Art Histories of Experience
These sessions explore the experience of spatial environments as an art historical question. Experience is multivalent, subjective, and above all ephemeral. Our experience of the built environment, designed landscapes and the world at large is highly mediated and contingent, connected to both individual perspectives and cultural framing. It is, moreover, a subject that lies at the complex intersection of the humanities and the sciences, as the senses, emotions, perception, and memory incorporate objective and subjective elements of cognition.
What contributes to our experience of a site or space? How do textual, visual, spatial, and cognitive elements interact to create experience? What sources can help reconstruct that experience? How does experience change across different cultural contexts, and how should our methods change in response? How can digital tools, such as mapping, 3-D modelling, or augmented reality, aid our understanding of experience?
Papers across two sessions explore historical experience of landscape and the built environment through art historical, curatorial, and interdisciplinary means. Spanning a variety of time periods and materials from both inside and outside Euro-American contexts, the papers take a variety of approaches, from focusing on the experience of a specific site to a range of examples and employing analog and/or digital methods to address broader methodological issues. Our goal is to create conversations around the experience of spatial environment across disciplinary, geographical, historical, and methodological boundaries.
Session Convenors:
Peyvand Firouzeh, University of Sydney
Stephen Whiteman, Courtauld Institute of Art
Speakers:
Jing Wang, University of Edinburgh
Tracing the Temporality in Stone: Huang Yi’s Investigating Steles and the Sensory Dimensions of Qing Epigraphy
This paper examines the Qing-dynasty scholar Huang Yi’s (1744–1802) investigating steles through experiential art history. By focusing on Huang’s embodied, sensory, and emotional interactions with stone inscriptions, I argue that his study of epigraphy was not merely scholarly but rather a deeply immersive practice of tactile, visual, and respectful exchanges with relics. Huang’s stele investigations resonate within a broader Qing cosmology, informed by Western astronomical knowledge and a burgeoning global geographic awareness. These interactions positioned Huang and the Qing literati within a cosmological framework that reconciled individual encounters with the vastness of temporality and space.
Huang’s investigation, rubbings, and paintings reveal the evocative power of materiality. Tracing the shift from tie xue (the study of model calligraphy) to bei xue (epigraphy), this paper explores how literati engagement transitioned from emulating moral achievement to venerating materiality, where the worn surfaces and fractured edges of steles became more compelling even than the inscriptions. This movement signals a shift from textual study to a three-dimensional, multi-sensory encounter with antiquity, underscoring the literati’s embodied connection to historical objects. Through the analysis of Huang’s stele paintings, epigraphic practices, and historical text, this paper proposes steles as active agents in the Qing literati’s imagination of time, cosmos, and self.
Hannibal Caleb Taubes, University of Bristol
Publics and Sights in the Construction of Early-Modern North China
What aesthetic categories, ideals of political community, and discourses of moral and visual experience were invoked in the physical construction of the built landscape of early-modern North China, i.e. houses, walls, gates, memorial arches, temples, public murals? How was the lived experience of this built and social landscape mediated into a discursive object called “China”? To answer these questions, I place into dialogue two highly disparate genealogies of writing about place and space in China. I first examine tropes of “absent” monumentality, politico-aesthetic awe, and discomfiting social gaze in the writings of European and Islamic visitors to northern China from the Mongol period onward. I argue that these encounters both map complex political solidarities around communal “sights,” and simultaneously construct “China” in the European imaginary as an aesthetic despotism, lacking “public art” because it lacks “publics.” Both with and against these European writers, I turn to north Chinese temple steles (beiwen), an extremely widespread and today little-read epideictic rhetorical tradition that centrally semiotizes affective experience into politically legitimizing aesthetic discourse, eulogizing the relationships between local communities and their monuments. I argue that these dialectic processes of experience and place, building and writing, are centrally constitutive of “China,” both as built landscape and as discursive construct.
Shriya Sridharan, Santa Clara University
Experiencing the Divine: Spatial Environments of Darshan
My paper will study the spatial context of darshan (devotional viewing) in active Hindu pilgrimage temples from South India. While sculptures and paintings of gods are the focal points of devotional viewing, the emotional responses of encountering a living divine, which Hindu temples are meant to bring about, are primarily triggered by ephemeral additions during important ritual and festival moments. My paper will look at how the addition of temporary markers to permanent temple forms, such as kolam drawings and auspicious decorations; performances alongside static art, such as retellings of stories, familiar music, and dance presentations, convert codified and ancient knowledge into accessible and contemporary formats that create a unique encounter with the divine. In these spatial environments, the art object is often consumed in multivalent and partial ways that are particular to individual circumstances and memories. Some questions explored in this paper will be: what is the role of art designed for such a viewing context? How can we study its meanings when they may be activated in varied ways and through temporary performative contexts? How is the familiar reproduced in this spatial environment for communal devotional experiences? Overall, this paper will argue that ephemeral spatial environments created for important ritual moments are central to the experiences of encountering a living divine in Hindu temples. Examples will include specific rituals/festivals from a few pilgrimage temples in the region of Tamil Nadu in southeastern India.
Sara Atwood, University of Edinburgh
Sacred Experience, Popular Art: Exploring Japanese Women’s Pilgrimage to Mount Kōya Through Edo Period (1603-1868) Travel Diaries and Prints
Founded in 816 in the mountains of Wakayama Prefecture, the Buddhist temple complex of Mount Kōya has been a prominent pilgrimage destination for both men and women for centuries. However, the nyonin kekkai (barrier against women) encircling the precinct prevented female pilgrims from worshipping in the same way as their male contemporaries until the early twentieth century. Instead, women worshipped at nyonindō (women’s halls) and walked the nyonin michi (women’s trail) around the perimeter, glimpsing the sacred temples from afar. My research utilises thematic analysis of Edo period women’s travel diaries alongside prints and other material culture to visualise their pilgrimages and explore how the religious and social construction of Mount Kōya impacted women’s personal and shared experiences. In this paper, I will introduce Konoha and Nishimura Misu, two women who visited Mount Kōya seventy-two years apart but who recorded almost identical sentiments in their journals: sadness and disappointment that their gender prevented them from being unable to go beyond the nyonin kekkai. Elements of their diaries even made their way into an illustrated travel guide from 1838, the Kii no Kuni meisho zue (Illustrations of famous places in Kii Province), and were included in depictions of the largest women’s hall, the Fudōzakaguchi nyonindō, and Rokuro Pass, which overlooked the complex. This discussion highlights the significant impact the barrier had on women’s pilgrimage and demonstrates that while individual experiences may be subjective and ephemeral, some are also capable of transcending time and having a dramatic influence on popular visual culture.
Sigrid de Jong, ETH Zürich
Capturing Ephemeral Experiences in Inhabited Drawings in Eighteenth-Century Paris and London
When in the second half of the eighteenth century, Paris and London went through major urban and architectural developments, many vividly debated questions were raised about the situation, spatial composition, form and meaning of buildings. In these debates, taking place across the Channel, architectural experience emerged as a key concept. Architects, theorists, and writers produced an outburst of publications, using the notion of experience to judge, criticize, and understand buildings.
While the notion can be traced in their various writings, it becomes more complicated when it is studied in visual material of the same period. This paper proposes to analyse how we as architectural historians can use drawings, sketches and paintings in reconstructing the role of experience. Starting from a specific type of architectural drawing, inhabited by figures, it will study some interactions between texts (both published and in manuscript), and inhabited drawings produced in Paris and London. With texts more obviously conveying a variety of experiences of spatial environments through the emotions or the effects on the senses, inhabited drawings provided the public with a visual understanding of the spaces. Viewing the lavishly coloured perspective section of the Comédie Française at the Paris Salon, visitors were able to imagine how they were to approach the building, move through the different spaces, and use them. The contemporary people depicted in architect Charles de Wailly’s spectacular presentation played out the future experiences of the drawing’s viewers. These mediated experiences navigated between recording and transmitting, between subjective reactions and objective intentions.
Elena Rieger, ETH Zürich
Travelling with Emilie von Berlepsch. Re-enacting embodied encounters with romantic landscapes
From October 29 to November 6, I went on a research trip to Scotland accompanied by Emilie von Berlepsch, an aristocratic German writer who travelled to Scotland from 1799-1800 and documented her experiences in Caledonia (1802-1804). Inspired by Berlepsch’s descriptions, which are deeply rooted in the romantic ideals that emphasised the subjective experience of landscapes and their capability of evoking feelings and moving the soul, I aimed to immerse myself in the spaces she described over two centuries ago.
Following Berlepsch’s route, I re-enacted her writings on-site, allowing her voice to merge with mine and pulling the sites from the past into the present. This methodology not only offers a means to visualise the historical landscapes but also facilitates a deeper understanding of the embodied and affective dimensions of these spaces. It considers the body as a ‘body-in-situation’, a concept coined by Iris Young, and underscores the ephemeral and unique nature of embodied experiences within architectural and landscape contexts.
By re-enacting Emilie von Berlepsch’s travel route in Scotland and physically immersing myself in the spaces she described over two centuries ago, I aim to develop a methodology to engage with architectural history and embodied experiences. This paper will explore an experiential approach focusing on embodied experiences and affect theory to engage with architectural history and embodied experiences. It offers insights into the sensory and emotional dimensions of architectural encounters, enriching our understanding of both historical and contemporary landscapes and built environments.
Giovanna Guzzi-Rossetti, Anglia Ruskin University
Designing an AR-aided exhibition at a heritage site: the role of the environment in the study of 2010s text/image art
Experiencing the environment and its bi-directional interactions with the artworks, is linked to (inter)subjective processes of meaning-making and engagement by the viewers. Drawing on semiotics, reception theory and narratology, this presentation proposes a methodology that can bring new perspectives to the study of text/image art and of the way it is perceived. The project consists of exhibition design through mapping and filming the site, which is augmented by the artworks with the aid of an AR application.
The site is a rural architecture area in Lombardy, called cascina, where metayage communities lived until the mid-20th century, sharing work, social and religious practices. The AR method digitally re-contextualises the artworks, allowing to observe their interactions with the space and temporality of an environment which is already strongly characterised. Walking the mapped virtual exhibition and filming the walk, the exhibition designer is at once filmmaker, immersing into the augmented environment and actor-viewer participating in the real environment, as well as viewer of the video, digital exhibition. These three layers of experience create an interplay of media and of digital-real spaces, temporalities and audiences, The project involves different ideas of audience: not only the spectators of the hypothetical real life exhibition and the viewers of the video exhibition, but also the cascina communities of the past centuries. They give an identity to the space, which reflects into the cascina characteristic architecture. The place already bears its narratives and becomes itself a character-narrator within the physical/digital experience of the augmented environment.
Marina Marques, independent curator and artist
Olfactory Chronologies: Reconstructing Atmosphere in Curatorial Practice
This paper explores olfactory experience within exhibition spaces, where scent’s elusive yet pervasive qualities construct emotional atmospheres. Through my curatorial work, I apply an “olfactory chronology” methodology, recording audience responses to reconstruct intangible atmospheres in-situ, challenging traditional art languages by navigating what remains a largely linguistically uncharted territory. Using these responses as sensory data, I aim to bridge personal and universal experiences, where scent operates as a catalyst for shared memory and emotional resonance. This research led to various projects I curated such as the exhibition Osmotopie commissioned by La Biennale di Venezia in 2023 or Under No Smell at Venice Art Projects in 2021, and editorial projects as How To Make Sense Without You, 2021 or Osmogonie, 2024.
Grounded in the exploration of olfactory metaphors as a means of engaging with the immaterial this research extends to studying subliminal indices and atmospheres that emerge through scent, transforming an exhibition into a site of lived, ephemeral experience. Drawing on collected data by audience interviews, I also analyse how these sensory encounters defy textual articulation in the attempt of capturing the essence of spatial memory and subjectivity within cultural contexts. This framework not only illuminates how scent activates emotional responses but also emphasizes the need to rethink curatorial strategies beyond visual-dominant paradigms. Ultimately, the paper suggests that the olfactory realm, as a distinct yet underexplored curatorial medium, holds transformative potential for fostering an embodied experience within art history’s study of environments.