Andrea Bubenik: 'Follow the Snail: Serious Jokes and Play in Renaissance Art'
Monash University’s annual Margaret Plant Lecture in Art History for 2023, Follow the Snail: Serious Jokes and Play in Renaissance Art presented by Dr Andrea Bubenik.
This lecture will conceptualise Renaissance play, and explore the games, wit, jokes, and subversive potential of early modern prints and broadsheets stemming from central Europe circa 1450-1700. We will see how artists challenged definitions of low/high art, invented pasts, and imagined other worlds. The assemblage of visuals includes costumes and masks, absurd architectural forms, and a fascination with the grotesque and spectacle. Existing in media traditionally denounced as crude or inferior, these popular cultural forms come accompanied by a history of laughter. Yet there is also a seriousness of purpose to these images, which are full of social and political implications. As we shall see, a humble snail can be a vector for thought, and enable, as Günter Grass put it “pauses in which to feel strange.”
About the speaker
Andrea Bubenik is an expert in Renaissance and Baroque Art, and the continued reception of early modern visual culture. She is a Senior Lecturer in Art History in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland. Her research interests include early modern printmaking, links between art and science, court cultures and collecting, and histories of reception for both iconic and lesser known works of art.
Her books include The Persistence of Melancholia (editor, 2019), Perspectives on Wenceslaus Hollar (co-edited with Anne Thackray, 2016), and Reframing Albrecht Dürer (2013). She was the curator of the exhibitions Ecstasy: Baroque and Beyond (2017) and Five Centuries of Melancholia (2014), both held at the UQ Art Museum.
About Margaret Plant and the Annual Lecture in Art History
The Margaret Plant Annual Lecture in Art History is coordinated by the Art History & Theory program in the Department of Fine Art, Monash Art, Design and Architecture and the Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA.
Margaret Plant is Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at Monash University. Plant began her teaching career at the University of Melbourne in 1962 as a tutor in the Department of Fine Arts. She then accepted an appointment at RMIT University in 1968 as Senior Lecturer in the History of Art—the first academic appointment of an art historian within an Australian art school. Plant has a long and distinguished association with Monash University as Professor of Visual Arts (1982–96) and Emeritus Professor from 1996 onward.
The Margaret Plant Annual Lecture in Art History was established at Monash University in 2018. Previous speakers include Erika Wolf (Consultant, Ne boltai! Collection of Propaganda Art, Prague, 2022) Ming Tiampo (Professor of Art History, Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, 2021), Christina Barton (writer, editor, educator and Director, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2019), and James Meyer (Curator, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2018).
Image: Heinrich Aldegrever (1502-1555/61), Design for a Candelabra Grotesque, 1550, Engraving, 6.8 x 5.1 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Phyllis Massar, 2011, Accession number 2012.136.783