Colloque international
Dates: 21-22 novembre 2013
Lieu: ROYAL FLEMISH ACADEMY OF BELGIUM FOR SCIENCE AND THE ARTS
Academy Palace - Hertogsstraat 1 - 1000 Brussel
http://www.hurtfulbody.ugent.be/
On the occasion of Diderot’s three-hundredth birthday, the present conference invites papers by historians of both visual arts and performance arts, to address the hurt and hurt-causing body in early modern and eighteenth-century visual culture. The point is better to address spectacles of pain and suffering before Diderot, whereby before is to be understood both physically and chronologically, in terms of images he saw and those that belong to a wider Ancien Régime visual and performance culture.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medicine, philosophy and works of fiction treated pain and suffering as contents of consciousness. Hurt and grief fixed the self in a state of disaffection and refusal, as opposed to the appetites or ‘sociable’ affects of love or admiration. During this time, the hurt body found itself at the apex of art theory (from Lomazzo to Le Brun), informing academic aesthetics, while the genre of tragedy, climaxing in the plays of Racine, was shaping the image of the actor’s craft. Images of saintly suffering were a fixture of post-Trentian Catholic life, but after 1600 they were incrementally visible in both civic theatre and popular imagery as well as aristocratic collecting. All of this culminates in the writings of Diderot, who was an assiduous admirer of spectacles of grief, pest scenes and other sujets de fracas. Such affinities, as present in his criticism as his commentaries on the tableau and the self-possessed actor, seem now more difficult to place, in part because so little is known of the rationale of the spectacle of hurt in the 150 years that preceded him, especially in relation to its socio-historical and performative context. Moreover, accounts of the period tend to segregate semiotic or iconographical developments (explaining continued interest for the Le Brun’s Traité de Passions and its plates) from historical clues that speak to the peculiar positionality of bodies in and of hurt. The disjunctive image of pain and suffering is today too often regarded as simply ‘emotive’, an expression like any other for artists and actors to master.
Through the impact of scholars like Jonathan Sawday, Erika Fischer-Lichte and Amelia Jones, present-day historians are familiar with problems of performativity and ephemerality, of body presence and the spectator’s participative witnessing and intervention. The hurt body can accommodate new diverse and perceptive approaches of the early modern body, as a body in withdrawal, a ‘communicative’ body in flux, or a body split in its desire to escape alterity and a corporeal ‘prison’. Time seems ripe for a self-standing history of the hurt(ful) body, illustrated through staging practices as well as material images (paintings, sculptures, prints), and addressing practices of making, acting and viewing; censorship and divulgation; collecting, directing and interpreting. The conference invites papers that revisit historical forms, practices and pressures of the hurt body, from the staging of blood and the representations of Hercules’ self-immolation to distressed audiences. Maintaining an interdisciplinary focus, speakers might address imaginaries of the hurt body recovered through stage praxis, visual representation and dramatic text. It welcomes papers exploring archival sources documenting (theatrical) communication between audiences and ‘hurt bodies’, or exploring public and elite spaces of performance, urban events and exhibition sites where Diderot and Ancien Régime audiences experienced such encounters.