The journal Perspective : actualité en histoire de l’art will explore, in its 2022 – 2 issue, the relationships between narration, art and art history.
From the stories that inspire images and art objects, to those (re)constituted by its viewers, to the “story-telling” of art historians, this issue is intended to make use of the act of narrating as a productively destabilizing heuristic tool. Even in the absence of figured diegetic content, the image and the art object narrate, if only as witnesses of an era or practices, as vehicles of narrativity.
The history of art, rooted in the works of Giorgio Vasari and Karel van Mander, is based on a narrative exercise, from the ekphrasis of Antiquity to the epic narratives of modernist autonomy, but also anecdotes and biographical legends. The way art historians have forged their discipline by freeing themselves from a willfully mythical literary practice and gradually adopting, fashioning, and discussing “scientific” methods bears witness to a complex relationship with the narrative and narration – otherwise stated, a kind of fiction.
While no one will deny that the image and the narrative act go hand in hand, the precedence of one over the other remains an eternal subject of debate, as are the relaying and embedding processes that engender them, from the time of the paragone to modernist discourse predicting the end of narrative artworks. These different oppositions and complex transmission phenomena can be approached from a variety of vantage points, provided that the analysis is situated within a historiographical perspective addressing the narrative processes at work in the creation and reception of art from the origins to the present day, from symbolic Paleolithic expressions to contemporary cinema.
Proposals should correspond to the journal’s editorial policy, which is aimed at going beyond simple case studies in order to bring out specific historiographical issues and, in this instance, analyze the ways art history, cultural heritage history and archeology make use of the relationships between narration, art and art history in order to rethink their methods and scholarly frameworks.
Please submit your proposal ( 2,000-3,000-character / 350 to 500-word summary, with a provisional title, a short bibliography on the topic, and a 2-3 line biography) to the editorial address (revue-perspective@inha.fr) by July 1st, 2021.
Authors of selected articles will be informed of the committee’s decision by the end of July 2021. Full texts of accepted contributions will need to be sent by December 15, 2021. These will be definitively accepted after the journal’s anonymous peer-review process.
