by Jon Lackman | 14 February 2007 | Conferences, News
Numerous papers and indeed entire panels this year are devoted to non-western topics — especially to the collision of western and non-western cultures. This afternoon we have panels on “The Reception of Caribbean Art,” “The Appropriation of Classical and Gothic Architecture by Indigenous and Diasporic Communities,” “The Art of Being Global: International Art of International Artists,” and “Western Art Studies in a Middle Eastern Context.” In the West Ballroom (confusingly labeled The Grand Ballroom), “Consuming Images, Constructing Selves: Europe and the Orient in the 18th Century” plays to an audience of about 110. According to chairs Nebahat Avcioglu and Finbarr Barry Flood, the eighteenth century is an important turning point in relations between Europe and “The Orient,” in how they perceived each other and in the uses they made of each other’s artistic traditions. Flood agrees with Edward Said critics who believe that his landmark Orientalism book too often considered the West ahistorically, ignoring important changes in its attitudes to the Orient. Avcioglu suggests that historians have for too long imputed to the West’s 18th century the mindset of the more infamous 19th century. “If the 19th century was about orientalism, what was the 18th century about?”
Kristel Smentek considers the Geneva-born Liotard, who spent five years c. 1740 in the Ottoman Empire. Upon his return to Europe, he declared himself a bona fide Turk, adopted Turkish attire and a long beard that eventually reached his waist. He created a sensation. Even though he lacked academic credentials, he developed a huge and devoted clientele, who sat for portraits dressed up in the Turkish costumes Liotard had brought back. Not only were Liotard paintings full of exotic dress and locales, his style stood out as unusually “realistic” by contemporary western standards — often direct, fully modeled, and unsparing in detail however unflattering. Smentek makes the controversial argument that indeed this new style of Liotard’s was also inspired by Ottoman models. Western artists of this period are generally held to have had only superficial exposure to and interest in such art, but she presents evidence that tells another story. As a “Turk,” he may have hoped to hold up a mirror to the European world, using his outsider, supposedly objective status, to point up its arbitrary conventions. Whatever his intentions, the European art world often despised him. Conservatives saw in his painting and in his “primitive” attire a threat to the exalted status to the artist, a return to the idea of the artist as a manual laborer for profit. Regarding a 1751 self-portrait by Liotard, one man wrote, “[Untranslatable expletive.] Flat flat flat. 3 times flat. Of everything that has ever existed, it is the most flat.”
Sarah Lawrence could not attend, but another attendee read her paper, “Piranesi, the Aesthetic of Eclecticism and His Stile Egliziano.” Piranesi embraced Egyptian ornament, well before the Napoleonic revival, consistent with his trademark eclecticism, which turned world art history into a sort of transnational salad bar. Each nation and each epoch had its elegances to be plundered, after all. (“Mankind is too pleased with variety” to do otherwise, he argued.) He asserted that in his work “for the first time Egyptian architecture makes an appearance.” What he meant was that he valued Egyptian architecture in toto, whereas most before him only saw its trademark pyramids and obelisks and the like. Unlike others, he saw Egyptian art not as an inscrutable hermetic tradition that knew nothing of the grace and expressiveness demonstrated by the Greeks, but rather as a sympathetic, natural, and palpable art that happened to also embrace the virtue of solidity because good architecture requires it.
(Note: quotations in conference diary reports are slightly approximate.)
