Lecture: 'Power and Performance: the Bruges Mantelpiece to Charles V'

Ethan Matt Kavaler (Acting Chair and Professor Graduate Department of the History of Art University of Toronto (Canada)) was invited by the  Flemish Research Centre for the Arts in the Burgundian Netherlands
 for a lecture on the Bruges Mantelpiece to Charles V.

The Flemish Research Centre for the Arts in the Burgundian Netherlands is an initiative of the Groeninge Museum in Bruges. The centre was established in 2010 with the following mission: to stimulate research on the art of the 15th and 16th-century Burgundian Netherlands and disseminate this research at an international level.

'Power and Performance: the Bruges Mantelpiece to Charles V'

How were political art works able to mediate between rival interests, to enhance the power and presence of rulers while buttressing the competing rights and privileges of their subjects? And in what ways did sculpture address these problems that painting could not? The carved mantelpiece dedicated to Charles V in Bruges is a revealing example that derives its agency partly from rituals designed to reconcile these conflicting demands. The mantelpiece, with its life-size statues encroaching on communal space, could induce a series of performances by beholders, structured by memories of previous social and political practices. Such monuments might best be explored through notions of performativity, of collective acts both executed and retraced that regulated power relationships. Their spatial, plastic, and material properties are all essential to its efficacy in shaping beliefs and framing public interaction.

Practical:

When: 11 March 15.00

Where: Vriendenzaal Musea Brugge, Dijver 12, 8000 Bruges

Price: No charge

More info: Flemish Research Centre for the Arts in the Burgundian Netherlands
Attention: The language of delivery for this lecture is English.

(News item 28 February 2014)