CfP: RSA 2019 Toronto - Early Modern Technologies of Art
Can
technologies of art enable us to reconsider the early modern
interactions between “local” and the “global?” Seeking to answer this
question, the proposed panel takes up art technology as a hermeneutic
tool toanalyze production of art in the early modern world. In this
period, technologies of art involved specialized and often localized
practices that required systematicapplication of techniques,
materials, andtools that did not travel as readily as the objects they
helped to generate. Although embedded in cultural objects, artworks and
materials exchanged across the Silk Road and the Oceanic networks of
trade, art technologies were seldom known to those who acquired these
objects of cross-cultural exchange. In contrast to the mobility of
inimitable artifacts and imagesart technologies were often intangible
and unknown, which heightened the foreignness and desirability of
objects produced with their application. Attempting to recreate foreign
objects using local technologies, practitioners across Europe, Near
East, Asia, and the Americas made all kinds of hybrid things—things that
were neither local nor foreign, but uniquely, early modern.
Notable
examples of objects evokingthe hybrid forms of early modern art
production include Indian dyedtextiles that mirrored Dutch prints,
Mexican feather painting that turned an “Old-world” technology into a
“New World”-adaptation, Renaissance images that reproduced Ottoman
carpets, embroideries, and metalwork, as well as Chinese silk and
porcelain, and Japanese lacquer. Dyestuff, namely Cochineal, voyaged
with the European travelers from the South Americas to Europe and
stimulated conversations on dyeing techniques.Exploring some of these
and other examples, papers can investigate any subject,
artist/practitioner or cultural context that throws light on how art
technologies can expand and enrich our understanding of the early modern
world.
Please
send your 150-word abstracts, along with a title, keywords, and a CV
(300 words maximum and not in prose)