a focus also allows for a demonstration of the violent side that the ideal of beauty bears which ultimately always entails changes to nature, a dissection of the body into beautiful individual parts and their chimera-like reassembling.

The aim of the workshop is to promote academic exchange between junior scholars and established experts. Also, with the aid of a selection of source texts and a common discussion of selected museum exhibits on site, a common thematic basis is to be developed that covers beautifying techniques of make-up and makeover and reaches beyond individual specialisation.

Junior scholars from all disciplines are invited to hand in proposals for twenty-minute contributions in German or English on the presentations and design of physical beauty between nature and art and cosmetics and medicine. Abstracts not exceeding 500 words and a brief CV are to be submitted to workshop@gemachtemenschen.net by July 31, 2014. Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered if applications for funding are accepted.

Organization
Dr. Romana Filzmoser, Universität Salzburg
Prof. Dr. Wolf-Dietrich Löhr, Freie Universität Berlin/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut
Julia Saviello M. A., Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Art History: The Formation of the Academic Discipline
Rethymnon, Greece, 3–4 October 2014

Proposals due by 30 June 2014

The Association of Greek Art Historians and the Institute for Mediterranean Studies (FORTH) organise an Academic Forum with the title Art History: The Formation of the Academic Discipline in Europe and Related Developments in Greece (18th–19th Centuries). The meeting will take place at the Institute’s premises in Rethymnon, Crete on Friday, 3rd and Saturday, 4th October 2014. The aim of this meeting is to explore the ways in which the academic and research fields of Art History were formed from the late 18th century and continued to develop up to the beginning of the 20th century. Shaped by its interactions with other disciplines, Art History eventually created its own unique discursive field and distinct methodology. With this meeting we also hope to chart the status of historiographical research in Greece, but also worldwide.

We invite papers that focus on, but are not limited to, the following topics: (more…)