SESSION: Reimagining the Fragment (FULL-DAY PART 2)

This panel seeks to explore the fragment broadly construed as both a physical entity and a methodological approach. In the discipline of art history, the fragment calls to mind ancient marble bodies, like the Belvedere Torso, and the ways in which the unearthing of such objects in the Renaissance produced, as Leonard Barkan observes, a new “aesthetics—which is to say a philosophy and phenomenology proper to art itself.” At the same time, scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum and Linda Nochlin have demonstrated that the fragment can be understood to function as both a potent tool and an emblem of cultural and historical realms as disparate as medieval sanctity and secular modernity. This panel aims to embrace this temporal and epistemological breadth in its investigation of the fragment.

Questions for consideration include, but are not limited to:

How does the fragment destabilize concepts of integrity?
How does the fragment act as a temporal matrix, prompting acts of deferral and memory?
How can encounters with the fragment reveal a previously hidden framework?
How does the fragment act as an agent of mobility?
How can the fragment engage issues of cross-cultural appropriation, dismantling, and re-use?
How does the fragment disrupt, or promote, authorial performance?

We are interested in papers that examine these questions within the context of intermedial and transtemporal dialogue, opening up investigations of palimpsest, collage, and pastiche across disciplinary and geographical boundaries.

Session Convenor:

Carolina Mangone, Princeton University

Jessica Maratsos, University of Cambridge

Part 2 Speakers:

Juan Carlos Mantilla, King’s College London

Fragments of an Ancient World in the Early Modern Andes

In the early modern period, scholars in the Andes faced the unprecedented challenge of understanding the deep past from a myriad of vestigial fragments -fossils, ruins, remnants- found in the territories of pre-Columbian archaeological geographies. Bringing together, through vestigial material culture, indigenous historical accounts and Renaissance antiquarianism, in novel texts and images, an ancient world was imagined.

In the Pacific coast, fossil vestiges of oversized beings found beneath the earth, formed the idea of an Andean age of giants, imagined in the chronicles of Cieza de León and Cabello Balboa, in parallel to beings and events narrated in Genesis 6 and 19 [Fig. 1]. Joseph Arriaga and Martin de Murua, otherwise, evince how indigenous people narrated the histories of such fossils, revering them as sacred ancestors inhabiting the mountains, called huari, or memorializing their extinction in mural painting.

In the eastern highlands of the Andes, a fragmentary wooden remnant found under the waters of Lake Titicaca, evoked an indigenous account about a visitor from distant lands. Reassembling the wooden pieces, a cross was shaped and taken to be material proof of a Saint’s visit. This enabled indigenous scholars Santacruz Pachacuti and Guaman Poma de Ayala to entangle the history of the Andes with the sacred history of the Apostles, imagining this highland territory as part of the history of the New Testament.

Through these fragments, I explore the early modern imagining of an ancient world, of which, quoting the Quechua Huarochirí scribe, “only a part we know.” [huaquinillantam yachanchic].

Freya Juul Jensen, University of Aberdeen

Natalie Barney’s Sapphosocial Fragments

When dealing with queer history, one must often be content with fragments. These fragments are particularly useful, as the unfinished edges of history can be woven into the present. Sappho’s words, with their fragmentary nature, were stitched together by Natalie Barney in the early twentieth century to create new meanings

This paper focuses on Natalie Barney and her Salon of the Amazon in Paris. It explores the Salon’s social network and its visualisation through an imaginary map of relationality. I argue that, through the performance of Barney’s play Équivoque and the further performance of antiquity in photographs, sapphosocial relationships are created across temporal boundaries. Here, Barney reimagines the Ovidian myth of Sappho’s suicide, using Sapphic fragments as spoken and sung lines by the performers in Équivoque. Such an act further fragments Sappho’s work, as her fragments are spoken by different bodies. Yet it also revitalises them, putting Sappho into conversation with herself through the conversation of the actors.

Working through the affective framework of erotohistoriography and Barthes’ musings on photography (2000), this paper teases out the different layers of times transposed upon each other. Facilitated by touch, we are invited to imagine sapphic time travel through the Sapphic fragment.

Roberta Minnucci, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History Rome

Excavating Rome: American Artists and the Postwar Fragment

In the postwar period, American artists arriving in Rome were confronted with a city of profound contrasts, where the material fragments of a classical past coexisted with the scars of recent conflict. This essay argues that the pervasive category of the fragment—whether encountered in broken statues, bombed-out buildings, or the detritus of everyday life—became a central conceptual paradigm for these artists. In their works, the fragment operated not through picturesque imitation but as a critical synecdoche. It enabled a dialectical relationship with European tradition and facilitated a break from the dominant idioms of American modernism, particularly Abstract Expressionism. In its place, they forged new aesthetic paths centred on history, memory, and materiality. This investigation traces two distinct yet intertwined engagements with fragmentation: one oriented toward antiquity and the other toward the modern city. Artists such as Cy Twombly treated classical remnants as linguistic excerpts or mythic echoes, while Philip Guston and Suzanne Santoro explored them as material vestiges in their respective mediums. Conversely, the fragment of the contemporary city was appropriated in the sculptural assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg and Salvatore Meo, who incorporated the very “body” of Rome into their work. This engagement with Rome’s urban palimpsest reveals how the fragment fostered artistic practices that reconfigured the reception of the past and the material reuse of the city’s contemporary debris. This paper contends that the fragment was reconfigured from a symbol of a lost, whole past into an active agent for constructing a new, although fractured, modernity.

Sam Rose, University of St. Andrews

Depiction in Fragments: David Hockney in the 1960s

In Depiction (1998) Michael Podro argued against any attempt to analytically ‘isolate’ particular aspects of medium and procedure that contribute to depiction. Fundamentally interdependent as individual elements are, ‘remarking on them separately risks narrowing and simplifying attention’. Podro’s words have a timeless finality shorn of context and current debate. But it’s possible that this remark was directed at two contemporaries and friends, Ernst Gombrich and Patrick Maynard. Together, the two had shown and were now further showing that fragmentation was possible. Artists created ‘convincing representation’ through the effects gained via toolkits of artistic devices. And depiction could be profitably discussed through the isolation and analysis of these particular devices.

David Hockney’s work in the early to mid-1960s is sometimes characterised as a ‘new pluralism’: the postmodern or post-historical artist newly freed to pick and choose their style at will. This paper gets more specific about what these pictures were really doing, focusing on Hockney’s self-described concerns with ‘technical approaches’ to depiction and depiction as ‘a formal problem’. The new stylistic freedom, I suggest, was significant in part because it allowed picturing to do a definite and previously foreclosed job: it made possible the breaking up of depiction into fragments, thus exposing and working through the many particular ‘devices’ or ‘tools’ that Hockney would later use to build back up to ‘realistic’ picturing. Drawing on Gombrich, Podro, Maynard and others, I then reconstruct and demonstrate how Hockney’s pictures work through many of these previously unremarked-upon devices.