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New Worlds, Old Worlds, Lost Worlds
Nouveaux mondes, anciens mondes, mondes perdus
Picturing Prehistory in American Art and Visual Culture
Représenter et médiatiser la Préhistoire dans l’art et la culture visuelle américains
Published on Friday, August 06, 2021
Abstract
Atlantis, pre-Columbian “Mound Builders,” cave men locked in combat with T. Rex — visions of ancient, ruined, or “lost” worlds on a spectrum between fact and fantasy have long fascinated American artists and producers of visual culture. How have U.S. artists and image makers depicted prehistory, and to what ends? How have visualizations of prehistory from the eighteenth century to 1980 contributed to new conceptualizations of culture, time, and space? For this two-day conference, we invite papers examining images of prehistory, in different media and in both artistic and nonartistic contexts.
Announcement
Argument
Atlantis, pre-Columbian “Mound Builders,” cave men locked in combat with T. Rex — visions of ancient, ruined, or “lost” worlds on a spectrum between fact and fantasy have long fascinated American artists and producers of visual culture. How have U.S. artists and image makers depicted prehistory, and to what ends? How have visualizations of prehistory from the eighteenth century to 1980 contributed to new conceptualizations of culture, time, and space? (Bleichmar and Schwartz, 2019)
From the moment of contact between indigenous Americans and people from what became the “Old World,” the Americas posed a problem for established stories about prehistory or “deep time.” On the one hand, this was a “New World,” seemingly without written history, while on the other it did not fit easily within biblical stories about prehistory. Such uncertainty, together with the cultural and technical revolutions of time and space that characterized several centuries of European commercial and imperial expansion, produced a great deal of pictorial speculation about deep time. As the “myth and symbol” school of American studies demonstrated during the 1950s and 1960s, mythic time has played an important role in U.S. culture, in visions of a mechanical Eden that would combine technology with the pastoral, evading Europe’s history and social conflict (Marx, 1964). Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, developments in both the sciences and popular culture accelerated a process in which various “old” and “lost” worlds were invented to make sense of and imagine the new. These worlds might be at the bottom of the ocean, buried underground, or lost in jungles, but they could be brought back via the image.
For this two-day conference, we invite papers examining images of prehistory, in different media and in both artistic and nonartistic contexts. We particularly wish to focus on how such images functioned as a way of “worldmaking,” to imagine and invent deep pasts and distant origins. We will ask about the relationships between production, circulation, and reception, as well as between image, media, form, and concepts of time.
Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Visions of lost worlds under the sea or below ground;
- Visual and material culture and art dealing with pre-contact Americas and indigenous peoples;
- Art and visual culture of biblical history and the holy land;
- Science, religion, and the visual culture of deep time;
- Visual culture’s relation to mythical and historical time;
- Disenchantment and (re)enchantment between science, religion, and popular knowledge;
- Landscape, nature, and deep time;
- Art and visual culture related to geology and paleontology;
- Prehistory and the “culture of time and space” (Kern, 1983);
- Prehistory and U.S. Black/Afrodiasporic art and visual culture
- Optical media and deep time;
- The visual culture and aesthetics of ruins
Submission guidelines
Papers may be in French or English. To submit a proposal, please send an abstract of about 250 words and a two-page CV to: jonathandentler@gmail.com.
Deadline: November 15, 2021
The conference will be hold on April 7-8, 2022, at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art
Scientific coordinator
- The conference is organized by Jonathan Dentler, Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow, and by the Université Paris Nanterre (HAR) and the Université de Paris (LARCA).
Scientific committee
- Rémi Labrusse, Professeur d’histoire de l’art contemporain, Directeur de l’unité de recherches “Histoire des arts et des representations” (HAR), Université Paris Nanterre
- Vanessa Schwartz, Professor of History and Art History, Director, Visual Studies Research Institute, University of Southern California
- Ewa Bobrowska, Associate Program Officer, Academic Programs & Library, Terra Foundation for American Art
- Judith Delfiner, Maître de conférences, HAR, Université Paris Nanterre
- Mark Meigs, Enseignant – chercheur, Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones (LARCA), Université de Paris
- Catherine Marcangeli, Maître de conferences, LARCA, Université de Paris
- André Gunthert, Maître de conferences, Chaire: Histoire visuelle, Écoles des hautes etudes en sceinces sociales (EHESS)
Subjects
- Representation (Main category)
- Mind and language > Religion > History of religions
- Zones and regions > America > United States
- Society > Science studies > History of science
- Mind and language > Representation > Cultural history
- Mind and language > Representation > History of art
- Mind and language > Representation > Visual studies
- Mind and language > Information > History and sociology of the media
Places
- Auditorium, l'INHA - 2 Rue Vivienne
Paris, France (75002)
Date(s)
- Monday, November 15, 2021
Attached files
Keywords
- art History, visual studies, American History, American studies, cultural History, cultural studies, archaeology, native American and Indigenous studies, black and African-American studies
Contact(s)
- Jonathan Dentler
courriel : jonathandentler [at] gmail [dot] com
Information source
- Jonathan Dentler
courriel : jonathandentler [at] gmail [dot] com
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« New Worlds, Old Worlds, Lost Worlds », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Friday, August 06, 2021, https://doi.org/10.58079/172b
