Academic Sessions: Glasgow 2010
AAH Annual Conference 2010
15 - 17 April, University of Glasgow
Picturing the Sensorium in Art from Antiquity to 1800
Session Convenors:
Rachel King, The University of Manchester, r.king@cantab.net
Christopher Plumb, The University of Manchester, christopherplumb@gmail.com
In recent years, scholarship has become increasingly sensitised to the fact that historical human interaction with the material world, as it still does today, engaged not only the visual, but also the spectrum of the sensory and affective. The result has been a raft of histories of tasting, smelling, touching and hearing. Then, as now, these oral, aural, visual, olfactory and haptic practices were not only culturally determined but also often communicated without written explanation or in transitory form. This panel presents papers that explore the performance of the senses in art from Antiquity to 1800 as well as affective responses such as desire, pleasure or pain. As their titles reflect, these papers also discuss sensory engagement with art and/or its materials in multiple contexts, as well as how art reflects the contingent physiological and social contexts of the senses. Equally, contributions relate to the heightening, inhibition and loss of the senses and how these work with, and are reflected by artistic practice and production.
Speakers:
Caroline Babcock (University College London)
Les premiers feux d'amour: The initiation of female sexual desire in late-eighteenth-century French erotic prints and cabinet Paintings
Stephen Caffey (Texas A&M University)
The howl of the Americans: the sights and sounds of cruelty and effeminacy in a 1764 painting by Benjamin West
Marlene L. Eberhart (McGill University)
Dosso Dossi's Apollo and Daphne and the transforming touch of sound
Morgaine Gaye (Nottingham University )
The formal 18th-century dining table as a social commentary and spectacle
Chantal Jacquet (University of Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne )
Kôdo A Japanese smelling art
Kristel Smentek (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Asian Porcelain and the Rococo Sensorium