PRESENCE AND AGENCY
LUCAS, LEIDEN INSTITUTE FOR THE ARTS IN SOCIETY
13 – 15 DECEMBER 2012
LAK-THEATER
Thursday, 13 December 2012
Consciousness in Objects? New Perspectives from Roman Lamps
Opening lecture by Ruth Bielfeldt (Harvard)
Roman lamps come closest to what we would today call a commodity item. More than any
other group of artifacts, lamps stand for mass production in antiquity. Their minimalistic
decoration, commonplace as it is, received only passing attention from scholars. In ancient
poetry, however, lamps are the most enlivened of all household items. Starting from Martial’s epigram on a bedside lamp, the companion of nightly pleasures, my talk will discuss
the notion of the ‘con-scious’ object (Mart. 14, 39). It will further explore a new – phenomenological – approach to lamp iconography considering the specific capacities of these
artifacts, which not only engaged human vision, but were themselves considered able to
perceive.
Reflecting Art in Poetry: Myron's Cow and Hellenistic Culture of Viewing
Keynote by Irmgard Männlein-Robert (Tübingen)
This paper deals with perception and imagination of an artifact in epigrammatic texts
from the Hellenistic period: It is Myron’s statue of a cow, which is well-known not at least
because of two famous sequences of so called ‘ecphrastic epigrams’ in the Anthologia
Palatina, where this work of art and its artist are rhetorically varied and celebrated. I’d like
to show that there is an underlying aesthetic and poetic discourse to be observed in many
of them. I am concentrating on the semantics of illusion and the new modes of viewing
recommended in these epigrams.
Travel Guides for Imaginary Journeys: The Presence of Rome in Early Modern Literary
and Artistic Reconstructions
Susanna de Beer (Leiden)
In this paper I will question the common interpretation of a number of Early Modern
guides to the monuments and buildings of Ancient Rome - Andrea Fulvio’s Antiquitates
Urbis (1527), Bartolomeo Marliani’s Antiquae Romae Topographia (1534) and Georgius
Fabricius’ Roma (1551) among others - as travel guides to be used during actual journeys.
Although such usage is not excluded, the texts first and foremost invite the reader to make
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an imaginary journey through the ancient city of Rome and its history. Not an addition to
the visual experience of the real city, they rather replace the visual experience and create a
textual presence of the ideal city by means of vivid description.
Toppling the Statue, Unwriting Praise: The Destruction of Domitian’s Statues in Pliny’s
Panegyricus
Bettina Reitz (Leiden)
I analyse Pliny the Younger’s rhetorical representation of the destruction of the emperor
Domitian’s images in the city of Rome after the emperor’s damnatio memoriae. In his
Panegyricus, a speech made in praise of the emperor Trajan, Pliny describes the destruction
of these images in order to suggest to his audience a particular reading of their visible
absence in the Forum Romanum and on the Capitoline. Concurrently, Pliny’s
representation of destruction aims at toppling a literary statue that is still standing. By
contradicting or ironising earlier praise of the statues of Domitian, such as Statius’ Silvae
1.1, Pliny attempts to control, invalidate and overwrite such Domitianic panegyric. He
represents physical destruction in order to perform a simultaneous process of literary
destruction.
Presence vs. Present Tense. Modernist and Altermodernist Fiction
Keynote by Armen Avanessian (Freie Universität Berlin)
From the first present-tense novels shaped by interior monologues and avant-garde
factography, to the nouveau roman and to historical novels from Thomas Pynchon, Claude
Simon, and Marcel Beyer, the history of present-tense fiction has changed the conditions of
fictional narration over the course of its century-long development. One of the main
reasons for why the development and history of present-tense narration so far hasn't been
recognized, is an ongoing confusion of present tense and presence. In my talk I will
advocate the following three claims: 1) 'present tense' and 'presence' are often on poposite
poles when it comes to contemporary fiction; 2) The unique accomplishment of presenttense novels, as first invented in 20century modernism, only becomes clear later in the
century; 3) In altermodern novels, the PT novel shows its true capacities of narrating a
(traumatic) past that has never been present to itself and therefore resists any
presentification into presence.
Images of Disaster: The Linguistic Properties of Thucydides’ ‘Vivid’ , Descriptive Prose
Narrative
Adriaan Rademaker (Leiden)
The Histories of Thucydides are renowned for their ‘vividness’ (ἐνάργεια), for instilling in
their readers the emotions that befell actual eyewitnesses. This paper attempts to sketch
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the linguistic means by which this effect of vivedness is achieved. I will argue that
Thucydides’ way of creating immediacy is specifically tied to the emerging of prose texts
that were designed to be read rather than recited. Thucydides can give his readers the
illusion of being transported back to the narrated past, and thus convince his readers with
of his specific construction of the past, which he presents as a ‘possession for the ages’.
The Presence of Cicero in Seneca the Elder
Christoph Pieper (Leiden)
Speaking is one important way of keeping a living memory of events, persons or general
cultural concepts. No wonder that the concept of memory within the field of oratory has
gained prominence in the research of the last decades. In my talk, I focus on Seneca the
Elder and his way of keeping Cicero and the last days of the Roman Republic alive. Cicero
is one of the heroes of the past for Seneca, not least because Cicero saw himself as an
important transmitter of memories. In my paper, I will focus on the sixth Suasoria in which
the death of Cicero is narrated. My talk will investigate how Seneca stages the
commemorative presence of a self-declared hero of the dying republican Rome.
Varieties of Presence and Agency in Ekphraseis of Works of Art
Keynote by Ruth Webb (Lille III)
Ekphrasis, in its ancient sense of “a speech that brings the subject before the eyes”, could
hardly be more germane to the topic of this conference: it is defined by the impression of
presence created by the speaker’s words. Though they were never considered, as they
would be in later criticism, as ekphrasis par excellence, ancient ekphraseis of works of art
play in specific ways on the paradoxes inherent in this sense of presence which is created
as much by the word as by the image. In the case of monuments, in particular, ekphrasis
can be a means of identifying a single source of agency (a patron, for example) where
several were available to the audience but may also function as a means for the speaker to
participate in the power of the monument or image. This paper will present some
examples of these phenomena.
Friday, December 14, 2012
“Caution is best, and go into no extremes”: How Romans came to terms with Images
Keynote: Stijn Bussels (Groningen)
Imperial authors are obsessed with the belief in animated images, but seldom they relate
this to themselves. They comment upon this belief. A first group of comments looks at the
talent of visual artists. Similarly, the rhetorical skill of enargeia is discussed. A second group
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focusses on the audience. Stoic epistemology discusses the delusion of images as paradigm
for problems to grasp reality. A last group looks at the animation by a god. Together these
discourses bring us to what imperial authors saw as being reprehensible and acceptable in
beholding images as artworks or as cult images. Moreover, it touches upon ontological
and epistemological problems. The barrier between life and death was explored, as well as
the conditions necessary to extract knowledge from observation.
Lam Qua's Portraits of Tumor Patients and the Concept of the Tumor-Simulacrum
Jadwiga Kamola (Heidelberg)
This talk addresses a series of oil paintings (1836-1852) of Chinese women, men and
children of a variety of ages, which depicts tumors in the western portrait format. These
portraits are the products of a collaboration between the Cantonese painter known as
“Lam Qua” (1801-1860) and the American missionary and surgeon Peter Parker (18041888). This talk unhinges the paintings from their previous isolation as medical
illustrations and thusly examines the artistic devices applied to show pathologies. It
particularly focuses on the function of the tumor in three paintings of the series. The
tumor is understood as a plethoric body, both excessive and void, a simulacrum, which
inverts the portrait into a cathartic anti-image.
Presence in Comics
Martin de la Iglesia (Saarbrücken)
Presence is the feeling in a viewer that a depicted figure is a living being that is really
there. Theoretical literature suggests that the size of the figures and their deictical
orientation are the most important factors of presence in single images. Comics, however,
consist of a sequence of images, so the degree of presence in a comic panel is influenced by
its surrounding panels, either by means of contrast or progression. Another typical feature
of comics is written text, which betrays their mediality and consequently decreases
presence. The example used here is the superhero comic The Ultimates (Marvel, 2002-2004).
Picture Dance: On Photography and Agency
Juliet Bellow (American University Washington) and Gustav Frank (Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität München)
Our paper brings dance – an art form that by its nature transgresses the boundaries
between work and viewer, reality and fiction – to bear on theories about the presence and
agency of pictorial representations. We raise new questions about mediality, visuality and
the power of images through close readings of photographs of the dancer Loïe Fuller,
collaboratively-produced works that stand between pictorial and performative media,
between presentation and representation. Extending W.J.T. Mitchell’s “picture theory”
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beyond the word/image nexus, we examine how photographs pictured dance, and how
those pictures themselves danced, at a key moment in the development of these two
media.
"Energie des Sehens": Strategies of Presence and Agency by Karl Friedrich Schinkel
during the Napoleonic Occupation
Julie Ramos (INHA/Paris I)
While political circumstances made building an impossibility, the future architect Karl
Friedrich Schinkel realised in the years 1806-1815 several large-scale paintings on
transparent surfaces that have tended to be associated with patriotic romanticism. Studies
have highlighted this aspect by analyzing the iconography of these works. It remains to be
considered, however, the technical processes by which these images of "entertainment"
acquired their efficiency. For my part, I would like to emphasize in this paper the
confusion that arose during the performances between reality and fiction. The effect of
these "illusionistic" techniques - inducing a feeling of presence - paradoxically produced a
form of "derealization" of the patterns painted by Schinkel - which is part of their agency.
The Visual Rhetorics in Karel van Mander III’s Decorative Cycle the ‘Aethiopica’
Juliette Roding (Leiden)
From the middle of the 1630s on there was a sudden revival of the novel in ten books the
Aithiopika by the late antique writer Heliodor. In the novel he describes the ideal love story
and the adventures and ‘odyssee’ of the Greek prince Theagenes and Chariclea, an
Ethiopian princess. The novel has a very complex structure with interruptions that are
filled in with supplementary stories. In 1634 a Dutch translation was realized.
The story was extremely favoured in the court circles of France, the Dutch stadtholder and
the Danish court. In the Netherlands it was the painter Abraham Bloemaert who first used
the theme. Bloemaert’s student Gerrit Honthorst painted an Aethiopica cycle for the Prince
Elect Christian in the year after his marriage with Maria Sybilla of Saxony (1635) and the
German-born Nicolaus Knüpfer made a second series for the Danish court. But there is
only one ‘Aethiopica’ series that survived the ages almost completely. This is the one that
Karel van Mander III (1609-1670) very probably made for the Danish king or another
member of the royal family. From the inventory of his library it is known that he had a
copy of Heliodor. The way the scenes are painted – de sotto in su - show that they were
meant to hang high up in a room, against the upper part of the walls or as ceiling
paintings. Via Sweden the cycle ended up as a gift in Schloss Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel
(before 1749). Nowadays nine out of ten scenes survive. Some of them clearly are of better
quality than others. In recent years the cycle mainly has been used in research on the
representation of black people in European painting of the 17th century.
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In the paper I want to show the difference in the way the painters mentioned above
depicted scenes from the novel and tried to convey the story to their audience.
Furthermore I want to investigate if the scenes that Karel van Mander III chose to render
have the same sequence and importance as in the novel of Heliodor or that he made his
own choices and put forward his own variations on the novel, both in the overall lay-out
of the scenes and in rendering the details. The paintings even today are rather shocking by
their sexual overtone and violent acts.
This way I hope to be able to point out – with at least some probability - the commissioner
(male or female) of the series and the building the series originally was meant for.
Countering the biological fatedness of death. Carl Einstein’s theory of apotropaic
surrealism
Keynote: Uwe Fleckner (Universität Hamburg/Warburg-Haus Hamburg)
Abstract will follow
Where Representation Meets Agency: The Idol in Modern Sculpture
Boris Čučković (Leiden/ VU Amsterdam)
"The notion of the idol in relation to a specific kind of sculpture is not uncommon in art
historical writings on qualities of artworks at the turn of the twentieth century. This study
approaches the category of the idol as a specific experience that relates to the agency of
particular objects in their historical context. However, in order to grasp the acceptance of
the idol into the categories of modern sculpture this paper suggest a necessary coupling of
the study of agency with the representational strategy of substitution as defined by
Richard Bernheimer (1961)."
The Living Objects. Cross-cultural Conservation, Artefacts and Art History
Noémie Etienne (New York University)
The conservation of objects in ethnography and anthropology museums raises some
specific issues discussed by conservators and curators since 2000. Indeed, the concept of
'crosscultural' conservation assumes two important networks: a culture which owns and
conserves objects – mostly European or Euro-American ; and a second culture, which
produced the artefacts but does not own them anymore. In this context, conservation and
restoration confront various knowledges, experiences and interpretations on a single
object, whilst sometimes raising controversies.
This communication examines the conservation and restoration of objects in the National
Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington DC and NYC. At the beginning of
the 1990s, a report on conservation methods pointed out that the elders of the First Nations
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claimed the agency of theirs artefacts, and asked the museum to preserve their life and
power, providing them with the necessary elements to their survival (water, food, oxygen).
The aim of this communication is to delineate what this perspective may offer
conservation sciences as well as art history. Indeed, the revendication of Native Americans
in the area of conservation is better heard today due to a new direction taken by Western
sciences and the contemporary art world, which question more directly the life of objects.
In a culturalist perspective, this case-study shows that the power of objects depends on
specific cultures. But this communication also emphasizes that the question of agency is
linked with specific times, places, purposes and individuals. The power of objects is able
to evolve, change and transform: the question cannot be addressed without a close look at
the people, gestures or displays manipulating the artefacts.
Armand Schulthess and his „Book-Bodies“
Helga Lutz (Erfurt)
In the 50ies and 60ies the fairly unknown Swiss scholar and „hermit“ Armand Schulthess
bought a house in the secluded Swiss Onsernone valley, trying to build up a „garden of
knowledge“ for visitors. What has become known only recently is the fact that he also
produced a wide range of self-made books on different topics like astrology, sexuality, the
mechanism of the human intellect, fetishism etc.
At first sight his books on „sexuality“ might appear to be not less more than a private
pornographic cosmos, combining magazine pictures of naked women with his own
drawings, illustrations and texts. At second sight the books reveal an interesting
overlapping of book and body, concerning the way the elements are combined and used.
Turning the semitransparent pages and thus dressing/undressing the represented body
(for example) becomes one and the same action. It becomes clear that the process of
knitting together the pages is somehow equivalent to knitting a folded fetish-body.
Rhetoric, Visual Experience, and Magnanimitas in Aby Warburg
David Marshall (Bielefeld)
One of the central issues in the “Warburg and rhetoric” line of inquiry has been Warburg’s
description of the Mnemosyne project as, in part, a restitutio eloquentiae. Discussion has
focused on a few passages in the Tagebuch der KBW from 22 December 1927. In a
handwritten note penned on the same day (which it seems scholars have not previously
taken into account), Warburg went into a little more detail on what restitutio eloquentiae
might entail. Implicit in this phrase, Warburg said was “Stil,” “Pathos,” “Ethos,” and
“Magnanimitas.” It is the last of these words that is the most unexpected and the most
interesting. What sense can we make of this apparent notion that magnanimitas is a core
visual rhetorical concern?
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Warburg, Bourdieu and Manet. Anthropological Reflections on the Breakthrough of
Modern Art
Keynote: Pieter ter Keurs (National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden)
Both Warburg and Bourdieu have written about the work of Édouard Manet (1832-1883),
in particular about the crucial 1860’s when Manet painted and exhibited his famous
Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia. Both authors have approached these important paintings,
and the context in which they were produced, from different perspectives, which will
shortly be reviewed in this lecture. However, apart from earlier interpretations of the
enormous impact of these two paintings on the history of art, it may be useful to expand
on recent anthropological theories on art, agency and the object-subject relationship and to
interpret the crucial 1860’s with these theories in mind. I will elaborate on the works of
anthropologists, such as Marilyn Strathern and Alfred Gell, and argue that (historical)
symbolic and sociological approaches are both inadequate in explaining the effects of
works of art on people and circumstances. Instead, I will attempt to explain Manet’s
seminal influence with concepts which have a strong interdisciplinary potential. Presence,
agency and a fundamental critique of the Cartesian separation between object and subject
offer us a much more promising critical framework.
Saturday 15 December, 2012
Visualising the Transitivity of the Art Object’s Power Substance (dunamis or virtus) in
Late Antiquity and Early Christianity: The Strigil Motif on Cinerary Urns, Sarcophagi
and Patens
Emma Sidgwick (Leuven)
In my paper I will argue for a connection between the parallel late antique and early
Christian centrality and proliferation of a particular concept of dunamis and the so-called
‘strigil motif’: an abstract, supposedly purely ‘ornamental’ and ‘decorative’ motif that
proliferated, quite suddenly it seems, on Roman cinerary urns and sarcophagi. More
precisely, this motif may well have been a visualisation of the transmission and transitivity
of dunamis as a fluid power substance that was believed to inhere in especially certain art
objects. Hence this motif arguably offered a visualisation of the very presence and agency
of the art object, understood in a specific manner.
How Medieval Franciscan Architecture Established the Divine Presence
Erik Gustafson (Berkeley)
Through a careful analysis of how the lay public was able to access the inner spaces of
Franciscan churches, I will show that in contrast to previous assumptions, the Franciscans
initiated a new regime of spatial practice in which the traditional spatial boundaries were
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made permeable, providing a new paradigm of popular devotion closer to the divine
presence articulated through the visuality of architectural agency.
Cycles of Identification and Repudiation: The Presence of Spanish Processional Images
Tomas Macsotay (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Spain’s unique religious heritage depended (and indeed to this day still does) on
performative investments in the image, achieved through processions, the use of floats
(pasos), elaborate costumes worn both by the image and participants, and the sonorous
element of music, all of which redeem and animate the static, silent work of art. This paper
is preoccupied by the processional context that informs the viewing of Spanish
processional images, and how such a context opens up the body of the saint to a type of
response that is both cyclic or unstable and fraught with anachronistic elements. I suggest
that participants in a procession, rather than succumbing to feelings of ‘shock’ and grief,
act to transposition suffering and reorganize the locale of the unimaginable experience of
suffering.
Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Della Porta and the Zierathenstil: on a historicalphilosophical approach to the living presence in the baroque architectural ornament
Paolo Sanvito (Humboldt Universität Berlin)
By the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17 th century a major number of natural
philosophers developed theories of the living presence or presence of spirit in objects, and
therefore in artefacts as well. This endeavor had already been expressed in the long durée in
natural philosophy, by considering the concepts of mens, spiritus phantasticus, anima
universalis or anima in the natural world. But especially in the Early Modern era indeed did
nature begin to be considered, rather high-handedly, as existing and breathing independently
from human, civilized, or social life. Concurrently, a deep awareness of empathy and
intimacy of the artefacts with the natural world dominated. In this deeper relation to nature,
expressed in philosophy and in various artistic media, is embedded an important form of the
new individualism that, supported by the philosophers after the Reformation, might also
have allowed the individual to emancipate itself from ecclesiastical and monarchic
hierarchies.
The paper will address the question of how a large deal of natural philosophy was
increasingly panpsychistic, pananimistic and how, to which extent, the sense of nature’s
intimate vitality persisted at least until the end of the 16th century, strongly appearing in
Campanella’s concept of anima universalis and culminating in Giordano Bruno’s concern with
the emotions in and outside the arts, and finding also some later followers. According to
Copenhaver, Bruno “gave matter a privileged, divinised status” (Magic, p. 293).
Southern Italy and Rome (also with the contribution of the Lincei group, of course), but also
further related centres in the North, such as Kepler’s Prague, must have partially been the
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original ambients giving birth to the mentioned debates and the development of some of the
most intriguing baroque ornamental formulas: while between Rome and Naples the Bernini
family (Pietro and Gianlorenzo) and Fanzago developed a new gazing, or laughing
architecture parlante, simultaneously and in a neighboring ambient, Giambattista della Porta
developed his physiognomic theories: De ea naturalis physiognomoniae parte quae ad manuum
lineas spectat libri duo (printed first in Strasbourg, 1606, later and extended: Naples, 1614). The
wave of their influence lasted long and could be annihilated only a few generations later.
The New Phalaris: Presence, Rhetoric and Agency in the Case of George Psalmanazar
Jacqueline Hylkema (Leiden)
In 1703 the French imposter George Psalmanazar presented himself in London society as
‘a Native of Formosa’ and continued to live and write under this highly exotic guise for
more than a decade. This paper will explore the methods Psalmanazar used to persuade
his various audiences of his deceptions and how they responded, especially those that
perceived him as a living work of art that experimented with viewing practices and
pushed the boundaries of its own representational nature. It will examine this view and
the early modern relationship between deception, art, presence and agency in a number of
texts related to Psalmanazar as well as a number of related intellectual, artistic and
theological developments and debates of the period.
Non-Angetive Efficacy: Presence, Absence and the Ontological Entanglement of
Miraculous Image
Christopher Nygren (University of Pennsylvania)
Miracle-working images seem like a logical place to begin the search for agentive objects:
these pictures make the presence of the deity known by healing the faithful. Theory
would predict that the picture itself is the effective agent of miraculous healings; as with
miracle-working relics, the dynamic inherence of God’s power in the image suggests that
physical proximity between image and its votaries be a precondition of the miraculous
event. The practical circumstance of the miracles affected by these images, however,
undercut this theory. This paper will seek to complicate our understanding of the
relationship between images, agency, and miraculous efficacy in early modern Italy by
examining the cult history of three images: the Madonna delle Carceri (Prato), the Madonna
dei Miracoli, and the San Rocco Christ Carrying the Cross (both in Venice). These images
challenge the art historian’s desire for identifying agentive images since the pictures did
not work their miracles in situ. Instead, miraculous healings almost always occurred at a
great distance from the cult image. The location of the healings are recorded in miracle
books, thus making clear that the painting qua work of art was emphatically absent from
the moment of miraculous healing. Miraculous agency resisted the quiddity of corporeal
circumscription in favor of physical absence: efficacy and agency could not be reified in
matter. These miracle books, though, are absolutely clear on another point: despite
occurring at a distance from the icon, each and every miracle is specifically attributed to
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the painting. How are we to make sense of what seems to be such a clear contradiction?
How can miracles that do not occur in its presence nevertheless be attributed to the icon?
This paper proposes a shift away from trying to “re-enchant” early modern art implicit in
the study of the agentive power of miraculous images; it advocates instead an appreciation
of the complex network of agentive forces that mediated the faithful’s interaction with, and
attribution of thaumatrugical powers to, these pictures. Miracleworking image disclose
themselves as transactional nodes within the economy of grace, and the vibrancy of these
image destabilizes any facile juxtaposition between agential being and inert matter.
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