KINETICS OF THE SACRED
IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN AND EAST ASIAN ART, 800-1600:
PASSAGES OF SPACE, PLACE, TIME

An International Symposium hosted by
the Department of the History of Art, University of Michigan,
and the University of Michigan Museum of Art,
Ann Arbor
29 September – 1 October 2006

This conference reconsiders medieval art (broadly construed as including
work from 800 to 1600), focusing on the spatial and temporal matrices in
which objects and their viewers are grounded and through which these
agents move. Although participants need not have any specialist knowledge
in art from other regions, the conference will adopt an explicitly
cross-cultural approach to highlight methodological biases in the
scholarship of both European and East Asian medieval art and to suggest
new avenues of study in these fields.

We have borrowed the term “kinetics” from the physical sciences and intend
to use it as a lens through which we can re-examine medieval religious
art. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “kinetics” as “the branch of
dynamics which investigates relationships between the motions of bodies
and the forces acting upon them.” Drawing on this basic definition,
“kinetics” will be employed in this conference to mean the study of
viewers and objects moving through the conceptual and physical spaces that
are constituted and defined through their interactions. Questions that
address this dynamic nexus between concepts of space, time, and
subject-object relationships include the following:

Embodied presence: How does the viewer or the viewed move between the
transcendent and mundane realms? In what ways can an apparently inanimate
object be said to be activated, animated, alive? What are the motive
forces of sacred art?
Passages of time and history: Through what kinds of temporal structures
does the viewer or the viewed move? How do objects create and maintain a
temporal structure around them? What senses of history are implied in
specific works of art?
Mental and spatial topographies: What are the conceptual topographic
structures in which the viewer and the viewed move? How do the physical
characteristics of an object and its context affect its motion through
this matrix, and how does the object in turn condition its environment?
How are conceptual maps realized in the physical world?
Passages and thresholds: What happens betwixt and between social,
religious, or other conceptual spaces? In which ways are viewers and the
viewed affected by systems of containment and bounding? What happens when
they cross those borders?

In addition to investigating questions such as these within the specific
fields of the participants, our symposium is also meant to engage in wider
methodological questions of cross-cultural research, examining its
pitfalls, limitations, and possibilities. Stated simply, we will consider
the question, “How can one make defensible and interesting cross-cultural
comparisons and what is the value of this pursuit?” To that end, the
symposium brings together representatives of two substantial and seemingly
analogous bodies of scholarly and visual material – European and East
Asian medieval art – to facilitate a series of focused dialogues on
theoretical issues in art history that will draw primarily on the common
store of examples provided by the participants. Not only will the
colloquium serve as a testing ground for the validity of a trans-regional
approach to medieval art, but we hope that it will also serve as a model
for an intensive exchange of ideas between apparently disparate fields of
study. Through this cross-cultural comparison, we hope to hold the mirror
up to each of our fields, while considering the possibilities of drawing
larger conclusions about visual cultures in general.

Our speakers are Paul Crossley, Courtauld Institute of Art, London; Thomas
Cummins, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Jacqueline Jung, Yale
University, New Haven; Ikumi Kaminishi, Tufts University, Boston; Yonekura
Michio, Sophia University, Tokyo; Samuel Morse, Amherst College, Amherst,
MA; and Zoë Opaÿiÿ, Birkbeck College, London.

For more information, please contact the organizers:

Achim Timmermann
Assistant Professor of Medieval Art
achimtimumich.edu
+1 734 763-6112

Kevin Gray Carr
Assistant Professor of Japanese Art
kgcarrumich.edu
+1 734 764-6223