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Open access publications by faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students in the Department of Art History.
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Item Type Time: Memes, Emblems, History, and Liberation(Representations, 2024-11-01) Nelson, JenniferIn academic fields of premodern history over the last ten years or more, scholars have often expressed their dismay at an increasing presentism, especially but not only in the context of engaging with college students and the public at large. For many people, including these latter groups, immersion in digital media has conditioned both intellectual formation and relation to the past, or pastness. This essay was born in part from the opportunity to critically discuss memes, a cultural format I have long enjoyed as someone who works on and teaches words and images. But it was also born from my conviction that dismay or even horror in response to younger generations’ differences from older ones is often misguided. What have my academic colleagues been missing in their anxieties about what appears to be pervasive presentism? How can they, or even we who read academic journals in the humanities, think about that apparent presentism differently? Can we relate more productively to the phenomenon? In meditating on these questions, I thought about memes and reaction images as modes of expression that orient communities toward a collective well of past cultural production. I also thought about a meme-like format closer to my scholarly training, the Renaissance emblem. Like memes, emblems arose as a distributed means of cultural expression as access to new media technologies (in this case print rather than digital) increased. In comparing these two formats that construct collective pasts in their different socioeconomic and cultural contexts, I found in memery a way to reinvigorate pastness as a field of opportunity.Item Pissarro at Pontoise: Picturing Infrastructure and the Changing Riverine Environment(Athanor, 2022-11-22) Westerby, GenevieveIn 1872, Camille Pissarro rendered the water of the Oise River rushing over a low dam with rapid, broken brushstrokes of pure color. Canal barges are moored to the opposite bank, their masts mirroring the young trees that line the bank and lead to the riparian village of Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône in the background. Here the artist depicts aspects of daily life on a major tributary of the Seine, but also how civil engineering projects transformed France’s river ecosystem. Throughout the nineteenth century, a range of new infrastructure projects were undertaken—from river dredging to the building of locks and dams—to create a predictable and reliable transportation network. How other signs of industrialization and modernity—like train bridges and riverside factories—manifested in the art of this period is well understood. Yet the presence of riverine infrastructure in the landscape is rarely discussed. Pissarro’s depictions of the Oise River offer a rich entry point to consider how these interventions radically altered the nature of these waterways and how the changed environment was approached by artists. Placing his pictures within the context of the infrastructure projects executed along the river, and in dialogue with the naturalist approach of Charles-François Daubigny to this same river, brings into focus Pissarro's ecological gaze, which registered the river as a space that was both natural and engineered.