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Call for Papers - Art and Presence
Second Early Modern Symposium
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Saturday 20 November 2010
Deadline for submission of proposal: 1 July 2010
Art and Presence is the second symposium of the Courtauld’s Early Modern department. The symposium will provide an occasion for established and emerging scholars to present and discuss their research together.
Historically and culturally specific, the ‘work of art’ is contingent on a series of social relationships and mediations that seem to emerge when considering the relationship between representation and presence. This one-day symposium explores the relationship between viewers and art makers from the perspective of how they conceived of the work as an informational ‘vehicle’ and/ or as a place of presence. Drawing on theories from such fields as art history, anthropology, phenomenology, literary studies, cultural studies, philosophy and sociology, papers will examine the way works of art ‘functioned’ from the point of view of a phenomenology of producing and viewing images, asking what is presence? What makes an object present? And how is it perceived?
The experience of viewing works of art in early modern Europe often confused the represented image with what was being represented. Louis Marin says that re-presentation is ‘to do as if the absent one were here and the same…so the King is only truly King in images, that is his real presence’. Deleuze goes further, stating that in painting the figure entails ‘a sensible form related to a sensation that acts on the flesh (on the nervous system)’. The relationship with the art object is thus phenomenological as in ‘being in the world’ because ‘sensation is not in the air but in the body’. According to Deleuze, ‘what is represented on the canvas is the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but insofar it is experienced as sustaining this sensation’. In an analogous way, Bruno Latour defines representation as that which ‘brings real presence’ because images are about ‘designating the one who receives the gift of life anew, about person-making’.
We invite proposals from scholars and postgraduates for papers that explore the theme of presence in all forms of visual and material culture from the early modern period (c.1580-1850) including painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, performance, print media, graphic arts, and the intersections between them.
Topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:
- The relationship between object and referent
- Presence of the object / presence within the object
- Performance and theatricality
- Absence
- The perception of the corporeal
- Phenomenology of presence
- Inanimate vs animate presence
- Beholding as a response: viewing, sensing, relating
- Relationships with objects: iconophilia/iconoclasm
Please send proposals of no more than 250 words by 1 July 2010 to rodrigo.canete@courtauld.ac.uk and deborah.babbage@courtauld.ac.uk
Further details will be posted when available on The Courtauld Institute of Art website: http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml