Figuring it out: Bodies and the History of Art
Art History Graduate Student Symposium. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Friday, April 10, 2015
From Pliny’s tale regarding “The Origin of Painting” – the commemorative tracing of a young man’s shadow on a wall – to Courbet’s Origin of the World, and beyond, one history of art can be delineated as a series of collisions between body and figuration, artist and model, experience and subjectivity. The body can also be a contested site for artists, focused on the abnegation of figuration, the denial of empiricism. The body, specifically the human figure, and its relationship to art stands at the intersection of a variety of topics, including medicine, anatomy, mimesis, naturalism, religion, biography, and abstraction. This symposium will investigate numerous ways that the body and its representation, or lack thereof, have informed the history of art.
The Rutgers Art History Graduate Student Organization invite the submission of abstracts that address the relationship between body and art from a variety of perspectives: historically, culturally, theoretically, and methodologically. We invite proposals from all historical periods and any academic discipline. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Suggested topics and issues (not exhaustive)
- Art and the history of science: dissections, anatomical theaters, medical treatises, etc
- The body as model: painting from life, academic studies, etc
-Body language in antiquity,
-Emotions in ancient art
-Figurative sculpture
-Body as relic: the body and religious practice
-The performative body: body as work of art
-The notion of the ideal body
-The denial of the body
-The body politic: issues of gender, race, sexuality, class, identity, nationalism
Please send your abstract (maximum of 300 words) and a current CV to by March 1st, 2015. Our symposium will take place on Friday, April 10, 2015 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. Applicants will be notified of the committee’s decision by March 9, 2015.