THE TANGIBLE/PALPABLE EARLY MODERNITY

Hi Everyone,

It may be a bit preliminary to pass my thoughts and ideas about the conduciveness of the theme ‘tangible/palpable’ to research on early modern visual culture before letting Maryse post her notes on the blog, but because I only have some time today, here we go:

CONDUCIVENESS OF THE THEME TO EARLY MODERN STUDIES

Overall, the theme should be of interest to medievalists/early modernists as it can be easily fitted into research on (1) the anthropology of the image [Belting, Freedberg, Stoichita, Daston], (2) the senses/sensory perception [San Juan, Loh, Taussig, Gaudio, Bal], and (3) the shifted epistemology of the image caused by ‘the crisis of the image’ (in Belting’s parlance).

1)     Traditionally, early modernists have discussed images in rationalised and aestheticized terms (an outcome of the Cartesian body/mind split, and the post-Enlightenment discourse on aesthetics). Belting, Freedberg and Stoichita were instrumental in proving that such modernist attitude to the ontology of the image is flawed because it completely overlooks every-day encounters with images (be they cultic, political/dynastic or mythological), wherein images were in fact treated as animated beings. This of course goes well with Latour’s dictum ‘we have never been modern’, as well as the Heideggerian discourse on things that was later updated and re-worked by Brown into the thing theory. In my opinion, the thing theory is particularly useful because it challenges the binary opposition between subject and object, or in other words: between things (understood as physical objects and rights to them) and humans in Western epistemology. The fission of the subject from the object is particularly perceptible within the field of Renaissance studies, owing to the position of the Renaissance in traditional academia as the original locus of modernity, and modern subjectivity, in particular.

2)     Recent scholarship on the human senses is particularly suitable for our enquiry. In very brief, it stipulates that the changing modes of imagining in early modernity, such as mimesis or the concept of representation itself, shifted the very conceptual infrastructure for the practice and the theory of the senses. The early modern classification of the senses is a good initial entry into this question.

3)     The category ‘art’ (of painting, sculpture, etc.) emerged as an established element of elite cultural life only in early modernity. Hans Belting in his anthropological study of human response to imagery has written about this historical moment in terms of the ‘crisis of the image’, wherein ‘art’ replaced the ‘image’. According to Belting, ‘art’ was developed as a joint outcome of the Protestant iconoclasm that freed the painting from the presence of God, and humanist intellectual endeavours that linked painting to liberal arts. Or, to use Victor Stoichita’s terminology, the imago had become a quadro. For Stoichita, imagery displayed a high degree of self-awareness in the early modern period in terms of its epistemology. Consequently, the response of the viewer to the new ontological construct of quadro also changed and now included the cognitive recognition of this self-awareness. The quadro was self-reflexive not only through the intellectual awareness of the beholder but it also turned the beholder’s attention to the represented nature of painting.

POSSIBLE TOPICS/QUESTIONS (I’ll liaise with Alexandra for more options)

·       The living image (a sculpted Madonna that cries, a sculpted Christ that bleeds, etc.; they were automata; a lot of criticism of such practices coming from Luther)

·       Representations of touch (Doubting Thomas, the flaying of Marsyas, anatomy lessons, etc.)

·       Embodied interactions with images (kissing Christ’s feet, touching Mary’s garments)

·       The process of bronze casting, death masks (wax), sculpting the body of Christ out of wood (only anthropological approaches; no reactionary connoisseurship)

·       Image collections (assembling the former cultic objects in the  space of a lay gallery; how did this change the sensory experience with these things)

·       Early modern allegories of human senses (i.e. Brueghel)

·       The physical transport of images (this is when their physicality actually matters; what happens if they break/crack/discolour during the journey?)

·       Votive offerings

POTENTIAL KEYNOTES (from my selfish perspective)*

·       Hans Belting, Emeritus professor (may mean he has a lot of time; on a down note, he lives in Germany)
·       David Freedberg, Columbia (not far away) http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Freedberg.html
·       Joseph Koerner, Harvard (even closer than NYC) http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k60328
·       Bill Brown, Chicago http://english.uchicago.edu/faculty/brown
·       Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute, Berlin http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/staff/members/ldaston
·       Igor Kopytoff, Penn State (he’s super interesting; he looks at things as if they had an agency of their own; he coined a term ‘biography of things’) http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~kopytoff/

*All the keynotes listed by Daniella are of potential interest to me, except the game theorists (as an early modernist, I couldn’t care less). I think that for the cohesion of the whole enterprise (and given our divergent interests), it makes sense to invite either a philosopher or an anthropologist: someone like Bill Brown or Igor Kopytoff would foot the bill advantageously for all of us.

EMPHASIS ON INTERDISCIPLINARITY

Given the uniqueness of AHCS Dept, and our own rather dissimilar research interests, we should emphasise in the CFP that diversity doesn’t need to mean chaos. Rather, we should turn this into a virtue. We should perhaps say something like: ‘We would like to invite speakers from a broad array of academic disciplines. However, given the unique interdisciplinary nature of McGill’s Department of Art History and Communication Studies, we will particularly welcome papers that can be simultaneously of interest to communications scholars, modernist and contemporary visual studies scholars, as well as scholars working on older periods.’ (Although perhaps this is a potential scarecrow?)

POTENTIAL IMAGES

Caravaggio's Doubting Thomas

Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas