Dwelling on the everyday: architecture, ghosts, ellipses 

An international interdisciplinary symposium

8 and 29 July 2022 (via Zoom)

Organisers:

Helen Hills, University of York (helen.hills@york.ac.uk)

Alice Sanger, The Open University (alice.sanger@open.ac.uk)

This symposium attends to the relationships between everyday architecture where people lived and what is left behind, salvaged, celebrated, or overlooked, but may sometimes be reactivated in powerful and unpredictable ways by those who come later. We are interested (though not exclusively) in the houses of artists and writers and the ways in which they are often treated like relics or holy shrines by subsequent fans and scholars. What, if anything, can we glean about artists (or others) from the places where they dwelled? And to what ends? What effects did their houses and places of residence exert upon them? How were they designed, bought, painted, furnished, divided, fought over, and lost? And in what ways and by whom were the houses lived in? What of children, spouses, extended family, caretakers and cleaners, au pairs and servants? And what of those places which are not celebrated but are quickly forgotten or ignored? Current scholarship on artist-homes and most museum presentations tend to collapse house into biographical facts / artist’s work. How might one avoid reducing the artist and their work simply to what is projected onto (what remains of) their home and vice versa?  

We are particularly interested in the ways in which the past resonates in places of dwelling, how it leaves its mark on places and how people leave their mark on their dwellings. What traces are left and how are they celebrated, fetishized, banished or ignored? What do the places inhabited reveal about those who inhabited them? How are these connections assumed or traced or made by visitors or scholars or those who come later? What role does temporality play in these relations?  How might the power of a place to conjure up the apparently vivid presence of its past be traced or accounted for? How is it triggered, enhanced, or suppressed? What role does such haunting have in academic writing, or in autobiographical or biographical pursuits? In what ways is it useful to seek such connections – or is it they which, in some way, rather seek one out? 

We are also interested in places beyond the house, where people actually spent most of their lives: where they grew up, where they died, or where they chose to be — if, indeed, this was a choice they managed to have. Is a ‘house’ too conventional or restrictive a limit to think through what is at stake here? What of the lodgings, apartments, offices, warehouses, factories, gardens, sheds, huts, workshops, tents, tree houses, or the places where they roamed and spent most time or were most restored? Is it the house where they lived that we should be concerned with, or, for instance, the homes of their friends, their favourite café, local pub, the market, or their mosque? What of those who were not rich and who lived in places where they left few traces? What of working-class homes? And what of people without a home at all: how might refugee camps and migrant houses be considered? How can we take them at least as seriously as rich people who splashed out on bourgeois trappings and property?

Format: We are planning two afternoon sessions on Zoom; with a combination of longer papers (20-30 mins) and short contributions (10-15 mins). Collaborative work will be particularly welcome. We will be delighted to receive abstracts of ca.500 words by 1 March 2022.  Please send to: helen.hills@york.ac.uk  and alice.sanger@open.ac.uk.

A special issue of the Open Arts Journal based on this conference is envisaged.

Edited by Fionna Barber and Eleanor Byrne

We are delighted to announce the publication of issue 8 of the Open Arts Journal (summer 2020).

Extract from the issue’s abstract:

This special issue offers a timely and current critical evaluation of the morbid symptoms and potential wounds of ‘Brexit Culture’ as its implications, causes and effects unravel in front of a global audience via multiple media in real time. Brexit cultures, for the purposes of our articles here, attends to the role of cultural production in forging political choices , and to  the cultural dimensions of Brexit – as a response to living in times of crisis and uncertainty. Departing from solely political or economic evaluations of Brexit’s effects, contributions to the special issue explore how the humanities and social sciences, artists and writers engage with the challenges, threats and potential disasters of Brexit. This issue interrogates how multiple constituencies that make up the inhabitants of the UK deal with a climate of continued uncertainty about definitions and effects of Brexit as they unfold in everyday cultural practices and specific locations, and what kind of responses or symptoms we can identify in current discourses of national and international culture. 

Issue 8 is available from our website now:

BREXIT WOUNDS: ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESPONSES TO LEAVING THE EU

We are delighted to announce the publication of our Winter 2017/8 issue:

Baroque Naples: place and displacement

Edited by Helen Hills, Professor of History of Art, University of York.

Download Open Arts Journal, Issue 6, Winter 2017/8 from our website:

https://openartsjournal.org/issue-6

Extract from Helen Hills’ introduction to issue 6:

This special issue investigates artworks, literature, and histories of baroque Naples through a critical interrogation of their relationship to place. It aims to consider ‘baroque Naples’ as a critical question, not in terms of periodisation, stylistic moment, or place set in time, as if these things are already known and settled, but in terms of convulsion, shifts, differences, and disparities.

What are the dislocating effects of baroque interventions? How have place in Naples and the place of Naples been imagined, invented, chartered, explored, and contested in baroque art, history, and literature? By what means – scholarly, cultural, social, political, and economic – has Naples been kept in its place and with what consequence for the interpretation of its culture? In what ways might ‘Naples’ be usefully thought, less in terms of reassertion of identity or of city as given and place in terms of continuity, than in relation to displacement, difference, and disjunction? What hitherto obscured aspects of Neapolitan baroque culture might thereby be allowed to emerge?

Baroque Naples and its forging, discursively, materially, technologically, and aesthetically are here examined in innovative essays by eight scholars. They investigate baroque Naples in relation to architecture, marble, painting, prints, written texts, maps, geology, power, and privilege in order to bring the relation between material transformation and place into focus.

Issue 6 contents

·       INTRODUCTION: DIRECTIONS TO BAROQUE NAPLES

Helen Hills

·       FROM PIAZZA MERCATO TO PONTE RICCIARDO, AND ON TO VIA TOLEDO: GIOVAN BATTISTA DELLA PORTA’S TRANSLATIONS OF HANDS AND FEET OF EXECUTED CRIMINALS ACROSS EARLY MODERN NAPLES
Sergius Kodera

·       DISLOCATING HOLINESS: CITY, SAINT AND THE PRODUCTION OF FLESH
Helen Hills

·     THE MATERIALITY OF ENCHANTMENT: RETHINKING NEAPOLITAN MARBLE INTARSIA
Joris van Gastel

·       BAROQUE TECTONICS: ERUPTIONS AND DISRUPTIONS IN THE VESUVIAN CITY
Sean Cocco and Alfonso Tortora

·       NAPLES IN FLESH AND BONES: RIBERA’S DRUNKEN SILENUS AND SAINT JEROME
Edward Payne

·       FLAYING THE IMAGE: SKIN AND FLESH IN JUSEPE DE RIBERA’S MARTYRDOMS OF SAINT BARTHOLOMEW
Bogdan Cornea

·       ‘MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN NATURE ITSELF’: THE EARLY COMMERCIAL AND CRITICAL FORTUNES OF NEAPOLITAN BAROQUE STILL-LIFE PAINTING
Christopher R. Marshall

We are pleased to announce that Issue 5 of the Open Arts Journal has recently been developed for publication as a book.

The Caribbean, with its transnational diaspora stretching to all the shores of the Atlantic and beyond, is one of the liveliest cultural landscapes in the world today. It is also one of the most troubled. A major new anthology of material edited by Leon Wainwright (OU) and Kitty Zijlmans (Leiden), published this year by Manchester University Press, presents the contemporary perspectives on the challenges facing Caribbean communities and shows how the arts can play a crucial role in improving sustainability through a shared ground of experience, enjoyment and understanding.

The book promotes the view that visual art in particular has an important contribution to make in enhancing the Caribbean’s networks and reflecting on the nature of its connections. It addresses a topic that spans the scholarly, artistic, curatorial and professional fields of art and heritage, exploring constructive comparisons between key linguistic regions – namely the Anglophone and the Dutch – and identifying new parallels and contrasts in global-local relations, capital, patronage, morality, sustainability and the benefits of knowledge exchange. Ultimately, it makes the case for social justice in the arts within a complex and little-studied global geography.

Sustainable Art Communities is a landmark collaboration between artists, policymakers, arts organisers, art historians and critics, drawing from such diverse settings as Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, Suriname, Curaçao, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States.

This exciting anthology is the outcome of a recent international project that explored how the understanding and formation of sustainable communities for the English and Dutch-speaking Caribbean and their diasporas may be supported by art practice, curating and museums — in a partnership between the OU and Leiden University, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). You can read more about this project here.

We are delighted to announce the publication of Issue 5 of the Open Arts Journal,

This themed issue, ‘Sustainable Art Communities: Creativity and Policy in the Transnational Caribbean’, brings together academics, artists, curators and policymakers from various countries in the English- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean and their diasporas, the UK and the Netherlands. It explores how the understanding and formation of sustainable community for the Caribbean and its global diaspora may be supported by art practice, curating and museums. The collection was developed through a two-year international research project (2012-14) led by Leon Wainwright, with Co-Investigator Kitty Zijlmans (Leiden University), focused on major public events in Amsterdam and London. The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO/Humanities).

The issue is available from our website now.

Re. 25^th November, Open Arts Journal research seminar with guest speaker Professor Helen Hills (University of York). PLEASE NOTE THAT DUE TO INDUSTRIAL ACTION AT THE OPEN UNIVERSITY, THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

The Open University is the publisher of the Open Arts Journal and provides its administrative base. An industrial dispute at the University where our research seminar is normally hosted has resulted in the cancellation of this event on 25^th November.

The Open University will be taking strike action over the next three weeks in response to the decision to close seven of their nine regional centres (Bristol, Leeds, Cambridge, London, Oxford, Gateshead and Birmingham) and the threat to over 500 jobs. There will be an all-out strike on the 25th November followed by two weeks of strike action at different centres around the country. The staff will also be undertaking continuous action short of a strike by working to contract.

Further background on the UCU campaign can be found here:

https://www.facebook.com/ucu.campaigns

https://twitter.com/ucu

On behalf of the editorial board of the Open Arts Journal, I would like to thank Professor Hills for her kind understanding.

Leon Wainwright, Editor-in-Chief

*             *             *             *

Abstract:  Silver & Salvation: Colonial Excess and Baroque Naples.

Helen Hills, Professor of History of Art, University of York

This paper examines the materiality of silver in relation to  trauma, transaction and transformation. It focuses on Naples, under Spanish rule, to explore the effects of colonialism within Europe through art and sculpture. Thus I consider the presentation of ‘the nature of the Neapolitans’ and their practices as ‘excessive’ through the material of silver. Silver was imported into Naples from Spanish territories in the so-called New World. In Naples silver is naturalized through artifice – both rendered to represent ‘nature’ and made into an apparently intrinsic part of ‘Neapolitan culture’. Indeed, the profligate display of silver in Neapolitan churches is remarked upon by foreign visitors as a mark of the very ‘nature’ of Neapolitans’ themselves.

Baroque Naples was tarnished in Protestant Europe with a reputation for excess – particularly an excess of silver in its churches and chapels, part of the mortmain of the Spanish church, a prodigious resource that was gathering dust rather than fighting wars or generating interest. Silver was the material par excellence for chalices, pyx and plate, for carte di gloria and sacred and liturgical objects of many kinds, including the spectacular solid silver reliquaries in the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in Naples, unsurpassed amongst European treasuries. Silver was particularly implicated in discourses of the sacred, yet silver was implicated, too, in the violence of Spanish colonialism.  Silver seemed to offer the imperial Spanish what they most desired – a means to substantialize every relation, even with the divine. And it was in Naples above all, emblem and testing ground of Spanish rule in Europe, that silver was beaten into splendid submission. Scholarship has made much of colonialism and its relationship with culture outside of Europe. But what of colonialism within Europe? Silver offers an opening.

We are delighted to announce the publication later this month of Issue 4 of the Open Arts Journal. Download the flyer here.

Touch me, touch me not:

senses, faith and performativity in early modernity

Issue 4, Winter 2014–5

Edited by Erin E. Benay and Lisa M. Rafanelli

This fourth issue of the Open Arts Journal brings together an exciting collection of essays that investigate the collaborative roles of the senses in the genesis and experience of renaissance and baroque art.  Examining, in particular, the ways in which the senses were evoked in the realm of the sacred, where questions of the validity of sensory experience were particularly contentious and fluid, the contributors seek to problematise the neoplatonic imperialism of sight and sense hierarchies that traditionally considered touch, along with smell and taste, as base and bodily.  The essays show that instead it was a multiplicity of sensory modalities – touch, sight, hearing and sometimes even taste and smell – that provided access to the divine, and shaped the imaginative, physical and performative experience of works of art. The issue’s project thus brings us closer to achieving the art historian Geraldine Johnson’s eloquent proposal: that by revisioning Michael Baxandall’s famous ‘period eye’, we might, in fact, arrive at a more aptly described, historically specific, period body.