Guest Editors: Eduard Cairol & Tomas Macsotay (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Revista Espacio Tiempo y Forma. Serie VII, Historia del Arte (ETFVII) is pleased to announce that the Call for Papers for the themed dossier for the upcoming issue (2021) is now open.
“There is nothing particularly novel about the claim that contemporary art has been characterised, since the time of the avant-garde, by its tendency to go beyond the limits between artistic media, but that it has also —perhaps as an outcome of, among other factors, its experimental vocation— been led by desire to integrate, in a single and unique experience, different sensorial stimuli. Nor is it outlandish to affirm that, precisely in this latter respect, avant-garde art follows a course that first emerges in the mid-nineteenth century, if not during early Romanticism. After modernism, the rise of immersive and multisensorial strategies in late and post-avant-garde forms continues, as has been the case since the 1960s with installations, performance, abject art and, in more recent years, virtual reality and environmental devices.
The collection of articles from the current call for papers, The Overflowing Object, will be a cross-over space between aesthetics, history of art and cultural studies, contemplating the historical evolution of artistic forms with an account of the technologies of the festive spectacle since the sixteenth century, the evolution of mass culture since the nineteenth century and finally in the twentieth-century the politization of immersive media in, for example, the Nazi rallies by Albert Speer, with their priestly and Wagnerian imprint. In this sense, this project has a marked transversal or interdisciplinary approach, as it is susceptible to admitting different methodologies of study, and to involving such diverse artistic fields as, for example, gardening, architecture, musicology, gastronomy, the history of dance, theology, the history and theory of theatre and cinema —as well as, of course, the histories of art and aesthetics. In addition, The Overflowing Object joins in a debate on the longue durée of the total work of art at a historical moment marked by the proliferation of simulated reality and immersive devices in the audiovisual field, and in its train contemporary art.
We welcome proposals for original articles dealing with overflowing artistic phenomena from a broad chronological spectrum. The dossier will deal with two possible non-exclusive approaches: one theoretical, where aspects relating to the total or multisensorial work of art will be dealt with from a critical perspective, that is, from the point of view of a history of art that takes a look at aesthetic or cultural-anthropological concepts, or that contextualises historiography in its intellectual or ideological contexts in order to open up new pathways for the study of multisensorial and immersive works. A second approach will focus on historical aspects, such as a detailed study of some examples from a diachronic point of view and as a first contribution to a future inventory or reconstruction of the history of the ambition from which these total works of art have been conceived.”
Papers should preferably be written in Spanish or English, and submitted until 30th March 2021.
For more details, please visit the Call for Papers on the ETFVII website .