UQ Art Museum Public Programs: 'Between the Angel and the Dog - Dürer’s Melancholy Community': Dr Drew Daniel
Event Details
- Date:
- Tuesday, 25 November 2014
- Time:
- 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
- UQ Location:
- James and Mary Emelia Mayne Centre (St Lucia)
- URL:
- http://www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Ms Gillian Ridsdale
- Phone:
- 67793
- Email:
- g.ridsdale@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- The University of Queensland Art Museum
Event Description
- Full Description:
- Centered on a brooding angel who props her head upon her hand in a now iconic posture of anti-social withdrawal, Albrecht Dürer’s 'Melencolia I' (1514) is the single most celebrated visual emblem of Renaissance melancholy. Long regarded as the quintessential depiction of the solitary, suffering self, it is the gambit of my talk that Dürer’s 'Melencolia I' might actually depict precisely the opposite of solitude: community. Specifically, the angel’s temporary alignment with other agents on the scene, both sentient (a dog at rest, a bat in flight) and non-sentient (a mute stone, discarded tools) graphically depicts a mode of ‘being melancholy together’ that unites highly disparate constituents along a conceptual and material continuum that includes weather systems, objects, animals and persons. In the process, Dürer transforms melancholy from a solitary experience of separateness into a communal network of adjacency, resemblance, and kinship across categorical divides. Telescoping from then to now, this ‘melancholy community’ of material agents and components within the image has itself generated a virtual interpretive community of viewers and scholars from the Renaissance to the present who continue to gather around and respond to Dürer’s image. How does melancholy flow across the boundary from one body to another? How does it flow across the boundary from one historical time period to another? Drawing upon art historian Joseph Leo Koerner’s work on ‘the reformation of the image’ in German Renaissance art, the critical theorist Walter Benjamin’s account of ‘creaturely existence’ across the species barrier, and philosopher Manuel De Landa’s ‘assemblage theory’ of social complexity, I want to consider 'Melencolia I' as a bonding agent, both in its time and in our time. On the occasion of its 500th anniversary, Dürer’s group portrait of melancholy community might have something new to tell us about the paradoxical means by which a seemingly negative and anti-social emotion brings people, animals, and things together.
Drew Daniel is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University. He has published numerous articles on Renaissance literature, emotion, politics, and contemporary aesthetics in journals such as 'Social Text', 'Shakespeare Quarterly', 'Film Quarterly', 'Criticism', 'Journal of English Studies', 'Early Modern Culture', 'The WIRE', 'Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies', 'Opera Quarterly', and others. He is the author of two books: 'The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance' (Fordham University Press) and 'Twenty Jazz Funk Greats' (Continuum). He is also one half of the critically acclaimed electronic group Matmos. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Presented by The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800) and The University of Queensland Art Museum, in association with the exhibition 'Five Centuries of Melancholia', curated by Dr Andrea Bubenik.
Free. All welcome.
Refreshments served after the lecture
RSVP Thursday 20 November
artmuseum@uq.edu.au
07 3365 3046
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
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- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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