Academic Session 9: Warwick 2011
AAH Annual Conference 2011
31 March – 2 April, University of Warwick
Round and Round Go Space and Time: The Afterlife of Lessing in Artistic Practice
Session Convenors:
Sarah Lippert, Louisiana State University Shreveport,sarjorlip@comcast.net
Melissa Geiger, East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, mgeiger@po-box.esu.edu
When Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote his treatise called Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry in 1766, the theory presented therein offered a systematic differentiation of the perceived strengths and weaknesses of each art. Supposedly so that they could peacefully coexist, Lessing endeavoured to equitably
carve out spheres for visual and textual media, in support of Horace’s ut pictura poesis tradition. Painting and poetry were divided based upon the notion that poetry
belonged to the realm of time, and painting to the province of space. While many scholars have evaluated the reception of these ideas by subsequent aesthetic
theorists and in artistic treatises, as well as parallel theories in Lessing’s time, few have studied its more visceral effects on individual artists and their works, despite their absorption and percolation into artistic instruction and practice, both within and outside of academies of art. This session will explore artistic responses to Lessing’s aesthetic theory, as well as derivative theories ranging from the eighteenth century to Clement Greenberg and beyond. For instance, how have scholars of the Modern era expanded upon the legacy of these systems? Should we sound the death knell for the theories of Lessing, Greenberg, and their kind in the world of artistic
production, or will conceptions of temporality, spatiality, and artistic competition continue to be played out indefinitely in all media, as W.J.T. Mitchell has proposed?
Submissions are welcome from scholars working on eighteenth-century to contemporary subjects in a variety of methodological approaches.
Speakers & Papers
Melissa Geiger (East Stroudsburg University)
Disruptions of Grandeur: The Post-Greenbergian Rejection of Purity
Sarah Lippert (Louisiana State University Shreveport)
Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t: The Metamorphosis of Aesthetic Theory into Pedagogical Practice in the Art Academies of the Nineteenth Century
Franco Cirulli (Boston University College of Arts and Sciences)
Bridging Space and Time: Herder’s critique of Lessing’s Laocoön
Ileana Parvu (University of Geneva)
Beyond the System of the Arts: Space and Time in Lessing and Allan Kaprow
Mark Stuart-Smith (University of London)
Post-Medium and Perversity in Juan Muñoz’s The Wasteland (1986)
Chad Airhart (Carson-Newman College)
Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient: Flesh: A Look at the Work of Soutine, Bacon, Dubuffet, and de Kooning