Image: Portrait miniature of A Young Man Leaning Against a Tree Amongst Roses, possibly Robert Deveraux, 2nd Earl of Essex (1566-1601), by Nicholas Hilliard, 1585-95. Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Dates: Thursday 23 October and Friday 24 October, 2014
Time: 10:00am – 3:00pm (arrival and coffee from 9:30)
Venue: University of Queensland Art Museum, Level 3, Boardroom
Keynote: Professor Laurinda Dixon (Syracuse University), author of
The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art (Penn State University Press, 2013)
Please RSVP by Friday, 17 October, to UQ CHE Education and Outreach Officer, Penny Boys at: uqche@uq.edu.au.
This interdisciplinary symposium will explore the history and continuing relevance of melancholia as an amorphous but richly suggestive theme in literature, music, and visual culture, as well as philosophy and the history of ideas. One way to characterize melancholia is as a survivor: of the four classical temperaments, only the melancholic persists, having long obscured the choleric, the phlegmatic, and the sanguine. Such resilience may be attributed, at least in part, to the concept’s flexibility: melancholia has been both cursed as a cause of inactivity and illness and celebrated as a source of intellectual and artistic creativity. Falling in and out of fashion, melancholia seems now poised (yet again) for renewed contemplation. Of late evoked and scrutinized by a wide range of scholars, theorists, and practitioners of a variety of art forms, melancholia persists both as a private emotion and as an intellectual and artistic mode – a way of framing and understanding experience.
Coinciding with the five hundredth anniversary of Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving Melencolia I – the first visual representation of artistic melancholy – this symposium will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines to engage in cross-disciplinary discussion of the continuing relevance of melancholia to the arts. The event will take place in conjunction with “Five Hundred Years of Melancholia”, a major exhibition of the University of Queensland Art Museum that will consider a range of visualizations of melancholy from the European Renaissance to the present day.
Confirmed speakers and titles of papers:
Amelia Barikin (UQ) – ‘After the End: Melancholia and the Politics of Time’
Andrea Bubenik (UQ) – ‘The Shape of Things to Come: The Polyhedron in Melencolia I”
Rex Butler (UQ) – 'Sebald's The Rings of Saturn and English Hauntology’
Sally Butler (UQ) – ‘Melancholia’s Mirror – Moral Conscience in Australian Art’
Denis Collins (UQ) – ‘Musical Responses to Dürer’s Melencolia I’
Laurinda Dixon (Syracuse) – ‘The Eyes, Brain and Heart of the Viewer: Love Melancholy and Renaissance Portraiture’
Alison Holland (UQ) – ‘The Melancholic Horizon in Australian Landscape Art’
Chari Larsson (UQ) – ‘Against a Melancholic Art History: The Afterlife of Images’
Dolly MacKinnon (UQ) – ‘A Melancholy Soundscape: Henry Purcell’s From Silent Shades (1683)’
Monique Rooney (ANU) – ‘Black Bile and Earth Objects: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011)’
Jane Stadler (UQ) – ‘Mood and Aesthetic Emplacement in Melancholia, Mood Indigo, and In the Mood for Love’
Refreshments and lunch will be included each day.
For more information please contact the symposium convenor, Dr Andrea Bubenik at a.bubenik@uq.edu.au