Call for Papers – Identity Construction and Meaning

AAH Call for Papers for Student Summer Symposium 2013, University of Oxford, 20-21 June 2013. Proposals deadline, 1st April.

The concept of ‘identity’ is prolific within the visual arts and in many ways its pertaining issues have shaped the discipline of art history. The biographical approach to reading artists’ work privileged by Vasari in his Lives (1550) has had a lasting influence. The portrait remains an effective medium through which to narrate the historical and contemporary identity of particular institutions and nations, and the art market continues to rely upon authentic attribution. Yet this art history of names remains problematic and by no means comprehensively represents either the discipline of art history or the plural notions of identity that have come to influence it.

During the twentieth century, subjectivity was critiqued and revised: psychoanalysis destabilized the concept of a consistent and whole subject, positioning the self as an illusion of stability and a site of fragmentation; Barthes and Foucault challenged notions of authorship, arguing instead that the reader-viewer be considered in the creation and interpretation of a work. More recently, gender and postcolonial theory has cast light on notions of identity understood as performance and as Otherness, and new technologies, such as the Internet, have altered relations between international communities and provided new platforms for constructing identity.

New Research Project: ‘Art Writing Writing Art’

‘Art Writing Writing Art’  is a new research group that has been set up by 5 History of Art PGRs  at the University of Bristol. It has been established with an aim to provide a place of convergence for researchers interested in the actively shifting and overlapping intersections between art, writing and art history. It hopes to support, consolidate and expand research through peer discussion and exploration. The group has set up a blog as a repository for events, talks, conferences and exhibitions (etc) that might be of interest to all sorts of people thinking around the area. In addition the project is organising a range of events over the coming year. More information can be found here: http://artwritingwritingart.tumblr.com

 

Call for Papers – Images of the Art Museum: Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, 26-28 September 2013 - Proposals due by 15 April 2013

Organized by the Max Planck Research Group Objects in the Contact Zone: The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things, directed by Eva-Maria Troelenberg. Scholars normally consider the institution of the museum to have arisen in Europe. Historians have traced its origin back to the collections of the Renaissance princes and the ‘cabinets of curiosity’, the ‘Kunstkammern’ and ‘Wunderkammern’, literally art chambers and wonder chambers, of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Western Europe. From their initial establishment until today, museums have become increasingly elaborate institutions, the purpose of which is not simply to exhibit collections of beautiful artefacts, but also to become a social agency able to interact with a different kind of public. In particular, in recent years, it seems as though ‘the museum’ has become a geographically universal or ‘global’ institution. At the same time, museum discourses are almost inevitably entangled with political questions, implying definitions of cultural values and privileges of interpretation.

Closing Soon: Turner’s Sussex at Petworth House

Petworth House and Park, until March 13

Turner’s Sussex is the first exhibition to examine and celebrate the artist’s work in the county of Sussex. View around 40 carefully selected exhibits, mainly drawings and watercolours, which represent the wide-ranging importance of Sussex to his art. There is also the rare opportunity to view the Old Library, used by Turner as a studio and not normally open to visitors. The works on display are all loans, and are drawn from major national and regional collections, as well as from private owners. Highlights include the unprecedented opportunity to see the pencil sketch of Petworth House, which Turner made in the park in 1809. See it alongside the finished oil painting he made from it – the 3rd Earl of Egremont’s first commission from the artist. Other exhibits represent both iconic and rarely seen works. They feature views of Arundel, Brighton, Chichester, Hastings, Lewes, Rye and Shoreham among many Sussex locations. Included in the Petworth section is a group of the famous small watercolour sketches on blue paper. Now largely held at Tate Britain, they were made of the house and park in 1827. Those selected for Turner’s Sussex did not feature in our 2002 Turner at Petworth exhibition, and some haven’t been exhibited for many years.

New Book: Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction

Kamilla Elliott, Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764–1835 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

Traditionally, kings and rulers were featured on stamps and money,the titled and affluent commissioned busts and portraits, and criminals and missing persons appeared on wanted posters. British writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, reworked ideas about portraiture to promote the value and agendas of the ordinary middle classes. According to Kamilla Elliott, our current practices of “picture identification” (driver’s licenses, passports, and so on) are rooted in these late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century debates.

Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction examines ways writers such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and C. R. Maturin as well as artists, historians, politicians, and periodical authors dealt with changes in how social identities were understood and valued in British culture—specifically, who was represented by portraits and how they were represented as they vied for social power.

Talk: ‘Rediscovering Fresco Painting in Nineteenth-Century Britain’

Research Lunch at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Friday 8th March, 12.30-2.00PM

Carly Collier (University of Warwick) ‘Rediscovering Fresco Painting in Nineteenth-Century Britain’

The spring programme of events at the Paul Mellon Centre includes a series of five research lunches, geared to doctoral students and junior scholars working on the history of British art and architecture. These research lunches, which will normally take place on alternate Fridays, are intended to be informal events in which individual doctoral students and scholars will talk for half-an-hour about their projects, and engage in animated discussion with their peers. A sandwich lunch will be provided by the Centre on these occasions. The hope is that this series, to be maintained in the summer and autumn, will help foster a sense of community amongst PhD students and junior colleagues working in the field, and bring researchers from a wide range of institutions together in a collegial and friendly atmosphere.

Call for Papers: Benjamin, Barthes, and Fashion

Fashion and Theory: Exploring critical perspectives in fashion and dress studies. Friday 28th June 2013, University of Manchester

Historian, philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin wrote on fashion’s relationship to modernity, commodity fetishism, history, and memory.  In his unfinishedArcades Project, the notes for a large section on Fashion reveal Benjamin’s desire to read the medium of dress culturally, materially, historically, and through his own brand of Marxist analysis. Roland Barthes developed a semiotic system for interpreting the discourse of fashion.  Barthes’The Fashion System, the seminal work on fashion and semiotics, suggests fashion can be understood as a language composed of codes, signs, and significations.

Both Barthes and Benjamin wrote on fashion’s relationship to temporality, memory and history, and both critically investigated the potential of dress as metaphor in literary and visual analysis.  In the vein of such work as Caroline Evans’ Fashion at the Edge (2003), which utilizes Benjamin’s writing on fashion and time, and Malcolm Barnard’sFashion as Communication (1996), which engages with Barthesian semiology, this conference invites new critical readings of fashion that engage with Benjaminian and Barthesian theories.

Research Seminar: ‘Edward Carpenter and the Domestic Interior’

Paul Mellon Centre, Wednesday 20th February 5.30-8pm

Michael Hatt (University of Warwick) ‘Edward Carpenter and the Domestic Interior’. These research seminars are intended to showcase original and stimulating research in all areas of British art and architectural history. They will take the form of hour-long talks, followed by questions and drinks, and are geared to scholars, curators, conservators, art-trade professionals and research students working on the history of British art. The papers given in this first series of research seminars will be delivered by members of The Paul Mellon Centre’s Advisory Council. 

Symposium: The Architect as Furniture Designer

The Wallace Collection, London, 9 March 2013 10am – 5pm

The subject of architects designing furniture, for their own buildings or for commercial sale, was first investigated by Charles Handley-Read in the 1960s in his researches into 19th century architects and interiors. However, there have been few attempts to take a broad look at the subject since the exhibition and associated catalogue by Jill Lever in the RIBA Heinz Gallery in 1982. This symposium brings together a number of distinguished scholars and curators to speak on architects from the 18th century to the 21st century and their moveable contributions to the interiors of their buildings. The sessions will be chaired by Charles Hind, Chief Curator, RIBA Library and Julius Bryant, Keeper of the Word and Image Department, Victoria and Albert Museum.

Exhibition – In Search of Classical Greece: Travel Drawings of Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi, 1805–1806

The British Museum, London, 7 February – 28 April 2013

This exhibition will look at Greece through the eyes of the classical scholar Edward Dodwell (about 1777–1832) and his Italian artist, Simone Pomardi (1757–1830). During their travels in 1805–06, they recorded the country and its people in a series of fascinating and spectacular drawings and watercolours. Kindly lent by the Packard Humanities Institute, these works have never been seen in public before. They represent a unique record of an important chapter in the rediscovery of ancient Greece on the eve of the creation of the modern Greek state.

Their landscapes, often featuring the ruins of classical sites, are peopled with modern Greeks and Turks at a time when Greece was under Ottoman rule. Especially fascinating and impressive are five rare surviving panoramas, measuring up to four metres in length, and providing 360 degree views of Corfu harbour, the Acropolis and of Athens and its surrounding countryside.