CFP 09.10.2017

3 Session at AAH (London, 5-7 Apr 18)

Courtauld Institute of Art and King's College London, 05.–07.04.2018
Eingabeschluss : 06.11.2017

ArtHist Redaktion

Association for Art History, 2018 Annual Conference

[1] Remembering and Forgetting the Enlightenment
[2] Towards an Aesthetics of Geology in the Age of Anthropocene
[3] Session 'Textility'

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[1] Remembering and Forgetting the Enlightenment

From: Hans Christian Hönes <hoenesbilderfahrzeuge.org>
Date: Oct 3, 2017
Deadline: 6 Nov 2017

Art history is often considered a child of the Enlightenment: its methodological roots – aesthetics and historicism – are commonly associated with towering figures of the 18th century. Winckelmann and Kant loom large and their influence on the development of the discipline is uncontested.

And yet, numerous art writers have been virtually forgotten, even though their contribution to and influence on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on art was probably just as important as the theories of the better-known German grandees. Pierre d’Hancarville or Jørgen Zoega are just two names, representative of those whose work has not stood the test of time.

More often than not, these writers belong to what has been called the ‘Super-Enlightenment’: their thinking is infused with mystical and occult ideas and is often interested more in history and myth than in beauty and style.

That art history turned a blind eye might be surprising, given recent attempts to reinvigorate approaches open to ‘unreason,’ in order to develop new ways for explaining the power of images. The renaissance of the work of Aby Warburg is notable here. This panel aims to evaluate these selection processes in the historiography and epistemology of art history and aesthetics: where and why are art historians, from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, acknowledging the Enlightenment legacies of their discipline - and when is it swept under the carpet? Does this canon formation in art history differ from other disciplines, such as classics and archaeology? Where has the ‘Super-Enlightenment’ left its traces in art historical thinking?

Session convenors:
Hans Christian Hönes, The Warburg Institute (Bilderfahrzeuge Project), hoenesbilderfahrzeuge.org
Daniel Orrells, King's College London, Department of Classics, d.orrellskcl.ac.uk

Please email your paper proposals direct to the session convenors. You need to provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 25-minute paper, your name and institutional affiliation (if any). Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper because the title is what appears online, in social media and in the printed programme. You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks.

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[2] Towards an Aesthetics of Geology in the Age of Anthropocene

From: riccardo venturi <riccardovegmail.com>
Date: Oct 2, 2017
Deadline: 6 Nov 2017

Geology has been a topic of interest and attraction for artists, at least since JMW Turner’s geological sublime, as it was famously put forward by John Ruskin. During the 1960s, a time of cybernetics, technological upheaval and subsequent reshaping of our relations to time and space, Robert Smithson suggested the notion of abstract geology, tracing connections between geological, body and mental processes.

Until the 1960s-1970s, what artists find particularly fascinating in the aesthetics of geology is the challenge of its double invisibility: on one side, the relation to ‘deep time’ threatens the three classical temporal dimensions within which we arrange our life experience, i.e., past, present and future; on the other the subtraction of visibility makes it a complex object to imagine and visualise. Once an Earth Science, with its unyielding remoteness and inert temporality, geology has become a model for the material conditions of our contemporary life. In digital and anthropocene era and in the midst of an irresolute – and politically undermined – relation between Gaia and anthropos, natural history and human history, several artists deal with geological imagination.

Enhancing the still unexploited convergences between the history of contemporary art and the politics of ecology, between visual humanities and environmental humanities, the session aims to explore the multiple ways artistic projects, art historical research, exhibitions and curatorial practices focus on the challenges posed today by the geological turn beyond anthropocentric humanities.

Please email your paper proposals of 250 words for a 25-minute paper and a short CV directly to the session chairs. You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks.

For more information: http://www.forarthistory.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/CONF2018_CALL_FOR_PAPERS.pdf

Maud Maffei, Independent, maudmaffeigmail.com
Riccardo Venturi, Gerda Henkel Stiftung, riccardovegmail.com

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[3] Session 'Textility'

From: Mechthild Fend <m.fenducl.ac.uk>
Date: Oct 6, 2017
Deadline: 6 Nov 2017

Technologies associated with textile production – such as weaving, knitting, spinning, embroidering or dying – have often served as models for processes of art making and colouring. Painting and weaving have been aligned since antiquity, during the early modern period the mythical weaver Arachne could serve as an allegory of colourist painting, and dying became a model to think through colour printing. In the 19th-century, architectural theorist Gottfried Semper declared weaving an ur-technology that is the basis of all building work, and artists such as Millet, Van Gogh or Liebermann drew, in their paintings and graphic work, comparisons between weaving and assembling brush strokes or between spinning and drawing lines.

This panel would like to newly explore such associations of textile production with artistic processes by joining them with recent anthropological theorisations of the 'Textility of making' (Tim Ingold) or with approaches that ‘look for the traces of the process that generated the work’ (Jean-Paul Leclercq). By doing so, it proposes to raise the question of the ways in which a focus on textility might pose a challenge to notions of the agency of objects. At the same time, it would also like to reconnect with earlier feminist approaches to textiles and textile production that aimed to destabilise traditional hierarchies of media by highlighting not only women’s involvement in textile production but also the paradigmatic character of techniques such as weaving.

Finally, we are interested in the way in which crafted fabrics serve as models for the human body and its visualisation, be it in the use of metaphors like ‘tissue’ or the association of dyes and body colour. We invite papers dealing with art theory or art practices and forms of fabrication (including, but not restricted to, textiles) that mobilise and reflect 'textility' as a theoretical proposition. This panel is ‘looking out’ as it engages with interdisciplinary methodologies and encourages global perspectives on fabrics and their fabrication as models for thinking about practices of making.

Proposals of 250 words, accompanied by a short academic CV, should be sent to the two session organisers no later than 6 November 2017.

Organizers:
Mechthild Fend, UCL History of Art, m.fenducl.ac.uk
Anne Lafont, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHSS) anne.lafontehess.fr

Quellennachweis:
CFP: 3 Session at AAH (London, 5-7 Apr 18). In: ArtHist.net, 09.10.2017. Letzter Zugriff 28.03.2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/16371>.

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