Salons, commonly associated with French literary and philosophical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries, were carried on until quite recently in urban settings.
‘The salonnières were not social climbers but intelligent, self-educated, and educating women who adopted and implemented the values of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters and used them to reshape the salon to their own social intellectual, and educational needs’
The integral role that women played within salons, as salonnières, began to receive greater - and more serious - study in latter parts of the 20th century, with the emergence of a distinctly feminist historiography.[33] The salons, according to Carolyn Lougee, were distinguished by 'the very visible identification of women with salons', and the fact that they played a positive public role in French society.[34] General texts on the Enlightenment, such as Daniel Roche's France in the Enlightenment tend to agree that women were dominant within the salons, but that their influence did not extend far outside of such venues.[35]
A feature that distinguished the salon from the court was its absence of social hierarchy and its mixing of different social ranks and orders.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, "salon[s] encouraged socializing between the sexes [and] brought nobles and bourgeois together".[41] Salons helped facilitate the breaking down of social barriers which made the development of the enlightenment salon possible. In the 18th century, under the guidance of Madame Geoffrin, Mlle de Lespinasse, and Madame Necker, the salon was transformed into an institution of Enlightenment.[42] The enlightenment salon brought together Parisian society, the progressive philosophes who were producing the Encyclopédie, the Bluestockings and other intellectuals to engage in the project of enlightenment.
Recent historiography of the salons has been dominated by Jürgen Habermas' work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (triggered largely by its translation into French, in 1978, and then English, in 1989), which argued that the salons were of great historical importance.
salons were at 'the very heart of the philosophic community' and thus integral to the process of Enlightenment...
The Paris Salon in 1748, and the salon remained a major annual event even after the government withdrew official sponsorship in 1881.
a Salon methodology:
1. From the middle of the 19th century until the 1930s, a lady of the society had to hold her "day", which meant that her salon was opened for visitors in the afternoon once a week, or twice a month. Days were announced in Le Bottin Mondain. The visitor gave his visit cards to the lackey or the maître d'hôtel, and he was accepted or not. Only people having been introduced before could of course enter the salon.
Jewish women called it the 'cultural salon'. he salon allowed Jewish women to establish a venue in their homes in which Jews and non-Jews could meet in relative equality. Like-minded people could study art, literature, philosophy or music together. This handful of educated, acculturated Jewish women could escape the restrictions of their social ghetto. Naturally the women had to be in well-connected families, either to money or to culture. In these mixed gatherings of nobles, high civil servants, writers, philosophers and artists, Jewish salonnières created a radical vehicle for democratisation, providing a context in which patrons and artists freely exchanged ideas. Henriette Lemos Herz, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Dorothea Mendelssohn Schlegel, Amalie Wolf Beer and at least twelve other salonnières achieved fame and admiration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_%28gathering%29
After the Salon:
Guests write on postcards something they have discovered, learned or would like to share, or their perspective of the boat.
Then publish a book made with the postcards and images of the event.
Walking Salons (Artist Mike Nelson, Whits Biennal 2016)
Artist Walks have been devised to explore possible alternatives to artist talks. They can aim to test the proposition that a walking journey with an artist could be as valuable as hearing her or him address a lecture theatre, and that sharing a range of sights and sounds could reveal something that slides and video clips do not.
Each route will culminate at a point along the Medway estuary or river Swale, forming a string of reference points between which the connections between the walks can be contemplated.
Rebecca Solnit “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”
http://mikenelsonartistwalk.tumblr.com/
The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of
thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the
passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance
between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind
is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.
A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was
there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making.
And so one aspect of of the history of walking is the history of
thinking made concrete - for the motions of the mind cannot be traced,
but those of the feet can.
The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets, and almost everyone’s adventures. The bodily history of walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned, as thought they were three characters finally in conversation with together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allow us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.
Walking itself has not changed the world, but walking together has been a rite, tool and reinforcement of the civil society that can stand up to violence, to fear, and to repression. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a viable civil society without the free association and the knowledge of the terrain that comes with walking.
While walking, the body and mind can work together, so that thinking becomes almost a physical, rhythmic act…..each walk moves through space like a thread through fabric, sewing it together into a continuous experience….
Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether hear or read.
Walking…is how the body measures itself against the earth.
Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets, and almost everyone’s adventures. The bodily history of walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned, as thought they were three characters finally in conversation with together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allow us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.
Walking itself has not changed the world, but walking together has been a rite, tool and reinforcement of the civil society that can stand up to violence, to fear, and to repression. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a viable civil society without the free association and the knowledge of the terrain that comes with walking.
While walking, the body and mind can work together, so that thinking becomes almost a physical, rhythmic act…..each walk moves through space like a thread through fabric, sewing it together into a continuous experience….
Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether hear or read.
Walking…is how the body measures itself against the earth.
Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
