Members of this list might be interested in submitting proposals for the
following sessions at next year's annual conference of the Association
of Art Historians, 6-8 April 2017, at Loughborough University.
Further details at http://aah.org.uk/annual-conference/2017-conference
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Beyond Therapy: Situating art and design in healthcare contexts
Convenors:
Tamar Tembeck, McGill University, [log in to unmask]
Mary Hunter, McGill University, [log in to unmask]
In Europe and North America, greater attention is being paid to the
built environment in medical spaces. ‘Healthy design’ initiatives are
increasingly being integrated into hospital planning, in a vision that
is coherent with the WHO’s definition of health, according to which
‘mental and social well-being’ are considered in addition to ‘the
absence of disease or infirmity’. Government percentage-for-art schemes
and public art funding policies count amongst the initiatives that have
allowed for the integration of art in hospital architecture, the
commissioning of in situ works, and the establishment of artists’
residences in medical environments.
Existing studies on art and design in healthcare contexts overwhelmingly
focus on accumulating evidence of their beneficial impacts on patients’
recovery and general well-being. Since the birth of hospitals in the
Middle Ages, however, the integration of art has played a variety of
other roles in medical spaces, ranging from providing contemplative
touchstones for patients, staff, and visitors, to improving the
institution’s overall image in the public eye.
This panel invites historians of art, architecture and design, as well
as cultural practitioners, programmers and policymakers, to reflect
upon, critique and question the forms and functions of contemporary and
historical art and design practices in healthcare environments
(hospitals, clinics, long-term care facilities, etc.). We are
particularly interested in investigating art and design practices that
are deployed outside of an explicitly therapeutic context (eg, in art
therapy). Submissions pertaining to live art practices in healthcare
spaces are also welcome.
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Catastrophism and the Ecology of Art in pre- and early modern Europe
Convenors:
Joanne W Anderson, The Warburg Institute, [log in to unmask]
Jill Harrison, The Open University, [log in to unmask]
Floods, fires, earthquakes, famines and plagues were catastrophic events
in pre- and early modern Europe. They impacted heavily on environment
and society by devastating resources, levelling infrastructure and
displacing or destroying communities. The residual presence of such
events in the cultural memory could be long term and institutionalised.
As Erling Skaug has recently argued (2013) in relation to change in
Giotto’s late oeuvre, ‘disasters of a certain magnitude tend to cause
breaks and abrupt changes in a historical course – for better or worse.’
Catastrophism is an emerging and productive way of thinking about art’s
relationship to climate and environment, and the circumstances of its
production and interpretation. But it also has a venerable tradition
within the discipline of art history itself. From Winckelmann’s climate
theory in relation to the stylistic development of Greek sculpture
(1755) to Millard Meiss’s theories about the Black Death and its
instigation of an archaising pictorial system (1951), the ecology of
visual representation is a persistent framework for critical enquiry. It
has the potential to align local events with universal histories, for
example a synecdoche for the Apocalypse or the Great Flood.
This panel welcomes papers that explore catastrophes of art in the
classical sense. By focusing on pre- and early modern Europe, it aims to
push art historians to rethink the role of such events in our
understanding of art and its production. It will seek to discuss and
offer fresh perspectives on the concept of catastrophism and its
relevance for the ecology of art.
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Damaged Art and the Question of Value
Convenor: Kathryn Brown, Loughborough University, [log in to unmask]
While entropy has often been used by artists as an aesthetic strategy,
this session examines the values that attach to artworks that are
damaged in the process of their execution, or that have been broken,
vandalised, discarded, or otherwise rendered unfit for their original
design or purpose. What aesthetic, historical and financial values
attach to such works, and are those values divergent or mutually
reinforcing? While ancient statuary is exhibited in fragments, what is
the display value of more recent works that have not benefitted from
restoration? For some collectors, prints pulled from cancelled plates
are prized objects, while, for others, such works are considered
counterfeit. Artists complain of failures to maintain the condition of
public art that no longer meets their original conception and, in some
cases, recommend destruction of that work.
Such examples problematise the values that attach to the material
qualities of art objects and the ways in which such qualities relate to
artistic intention and audience expectations throughout time. This
session asks why some works have been considered worthy of restoration
while others have been ignored? Might the preservation of damage to an
object have evidential value that outweighs the restoration of that
object’s material appearance? What types of destruction befall
conceptual and performance artworks? From the activities of the Salvage
Art Institute to the exhibition of paintings and sculptures marred by
war, accident, or neglect, this session uses the concept of damage to
investigate values that attach to the production, display, preservation,
and financial value of artworks.
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Flawed Illumination: Broken glass in modern and contemporary art
Convenor: Taisuke Edamura, Independent Scholar, [log in to unmask]
The early 20th century saw the emergence of broken glass as a source of
new forms and concepts in artistic creation. Take, for instance, Josef
Albers’ broken glass assemblages in the 1920s or the accidental
shattering of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23), which triggered a
‘chance’ transformation of the work’s complex iconography. Its potential
as both an artistic material and a subject matter has since been largely
explored by many artists, such as Robert Smithson, Chris Burden, Barry
Le Va, Cildo Meireles and Walead Beshty, to name a few. Their differing
deployments of broken glass show its diversity in form, function and
dissemination. Its sharp materiality stimulates more than just sight and
induces a wide range of feelings from fear to liberation. There is also
such diversity in ‘breaking glass’ that the action can indicate
different approaches to violence and its implications. These
characteristics have assisted in developing new artistic languages and
critical attitudes, reconsidering the process and spaces of artistic
production.
This session seeks papers from across 20th-century art history and
contemporary art that illuminate the capacity of this ‘flawed’ material
through diverse methodological approaches that productively complicate
our conventional grasp of glass. The session also considers proposals
addressing distinctive explorations of broken glass in pre-modern times
(eg stained glass) from contemporary perspectives. Suggested themes
include, but are not limited to: glass as refuse; violence and
iconoclasm; the sound of shattered glass; ecological issues concerning
the appropriation and deployment of broken glass as a medium; the
poetics of protection/restoration; broken glass and memory.
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Revisiting Susan Groag Bell: New directions for ‘medieval women book owners’
This session is sponsored by ICMA
Convenors:
Elizabeth L’Estrange, University of Birmingham, [log in to unmask]
Sherry Lindquist, Western Illinois University, [log in to unmask]
2017 marks the 35th anniversary of the publication of Susan Bell’s
pioneering article ‘Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety
and Ambassadors of Culture’, which paved the way for much subsequent
research on women’s manuscript ownership. This session seeks to revisit
the topic by re-examining Bell’s conclusions in light of the decades of
fruitful scholarship that it stimulated.
For instance, Bell’s article only considered Christian women and
devotional literature between 800 and 1500, mainly in Western Europe.
What can we learn by applying Bell’s questions to adjacent periods and
geographies? How might Bell’s conclusions be refined in light of new
studies on how books operated in gift exchanges, and as part of family
legacies and reading communities that involved both women and men? What
iconographic inquiries prove relevant to expanding Bell’s preliminary
discussion of images, which was limited mainly to those of the Virgin
and St Anne? What kinds of books did non-elite women own? How did
illuminated books figure in broader patterns of female patronage of art
and architecture? How did the rise of printing and the Reformation
affect women’s book ownership?
Bell’s ground-breaking work was written at a time when use of the term
‘woman’ had yet to be problematised, and the term ‘gender’ had not been
theorised. How might methodologies and technologies not available to
Bell (eg gender studies, the global Middle Ages, queer studies,
post-human studies, digitised collections) be brought to bear on this field?
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