The journal Perspective : actualité en histoire de l’art will explore, in its 2025 – 1 issue, the relations between labor and art history, understood both as a scholarly discipline and the material under study.
That which we collectively term “labor” is today the subject of rapid changes and fierce debates which, in an often caricatural way, pitches those for whom labor is a value in and of itself (work or else laze about) against those who question the value of labor: Which type of work is useful to society? Are the conditions acceptable where labor is active? Is labor a form of domination ()? Posing these questions from an art-historical point of view allows us to start from scratch. This volume suggests that we study the relationships between labor and art history along four axes:
- The debate over art as labor: How has art history participated; effected changes in its vocabulary; and interacted with those artists, art critics, or philosophers who played a role in this debate?
- Art as a process of production: Which strands of art history have turned their attention more to the production of art than to its reception and through what type of theoretical, methodological, and ideological apparatus?
- The iconography of labor: What contributions does art history furnish, through the analysis of images, to our knowledge of the realities or representations of labor? What does it borrow from or contribute to other humanistic disciplines that study labor?
- Art history as labor: What are the material conditions in which art history is produced? How do these conditions vary in relation to individual, local, and/or historical situations?
Taking care to ground reflections in a historiographic, methodological, or epistemological perspective, please send your proposals (an abstract of 2,000 to 3,000 characters/350 to 500 words, a working title, a short bibliography on the subject, and a biography limited to a few lines) to the editorial email address (revue-perspective@inha.fr) no later than December 11, 2023. Perspective handles translations; projects will be considered by the committee regardless of language. Authors whose proposals are accepted will be informed of the decision by the editorial committee in January 2024, while articles will be due on May 15, 2024. Submitted texts (between 25,000 and 45,000 characters/ 4,500 or 7,500 words, depending on the intended project) will be formally accepted following an anonymous peer review process.
