chair /

• Martha Langford, Concordia University

I once asked an abstract painter how he determined the size of the canvas that he would be acting upon: “It’s the limit of my reach,” he answered, “I need to be able to get my hands around it.” It seemed to me the perfect encapsulation of the phenomenological attitude (further research revealed it as a trope). Conceptual art similarly explored the physical limits and mindfulness of bounded space—walking, mapping, drawing parentheses around. More current examples include the performing body as an archive; oral histories of craft or craftivist circles; or writing object-lives from the holdings of a diasporic historical society. Global and local are entangled. Studying the local—writing from within one’s ideational village—remains crucial, but defining a micro-art-historical project is increasingly daunting. This call for papers appeals to art historians, theorists, and practitioners who have braved the anecdote and excavated the footnote to situate their work.

keywords: local, global, historiography, methodology

session type: panel

A Little Bit of the Alps in Bethlehem

• Braden Lee Scott, Bibliotheca Hertziana—Max Planck Institute for Art History

In 1448, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, initiated plans to replace the wooden beams of the Bethlehem Basilica’s roof. By 1484, his heirs Charles and Mary saw the project through to completion. Philip had nurtured connections with the monks of the Franciscan order who lived in and around Jerusalem, but unlike his father and grandfather who led gruesome crusades against Islam, Philip was a “soft crusader.” Instead of leading a bloody war in the Levant, he invested Burgundy’s resources in Levantine Christian infrastructure. Burgundy’s material investiture included the replacement of the Bethlehem Basilica’s ancient West Asian cedar beams with Central European larch. Philip began by requesting permission from the pope to carry out the renovation; he then negotiated for larch trees from the Alpine mountains to be felled, cut into planks, and brought downriver to Venice for shipment. But why go through all the effort when cedar was still readily abundant in Syria? It was, after all, ancient custom to build Jewish, Christian, and Islamic architecture with cedar, a wood that had magical origins in West Asian mythologies. I argue that to replace cedar with larch wood shifted the context of architectural diplomacy to accommodate a new set of European symbolic values in Bethlehem. This is to say that in Burgundy’s vision for renovations, European architectural wood materially abstracted and conveyed a European landscape to the so-called “Holy Land.” By microcosmically occupying parts of Mamluk Syria without waging war, the renovation effected Burgundy’s “soft crusade.”

keywords: architectural wood, infrastructure, diplomacy, materiality, global art histories

From Forms to Form: Micro-art-histories of Bureaucracy and the Practice of Bureaucratic Everyday Life

• Raphaël Ouellet, Université du Québec à Montréal

This communication seeks to investigate the ways in which artists who seek funding, or to have their works shown, bought, and collected, divert and deflect bureaucratic proceedings and standards. Bureaucracy is generally perceived as an antithesis to art and to imagination alike. And yet, most, if not all, organizations within the field are governed through its principles: museums, art councils, artist-run centres, private galleries, and foundations are administered through impersonal rules, norms, and proceedings. In the last few decades, neoliberal rule seems to have exacerbated the amount of paperwork to fill, the number of standards and “Good Practices” to uphold. However, to comprehend the role that bureaucracy plays in the art ecosystem, we need not only understand these formalities in the abstract, but also how they are really applied by cultural workers and artists. I therefore wish to examine all the ways in which they work with, against and despite bureaucracy, in a dynamic of creation of the bureaucratic everyday life (De Certeau, 1990). Following political scientist Béatrice Hibou (2012), this refers to the elaboration of a study of cultural bureaucracy “from the bottom:” in other words, a micro-art-history of the bureaucratic.

As the artistic profession is already marked by precarity, these diversions become ways to negotiate bureaucratic and aesthetic injunctions. However transgressive these acts might seem, we can assume that most bureaucrats know about them, and most of them let them slide, most of the time. I therefore aim to understand the bureaucratic role we all must play, and what are the breaches between the artistic personal and the bureaucratic impersonal put forth by artists and administrators. From there, I hope that there may exist seeds of artistic organizations beyond bureaucracy.

keywords: arts administration, field of contemporary art, art and politics, bureaucracy, practice of everyday life

Imperative Artmaking: Prison Art in Canada

• Sheena Hoszko, Queen’s University

Recent large-scale exhibitions and popular podcasts in the USA have brought prisoner cultural production to the forefront, asking viewers to pay attention to intentionally hidden carceral spaces and, more importantly, the people forced to live within them. However, current and historical artmaking practices in Canadian prisons have received less attention. This paper discusses prison art as both an index and a lens of prison life. Artmaking inside encompasses survival strategies, creativity, resistance, and care; demonstrates deteriorating living conditions within institutions coast-to-coast; and documents penal expansion in Canada. Drawing on the work of Nicole Fleetwood, Ben Davis, Gayle K. Horii, and decades of abolitionist organizing by prisoners and outside allies, this paper looks at three digitized and publicly available artworks within Canadian archives of prisoner material culture. Prison artists are vital scholars within the larger prison justice movement, and the carceral materiality of prisoner artmaking affirms more than the middle-class values often asserted within contemporary and historical art ecologies. In making artworks under the repressive conditions of incarceration, prisoner art challenges and builds places and relationships beyond the capitalist and carceral logics of the Canadian settler-colonial state.

keywords: prison art, prisoner material culture, social movements