1,721,049 research outputs found
Reseña de: Martin, Meredith y Weiss, Gillian, The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France: Reseña
No full textBook review: Martin, Meredith y Weiss, Gillian, The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France, Los Ángeles, Getty Research Institute, 2022, 244 págs. ISBN 978-16-0606-730-7.Reseña de: Martin, Meredith y Weiss, Gillian, The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France, Los Ángeles, Getty Research Institute, 2022, 244 págs. ISBN 978-16-0606-730-7
Star Wars Succession Crisis: The Shape of Authorship in the Multi-Author Franchise
No full textMulti-author franchises, or expanded universes, have a new form of authorship distinct from old ways of viewing authorship. This form is examined using the Star Wars franchise as a case study
Journal18. A Journal of Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture
No full textArt history’s material turn, informed by anthropology, material culture, and consumption studies, has prompted new interest in both the physicality and the social lives of artworks. Examining the ways that eighteenth-century art objects were produced, transported, and transformed helps us to understand how they were perceived and reimagined in different cultural and temporal contexts. In the workshops and collective spaces of artistic design and manufacture, objects became the creative products of many minds and many hands, simultaneously and successively. Likewise in their afterlives as commodities and possessions, objects were continually altered through use and re-use, each transaction constituting a reframing – sometimes literal – as objects inhabited new settings or were subjected to damage, aging, or rejuvenation.
This inaugural issue of Journal18 explores the multilayered nature of eighteenth-century art. Our focus is on artworks that bear traces of multiple hands as a result of workshop production, cross-cultural exchange, re-use, restoration, vandalism, or other factors. Among the questions considered are: who were the many people involved in art’s production and reproduction (artists, collectors, scholars, dealers, handlers, and restorers)? How were eighteenth-century artworks made, re-purposed, transported, and conserved? How were they translated across media as well as across time, space, and culture? And what is the creative effect of non-creative acts like accidents or defacement? By taking a “multilayered” approach, the articles in this issue not only reexamine traditional art-historical categories – such as style, originality, or authorship – but also encourage new methodological perspectives and find new meaning in the materiality of art objects
Journal18. A Journal of Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture #12
No full textThe ‘Long’ 18th Century?
If art historical periodization constitutes a sort of prospect, at the heart of the matter for this issue is what sort of prospect, or terrain, or subjectivity, is interpellated by the ubiquitous phrase, “the ‘long’ eighteenth century”? Two sets of clouds bookend the questions about unstable temporalities and territories, overlooked bodies and artifacts addressed in “The ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century?”: Thomas Baldwin’s 1786 A Balloon Prospect from Above the Clouds and the Zoom clouds that have been the sites of our digital encounters since March 2020. Baldwin’s Balloon Prospect telegraphs the desire to capture, distill, and plot an unfettered view from above. At the same time, engraved onto the paper is also the fragility of occupying such a prospect: beyond puffs of clouds, fields of green, gridded settlement geometries, and the snaking pink river, threading though the chromatic view is the faint black line of Baldwin’s meandering 30-mile trajectory, its looping path a testament to the sheer uncertainty of the enterprise. This print evokes the dynamics involved in “worlding” the study of eighteenth-century art in scholarship and curricula over the past two decades: the significant transformation of art historical inquiry into expanded geographical and cultural terrains alongside of which we have seen the rise of a “long” eighteenth century. While the habitual slicing up of Britain’s eighteenth century to 1688-1815 is not that far out of alignment with France’s 1643-1815, it looks very different from the perspective of, for instance, South Asia, where an end point has tended rather to be located in the 1830s. Even as new maps of the long eighteenth century are delimited, the temporality and teleology of eighteenth-century European colonialisms frame prospects—the faint timelines from localized grounds and the deep markings of balloons that scudded along, often minimally acknowledged.
When the focus on histories of colonialism and enslavement forces us to look anew at the bodies, lands, and knowledge presented in art, how do our narratives change and how do the sites and objects of our inquiry shift? What are the implications of this broadened scope of inquiry for disciplinary habits of locution and the habits of mind that underwrite them? What conceptually binds an eighteenth century once we have taken up the project of tracking the entanglements of art, commerce, and empire across worlds and vantage points, whether local, regional, or transregional? For whom is the eighteenth century long, and to what ends?
The issue takes off with a series of interventions anchored in discrete episodes, artefacts, and sites. In her investigation of Fischer von Erlach’s often-cited but rarely analyzed first history of world architecture of 1721, Sussan Babaie discerns alternative genealogies and counter-historical trajectories for Islamic and Asian sites at odds with the parameters of colonial and orientalist views that would subsequently shape dominant racialized historical narratives. Andrei Pop offers an analysis of Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of a Black man, claimed to represent Samuel Johnson’s freed Black servant and legatee Francis Barber, as a means for examining the stakes for his provocative assertion that for art historians, the conceptual coherence of “the eighteenth century” is bound up with the period’s connection to Enlightenment ideology. In her account of the British gallows and an attendant visual culture of spectacular punishment in Europe and its plantation colonies, Meredith Gamer unsettles the primacy of the guillotine, long understood to anchor epochal shifts, thereby reframing the long eighteenth century as an era of significant continuity, whose violence, afterlives and legacies still persist today. Turning from land to sea, Maggie Cao centers the maritime media of scrimshaw—whale teeth artifacts incised by sailors, artifacts of and on the sea—to trace the intimately linked course of ecological and imperial histories. In so doing, she explores contact and connection between animals and humans, and between sailors and Indigenous communities, to challenge the geographies and temporalities of periodization. Bart Pushaw’s close reading of woodcuts by the Kalaaleq artist Rasmus Berthelsen opens onto the embodied experience of Poq, the first Inuk to complete the transatlantic colonial circuit between Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and Denmark in 1724. Moving between Poq’s initial voyage and Berthelsen’s nineteenth-century representations, Pushaw explores Indigenous epistemologies of time and duration that stand in stark distinction to the colonial construct of linear time that has served as the ground for art historical analysis.
A dialogic exchange on microhistories follows these articles. Here, Chanchal Dadlani and Holly Shaffer, art historians of early modern and eighteenth-century South Asian, Islamic, and British art, probe the potential resonances of the long eighteenth century, and emphasize the variability, mutability, and art historical ramifications of such a concept, even within a single region.
In the time of the making of this issue #12, commitments to decolonize art histories—an always ongoing and incomplete process—were accelerated through new online conversations spanning time zones, institutions, and individuals. Our work to query the long eighteenth century unfolded in Zoom clouds, even as it adhered to a rigorously from-the-ground-up analytic with an eye to the horizon. New paradigms of teaching thus take center stage alongside new research. The culminating distillation by Eleanore Neumann features a lively online roundtable, “Teaching the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century,” convened in April 2021 and to which participants—including Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Nebahat Avcıoğlu, Emma Barker, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Prita Meier, Nancy Um, and Stephen Whiteman—contributed open-access teaching resources. The volatility and disorientation entailed in looking at the habitual through new pedagogical lenses and globalizing curricula surfaced sharply in digital boxes or “clouds” which themselves may have appeared unequal and hazy based on from where and how you connect the dots and data.
As you touch down in this issue, we hope you will find as bracing as we do the myriad ways that our contributors challenge established spatial and temporal mappings, even as they signal the vitality and urgency of their continued explorations of specific local contexts, provincialized materials, and obscured agents. As these interventions suggest, in centering Indigenous temporalities and oceanic perspectives, in scrutinizing who constitutes art’s publics, in probing how taxonomic practices and an ethics of othering persist in art history and museum practices, and how beyond such hallowed halls these projects often meet distinctly violent ends, an exploration of just where the long eighteenth century ends may well land not in 1815, or 1830, but rather in our own time.
Sarah Betzer and Dipti Kher
Journal18. A Journal of Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture #9
No full text#9 - Field Notes (Spring 2020)
How do we understand the field of eighteenth-century art today? What are its objects of study, and how do we think, write, and teach about them? Where, and when, do we locate “the eighteenth century”? This issue of Journal18, emerging from a conference organized by the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) in Dallas, TX (November 2018), maps out the questions and approaches driving the field today, and proposes new directions for its future.
HECAA was established in 1993 at a vibrant moment in the evolution of the “new” art history in the United States, in an effort to carve a place for the study of eighteenth-century art in a discipline that had only just begun to acknowledge it. A quarter of a century later, buoyed by a membership that had increased ten-fold and an utterly transformed publishing landscape (including the founding of Journal18), an anniversary conference was convened at an exciting but also challenging moment in the field. Hosted by the Department of Art History at Southern Methodist University, the HECAA at 25 conference convened 160 scholars of eighteenth-century art to survey its history, present current research and pedagogical initiatives, and consider possible trajectories for its future.
These Field Notes take two different forms. Four research essays by emerging scholars who presented their work at the conference—on French typefaces, Korean folding screens, British ceiling painting, and American veneer furniture—showcase new scholarly directions. A parallel roundtable discussion by conference participants brings to light the most pressing issues facing, and defining, the present and future of the field—among them the importance of place and the possibilities of a “global eighteenth century,” the turn toward materiality and material culture, the centrality of the work of female artists, and the impact of the digital humanities on teaching and scholarship.
Issue Editor
Amy Freund, Southern Methodist Universit
Journal18. A Journal of Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture #11
No full text#11 The Architectural Reference (Spring 2021)
In Istanbul, microarchitectural birdhouses adorn the exteriors of mosques. In Lucknow, Urdu poets celebrate a new architectural style. In London, the local and the imperial converge on a renovated building façade. In Philadelphia, political aspirations are articulated in architectural books. And in Banaras, a new temple recasts the past and confronts an imperial present. These moments are at once distinct and connected, attesting to the multiple modes of architectural referentiality that characterized the eighteenth century’s visual and material cultures. In this age of intensified mobility and exchange, artists, architects, patrons, and audiences were primed to (re)consider their own architectural traditions in light of new models and information at their disposal. Such sharpened aesthetic consciousness gave rise to—and was itself facilitated by—various kinds of referencing associated with the emergence of novel styles, typologies, and strategies. The articles in this issue engage the theme of referentiality as it relates to various regions, contexts, and media. What forms did architectural referentiality take in the eighteenth century, and what was at stake in the processes and works involved? How did referentiality figure into shifting architectural practices, the construction of historical and ideological narratives, and the evocation of alternative temporal or geographic sites?
Exploring the possibilities of microarchitecture, Christiane Gruber shows how the birdhouses that proliferated in eighteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul not only reflected and even anticipated broader stylistic developments, but also spoke to longstanding spiritual themes and to newer environmental concerns prompted by the city’s growth. Nicolas Roth argues that the Urdu poets Rangin and Mir Hasan engaged deeply with the new architectural styles and typologies of the late Mughal empire, capturing in verse the visual languages that had been standardized in recent monuments and their painted representations. In her article on George Dance the Younger’s new façade for London’s Guildhall, Zirwat Chowdhury uncovers the multiple discourses informing Dance’s design, from William Hodges’s commentary on the relationship between Gothic and Indian architecture, to debates about global commerce and Britain’s colonial aspirations, to the preoccupation with fire as both spectacle and threat on the streets of eighteenth-century London. Examining the contents, paratexts, and circulation of the first two architectural books published in the American colonies, Carolyn Yerkes highlights how these works—both editions of earlier British works—expressed the intertwined craft and political identities that played a crucial role in shaping the radical environment of 1770s Philadelphia. Heeryoon Shin concludes the issue with an essay on the ruler Raja Madho Singh’s Amethi Temple in Banaras, a structure that simultaneously references medieval Hindu models, Islamic forms drawn from a transregional courtly repertoire, and recently introduced British Neoclassical motifs, revealing how elite patrons used architectural references to align themselves with various powers during the charged moments of transition between the Mughal and British empires.
These rich case studies both substantiate and complicate the idea of the eighteenth century as a distinct moment within the longer history of architectural referentiality. Linked though they are by certain broadly shared conditions of the time, the examples addressed by this issue ultimately challenge a neat periodization and resist any sort of monolithic “global” framework, pointing just as much—and arguably more so—to the specific contexts in which and for which they took shape.
Issue Editors
Chanchal Dadlani, Wake Forest University
Ünver Rüstem, Johns Hopkins Universit
Journal18. A Journal of Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture #10
No full text#10 - 1720 (Fall 2020)
Paris, 1720. Throngs of frenzied speculators gather on rue Quincampoix, seduced by the promise of spectacular wealth awaiting investors in the Compagnie des Indes. The manic trade in stock shares fuels an unprecedented bull market that culminates in the world’s first international financial disaster: the collapse of the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles, named after the state-sponsored, New World trading companies in France and England, respectively, that ignited the speculation craze. The calamities will live on in popular imaginations as inaugurating the boom-and-bust cycles of the modern economy. Anonymous Dutch prints compiled in a volume known as Het groote tafereel der dwaashied (“The Great Mirror of Folly,” or the Tafereel) will immortalize the bubbles as lessons in the dangers of herd behavior. In the example shown on this issue’s cover, John Law—controller-general of France’s finances, mastermind of the Mississippi scheme, and recent convert to Catholicism—squats on a pedestal while three priest-like charlatans cram a funnel filled with coins into his open mouth, prompting him to defecate a bill bearing his own name into the hands of an overeager speculator. The print lampoons not only Law but also the worshipful hordes who foolishly invested belief in his filthy lucre, empty paper promises emblematic of what satirists dubbed “a commerce in wind.”
Such caricatures have long dominated visual accounts of 1720—until now. This issue of Journal18 reconsiders that watershed year not only through satirical depictions but also through the lens of art objects that, far from critiquing the delusions and desires unleashed by New World commerce, actively encouraged them. Taking part in a tricentenary reevaluation of the significance of the bubbles—one that includes a special issue of the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies; a workshop on “Panic and Plague in 1720 and 2020” organized by the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota; and a forthcoming exhibition on “Fortune and Folly in 1720” at The New York Public Library–the four articles comprising this issue explore how artworks made around 1720 alternatively proselytized on behalf of bubble ventures, and promoted ideologies and activities that supported colonial commerce.
Investigating the pocket globes designed by the London cartographer, engraver, and publisher Herman Moll, Jason Nguyen argues that such commodities effectively marketed slave-labor backed practices of global capitalism to a broadening consumer base. Examining the role of cartographic practice and prints alike in mythologizing the promise of New World commerce, Camille Mathieu spotlights the ways in which maps of La Louisiane—and particularly their cartouches—substituted utopian visions of readily-extractable mineral wealth for realities of forced, Indigenous labor. William N. Goetzmann and Darius A. Spieth explore how Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini’s allegorical ceiling painting for Paris’s Banque Royale attempted to visualize and endorse Law’s vision of global commercial hegemony–in part by drawing upon royal precedents that were subsequently ridiculed in the Tafereel. Pellegrini’s depiction of the “diverse nations of the world” may have helped inspire the artist’s sister-in-law and travel companion in Paris, Rosalba Carriera, to create her own much more intimate version of the Four Continents in pastel. In his contribution, Oliver Wunsch offers a nuanced reading of Carriera’s images, complicating a standard view of how artistic renderings of skin color contributed to emerging ideas of racial difference.
It is our hope that these discussions, spanning multiple media and geographies, will contribute to new understandings not only of the seminal impact of 1720 over the course of the long eighteenth century, but also of its critical relevance to our current moment.
Issue Editors
Nina Dubin, University of Illinois at Chicago
Meredith Martin, NYU and Institute of Fine Arts, New Yor
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