Publications list since 2017.pdf

List of Publications

Documenta

Luk Van den Dries eater studies in Flanders is a young eld of research. is is a statement one o en encounters in early texts mapping the birth of this discipline in Flemish academia (see, e.g., Van Schoor, " eaterwetenschap hic et nunc" 210; Tindemans, "Ziele und Methoden" 49; Schrickx 189). In these writings, the somewhat belated arrival of theater studies is frequently invoked by way of compensation for the fact that there had hardly been any progress, or as an excuse that everything moved so slowly and that still so much was lying ahead of us.

Documenta: tijdschrift voor theater, 2018

In this contribution, I present Van Kerkhoven’s foundational redefinition of dramaturgy as an open-ended and necessarily flexible process, which has proven to be highly influential not only in Belgium but also in other European countries. As I will argue, her view has important implications for the study of dramaturgy in university curricula, while it also laid the groundwork for some of the more recent developments in the field of dramaturgy that I trace in the course of this contribution.

Documenta, 2016

During the second half of the 20th century, the label ‘contemporary’ has increasingly been used to designate an artistic work’s synchronous relation to the present. Today, contemporaneity has become a prerequisite for artistic production, not only in the visual arts but also the performing arts, time-based arts that are often defined by their ontological foundation in the ‘here and now.’ However, ‘contemporaneity’ as a notion and as a condition of performance is far from unproblematic or neutral and is in urgent need to be explored further. This collection of texts written by performance theorists and theatre makers examines ways in which performance and the performing arts today reflect on contemporaneity. What does the ‘contemporary’ in ‘contemporary theatre’ or ‘contemporary dance’ stand for? How do these in turn relate to the general notion of ‘contemporary art’? How do the performing arts intervene in the world they are contemporary with? And what kind of contemporaneity is produced by the performing arts? What are some of the philosophical, temporal and political assumptions underpinning the contemporaneity of performance and how do the performing arts negotiate, critique and transform these assumptions?

2016

In this special issue of JHNA we ask ourselves how the sublime can function as a fruitful concept that allows us to gain more insight into the effect and agency of seventeenth-century art in the Netherlands. With the help of art theory, poetics, laudatory poems, fragments from diaries, biographical data, and theological concepts, the contributors show that by using different theories of the sublime in analyzing specific works of art we can better understand their precise impact. With examples from divergent painterly genres, emblematic works, and spectacle the authors point at the capacity of overwhelming art to accentuate the exceptional position of the artist, elevate the onlookers morally, or offer them ways to deal, in the secure space of the representation, with deep-rooted fears, divine magnanimity, and superhuman infinity.

Special Issue The Sublime and Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Art, 2016

In this special issue of JHNA we ask ourselves how the sublime can function as a fruitful concept that allows us to gain more insight into the effect and agency of seventeenth-century art in the Netherlands. With the help of art theory, poetics, laudatory poems, fragments from diaries, biographical data, and theological concepts, the contributors show that by using different theories of the sublime in analyzing specific works of art we can better understand their precise impact. With examples from divergent painterly genres, emblematic works, and spectacle the authors point at the capacity of overwhelming art to accentuate the exceptional position of the artist, elevate the onlookers morally, or offer them ways to deal, in the secure space of the representation, with deep-rooted fears, divine magnanimity, and superhuman infinity.

When thinking about the sublime, most people would spontaneously refer to an aesthetic experience -be it in nature, in art or in the self -that destabilises us, that evokes conflicting emotions of awe and fear, of horror and fascination, or that escapes our human understanding. codified by edmund burke and Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, the sublime often appears as the impressive and the awe-inspiring that is opposed to the orderly and balanced nature of the beautiful. In this (simplified) narrative, the sublime is then often historicised as a relatively late concept or, as Jean-françois Lyotard would have it, as a mode of sensibility that is specific to modernity itself. however, the sublime is a much older notion and cannot be confined to the birth of aesthetics in the eighteenth century. originally, the sublime is a rhetorical concept that finds its main source in the treatise Peri hypsous (On the Sub lime), probably written in the first century Ad by an anonymous author, who is generally referred to as Longinus. the importance of On the Sublime resides in the fact that it deals with the strong persuasive and emotional effect of speech or literature on the listener or reader. It addresses the question of how language can move us deeply, how it can transport, overwhelm, and astonish the reader or listener. It destabilises so to speak the fixed position between a reader, an author and a text or speech. 'for the true sublime', Longinus writes, 'naturally elevates us: uplifted with a sense of proud exaltation, we are filled with joy and pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we heard.' 1 So already from its very beginnings the sublime appears as a profoundly liminal concept that questions the boundaries between representation and the subject beholding it. As emma Gilby has argued elsewhere, the Longinian sublime is always about 'an encounter'. 2 It creates a close contact, or even a clash, with the object represented, while it also establishes a deep, indeed intimate, communication between an author and a reader or listener through a text or speech.

Documenta, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2017

Vereniging van Nederlandse Kunsthistorici, 2019

Commissioned by the Dutch Association of Art Historians (VNK), every year a young art historian is asked to compile a bibliography. This year's bibliography is focused on fine and decorative arts from the period of 1550-1700. It gives an overview of all the scientific publications by Dutch art historians published between 2014 and 2018. With a clear categorization and artists ordered alphabetically, it is a useful and interdisciplinary tool for all art historians interested in the early modern period. With a preface by prof. dr. Reinier Baarsen