[1]

Style as History: Self-reflective moments in drawing

Since the Renaissance drawings have been inextricably linked with their authors. Drawings were thought to embody in a seemingly direct and unmediated way the artist’s pictorial thinking. They were understood as both traces of the process of artistic creation and highly idiosyncratic demonstrations of the manipulation of line, form and texture. More recently, increased attention has been paid to drawing as a discipline replete with its own tacit conventions and handed-down formulae that not only guides the learner in the acquisition of a certain facility and skill but also reveals the collective aspect of the art as a system of rule-bound notations. Concurrent with the efforts of academies to promote drawing as a universal visual language, the drawing collections of the 16th and 17th centuries and more particularly the great 18th-century cabinets, along with the ensuing publications by renowned collectors and connoisseurs, fostered an historical understanding of this art.

This session explores how artists across Europe have dealt with these developments. How have they reacted to different conceptions of stylistic formation when developing their own manner of drawing or engaging with drawing styles of the past? What kind of role has the recourse to – or rejection of – past traditions of drawing played in the construction of artists’ identities and their self-positioning within the competitive arena of contemporary draughtsmanship? This session invites papers that examine how the historicity of form is reflected in drawings from the early modern period to the present day.

Please email paper propsals to the session convenors Amy Concannon (Tate Britain, amy.concannontate.org.uk) and Iris Wien (Institut für Kunstwissenschaften und Historische Urbanistik, Technical University Berlin, iris.wientu-berlin.de) by 9 November 2015.

Download a Paper Proposal Guidelines

- See more at: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session26

[2]

Art History and Physiological Aesthetics: Bodies, senses, historiographies

Convenors:

Raúl Martínez, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, raul.martinez-martinezupc.edu
Francesco Ventrella, University of Sussex, fv37sussex.ac.uk

In the past decade art historians have turned to embodied experience in order to explore how material culture is shaped by the interaction between bodies and objects. The term visual culture has been critiqued for its inability to contain senses other than visual, and the turn towards the sensory has become a fertile ground for the application of neuroscience to art historical investigation. Although technological advances make the latter approaches appear new, the interest in bodily responses is not. During the late-19th and early-20 centuries, physiological aesthetics rooted in approaches as diverse as formalism, iconology, and connoisseurship were influential in the formation of disciplinary art history.

Art historians interested in empathy theories and synaesthesia often crossed the boundaries between architecture, plastic, visual, and decorative arts. Their questions established connections between modern art practices and disciplinary art history. Not only did physiological aesthetics provide the modern discipline with a scientific language, but they also addressed creative and optimistic possibilities to reshape individual and social life. How do physiological aesthetics wrestle between the lab and the library, between science and philosophy? By returning to this moment in art historiography, this panel seeks to examine ways of reading embodied responses both now and then. Papers should consider, but need not be limited to, the history of art and architectural history; relationships with Gestalt psychology and phenomenology; the physiological nature of feelings, motor responses and synaesthesia; how physiological aesthetics convey representations of nationality, ethnicity and gender in art historiography.

Email paper propsals to the session convenor(s) by 9 November 2015.

[3]

Artistic Re-enactments as Vehicles of Cultural Transfer in Eastern European Performance Art, 1960–present

Convenor: Amy Bryzgel, University of Aberdeen, a.bryzgelabdn.ac.uk

Description: The re-enactment of artistic performances and actions is a topic that has garnered much attention in recent years, most notably catalogued in Amelia Jones’ and Adrian Heathfield’s substantial publication Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (2012). Given the fact that, in many cases, artistic transfer from one generation to the next did not occur in the traditional manner – through the academies – in Eastern Europe, re-enactments of artistic performance can function, in the region, as a witness to the forgotten past, functioning as a vehicle of cultural memory. Additionally, it can facilitate the transfer of ideas, history and practice from one generation to the next.
This panel invites papers that discuss artistic re-enactments of performances from across the former communist and socialist countries of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe in recent artistic practice. The papers in the panel should interrogate some of the following questions: What are the various functions of artistic re-enactments of performances in Eastern Europe? How do these functions compare with current understandings of re-enactment in the West? How can re-enactments be used to access a lost or inaccessible history (such as performance art in Eastern Europe)? Also welcome are papers that consider revisiting culturally relevant or historically significant places by artists or within the context of artistic re-enactments.

Please download the proposal form at http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session7 and use the template to submit your abstract of no more than 250 words to Amy Bryzgel: a.bryzgelabdn.ac.uk by November 9, 2015. Please follow the guidelines on the form.

The proposal form provides details of the conference fees. Please note that as this panel will take place as part of the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians, no funding is available for travel or accommodation. All speakers are self-funded, and are also responsible for the conference fees. Members of AAH receive a discount on the conference fees.