Tag: University of Melbourne

Joseph Burke Lecture | Possessions and sacred signs in the art of Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556) | Paul Hills

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Possessions and sacred signs in the art of Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556) Paul Hills, Courtauld Institute of Art Active in northern Italy in a period when the function of sacred images was challenged by reformers, Lorenzo Lotto (c.1480-1556/7) was a painter who was inventive in recasting religious imagery. This lecture will argue that Lotto’s career sheds a vivid light on the shifting relation between authorship, ownership and devotion in Early Modern Italy. Moving between religious subjects and portraiture, Lotto suggests an enfolding of the self within the dwelling place of garments. All manner of textiles, including fashionable clothes and furnishings, are displayed as tokens personal possession, yet at the same time Lorenzo Lotto discovers domestic equivalents ­– in towels, handkerchiefs, and shawls ­– for the vestments of religious ritual. Paul Hills studied the History of Art at the University of Cambridge…

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Seminar | ‘Space, Memory, Narrative: The Oratorians and the Memorialization of San Filippo Neri in Rome, Florence and Naples’ Glenys L. Adams

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Space, Memory, Narrative: The Oratorians and the Memorialization of San Filippo Neri in Rome, Florence and Naples Glenys L. Adams, University of Melbourne PhD Completion Seminar, Art History, School of Culture and Communication The Rooms of San Filippo Neri at the Roman Oratory in the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella (Chiesa Nuova) Rome were reconstructed between 1635 and 1643. This thesis is an examination of these rooms and argues that the relationship established between the architecture of the spaces, framed in relation to the carefully positioned relics, objects and paintings on display in these rooms, served an important means of legitimizing Filippo Neri’s mysticism and the creation of an Oratorian narrative that became the model for how the memory and cult of Filippo Neri was authenticated beyond the Roman Oratory. Date: 1-2pm, Wednesday 10 April, 2013 Date: Visual Cultures Resource Centre,…

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Lecture | If you were to live here… with Hou Hanru

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If you were to live here…a conversation with internationally renowned biennial curator Hou Hanru This free event is a prelude to Hou Hanru’s 5th Auckland Triennial as he joins Natalie King for a candid conversation about exhibition modalities that are concerned with locality and place. Hou will provide insights into exhibition modalities that interact with artists, audiences, cities and communities to envisage possible futures. Like a laboratory, Hou is interested in open and evolving exhibition platforms and the social agenda of locality and place Based in Paris and San Francisco, Hou Hanru has curated numerous large-scale exhibitions including Shanghai Biennale (2000); Venice Biennale (French Pavilion, 1999; Chinese Pavilion, 2007); Guangzhou Triennial (2005); Tirana Biennale (2005); Istanbul Biennale (2007); Lyon Biennale (2009). Presented by Utopia@Asialink and proudly supported by Naomi Milgrom AO Date: 15th Apr 2013 6:00pm Venue: Yasuko Miraoka Myer…

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Seminar | Roman Graffiti and the Evidence For the Depiction of Crucifixion in Late Antiquity, Felicity Harley-McGowan

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The infamous ‘Alexamenos’ graffito, depicting a young man saluting a donkey-headed figure tied to a cross, is often treated as the earliest representation of a crucified figure in antiquity. Excavated on the Palatine hill in Rome, it is usually dated to the early third century CE. This paper will discuss a second piece of evidence that may pre-date the Palatine image by roughly a century: a graffito excavated in Puteoli, Italy, which depicts a human figure tied to a cross.

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Seminar | ‘Magical Transparencies: Seeing the Divine in Glass’ Peter French

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Magical Transparencies: Seeing the Divine in Glass Peter French This seminar examines key elements of the religious iconography of Australian contemporary glass artist, David Wright (b.1948). Following a brief introduction to the artist and the context in which the artist is working, especially concerning Australian religiosity in the latter part of the twentieth century, this seminar will use the artist’s representations of the three persons of the Trinity as a focal point for a deeper understanding of the artist’s iconographies and the influences behind such images. The Australian nature of such iconography will also be considered and the role of artist as visual exegete. David Wright was awarded an Order of Australia on Australia Day, 2013, for ‘services to the visual arts in the medium of stained glass.’ Peter French is a PhD candidate in the Art History Program, School…

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Lecture | ‘Broken Pastoral and the English Folk’ Professor Tim Barringer

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‘Broken Pastoral and the English Folk’ Professor Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of Art History, Yale University This paper examines the revived interest in folk culture in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, exploring the relationships between ethnography, musicology and the study of historical arts and crafts. It places within this matrix the work of photographers, painters and composers, who derived both motifs and models for avant-garde artistic identity from the study of the rural poor. Professor Tim Barringer contends that the aesthetic potency of visual and musical compositions drawing on folk sources lay in the widespread acknowledgement of the imminent disappearance of folk culture in the face of modernity and mechanized warfare. Under consideration are the photographer P.H. Emerson, painters George Clausen, Henry Herbert La Thangue and Augustus John, the gardener and writer Gertrude Jekyll, ethnographer E.B. Tylor, and composers Sir Hubert…

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Symposium | Migration and Exchange: Symposium on early Australian Photography, Melbourne 29-30 November

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Migration and Exchange: Symposium on early Australian Photography This symposium explores itinerant and sporadic image making in Australia (including those parts of the Pacific that Australia administered and that Australian photographers travelled to) in order to understand the effects of photographic transformation and exchange. It begins with images recruited to lend authority to colonial and indigenous elites and royals, includes the images created in the most intense period of Australia’s settlement – a period which includes the gold rush, the Great Exhibitions and Federation – and ends with the First World War which transformed relationships between foreign colonial powers, engendered a spirit of independence, and saw locals journeying to a European war carrying cameras and bringing back a new set of travel images with deep personal meaning. The symposium seeks to emphasise patterns of transformation and exchange. It includes the…

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EVCS | Angela Hesson ‘Dangerous Ornament: The Feminine Form in Art Nouveau’

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Angela Hesson Dangerous Ornament: The Feminine Form in Art Nouveau The decorative arts of the fin-de-siècle were populated by a feminized pantheon of transient, metamorphic figures and forms delicately suspended in moments of transformation. From pin trays to paper knives to poster advertisements, Art Nouveau refashioned the most controversial subjects of Decadence and Aestheticism within the most accessible and domesticated media. While the changing role of women in the literature and so-called fine art of the period has been subject to continued scholarly investigation, the decorative arts have been excluded from the majority of critical accounts, alluded to perfunctorily as reference points for nineteenth-century misogyny or female objectification. This paper will argue, by contrast, that Art Nouveau’s celebration of the limitlessly transforming feminine form may be productively read within the context of early feminism, the renewal of interest in such…

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Symposium | Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse

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Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse The University of Melbourne, September 1st-2nd, 2012 This symposium will explore the different ways that communities and individuals understood disaster and mass death in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the impact of human emotions in shaping these understandings. Speakers Dagmar Eichberger (Trier), John Gagné (Sydney), Sigrun Haude (Cincinnati), Fredrika Jacobs (Virginia Commonwealth), Erika Kuijpers (Leiden), David Lederer (NUI Maynooth), Dolly MacKinnon (UQ), Louise Marshall (Sydney), Una McIlvenna (Sydney), Gerrit Schenk (Heidelberg & Darmstadt), Peter Sherlock (MCD), Patricia Simons (Michigan – Ann Arbor), Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Texas at Austin), Jenny Spinks (Melbourne), Stephanie Trigg (Melbourne), Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge) and Charles Zika (Melbourne) (full program below). Venue: Graduate House, 220 Leicester Street, The University of Melbourne Dates: Saturday 1st   8.30 am – 6.00pm and Sunday 2 September 2012 9.00 am – 6.00 pm Convenors: Dr Jenny Spinks, Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, School of…

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Exhibition Review | Adventure and Art: The Fine Press Book from 1450 to 2011. Reviewed by John Weretka

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Adventure and Art: The Fine Press Book from 1450 to 2011 Reviewed by John Weretka Adventure and Art: The Fine Press Book from 1450 to 2011 Curated by Alan Loney. Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne. Closes May 27th, 2012. More exhibition information available on the Baillieu website. So many of us live with so many books so much of the time that it is frequently difficult to take the book seriously as an object. Adventure and Art, curated by fine-press book maker Alan Loney, gathers around 50 examples of the fine-press book from the Gutenberg Bible to very recent examples of this art and, in so doing, makes a strong case not just for the persistence of this art form but for its often extraordinary beauty, in many cases transcending the information content of the words themselves. On show in…

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Symposium | Animals in Art and Philosophy Part 2 – Raimond Gaita keynote

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In Flesh and Blood: Animals in Art and Philosophy The second symposium in the series In Flesh and Blood: Animals in Art and Philosophy run by the Centre for Ideas at the Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne) will take place on Tuesday, 24 April. The draft program is as follows: Morning 10.30 – 1.30: Animals, the law and politics Justin Clemens ‘Man is a swarm animal’ What is it about ‘man’ that makes him a candidate for politics and the political? What makes human being-together a properly political question and not just a question of species-activity or genetic determinism? In this presentation, I examine a pun of Jacques Lacan. This is S1, l’essaim; S-one, the swarm. To date, this pun has, at best, been taken as a suggestive metaphor; at worst, as just another…

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