Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
Irish Studies and History of Art: Impossible Dialogues?
Convenor:
Lucy Cotter, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam lucy_cotter@yahoo.com
The relationship between Irish Studies and History of Art disciplines remains a contested one, despite an increasing amount of cross-research and publishing by academics in both disciplines. On the one hand, art has remained an area of marginal interest to Irish Studies. One might ask whether this status relates to historic associations of Irish culture as essentially non-visual or to the perceived internationalism of modern and contemporary art. On the other hand, art historians have been slow to engage with Irish Studies, which is perceived as having a literary bias, and a methodo-logical approach in which art is subservient to theory.
Beyond disciplinary differences, the relationship between Irish Studies and Irish History of Art is underscored by divergent views on the status of the ‘national’ and the ‘postcolonial’ within Irish cultural production. Within Irish art discourse, the ‘national’ is often perceived as reductive in its isolation of Irish art from international art discourse and apparent focus on a culturally essentialist ‘Irishness’. The post-colonial status of Ireland and its relevance for art historical research are widely disputed. Focus is rather on the formal influences of European and British art on individual Irish artists. In contrast, ‘national’ and ‘postcolonial’ referents are central tenets of Irish Studies discourse.
This session brings the disciplines’ discrepant conceptions of Irish cultural production, and of the place of art and visual culture within it, to bear on each other. It reflects on the objectives and methodologies of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary encounters and teases out some areas of discourse which are opened up, expanded, silenced or displaced in the process.
Speakers:
Fionna Barber (School of Art and Design History, Manchester Metropolitan University)
Disturbed Ground: Francis Bacon, Traumatic Memory and the Gothic
Riann Coulter (Paul Mellon Centre for British Art)
Nationalism, Homosexuality and the Modern Artist: Suppressed narratives in Gerard Dillon's images of Connemara
Finton Cullen (University of Nottingham)
Irish Visual Studies and Interdisciplinarity
James Elkins (School of the Art Institute Chicago)
Between National Art History and International Visual Studies
Luke Gibbons (University of Notre Dame)
Visual Culture, Cultural Boundaries and Irish Studies
Niamh Ann Kelly (Dublin Institute of Technology)
Between Art and History: Remembering the Great Irish Famine
Kerstin Mey (School of Art and Design, University of Ulster)
Histories of Art and Inter/national Discourse
Gavin Murphy (Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology)
Unsanctioned Transgressions: The Limits of Irishness in the Works of Willie Doherty and Gerard Byrne
Yvonne Scott (TRIARC, University of Dublin, Trinity College)
What is/are Irish Studies?