ICONOCLASM – A Symposium
Symposium to be chaired by Dr Gerard Vaughan, Gerry Higgins Professorial Fellow
Conveners: Dr F Harley-McGowan, Gerry Higgins Lecturer in Medieval Art History
Dr Justin Clemens, Senior Lecturer, English
School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
The history of images is inseparable from the history of the hostility towards images. In its most extreme expressions, this hostility can become an injunction to the breaking of all images: iconoclasm. Sometimes certain images or kinds of image have been banned from being made, circulated, or exhibited; sometimes all images are held to be available for destruction; sometimes images themselves incorporate various kinds of auto-hostility; sometimes images are made only to be broken; sometimes images that should be broken never are. Justifications for iconoclasm can likewise be of many kinds: religious, economic, social, aesthetic, philosophical. This symposium takes up the problematic of iconoclasm through a series of historically-focussed presentations from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, running from early Christianity to contemporary Australia.
Date: Friday 6 September
Venue: The Oratory, Newman College, 887 Swanston Street Parkville Newman College, University of Melbourne 887 Swanston Street Parkville, VIC 3052
Bookings: Free but need to register here http://www.trybooking.com/Booking/BookingEventSummary.aspx?eid=56670
Program
9.15 Welcome – Introduction
9.30 Felicity Harley-McGowan | In the beginning was the Image: Early Christianity and the visual arts
10.30 Morning Tea
11.00 Lachlan Turnbull | Iconophobia: Faces, relics and fear in the medieval West
12.00 Nick Heron | Iconophilia: The image of the image
1.00 Lunch
2.00 Justin Clemens | Milton’s Golden Calf
3.00 José Antonio González Zarandona | Iconoclash: the destruction of Australian Rock Art
4.00 Close
Enquiries: Dr Felicity Harley-McGowan, +61 3 8344 4285, fharley@unimelb.edu.au
