The Firefly, 1907, by George Henry Seeley. Photogravure from Camera Work, October 1907 (Clark Art Institute)

The Lure of the Object

A Clark Conference: April 30-May 1, 2004

A lure is something that tempts or attracts with the offer of pleasure or reward, a promise sometimes false, sometimes kept, and sometimes broken. The conference will ask how art history finds, loses, or gives itself away in the face of its objects.

Clark Conferences provide an international forum for the discussion of issues raised by the study, presentation, and exploration of art by focusing on the pressing issues and debates that are driving art history today.

This Clark Conference brought together curators, conservators, and scholars from several disciplines in the humanities to consider how artists, the public, and art historians encounter objects. How are art and art history shaped by the confrontation with the object--painted, drawn, and sculpted; lost, found, and ready-made; exhibited and conserved; made and unmade?

Program: Friday, April 30

Introduction

9:15 a.m.

Michael Conforti, Director, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Michael Ann Holly, Director of Research and Academic Program, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Instistute

Stephen Melville, Professor of the History of Art, The Ohio State University, and conference convenor

9:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m.

Commerce and Context

The Lure of Leonardo: Two Belles Ferronieres in the 1920s
John Brewer, Eli and Edye Broad Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of History and Literature, California Institute of Technology

The Private Property of the Subject
Emily Apter, Professor of French, New York University

Samuel Quiccheberg, the Wunderkammer, and the Copious Object
Mark Meadow, Associate Professor of the History of Art, University of California, Santa Barbara

Naturalezas Mexicanas: Objects as Cultural Signifiers in Mexican Art, c. 1750-1850
Edward J. Sullivan, Professor of Fine Arts, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

2:00-5:00 p.m.

After the Object

Material as Language in Contemporary Art
Christian Scheidemann, Senior Conservator, Contemporary Conservation Ltd, New York

The Work of Art in the Age of Visual Culture: France in the 1930s
Martha Ward, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Chicago

Photography’s Expanded Field
George Baker, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles

Saturday, May 1

Objectivities

9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Object Histories and the Materiality of the Sculptural Object
Malcolm Baker, Professor of Art History, University of Southern California

Encountering the Object
Karen Lang, Assistant Professor, University of Southern California

The Object as Subject
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Professor of History of Art, Harvard University

Lost and Found

2:00-3:30 p.m.
The Surrealist Situation of the Photographed Object
Margaret Iversen, Professor of the History of Art, University of Essex, England

Part Object/Part Sculpture
Helen Molesworth, Curator, Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University

Conference Response and Discussion

3:45-5:30 p.m.
Responses to questions raised at the conference were provided by two Clark Fellows, Martha Buskirk, Associate Professor of Art History and Criticism at Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Massachusetts, and Marcia Pointon, Professor Emerita, The University of Manchester, England. These responses were followed by a discussion with all the speakers.