Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art I
International Conference at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz Max-Planck-Institut, December 14-15, 2015

Conference website: http://www.khi.fi.it/5273294/20151214_Ecologies

Organized by Hannah Baader (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz/ Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin); Sugata Ray (University of California, Berkeley); Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz)

Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art is conceived as an intellectual laboratory to address the ecological and aesthetic dimensions of human interaction with geographical, geological, botanical, zoological, astronomical, and climatic formations from the micro to a planetary scale. How was the interrelationship between the nonhuman and the human visually configured in geographically distinct, yet often interconnected, terrains in different moments of history? How did striated knowledge-systems, the agentive qualities of matter, and aesthetic practices shape such configurations, topographies, and spatial orders? To what extent were particular aesthetic practices related to the economies of religious systems or social arrangements? What are the conceptual interconnections, or conversely interstices, between theories of nature, ecology, environment, and aesthetics? While literary ecocriticism has become a field of intense debate over the last decades, the ecological turn in visual culture studies is still at its early stage. The conference thus aims to bring art history, a discipline that has for long been concerned with notions of landscape, nature, materiality, and aesthetic processes, into this emerging conversation. The conference aims to act as a crucial interpolation in the conversation between ecological and aesthetic studies, envisaged here in a historical and transcultural perspective from the earliest known human interaction with the natural environment to the present day.

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz Max-Planck-Institut
Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai, Via dei Servi 51, 50122 Firenze
Contact: dirwolfkhi.fi.it
Free admission until capacity is reached

Program
December 14, 2015
10:00 Hannah Baader, Sugata Ray, Gerhard Wolf
Welcome and Introduction

10:30 Felix Pirson | Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Istanbul
Nature, Religion and Urban Aesthetics in Ancient Pergamon
Chair: Hannah Baader

11:15 Break

11:45 Mimi Yiengpruksawan | Yale University
Environment, Contingency, and Improvisation at the Heian Court in the Time of the Supernova

12:30 Adam Herring | Southern Methodist University
Inca Sand: Towards An Ecology of Inca Architecture
Chair: Subhashini Kaligotla

13:15 Lunch Break

15:00 Lihong Liu | Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
The Path of Process: Lingering Wonder in mid-Ming Chinese Painting

15:45 Sugata Ray | University of California, Berkeley
From Viceregal New Spain to Mughal India: Rethinking Early Modern Animal Studies with Jahangir’s Turkey Cock, ca. 1612
Chair: Meha Priyadarshini

16:30 Break

16:45 Michael Marder | The University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz
Architectural Amekhania: Dwelling on the Hither Side of Economy
Chair: Brigitte Sölch

17:30 Break

18:00 Evening Lecture
Dipesh Chakrabarty | University of Chicago
Stories We Tell: Nature and Narrative in the Age of Global Warming

December 15, 2015
9:15 Timothy Ingold | University of Aberdeen
From Science to Art and Back Again: the Pendulum of an Environmental Anthropologist

10:00 Spyros Papapetros | Princeton University
Ornament as Portable Ecology

10:45 Margarete Pratschke | ETH Zürich
An Ecology of Art History? James J. Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
Chair: Gerhard Wolf

11:30 Break

11:45 Sandy Prita Meier | University of Illinois
Crossings: Thinking Things and Territory in the Indian Ocean World

12:30 Hannah Baader | Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz/ Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin
Thalassic Ecology and Maritime Aesthetics
Chair: Costanza Caraffa

13:15 Lunch Break

15:00 Venugopal Maddipati | Ambedkar University
Urbanizing Finitude: Eco-Aesthetics, Architecture, Density, Death and the Possibilization of New Material Lives (India, circa 1975–2011)

15:45 Peter Schneemann | Universität Bern
Exhibiting Nature? Artificial Ecologies in Contemporary Art

16:30 Gerhard Wolf | Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz
Ecologies and Aesthetics Between Endogenic and Exogenic Dynamics
Chair: Sugata Ray

17:15 Final Discussion