Territories of Fantasy

                                    Summer School
Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne – Columbia University NY
        in partnership with Sciences-Po Paris and the École Polytechnique
                  27th, 28th and 29th of June 2018



Submissions deadline: Friday, October 23, 2017
To: [email protected]
Submissions format: One page of approximately 350-350 words in French or English.
The candidates must attach a curriculum vitae to their submission

September 25, 2017

Details on the call can be accessed in the accordion below. Further information on ADHA ( Association of Doctorates in the History of the Arts) can be found on their website.

This unprecedented summer school project is based on the initiative of a group of young Art History researchers in Paris, acting as the PhD students’ representatives.

Built along the framework of a two day symposium, and punctuated by various events (tours, debates, projections) and informal gatherings, the summer school’s ambition is to promote human and scientific exchanges among young art historians and archaeologists on both sides of the Atlantic, thus creating a transnational academic dialogue and stimulating the role of young researchers in building academic networks. We wish to carry out this transversal and multidisciplinary project from a distinctly methodological angle, while relying on the students themselves. The bilingual publishing of the symposium’s proceedings is planned.

This project is addressed to all the Art History and Archaeology PhD students from our partner institutions : Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Columbia University, Sciences-Po Paris and the École Polytechnique, regardless of medium, from Antiquity to today. All expenses for Columbia students will be covered (round trip to Paris, housing, catering).

A project organized by: Élodie Baillot Matthieu Leglise Marie Piccoli-Wentzo Olivier Schuwer Marie-Charlotte Téchené

Scientific Commitee: Élodie Baillot (Paris 1), Laurence Bertrand Dorléac (Sciences-Po Paris), Holger Klein (Columbia University), Matthieu Leglise (Paris 1), Marie Piccoli-Wentzo (Paris 1), Michel Poivert (Paris 1), Thomas Schlesser (Polytechnique), Olivier Schuwer (Paris 1), Marie-Charlotte Téchené (Paris 1).

From the Latin word phantasma (« ghost », « phantom ») and the Greek word φάντασµα, phantasma, («apparition»), fantasies have always shaped our foremost relationship to images. This “spectral” model, shall serve as our starting point to address the question of fantasy and the imprint it leaves on our work as art historians.

For the first edition of this summer school, in partnership with Columbia university, we will invite PhD students from both sides of the Atlantic to lay out the cartography of their own doctoral fantasies, in a informal setting that will allow true freedom of exchange and interaction: In which territories do these phenomena of projection, illusion, hallucination or fetishist fixation develop, and inevitably haunt even the most rigorous of scientific approaches? We shall attempt to uncover and explore, through our work as young researchers, the different territories where fantasies unfurl, and draw up a genuine topography of the unconscious forces at work - whether it be in our relationship to our subject, to our peers, to the university, or the institutions in general- and of course, first and foremost, to the works of art themselves.

This theme will also allow us to cross examine how French and American researchers regard each other, in terms of their approach, methods and goals, as well as their myths and tutelary figures – as many different perception, fed by fundamentally phantasmagorical desires, repulsions and repressions.

Submissions must follow one of the four axes hereafter:

Unlike other human science disciplines, art historians have generally kept their distance with questions of ego-history. While undeniably uncomfortable, as it questions the incorporated self-eclipsing mechanisms of the academic subject, this exercise of self-reflexivity, theorized in 1987 by George Duby, Pierre Nora and a few others, possesses nevertheless unarguable heuristic virtues: « the exercise consists in shedding light on ones own history, as one would of the history of another, and try to apply to oneself, each individual with his own style and methods, the cold, thorough, explanatory gaze that one has so often turned to others. To clarify, as historians, the existing link between the history we make, and the history that made us. »

Our purpose is to investigate the shady areas of research which escape the clarity of discursive scientific work, in a necessary process of investigation and exhumation, so as not to let the blind spots of our reflection come haunt and destabilize our most ambitious academic architectures. What specters of our own selves inhabit our interpretations? What innermost wishful projections shape or distort our practice as young researchers? How, and why do we fantasize our corpus, our thesis? Would it be possible – or even advisable – to envisage a scientific approach devoid of any phantasmagorical quality? All these interrogations can apply, on several levels, to the objects of our studies, but also to the individuals studying them, individuals unavoidably divided between rational and wishful thinking, where the scientific approach is constantly overflowed by fashion, ideology and one’s most private self. Finally, this subject questions the boundary lines that cross hatch our lives as young researchers, in order to gain a better understanding of their complex and irregular trajectories.

Without, however, having practiced a strict exercise of intimate exploration, some of the essays by David Carrier James Elkins, Paul Barolsky or Carlo Ginzburg, have questioned the flaws and artifices of some of our academic tools which are nevertheless regarded with the strength of obviousness, first of these being the question of writing, challenging a generally accepted neutrality that should always appear as problematic. If the works of Ivan Jablonka ou Paul Veyne come naturally to mind in the field of History, Art History references are less obvious. We could mention certain popularization articles by Daniel Arasse which — with brio and simplicity, question the interweaving’s of the intimate and the scholarly, or else Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model, the uncommon work of Eunice Lipton, published in 1992, which overlaps academic inquiry and personal quest in a stimulating self-reflexive work.

The specters that haunt our work as young researchers can be intimate as well as collective, they can teach us about ourselves, or, to quote Pierre Bourdieu, reveal a « scholastic habitus », or even an « academic subconscious ». Art History, being a stereotyped and codified human science, is crisscrossed with preconceptions, schemes and structures, more or less conscious, more or less clearly expressed, that nevertheless influences the writing of history.

These determinations are multiple. For example, a whole section of art history, as Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz practiced it in 1930s Vienna, was founded on the analysis of the mythological and fictional substratum that forged the legend of the artist in literature since Antiquity. From monographic to panoramic, it is also the question of the classifications and taxonomies that allow us, according to Jacques Le Goff, to « slice History » while bringing into to light the « overwhelming complexity of things ». We could also address the issue, introduced by Michael Baxandall, of the « language of Art History ». Faced with the ineffability of the work of art, the issue is to question the lexicon, vocabulary and rhetoric which compose the base of « science » and « objectivity » in art discourse. Finally, the epoch, and intellectual fashions of our present, can seep into art history, which is continually under teleological threat.

Our position when dealing with such an a priori - which concern the biography and art history lingo, as much as the structure itself of the construction of historical knowledge - is necessarily ambivalent. The issue, especially during the first years, is to prove ones ability to « do » art history by conforming to a certain number of topoi, while the originality of ones research can also be measured by the critical distance of the author, whose intention in less to build a narrative around its object that to interrogate ones own fantasies. This axis is intended as an invitation to such an exercise of self-critique.

Whether they are manuscript, audible or visual, the sources of art history archives confront the researcher to his hypotheses and to the works of art. As pointed out by Arlette Farge (The allure of the archive, 1989), contact with archive is far from being neutral. From this assertion, how does the art historian question his archives? Laden with expectations and desires, archivist research is an exercise that can be exhilarating at times, and at others deceptive. The lack or profusion of archive put into question the place of fantasy in research. What is left of our fantasies once the historic analysis of the sources has been done?

One of the particularities of our discipline lays in the confrontation of the archive with the work of art, and vice versa. What fantasies can guide or misguide the art historian addressing both archive and work of art? Can archivist research constitute a territory of fantasy when the sources and archives are geographically distant? Or else, when they are unprecedentedly easy to access thanks to digital and dematerialized forms?

While remaining an object of fantasy for the art historian, does the archive not constitute an obstruction to fantasy?

Nothing is more essential that the choice of the subject of one’s thesis, for while our research is without doubt an object of fantasy, it may well also become it’s subject. Therefore, the originality or the singular character of one’s research becomes undeniable assets. Thus, a rediscovery, a shedding of new light, gives to the term researcher all it’s meaning. To create an object that disappeared or to discover the unexplored potentiality of a corpus, unquestionably relates to the subject of fantasy, yet also reveals the possibility of passing on this same fantasy. Amongst the greatest examples of such a circumstance, let us recall the infatuation that inspired the 1934/1935 Georges de La Tour exhibition, a painter who had been thus far forgotten and who then became famous.

In this mindset, the question of the « mise en scène » of one’s subject, research and presentation, appears as fundamental. The oral adaptation of a communication, the visual effect produced by a PowerPoint, the essential writing stage, the research and the thesis that is drawn from it, appear as the tools which allow the researcher to incite fantasy in others, and to circulate one’s own imaginary making. The developed etymology, the chosen vocabulary, the search for the right voicing, and the order and format in which the works will be projected, are as many effects selected to inspire the reader with marvel, amazement, astonishment, amusement, or in other words imagination, and ultimately with a certain phantasmagorical construction.

However, so as not to lose track of the essential scientific intention of research, these effects cannot exceed a certain limit. Thus arises the question of just measure, far from fantasy, but essential to it’s production: the researcher must demonstrate a certain sprezzatura in Baldassare Castiglione’s words, and make his thesis an art « that does not look like art » (The book of the courier). How does one create this elaborate grace, this je-ne-sais-quoi, this subtle tonality, between scientific rigor and conveying of inspiration, of fantasy? To what degree, and with what limitations, could we eventually envisage a poetic science?