pArts as hosts and guests

Activities hosted by pArts

The main public activity of the projects were five scholarly conferences hosted by pArts. These represent also the most obvious chronology of the project. The content of these events reflects different aspects of the the project, thematically as well as theoretically. Another important part of the initiating activity of the project were visits to research colleges in Copenhagen and Stockholm in 2014. Those visits gave inspiration and direction to the project, why we offer shorts mentions on the visits under the timeline. 

The first two conferences of the project were instrumental in establishing some practical/methodological and theoretical foundations for the future work. In the project description theories around professionalization, publicity/privacy. sociability, and gender were mentioned as core perspectives, supposedly guiding the explorations within the project. To a certain degree, the first conference Performativity and historiography expanded on the theoretical aspects of the project by entering into the even more fundamental problematic around the writing of history in general. The concepts of "history writing as performance" – at that time not a frequent theme in art historiography – stressed the character of history as produced, as opposed to found. The participation of professor Shannon Jackson was meant to underline exactly that historiographical tenet through the invitation to discuss her thoughts around the materiality, narrativity, and subjectity of the writing of history, as in her 2001 book Lines of Activity. Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity.

The second conference, Kunstfagenes kilder (The sources for Art Research) was focused on a more practical – but still foundational – aspect of research; the mere availability of empiric material. This encompasses everything from artefacts to written and graphic material, and the project members knew that the relative success of the project hinged on access to core historical material. This was a strongly felt concern since the individual projects had a common interest in marginal artistic phenomena; artistic practices in the periphery of the artistic fields.

The third conference, Lidenskap eller levebrød? (Passion or professionalism?) was also conducted in Norwegian/Scandinavian. The conference approached the overarching thematic of the project – the relationship between the historic regime of dilettantism and the expanding understanding of professionalism during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The project owners had invited scholars to reflect on preconditions for the changes around 1800, both of a more general kind and those being specific for the individual disciplines.

With the fourth  conference, Plays, players, and participants, the project addressed the thematics in an European context, both by focussing specifically on the exhange between Scandinavia and the continent, and, not at least, by inviting international experts as keynote speakers. The focus was, deliberately, narrowed down to agents and their roles in the develoment of the fields in question; composers, dancers, dramatists, critics, audience members.

With the fifth conference, Re-searching relevance, the project once again delved into the core thematics of the project – the tension between high and low, between centre and margin. This time, and again with an international oriented conference, the focus was on the important role of canon in professionalizing processes. Form, style, and genre has always been instrumental in artistic development, but also in the less researched processes, those of marginalization and exclusion. 

Members of pArts on others' arenaes

Almost equally important as events initiated by the project itself, were the participation on other scholaraly and non-scholarly arenas. One attractive conference arena has been the bi-annual conferences of the Norwegian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Members of pArts has taken part in two conferences during the project periode – in 2013 and 2017.