Clark Art Lecture on Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne

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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Tuesday, March 18, the Clark Art Institute's Research and Academic Program presents a talk by Annie Bourneuf (School of the Art Institute of Chicago / Clark Professor 2024–25).
 
She investigates one of the most enigmatic passages in the German-Jewish art historian Aby Warburg's picture-atlas Mnemosyne, his attempted summation in arrays of images of his work on the afterlife of antiquity, centered on Renaissance Europe and nearing completion when he died in 1929, stated a press release. 
 
This free event takes place at 5:30 pm in the Manton Research Center auditorium.
 
According to a press release:
 
Mnemosyne ends with two panels revolving around the Lateran Accords of that year, which established a new relationship of reciprocal support between the Catholic Church and Mussolini's Fascist regime. Warburg himself stayed out late to witness the massive celebrations of the agreement, which he described as "the re-paganization of Rome," and later combined press photographs of this and related events with reproductions of paintings by Botticelli and Raphael on the theme of the Eucharist, defamatory woodcuts depicting Jews desecrating the Host, a staged photograph of seppuku, and newspaper photographs of athletes, among other items, to make the two last panels. How might Warburg have understood the accords? What do these combinations of images do? More broadly, how can we understand the possibilities and perils of this foundational art historian's attempt to bring his scholarly work to bear on the images and gestures formed by and in part forming the mass politics of his present?
 
Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event. 

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Clark Art Lecture On Queer Art And Artists in Medieval Europe

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Tuesday, April 11, the Clark Art Institute's Research and Academic Program presents a talk by Karl Whittington (The Ohio State University) titled "Queer Making: Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe."

This free event takes place at 5:30 pm in the Manton Research Center auditorium.

According to a press release: 

Whittington asks: what role does desire play in the making of art objects? Art historians typically answer this question with reference to historical evidence about an artist's sexual identity, personality, and relationships, or with reference to particular kinds of imagery in works of art. But how do we think about desire in the case of anonymous artists or in works whose subject matter is mainstream? We know little about the lives and personalities of the makers of most works of art in Europe in the Middle Ages, but this should not hold us back from thinking about their embodied experience. This talk argues that we can "queer" the works of anonymous historical makers by thinking not about their identities or about the subject matter of their artworks but rather about their embodied experiences working with materials. Through considering issues of touch, pressure and gesture across materials such as wood, stone, ivory, wax, cloth, and metal, Whittington argues for an erotics of artisanal labor, in which the actions of hand, body, and breath interact in intimate ways with materials. Combining historical evidence with more speculative description, this talk broadens our understanding of the motivations and experiences of premodern artists.

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event. For more information, visit clarkart.edu/events

 

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