(march 6th 2009 Louvain-la-Neuve Belgium)

When Iconology meets Visual Studies

March 6th 2009

Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres
Salle du Conseil
1, Place Blaise Pascal
Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium

Organised by
Barbara Baert (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
Agnès Guiderdoni (Université catholique de Louvain)
Ralph Dekoninck (Université catholique de Louvain)

"Visual studies" emerged at the end of the 1980's in the context of a growing
awareness of the impact of visual media on society and culture. Visual
studies as a discipline are now recognised in academic departments, have
their own journals, textbooks and readers, and recent historiographic
overviews/reviews. These are as many marks of the growing importance of this
discipline in the humanities, marked by what Mitchell termed the "pictorial
turn".

Although one can thus document the arrival of visual studies as an
independent research field, its nature, scope and methodologies are still
contested. As far as its relationship with art history is concerned, it
appears highly problematic, and even more so when it comes to its
iconological heritage. While some fear that the integrity of art history
could be damaged by calling into question the boundary between art and
non-art, others on the contrary see visual studies as an opportunity to
question the ideological origins of these boundaries. From this latter point
of view, the visual studies would open the field to new research avenues or
renew the traditional objects and methodologies of iconological studies.

Often limited to the sole decoding of the legible in the visible, iconology
could indeed benefit from a new set of questions pertaining to the "period
eye", namely systems of representation and their underlying ideologies.
Assuming that vision is not a natural given but a cultural one, the visual
studies draw attention to the social construction of the visual and the
visual construction of the social. They emphasize the study of the
interaction between the beholder and what he/she perceives, rather than
studying the object of his/her perception. In doing so, they consider the
image as a "complex interchange among visuality, technology, institutions,
discourse and the body" (Mitchell).

In order to better grasp the interactions between visual studies and
iconology, and also to appreciate their methodological, epistemological and
even institutional repercussions, one should first examine how some key
notions or ideas of visual studies connect with some of the intuitions of the
founders of iconology (a historiographic perspective). One should also pay
attention to the application of theoretical prejudices - often conceived in
close relationship with our contemporary media ecology - over older periods
(a historical perspective). It is also important to question the exclusive
attention that has been devoted to vision, to the detriment of other senses
which are nonetheless active in the experience of images, and more generally,
in the multi-sensory relationship to the world. Even if the focus of visual
studies stresses less the objects than the subjects that interact with images
and all their mediations, one should still take into account the specificity
of media and the materiality of images which have been disembodied, to some
extent, in the process of warding off the fetishism of a certain type of
history of art.

These are several of the avenues that could be explored on the occasion of
this workshop, and do not exhaust the range of issues that might be raised in
the confrontation of visual studies and iconology.

http://www.iconologyresearchgroup.org
<http://www.iconologyresearchgroup.org/>

http://gemca.fltr.ucl.ac.be/

Programme

09:30 Welcome and registration

10:00 Barbara Baert (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) and Agnès Guiderdoni
(Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS, Université catholique de Louvain)
/Introduction/

President of the Morning session - Thierry Lenain (Université Libre de
Bruxelles)

10:30 Ralph Dekoninck (Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS,Université
catholique de Louvain)
/Iconology and/or Visual Studies. Art History at the risk of the Pictorial
Turn./

11:15 Reindert Falkenburg (Universiteit Leiden)
/The creative viewer: imagination versus iconology in early 16th-century
landscape painting/

12:00 Lunch

President of the afternoon session - Philippe Bordes (Institut National
d'Histoire de l'Art-Paris)

14:00 Rebecca Zorach (University of Chicago)
/Empty spaces, pure painting: on visual culture, iconology and modernism/

14:45 Clemena Antonova (American University Bulgaria)
/Visual Studies and Iconology at RAKhN in the 1920s: Insights from an
Unfinished Russian Experiment/

15:30 Break

16:00 Ann-Sophie Lehmann (Universiteit Utrecht)
/The Story of the Teapot - Meaning and Materiality of a Digital Icon /

16:45 Jan Baetens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
/Concluding remarks/

--
Professor dr. Barbara Baert
Medieval Art, History of Christian Art, Iconology Research Group (IRG)
Faculty of Arts Room 04.05
Blijde Inkomststraat 21/Postbus 3313
B-3000 Leuven
BELGIUM
Phone: +32-16-32 48 64 Fax: +32-16-32 4872
E-mail: barbara.baertarts.kuleuven.be
www.kuleuven.be <http://www.kuleuven.be/>

www.iconologyresearchgroup.org <http://www.iconologyresearchgroup.org/>

Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm