It was exactly 3 years ago, on the 25th of January 2018, that the international conference ‘The Icon as Cultural Model’ kicked off with a wonderful key note lecture by prof. Ann Rigney (Utrecht University). What followed were two inspiring days, during which a diversity of speakers presented many interesting examples of, and approaches to, the modelling function of the icon as an artistic, religious, political and commercial symbol.
The Icons-conference feels like yesterday and at the same time half a lifetime away, because in 2018 we could not imagine that a global pandemic would inflict the world as it does now, nor would we even think about organizing such an event wholly online – as was the case last week, with the Open University’s follow-up conference ‘Cultural Perceptions of Safety’.
Today, I am more than happy to announce that the conference proceedings, entitled The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons, are to be published by Amsterdam University Press very soon.
The volume offers a comprehensive overview of the existing conceptualizations of the icon and demonstrates how the concept can be fruitfully applied in cultural studies’ research. It includes chapters on, in the Western world, well-known media icons such as Brigitte Bardot, on political icons such as Lenin and on iconic national objects such as the Japanese tea bowl. There is a chapter on ‘iconic city cinema’ and how to use movies to encode geopolitics, and another one on what we can call a ‘subsequent icon’, the chest-nut tree in the garden of Anne Frank, that became an icon on its own, thus renewing the memory of the icon Anne Frank itself. But also chapters that focus more on processes of iconization: such as the role of museum exhibits in the construction of the ‘narrative’ accompanying the image and the complex question how, within the rather fixed, static iconic representation, there can be made room for new perspectives and meanings.
The volume is part of AUP’s Heritage and Memory Series and can be pre-ordered via their website.