WORKSHOP: Choreographies of Invention: Cognition and Embodiment in the Arti del Disegno

Kooperation des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte mit dem Max-Planck-Institut Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz und der Evangelischen Akademie Tutzing.

• Zeit: Freitag, 31. Oktober bis Sonntag, 2. November 2014
• Ort: Evangelische Akademie Tutzing

As the various arts stirred from its exercises, disegno belongs to the domain of movement. In the act of investing matter with form, the artist’s body can be seen to vary between routines of repetitive movement and motions of improvised interventions of these routines. The channelling of the interior idea into the exterior of material space demands the body to move in search of kinetic tension that calibrates motion into form. Yet while art historians have long since agreed that the role of the body linking the hand and the mind of the artist remains understudied, while at the same time our notion of disegno has been over-intellectualised, an overall understanding of somatic agency and its bearing onto the history of the arte del disegno is still lacking.
New insight seems available from the field of choreography as both the art concerned with the somaesthetic structuring of movement into sequences of form, and currently emerging discipline in the study of philosophies of movement.

As a mode of composition, choreography and its preliminary module of etude (small study) underscore the fact that the act of disegno entails the physical acquisition of a set of movements that are learned, rehearsed, and subjected to improvisation. Learning the art of drawing, painting and sculpture the artist internalises the rhythms and imperatives of a choreography of actions into cellular, affective and muscular memory that simultaneously distributes and organises the relationship of movement to perception and signification. As discipline or technology of the trained body, disegno institutionalised the transition from the disorganised movement of creativity to a choreographic knowledge directed towards a process of invention.

Introducing a graphic record of the unfolding of imagination into space, the notational system of the choreographic emerged throughout the same decades in which Italian art theory registered the creative process generated by the link between mind and hand under the semiotic abbreviation of disegno. Attention to this dimension opens the way for an examination of disegno as embodied knowledge and economy of somatic cognition. Drawing from the mind, the artist’s limbs essentially take recourse to a choreographic map inscribed with sequences of kinesthetic stress and ease that allow for the intra-action of the body and the materiality of the artwork. Transferred not only in writing, but in the imitation of movement and gesture, the theory of disegno presents a culturally shaped symbolic order that is appropriated and manipulated by the individual body of the artist, whose kinaesthetic challenges to acculturated behaviour presents a from of agency that displaces patterns of reiterated movement and activates processes of aesthetic transgression.

How do our current concern with somatic cognition correspond to Renaissance reflections of the dynamic connecting the artist’s moto mentale and moto corporale in acts of imagination, imitation and creation? Which were the routines of movement acquired by the artist in the Renaissance workshop, and how would they relate to the period’s concern with the body’s installation in space governed by the rules of perspective? How do processes of kinetic displacement in established values of artistic language relate to aspects of subjectivity and stylistic heritage? The workshop will provide an occasion for an interdisciplinary discussion of these questions by scholars and artists questioning these issues in the fields of art history, dance and movement studies, and philosophy of the mind.