CFP: Unorthodox Autobiographies

CFP: Unorthodox Autobiographies
Art History Supplement, November 2014

Contact: Matthew Ryan Smith, Guest Editor, matthewryansmith733@gmail.com

Deadline for abstracts: July 1, 2014
Deadline for papers: September 1, 2014

Launched in 2011, Art Histories Society (ArtHS) is a free, independent, online non-profit, educational, open network; working towards a public understanding of arts and their histories. ArtHS promotes, through its website, social media and its e-journal, advances in the science of history of art. ArtHS also proposes a critical direction towards the study of public and oral art history; and towards a hypothesis that personal stories and interpersonal relations shaped and constructed the science of art history.

Art History Supplement (Online edition: ISSN 2046-9225) is a bimonthly scholarly e-journal, published by Art Histories Society.

Issue 4.6, “Unorthodox Autobiographies” welcomes papers that engage an interdisciplinary and unconventional approach to the study of autobiography in art history and visual culture. “Unorthodox Autobiographies” is intended to challenge conventional discourses of autobiographical studies by rupturing its definitions, and thus opening it up to new lines of flight and states of inquiry. We aim to provide a scholarly venue for papers that would not rest comfortably in other, more traditional, scholarly publications. This issue of Art History Supplement is specifically intended to contribute to the growing discipline of autobiography, a typically literary-based disciplinary field of knowledge, in the visual sphere.

For the forthcoming issue of Art History Supplement, we seek submissions from scholars, visual artists, artists, and art critics. Possible topics or areas of interest include, but are certainly not limited to, the following subjects:

– Dynamic representations of memory or affect
– Communications of historical or structural trauma
– ‘Selfies’ and self-portraiture
– Social networking and online presence
– Autobiography as Otherness
– Queering autobiography
– Politics of public / private autobiographies
– Relationships between literary autobiography and visual autobiography
– Self-representation, psychotherapy, and confession
– Image archives and image banks
– Narcissism and overrepresentation
– Truths and falsehoods
– Technological mediations of identity

Submissions should consist a minimum of 3000 words, a 100-150 word abstract, and a list of illustrations. Files should be submitted in English and in Microsoft WORD format. Each image should be sent as a separate file; jpeg or .tiff (min. 300 dpi). Please note that all necessary copyright documentation for all quoted material and / or all illustrations must be included in the submission package. For more information, visit: http://www.arths.org.uk/about/journal/author-s-guidelines

 

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CFP : Paragone Studies (Quebec, 18-20 Sep 14)

Quebec City, Canada, September 18 – 20, 2014

Deadline: Apr 1, 2014
Paragone Studies Conference

Papers are invited for The 3rd Annual International Conference in Paragone Studies, to be held at the Musée des beaux-arts du Québec (Museum of fine arts of Québec: http://www.mnbaq.org/en), just outside of the old quarter of the City of Québec in Canada.

The conference’s purpose is to support the scholarly investigation of the paragone, or rivalry in the arts, as it has been manifested in all media across history. The conference will also include a round-table session featuring artists who choose to discuss how competition in the arts, past or present, has impacted their work or their professional lives.

To apply: Submit a 300-word abstract using the paper or round-table presenter appropriate form on the conference website
(http://blogs.umflint.edu/paragonestudies/) and send to paragonestudies@gmail.com. Please include a c.v.

 

Reference:
CFP: Paragone Studies (Quebec, 18-20 Sep 14). In: H-ArtHist, Mar 6, 2014 (accessed Mar 6, 2014), <http://arthist.net/archive/7133>.

 

 

 

CFP : Louis Marin and the material condition

Art History Supplement, September 2014

Deadline for final submission of manuscripts: August 15, 2014

Contact: Ioannis Tzortzakakis, editor@arths.org.uk

 

 This issue of Art History Supplement seeks to address issues regarding the work of French philosopher and art historian Louis Marin (1931 – 1992) and the material shift in art history. What do we actually mean by the study of material culture in history of art? One may support that the artefacts that are not considered art are part of the material culture.  However, do we subsequently, if not intentionally, tend to separate the notions of art and material? Whilst, despite art being “mirror” or representation, it is primarily of a material nature.

Combining the research of Bourdieu and Damisch on the “structure as representation,” Louis Marin had noted, among others, in his De la représentation (1994, Paris: Seuil/Gallimard) that:

“Structured and structuring, produced and producing, the “cultural” dispositions constitute, between material structures and social practises, behavioral and representational schemas or matrices that function as authentic mediations in the materialist dialectic of society. […]”[1]

And

[…]

“Thus the process through which pictorial practice is developed, structured by the habitus of representation, in a purely symbolic activity misrecognizing both its character as practise and its material conditions of possibility, is the consequence or the effect of that process of mutation through which economic structures become autonomous.”[2]

However, Marin’s starting point could be traced back to the reading of Foucault’s Cours de linguistique générale; to the best of my understanding, for the gap between sign and signifier / or the “real-world object.” One may also discuss on the relation between Marin and Roman Jakobson. Yet, if this schism, between material and representation (as meaning), exists, indeed, the problem, once again, remains to be sought in between. The poles of materiality and meaning are thus being constructed. How are these two poles being connected and under which mechanisms? Can we discover anew instances in history, where a change in the material-ity of an artwork generated an alteration also in its meaning – whether in its original setting and context, or not? This change in material could be made possible through natural causes or by human integration via restoration or conservation.

Furthermore, following this distinction between material and representation / meaning, if we are to approach them as separate beings in an artwork, there is, once again, a latent, in the epistemological sphere, distinction between theoretical discourse and practical application in art history.

 

Papers submitted must contain a minimum of 3,000 words. Authors are responsible for securing high-quality digital images and securing rights to reproduce them digitally. Additional author guidelines and editorial procedures can be found here: http://www.arths.org.uk/about/journal/author-s-guidelines

 

 


[1] Louis Marin, On Representation, translated by Catherine Porter (2001), Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, p. 26.

[2] op.cit. p. 30. 

CFP: On the future of (social) history of art

On the future of (social) history of art
Art History Supplement, March 2014

Deadline for submission of manuscripts: February 15, 2014

Contact: Ioannis Tzortzakakis, editor@arths.org.uk

 

Art History Supplement welcomes submissions discussing aspects and perspectives of social history of art. In addition, papers engaged with the history of social art history in Africa, in America, in Asia, in Australia and Europe (meaning in their countries and territories), for instance, are more than welcome. More, what might be the differences, if any, between a western and a non-western social history of art perspective?

Taking a closer look at the narrative elements / patterns of social art history, one could not help but wonder. Could historians and philosophers of art feel comfortable with the application of a simple generic social art history compound? This compound (as equation) may contain the variable, in size and content, elements of a) an “in vivo and in vitro context”, b) an “artwork”, and c) an “(ω) and (n) public,” while emphasising on and examining the quality and quantity of their bonds in history. Could also such a notion of an art history be translated as a systematic art history, or with a systematic approach? The element of context could also be translated as the in vivo environment, as historic, of that particular compound and as the in vitro environment of the examination of that particular compound. Further, the concept of an “artwork” central to the narrative may be used paradigmatically to denote an exhibition (permanent or not), a museum or any cultural institution, in their generic term. While (ω), from set theory, is indicating the least infinite ordinal number of publics in history – diachronically; whereas (n) notes the cardinal number – as description – of different publics in their synchrony. More, I might tend to consider the concepts of p/matron, curator, and artist to be distinct subcategories of that great and variable parameter of public. For patron, matron and artist are also viewers of art – some them even before making it, both in terms of style and iconography; as the meaning imposed to an artwork may originate well back before the time of its production; and as pictorial signs exist before their production.

Moreover, on these grounds, discussions may, thus, arise on the status of history of art as science; regarding patterns of methodology, for instance. Such a theoretical standpoint does not juxtapose, though, to, an almost innate, as far as I am concerned, distinction in art history – as history of art and technical art history; a distinction translated as intellectual discourses and practical applications.

However, could such an intellectual demonstration be necessary or useful for certain communities? In nothing but in art history for art history’s shake context, or better, it may well provide the foundations for threshold in a space for real life problems to be challenged, in the future.

Papers submitted must contain a minimum of 3,000 words. Authors are responsible for securing high-quality digital images and securing rights to reproduce them digitally. Additional author guidelines and editorial procedures can be found here: http://www.arths.org.uk/about/journal/author-s-guidelines

 

CFP: Representations of the life of Leonardo da Vinci in motion pictures

Representations of the life of Leonardo da Vinci in motion pictures

Art History Supplement, May 2014

Deadline for submission of manuscripts: April 15, 2014

 

Contact: Ioannis Tzortzakakis, editor@arths.org.uk

 

 

This is not a history of art. Paying homage to Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation,” it adopts the subtitle of that milestone series: “A Personal View.”

 

With these words John J. O’Connor (1993 – 2009), American journalist and art critic, endorses in the New York Times of January 11, 1981, the American screening of the British documentary series The Shock of the New, written and presented by Robert Hughes, a native of Australia and, among other things, art critic for Time magazine. [1]  

 

John O’Connor himself continued: “Mr. Hughes is nothing if not refreshingly direct: “Unfortunately, epochs of art don’t start or end neatly on cue. Ours is finishing its run now, leaving behind it some of the most challenging, intelligent and beautiful works of art ever made by man, along with a mass of superfluity and rubbish. We’re at the end of the Modern era. Art no longer acts on us in the same way that it did on our grandparents. I want to see why.””[2]

 

Art documentaries like motion pictures as a term denote the technique in which a series of still images which, when shown on a screen, create the illusion of moving images due to phi phenomenon, in the realms of Gestalt psychology. The nature of the content of their embedded narration may be of a fictional or factual character. By factual, as a board term, I am referring to documentaries, recorded, academic or not, lectures and seminars created for an audience.   

 

An example of such pictures could be the Italian miniseries La vita di Leonardo da Vinci, produced by RAI (1971); with Renato Castellani (director), Philippe Leroy, Giampiero Albertini and Giulio Bosetti, as the narrator. The same series had been on air in Venezuela, France, the USA, and in a shorter version in West Germany. Whereas, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) features many several appropriations, in the series, films, documentaries and cartoons categories.

 

In the mini-series, in question, for example, the first two scenes are a flying eagle, a signification of the Leonardo and the eagle incident narrate by Vasari, and a representation of the death of da Vinci in the hands of Francis I of France, as Ingres, at 1818, had visualised the words of Giorgio Vasari.

 

Taking the image of Leonardo da Vinci as a paradigm, this issue of Art History Supplement seeks papers that discuss the uses, and abuses, in the representations of the lives of Leonardo. The artist and the canonization, the commodification of the images of the artist and his oeuvre; the popularisation of Leonardo, or just making academic knowledge accessible to a public; as it seems happening in La vita di Leonardo da Vinci; combining fiction and documentary.

 

However, are these motion pictures the narrative of representation of a particular art history? In this occasion, the state of art history in Italy in 70s, as expressed by Renato Castellani; author and director. Which has been the scene of Art History in Italy in 70s? Even though, it could be anachronistic, had Renato Castellani expressed a personal view (aka a personal history of art) in this series? Or, had he been considering his visual narrative a history of art?

 

Nevertheless, is there any difference, indeed, between the terms of “history of art” and “personal view [on art]”?  As I understand the first term, it notes an academic or a widely accepted (collective?) art history. The mere fact that there is the need to someone to discern her/his position to a “personal view” implies the coexistence of an opposite, story; or another view of the things. Yet, in which context one could find these two, or more, sides of art history? What do we mean by “side of art history”? I understand it as a different methodology, approach and interpretation to or view of the artistic phenomena. Then, again, would the existence of simultaneously active various cultural, for instance, contexts mean also the existence of the same number of art histories and a (n) number of personal views (opposing to the “official” art history)? If this is true, could we speculate that a personal view in one context, in the same time, could be the “dominant” one in another context?

 

Papers submitted must contain a minimum of 3,000 words. Authors are responsible for securing high-quality digital images and securing rights to reproduce them digitally. Additional author guidelines and editorial procedures can be found here: http://www.arths.org.uk/about/journal/author-s-guidelines


[1] John J. O’Connor (January 11, 1981) “TV View; A PROVOCATIVE NEW SERIES ON MODERN ART,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/11/arts/tv-view-a-provocative-new-series-on-modern-art-by-john-o-connor.html (last accessed 06/12/2013). 

[2] Ibid.  

 

 

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