Landscape Art of the Americas: Sites of Human Intervention across the Nineteenth Century: An International Symposium

Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia. Mayo 21 – 23, 2020

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Call for papers

Landscape, for Alexander von Humboldt, was “the totality of all aspects of a region as perceived by men.” It references an area whose character is the result of the interaction of human and natural factors. All too often, however, the Americas are characterized as “Edenic,” untouched by the hand of man, the proverbial “Natural Paradise.” Taking the long nineteenth century as its focus, this conference seeks papers that examine landscape art of the Americas in which human intervention is evident. There is a history of this mode of landscape art that has yet to be fully explored. Not only Euro-Americans but also Indigenous peoples left their marks on the land that also deserve investigation. Evidence for this line of inquiry might be explored in oil paintings, photography, prints, maps, sketchbooks, books of picturesque travel, and three-dimensional artifacts. In sum, we seek papers that serve to problematize prevailing interpretations of the terrain of the Americas, bringing the natural landscape into dialogue with the cultural landscape. Considering landscapes from across the western hemisphere allows us to identify parallels, confluences and divergences in subject and approach that provide further insights, consistent with a Humboldtian worldview. 

This Symposium will lead important discussions on nineteenth-century landscape through sessions of exchange and dialogue. The importance of thinking about landscape in the nineteenth-century from a twenty-first century viewpoint will open the possibility of understanding how our construction of notions of landscape, meaning, circulation, representation and uses frame how many nations see themselves. With a variety of participants, the event will allow for new topics of study to be submitted, new methodologies of approaching this subject and new research projects to be suggested. Located in Bogotá, at the top of the plateau on the Andes Mountains located 8660 ft. above sea level on the Eastern Cordillera, the Universidad de los Andes is an ideal venue to host an event that takes landscape as its central theme. It was, precisely, this Andean environment which stimulated travelers such as Humboldt, Baron Gros, Frederic Church and others to form new ideas about art and science. With fantastic nineteenth-century art collections at the National Museum, at the National Library and at the Bank of the Republic, all of them within walking distance from the University the Symposium will prove to be held in an ideal environment that will promote discussions on landscape as a central topic.

Topics might include but are not limited to:  agricultural imagery, indigenous sites, deforestation and ecology, railroad construction, landscapes and mining, migrations and landscape, symbolic landscape , ports and commerce, navigation and river systems, telegraphs and modern technology, natural landscapes and cultural landscapes, romantic landscape, travelling and migration, bridges & road building, women intervening in the land, female landscape artists and photographers, travel and print culture (newspapers, magazines and their role in narrating the landscape)

Proposals and papers may be presented in Spanish or in English. Simultaneous translation will be provided throughout the conference.

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Keynote speakers:

Dr. Rachel Z. DeLue, Princeton University

Dr. Claudia Mattos Avolese, Universidade Estadual de Campinas

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Deadline:

October 6th, 2019. For individual papers, send 250-word proposals. Please include a one-page CV with your name, affiliation, and email address. Send proposals, CV and inquiries to landscapeamericasbogota@gmail.com

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Organizers:

Verónica Uribe, Chair, Department of Art History, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia

Katherine Manthorne, Prof. Modern Art of the Americas, Graduate Center, City University of New York

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There are some travel awards available for graduate students enrolled in PhD programs. Please indicate when you submit your abstract if you are interested in being considered for travel support.

ART AND MEDIUM(S) 

IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORY OF ART

VIII Art History Symposium

Art History Department at Universidad de Los Andes

Bogotá. October 24th – 26th, 2018

Deadline: June 30th

 

Keynote speakers:

Carol Armstrong (Yale University)

Andrew Uroskie (Stony Brook University)

Video, photography, and cinema have played key roles for identifying the challenges and prospects of twenty-first century history of art, regarding how to question, critically reformulate, and overcome modernist notions and models of medium specificity. They have also helped to enrich both inter/transdisciplinary approaches in the contemporary history of art and our understanding of art produced in different mediums, before and after modern times. In this direction, the VIII Art History Symposium at the Universidad de los Andes invites proposals for individual papers discussing and examining some of the methodological, analytical or theoretical new challenges and prospects for the discipline concerning the relationship between art and mediums in art works (in a wide sense of the term) produced in any time and place. Papers may include responses to, but are by no means limited by the following approaches.

1. Rosalind Krauss reformulated the modernist discussion on medium in response to what she considered a crisis related to the emergence of video in the sixties. She proposed a post-medium notion of medium in terms of supporting structures of “differential” and self-differentiating elements (e.g. the celluloid strip, the camera, the projector, and the screen in cinema), and in terms of the open possibilities of various interactions between these components. On her part, Carol Armstrong proposes a feminist interpretation of Georges Seurat’s “pointillist mark”, which she interprets in terms of a “complex matrix of interrelated media and materialities,” and as optical as well as embodied, tactile, and generative mark. The symposium invites papers related to the study of how artworks and practices could be understood from a perspective that emphasizes materiality and creation within conditions and dynamics of an art medium’s “self-differentiating elements” or of interrelatedness of different art media.

2. Ji Hoon Kim’ Between Film, Video and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-Media Age (2016) shows that both medium specificity and Krauss’ proposal hardly help to study works that use other exhibition devices and platforms to “mediate and scrutinize in the material and technical complexity of the cinema”. Andrew Uroskie’s Between the Black Box and the White Cube (2014) shows how artists in the fifties and sixties used sculpture and other media “to address fundamental aspects of the cinematic experience”. He also proposes that artists and the public understood cinema’s specificity less in terms of “an ontology of a material form”, and more in terms of both “the contingent historicity of that form’s cultural elaboration”, and the perceptual regimes in which cinema took place. In this direction, the symposium also seeks papers that study how production and reception of art before and in modernity occurs in terms of perception, communication, and the interweaving and hybridization of media and mediums. The symposium also invites investigations on how artists and institutions have developed and problematized formal, structural, and ontological characteristics of mediums/media in order to ‘expand’ the different cultural and communicational possibilities of art.

3. Raymond Bellour’s L’Entre-Images: Photo Cinéma Vidéo (1990) demonstrated that video, electronic, and digital artifacts did not dissolve cinema, but rather enabled its development and allowed the reexamination of the relationship between old and new mediums. This task was assumed and reformulated by the “media archeology”. Among those archeologist is Friedrich Kittler who criticized humanist approaches to technology, and proposed that old and new mediums (and one may add here biological mediums) can be understood as active (bio)technologies and mechanisms of inscription of their own archeology. On her part, Ina Blom has combined both art history and media archeology in order to identify an “autobiography” of video art that accounts for “the life and times of a memory technology” in a postwar world. The symposium invites papers evaluating intricate (bio)tecnologic dynamics of memory, narrative, and (bio)politics in specific art works, addressing reexaminations of the relationship between traditional and new (art) mediums, or studying how these mediums give an account of their own histories and hybridizations.

Speakers have 20 minutes for their presentations. Please send your proposal by June 30th to Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernandez (historiadelarte@uniandes.edu.co). Make sure you write “VIII Art History Symposium” in the subject. Proposals should include two files (PDF or word). The first file includes a tentative title of the paper and an abstract (400 to 600 words long). Please, avoid including your name in this document. The second file should include a short CV (between 100 and 200 words long) stating your full name, academic affiliation, e-mail, and list of publications. In case you have any question, please do not hesitate to contact Juan Guerrero-Hernández before June 20th. Official languages are Spanish and English. Selected papers will be announced by July 15th.