Baroque and Neobaroque in the Spanish and Portuguese World

Monday June 16 to Thursday June 19, 2014
Werner Oechslin Library Foundation Einsiedeln, Switzerland

The workshop aims at mapping current research on the Baroque in the Portuguese and Spanish world and its modern and postmodern reception. The Baroque, as a seemingly universal stylistic phenomenon, connecting the early modern, the modern, and the contemporary periods, will be analyzed as a case and model of globalization of art and art history. A transcultural approach to the Baroque covers the cross-cultural impact of its style, the intercultural and local differentiation of its forms and meanings, its function as a medium of cultural hybridization and amalgamation, and a way of national identity building. The workshop questions the alleged historical transcendence and universality of the Baroque style, as established by late 19th-century art history, and aims at analyzing the ensuing ideological and aesthetic constructions of history by the means of Baroque style in the Iberian world at large. Both case studies and theoretical contributions shall be addressed and discussed.

Monday, June 16

Introduction: Werner Oechslin, Tristan Weddigen, Jens Baumgarten

I. Transformation, Inter- and Transculturality

Chair: Martino Stierli

• David Sánchez (Madrid): Re-Emergence of an Aztec Religious Ritual in Spanish Festivals. The Power of Baroque "Universalism" Questioned
• Maria do Rosário Salema de Carvalho / Ana Almeida (Universidade de Lisboa): Portuguese Baroque and Neobaroque Azulejos
• Ricardo González (Universidad de Buenos Aires): Jesuits, "Barroco Mestizo" and Interculturality in Southern Colonial Peru
• Jens Baumgarten (Universidade Federal de São Paulo): From Circulation to Comparison: Brazil, the Philippines, and the Discourse of the Baroque and Neobaroque

II. Visual Power and Agency

Chair: Werner Oechslin

• Anette Schaffer (Universität Bern): On Ecstasy: Nietzsche’s Murillo, Eisenstein’s El Greco, and El templo del pocito (Guadalupe)
• Raphaèle Preisinger (Universität Bern): (Re)Framing the Baroque Virgin: Cult images of the Virgin Mary in the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru
• Felipe Pereda (Johns Hopkins University): Art of Excess: Baroque Hyper-Realism and the Production of the Sacred
• Guided visit of the Oechslin Library

Tuesday, June 17

Guided visit of the Einsiedeln Abbey

III. Theory, Methodology, and Historiography

Chair: Tristan Weddigen

• André Tavares (Universidade Federal de São Paulo): Unpacking History: Finding a Place for Brazil in the Portuguese National Historical Narratives, 1770–1830
• Silvana Rubino (Universidade Estadual de Campinas): Framing the Baroque Arts and Colonial Architecture: The Role of SPHAN
• Gabriela Siracusano (CONICET, Buenos Aires): Materials for a Baroque Narrative in the Americas?
• Fernando Guzmán (Adolfo Ibáñez University, Santiago de Chile): Methodological Problems in the Study of Acculturation in Mural Painting of the Ruta de la Plata in the 17th and 18th Centuries
• Monika Kaup (University of Washington, Seattle): Theorizing the Baroque’s Alternative Modernity with Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory

Wednesday, June 18

IV. Global / Local Exchange and Reception

Chair: Axel C. Gampp-Hummel

• Berthold Hub (Universität Wien): When Architecture Peels: El Transparente in Toledo Cathedral as Judged by Contemporaries and in Spanish Historiography
• Ana Duarte Rodrigues (Universidade Nova de Lisboa): The Portuguese Royal Villa of Queluz as a Case-Study for Conceptual and Methodological Questions on the Baroque
• Mateusz Kapustka (Universität Zürich): Lisboa and Santini, or the Temporality of Otherness
• Eckart Kühne (FSMA Bad Zurzach): The Revival of the Baroque Architecture and Music from the Jesuit Missions in the Lowlands of Bolivia
• Evonne Levy (University of Toronto): Raphael and the Andean Shrine Painting: The Western Discourse on Art in the Americas

V. Neobaroque Contemporary

Chair: Felix Vogel

• Pauline Bachmann (Freie Universität Berlin): The Neo-Baroque as Institutional Critique – Examining Artistic Practices between the 1960s and 1980s
• Letícia Squeff (Universidade Federal de São Paulo): Adriana Varejão and the Rediscovering of and Old Question: Brazil Baroque in Contemporary Art
• Olga Isabel Acosta Luna (DAAD Berlin): The Global at the Museum: Agreements and Disagreements about the Baroque
• Peter Krieger (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México): Neobaroque Aesthetics and Eco-Criticism of the Mexican Megalopolis

Thursday, June 19

VI. Identities

Chair: Jens Baumgarten

• Jens Andermann (Universität Zürich): Mar Paraguayo: Trans-Languaging and the Neo-Baroque
• Margareth Pereira / Mario Magalhães (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) / Daniela Ortiz dos Santos (ETH Zürich): American Experience and Baroque Concerns: Notes on Re-Emergences of a Modern Crisis
• Tristan Weddigen (Universität Zürich): Neobaroque Modern: Oscar Niemeyer and the Construction of Brazilian Identity
• Hannes Böhringer (Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig): Some Considerations Upon the Concept of "Contraconquista" (Lezama Lima)
• Walter Moser (University of Ottawa): Using the Baroque for Latin American Identity Constructions: A Contrastive Reading of Two Essays by Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier

Jens Baumgarten, Tristan Weddigen, Felix Vogel

Connecting Art Histories – The Getty Foundation

Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW)

Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)