Enfilade

As noted at Le Blog de L’ApAhAu:

L’œuvre d’art entre ambition identitaire et aspiration à l’universel
Institut Catholique de Paris (ICP), 5-6 April 2013

Proposals due by 31 July 2012

Institut Catholique de Paris, founded in 1875

L’œuvre d’art et le sens qu’on lui donne sont porteurs d’une tension : la création est tout à la fois symbole d’une identité culturelle spécifique et dépositaire d’un message d’ordre universel. Ce phénomène s’accentue dans le contexte contemporain de mondialisation des échanges où l’art semble constituer plus que jamais un repère stable dans un monde au caractère mouvant parfois perçu comme inquiétant. Le propos de ce colloque est d’explorer, dans une perspective historique, cette dialectique identité / universalité de l’œuvre d’art par le biais de trois thématiques :

• L’étude des œuvres hybrides, combinant ostensiblement différentes traditions artistiques, culturelles, techniques… et les conséquences de l’intégration de nouveaux modèles sur la formation d’une identité culturelle.

• La thématique du transfert : voyages d’artistes, circulation d’œuvres, décentrement des foyers artistiques… : autant d’éléments aux conséquences majeures sur la création de nouvelles formes d’art, sur leur appropriation et la portée du sens qui s’y attache.

• La question muséale avec le contraste entre un spectaculaire développement du nombre de musées à vocation plus ou moins universelle et les difficultés croissantes liées à la circulation et à la propriété des œuvres, considérées tantôt comme des marqueurs identitaires nationaux tantôt comme des icônes universelles.

Le colloque se tiendra sur deux jours dans les locaux de l’ICP. Les propositions de candidatures devront être envoyées avant le 31 juillet 2012 à l’adresse suivante : colloqueicp-2013@yahoo.fr. Elles comporteront un exposé du projet de communication 1500 signes environ ainsi qu’un bref CV ou résumé biographique. La durée des communications est fixée à 20 mn.

From the conference website:

Politeness & Prurience: Situating Transgressive Sexualities in the Long Eighteenth Century
History of Art Department, the University of Edinburgh, 2-3 September 2013

Proposals due by 10 September 2012

Embedded within the narrative of John Cleland’s infamous novel Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), is a vignette which affronts the moral compass of even the tale’s sexually promiscuous protagonist. Having attended a ‘drag masquerade’, Fanny bears witness, through a convenient crack in a wall, to a sodomitical act, which she finds ‘not only universally odious but absurd’. Despite her apparent condemnation, Fanny pruriently watches on. In its dichotomous nature, Fanny’s reaction – suggestive of both outrage and intrigue – mirrors reactions to homosexuality in the eighteenth-century and its subsequent historiography, wherein it is treated at once as a site of fascination, but considered separately from the history of normative sexualities. Situated as it is, within this feast of heterosexual eroticism, Fanny Hill’s same-sex love scene may seem incongruous. Cleland’s text however, proffers a way to approach homosexuality as both explicitly aberrant and problematic, but still located within the general lexicon of eighteenth-century sexual congress. By the same token, Cleland offers a model for resituating the homosexual narrative within a wider historiography of sexuality, where its relationality to dominant modes, not its difference from them, might fruitfully be used as a way to re-evaluate transgressive sexualities during the period.

In his 2006 article ‘Queering Horace Walpole’ George Haggerty advocates an approach to the history of sexuality wherein the search for a ‘concrete account of same-sex sexual behaviour’ is rejected, forcing the historian ‘to look elsewhere in almost every case’. Accordingly, this conference will privilege the assessment of cultural evocations of the ‘other eighteenth century’; the transgressive will be identified as, and sought within, dominant modes of eighteenth-century culture and its discourses. In the realm of visual culture, transgressive and deviant sexualities have previously been interpreted as autonomous and distinct from these prevailing modes. Hogarth’s famous print-series A Harlot’s Progress (1732) and A Rake’s Progress (1735) have been interpreted simplistically – in accordance with their appellation – as ‘modern moral subjects’. As such they have routinely been presented as providing antitheses to a broadly defined exemplar of ideal polite culture. Such a prima facie interpretation however, boldly precludes the rich scopophilic potential provided by scenes of prostitution and illicit sexuality, locating it instead within the polite framework of moralising art. Like Fanny, the viewer of such images is at once repulsed and titillated. Yet Hogarth’s satirical oeuvre is not merely a visualisation of moral imperatives central to polite culture, but a vivid visualisation of a real section of contemporary society. In reintegrating these apparently oppositional forms of behaviour a clearer picture of eighteenth-century society and culture emerges. Hogarth’s images may therefore be viewed not as simply the commentary on the mores of an apparently ‘polite’ society via the representation of its very opposite, but, analogous to David Halperin’s definition of ‘queer’ in Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (1997), as ‘a positionality vis à vis the normative’.

In an attempt to highlight underwritten facets of contemporary sexuality, texts such as G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter’s Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (1987) which label themselves as examining the ‘other’ or ‘underworld’ have instead further problematised the role and import of such histories to wider eighteenth-century culture. The aim of this conference is therefore not to present illicit sexuality as an underbelly to a dominant polite culture, but to reconcile the ‘two eighteenth centuries’ that have for too long been presented as the subject of two discrete discourses – politeness and prurience. As well as dealing with the interface between politeness and prurience as it appears throughout eighteenth-century visual, material and literary culture more generally, specific topics for papers could include:
• Bodies – the venereal body, castrati, physicalities, sadomasochism
• Settings – home and abroad, urban centres, rural backwaters
• Spaces – the architectural exterior and the private interior, the bagnio, the brothel, the masquerade
• Gaze/Experience – viewing sexualities, the keyhole testimony, description and biography
• Material Evidence – the objects of sexuality, dress, sex aids, collections, erotica
• Masculinities and Femininities – gender roles, reversals and subversions
• Modes of the illicit – sodomitical, Sapphic, pathological, pederastic, extra-marital, rape
• Public & Private – reception/reaction, fear/celebration, homophobia, display, expression
• Language – parlance, designation, rumour, slander, code

We invite abstracts of no more than 500 words to Dr. Viccy Coltman, Head of History of Art, Jordan Mearns & Freya Gowrley at politeness.prurience@gmail.com by 10 Sept 2012. Website: http://www.politenessandprurience.com