War in the Visual Arts

Sept 12-13: Western Gateway Building, UCC | Sept 14: Crawford Art Gallery

The call for papers is now closed. If you wish to attend the conference, please contact us.

How is war recorded in visual media? And what are we talking about when we talk about war? What, exactly, constitutes war and what qualifies as a visual representation of it? Human conflict and the visual arts have perhaps never remained completely separate from each other. Given war’s omnipresence throughout human history and its interconnectedness with politics and propaganda, the content of its imagery projects certain facets of warfare while concealing others. What is revealed through agency and to what extent is it permitted to prevail? Whose viewpoint is represented? How politicized or personal is an image of war? How does imagery produced by war participants compare with officially sanctioned works? How is such imagery digested and understood in our own age?

This conference will bring together multiple perspectives on representations of war in visual culture. It is intended that the conference will lead to the formation of a multidisciplinary, international scholarly community with its own calendar of events and digital presence.

Panels topics will include: The Classical World, Print Culture of WWI and WWII; Home Front; Memory; Contemporary Responses; Colonial Encounters; Commemoration and the Built Environment; Bodies, Senses and Spaces of War; Propaganda; Art during the Rise of Fascism; the Soldier’s Body; Art of Resistance; Battlefield Imagery in late Medieval and Renaissance Europe; Artist as Witness; Photography and Film; Identity; Internment; Soldiers Documenting War; Current Artistic Practice; Curatorial Perspectives.

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Plenary Speakers

Brendan Dooley (PhD Chicago, 1986) is Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College Cork.  Educated in the US, UK and Brazil, he previously taught at Notre Dame,  Harvard and Jacobs University (Bremen Germany) and headed the research team on digital humanities at the Renaissance Archive Project in Florence.  He has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the American Academy in Rome, as well as receiving Fulbright and NEH grants for various projects; and he has won the History of Education Society article award and the Society for Italian Historical Studies manuscript award. As Distinguished Professor of Italian at the University of Virginia in 2009 he taught a course on War and Culture. Publications include Morandi’s Last Prophecy and the End of Renaissance Politics (Princeton 2002), The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture (Johns Hopkins, 1999), Science and the Marketplace in Early Modern Italy (Lexington Books, 2001), Italy in the Baroque (Garland, 1995), Amore e guerra nel tardo rinascimento  (Polistampa 2009), Peste e società a Firenze nel Seicento (Polistampa 2001), and, as editor and contributor, The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate 2010), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe [with Sabrina Baron] (Routledge, 2001), Energy and Culture (Ashgate 2006).  He directs the UCC program on Digital Arts and Humanities and is currently working on the life and battles of Don Giovanni de’ Medici (1567-1621).  His A Mattress Maker’s Daughter:  The Renaissance Romance of Don Giovanni de’ Medici and Livia Vernazza is due out on Harvard University Press later this year.  Forthcoming is Brill’s Companion to Renaissance Astrology.

Paul Gough is Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of the West of England, where he was previously Executive Dean of the Faculty of Creative Arts.  He is also Professor of Fine Arts at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol. Professor Gough’s research interests lie in the processes and iconography of commemoration, the visual culture of the Great War, and the representation of peace and conflict in the 20th and 21st century. He is the author of over sixty published papers on visual culture, art history and cultural geography. His books include a monograph on the British artist Stanley Spencer (2006), A Terrible Beauty (2010), an extensive study of British art of the Great War and a book on street artist Banksy, Banksy: A Bristol Legacy (2012). He published an edited volume of correspondence between Stanley Spencer and Desmond Chute in 2011. In ten years as a television presenter, researcher and associate producer he has worked for ITV, BBC and Channel 4 on a wide range of programmes, including the award winning documentary Redundant Warrior, about the photographer Don McCullin. He is also a practising artist with work held in the permanent collections of the Imperial War Museum, London, the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa and the National War Memorial, New Zealand. His most recent exhibitions have been in Melbourne, London, and Wellington.

Sabine Kriebel currently serves as Lecturer of Modern and Contemporary Art at University College Cork, playing an elemental role in establishing the History of Art as a new discipline at the university. Prior to moving to Ireland in 2004, Dr Kriebel collaborated on the groundbreaking Dada exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, which embedded Dada tactics in the cultural and political upheavals of World War I. Her essay on Cologne Dada’s subversive interventions under British Occupation was published in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. Her book Revolutionary Beauty: John Heartfield, Political Photomontage and the Antifascist Imaginary, 1929-1938, forthcoming with the University of California Press, investigates the impact of propaganda strategies, devised during the Great War and refined by the postwar photojournalistic culture industry, on political montage until the eve of World War II.  Her writings have been published in Oxford Art Journal, New German Critique, Kritische Berichte, and History of Photography, as well as in numerous edited volumes and exhibition catalogues. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, and a BA in political economies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Laura Brandon took up her present appointment as Historian (Art and War) at the Canadian War Museum in 1992. Since then, she has lectured extensively in North America and overseas and written numerous catalogues, articles, chapters, and reviews. She is the author of the award-winning biographyPegi by Herself: The Life of Pegi Nicol MacLeod, Canadian Artist (2005), Art or Memorial? The Forgotten History of Canada’s War Art (2006) and the internationally respected Art and War (2007). Of her nearly 40 exhibitions, the most recent is A Brush with War: Military Art from Korea to Afghanistanwhich travelled across Canada between 2008 and 2012. In 2000, her exhibition Canvas of War received the Canadian Museum Association’s Award of Excellence. For the 2005 opening of the new Canadian War Museum, she co-curated  Art and War: The Second World War Art of Australia, Britain, and Canada, which travelled to the Imperial War Museum and the Australian War Memorial. In 2014, two of her exhibitions will run concurrently in Ottawa: War into Landscape: A. Y. Jackson and Otto Dix and From the Trench to the Salon: Canada’s First World War Art. Dr. Brandon holds a BA (Hons) in History and Art History from the University of Bristol, an MA in Art History from Queen’s University, Canada, and a PhD in History from Carleton University, Canada. She is an adjunct professor in the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University.

Paul Fox’s research interests span European visual culture since 1850 with a particular focus on responses to armed conflict, including the imagining of masculinities and the politics of memory. Dr Fox has published on Otto Dix and the identity of veterans in Weimar Germany, images of military command and control and their relationship to identity formation in Wilhelmine culture, and representations of technological modernity in visual accounts of combat before and after the First World War. He is a teaching fellow at University College London. His long Level 3 module, Modernity and the Representation of Armed Conflict since 1850, addresses issues including the construction of national and gendered identities, witnessing and testimony, censorship, protest, trauma, and commemoration, in the shifting political, social and technological contexts of the period. He is also a visiting lecturer at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Cranfield University. He lectures on the memory of conflict and the cultural construction of martial identities in Britain and South Asia, and is the co-author of a program preparing cultural specialists for operational duties in Afghanistan and elsewhere. He is currently working on the impact of censorship on British graphic art practice during the opening year of the First World War, and on the representation of Cold War British military cultures in Ministry of Defence training films. Dr Fox was formerly a military intelligence officer specialising in imagery intelligence, and operational intelligence support to battlefield activities of all types.

Conference Program

Click on the link to download the Conference Program

Draft Program

Contact

Ann Murray
Department of History of Art
University College Cork
5, Perrott Avenue
College Road
Cork
Fax:  021-4903254

annmrry@gmail.com

Website:

http://warinthevisualarts.wordpress.com