Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (2nd Research Seminar): Southern Discomfort - Art and Abjection at the Birth of a Discipline

However, ideologically-loaded labels and concepts persist despite radical transformations in contemporary accounts of art historical theories and methods.

This research seminar series intends to encourage a critical and historical analysis of conceptual frameworks such as the relationship between art history and ideology, politics and cultural heritage, collective identities, post-colonialism and national stereotypes, formalism and stylistic categories, visual arguments and teaching practices as well as eco-criticism and the Anthropocene.


2. Research Seminar: Southern Discomfort - Art and Abjection at the Birth of a Discipline

Departing from some previously unpublished notes in which the young Heinrich Wölfflin describes his impressions of the city of Naples, this paper seeks to trace how, around the turn of the nineteenth century, German-language art history struggled to give what we may broadly call the South – Southern Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and, to a lesser extent, Latin America – a place in the larger narrative of the history of art. By analysing the writings of a number of key authors it will illustrate how their accounts of the South are replete with moments of “abjection” (Kristeva), thus creating an exotic "Other" that both repels and attracts but is effectively kept outside of the realm of art. This also raises the question as to what traces of such discourses persist in the discipline of art history today and how we deal with them.

Joris van Gastel is assistant professor at the University of Zurich. He studied Psychology and Art History at the VU University Amsterdam and the Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice. Between 2006 and 2011 he was part of the interdisciplinary research project Art, Agency and Living Presence in Early Modern Italy based at Leiden University, in the context of which he wrote his PhD thesis Il Marmo Spirante: Sculpture and Experience in Seventeenth-Century Rome. In addition to shorter fellowships in Florence, Rome, Ferrara and Berlin he was research fellow at the Kolleg-Forschergruppe Bildakt und Verkörperung (Humboldt University, Berlin; 2011–2012), at the University of Warwick (2013) and was part of the research group Images of Nature, based at Hamburg University (2014–2016). Before coming to Zurich, he was postdoctoral assistant at the Bibliotheca Hertzian (2016–2018). He is co-director of the project Heinrich Wölfflin: Collected Works and is currently concluding a book project on art and materiality in baroque Naples.


Zoomlink for online participation (previous registration): https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEtdOihqTMiGtJnXfH6ynWqDhJe2txmj5UT - Passcode: 442841

Scientific Organization: Giovanna Targia (Universität Zürich) und Tobias Teutenberg

_{Image: Anonymous photographer, Street in Naples, c. 1851–1900, albumen print with hand colouring, 27.3 × 22 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (inv. RP-F-F16746).}