International Conference

10 December 2010

John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin

Organized by Jennifer Raab and Winfried Fluck

What does it mean to represent the natural world? How do artists turn vision into practice and the perception of space into a medium? How has landscape been defined and depicted by painters and photographers, naturalists and scientists in the United States and Europe from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century?

This conference aims to bring together historians of art, culture, and science for an intensive one-day discussion about that slippery term, “landscape,” considering issues of site-specificity, biology and ecology, cultural geography, consumerism, the sublime and the picturesque, nationalism and globalism. Through both case studies and broader methodological papers, concepts of space, site, and landscape will be examined and reimagined.

The conference is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.

Program

Morning Session

9:00 am: Introduction

9:15 am: Winfried Fluck (Freie Universität Berlin), Napoleon Crossing the Rhine: Transnational Studies and American Painting

10:00 am: Alan Wallach (College of William and Mary, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, Freie Universität Berlin), Rethinking ‘Luminism’: A Summary

10:45 am: Coffee Break

11:15 am: Angela Miller (Washington University, St Louis), Time, Duration, and the Modern Moment in Early Twentieth-Century American Art

12:00 pm: Maria Slowinska (Freie Universität Berlin), Dematerializing / Rematerializing the Site: Prada Marfa and Site-Specificity

12:45 pm: Lunch

Afternoon Session

2:30 pm: Charlotte Klonk (Humboldt Universität Berlin), Nature’s Imprints

3:15 pm: Jennifer Raab (Freie Universität Berlin), Seeing and Knowing: Darwin’s Details, Thoreau’s Objects, and the Challenge of Landscape

4:00 pm: Coffee Break

4:30 pm: Laura Bieger (Freie Universität Berlin), "To be in scale is to be out of it" – Spatial Perception in Land Art

5:15 pm: Samantha Schramm (Universität Konstanz), Site, Non-Site and Photography: Reconsidering Site Specificity

6:00 pm: Reception