Image-­chains

One of the most difficult realities to confront for the researcher of early modern artistic production in a global age is the sheer surfeit of roughly similar images that appeared in the wake of exploration by European merchants and missionaries. Distinguishable by stylistic signature and the occasional attribute adjustment, the number of images bound by shared iconographies problematized entrenched notions of authenticity, originality and even auratic presence that formed the bedrock of western devotional art. This lecture will use objects produced by cultural encounter to consider what constitutes what might be called an “image-chain,” that is, objects produced as a result of a chain of iconological reactions. It will look to the detritus of cross-cultural religious art to reflect on the promise and shortcomings of earlier methodologies used to treat art that falls outside of canonical national trajectories. Relying upon a relational aesthetics, this lecture will then examine the paradigm shift a print diaspora created with an important, if less often acknowledged role for mimesis. Preserved evidence suggests that image-chains created image communities, whether populated by choice or under pressure, that force us to recognize our limitations as art historians in the face of the power of images to continually surprise even when only a ghost of an idea, like an echo of an Antwerp print, remains.

Mia M. Mochizuki

Mia M. Mochizuki is Associate Professor of Renaissance and Baroque Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi and the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, New York. Born in Tokyo and educated at Sacred Heart schools and Groton School, she trained as a historian of seventeenthcentury Dutch art at Vassar College (B.A.), Yale University (Ph.D.), and Leiden University. She is the author of The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566-1672. Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age (Ashgate, 2008), which received the College Art Association Publication Award, the ACE/Mercers’ International Book Award for Religious Art and Architecture, and the Ashgate Editor’s Choice Award for a significant contribution to the field. She is also an editor of In His Milieu. Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias (Amsterdam University Press, 2006) on the archival and socio-economic study of art. Her current research considers pressure points in cross-cultural contact and the challenges for a global art history with a single-authored monograph on the Jesuit Global Baroque, an edited anthology dedicated to The Nomadic Object: Early Modern Religious Art in Global Contact (Brill, 2017) and a volume of essays translated into Japanese, entitled Dawn of a Global Age: Cultural Exchange between the West and Edo Japan (Koyo Shobo, 2017).

Colloquium

Prof. Dr. Mia M. Mochizuki, New York University Abu Dhabi and NYU Institute of Fine Arts, New York
Prof. Dr. Christine Göttler, Universität Bern

Date: November 25, 2016
Time: 09:15 am - 05:00 pm
Room: Universität Bern, Unitobler, Lerchenweg 36, Raum F-111

For PhD students and advanced Master students of the University of Bern The first part of the colloquium is dedicated to the discussion of the lecture and the texts suggested by our guest. After lunch, a core group presents their PhD thesis, speaking for about 20 minutes on how the concept of “Authenticity/Originality/Replication” (and/or similar concepts and terms) connect to their research questions and which aspects of the texts are of particular relevance to their own work. He or she raises questions for the discussion with his/her peers, which should contribute to the development of their thesis. Finally, the conversation will open up again so that also the other PhD students have an opportunity to address issues related to their projects.

Organization and Contact:

Dr. des. Michael Toggweiler mike.toggweiler@unibe.ch

Application:                       

By October 15, 2016 to mike.toggweiler@unibe.ch