[1]
From: Jennifer Walden <jen.waldentinyworld.co.uk>
Subject: CFP: Art History Matters

University of Edinburgh Scotland, UK, April 7 - 09, 2016
Deadline: Nov 9, 2015

Academic Session:
Art History Matters

Jennifer Walden, University of Portsmouth, jenny.waldenport.ac.uk
Veronica Davies, The Open University and Chair of Freelance &
Independents’ Special Interest Group

Following the critique of art history as an ideological project, with the
political urgency of the Marxist, feminist and postcolonial interventions
in the latter 1970s and 1980s and later philosophical discursive turns,
there comes a reawakening of the discipline’s work as itself material, to
be understood in terms of its own affective force. This is evidenced by a
desire to foreground, often alongside practitioners, ‘creative’ art
history practice, stretching the weave of its texts, expressing and
performing encounters with its objects (see Art History Special Issue
34/2/April 2011 Creative Writing and Art History and Courtauld Art History
Research Students’ Group: Performing Art History events 2010/11) or to
reveal the tension between a discourse of ‘images’ and stubborn/elusive
material objects (see Art History Special Issue 36/3/June 2013 The Clever
Object) and by a (re) casting of art historical work in the wake of a turn
to a new materialism, twisting from an emphasis on (de)constructivist
characteristics towards the material emergence of its knowledge and affect.
This is also provoked by the insistence coming from the practices of making
art that there is an embodied material practice at stake as a form of
knowledge which a hitherto preoccupation with signification and
representation may not fully grasp. This session will explore how art
historical research and writing has worked and presently works as material
practice. Papers are welcome which critically examine examples pushing the
discipline’s methodological boundaries with materialist and creative
urgencies, as contributions to these understandings of art historical
mattering.
Email paper proposals to the session convenor(s) by 9 November 2015.
see more at
http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session4

[2]
From: James Bloom <james.bloomcentre.edu>
Subject: CFP: "The Artist as Historian" Session at AAH 2016 Annual
Conference

Edinburgh, October 8 - November 10, 2015
Deadline: Nov 9, 2015

The Artist As Historian

Convenors:

James J Bloom, Centre College, james.bloomcentre.edu
Amy Reed Frederick, Centre College, amy.frederickcentre.edu

This session seeks to examine the scope and range of artistic activities
that can be construed as historical enterprise. Although history is
conventionally understood as the product of scholarly discourse, we invite
papers that recognise in the historical engagements of artists the
possibility of an alternative model of history making. To cite just a few
examples, Jan van Scorel, Keeper of the Vatican Antiquities and celebrated
16th-century painter in his own right, was perhaps the first of many
artists to have restored the Ghent Altarpiece (though his historicising
efforts in both capacities have been broadly ignored); William Morris
reportedly pursued extensive research into the production of medieval
manuscripts (an historical exercise that has been dismissed as medievalist
fantasy); and while it is well known that Pablo Picasso reproduced
techniques and motifs won from the study of Rembrandt’s etchings,
Picasso’s attentions have not been assessed for their historicist
implications. While obviously different from traditional scholarly
understandings of historical representation, can we yet discern or
distinguish a discrete critical value in such explorations?

We welcome studies that identify instances from any historical moment or
cultural geography in which artists and architects explicitly set
themselves the task of excavating the past. These might include – but are
not limited to – architectural reconstructions, pictorial or sculptural
restorations, and explorations of facture (copying, forgery, appropriation)
that are self-consciously historicising. Ultimately, we hope to
collectively consider how an examination of artists’ conceptions of
historical representation might affect our understanding of history itself.

Email paper propsals to the session convenor(s) by 9 November 2015.
- See more at:
http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session28#sthash.pcPrhOwg.dpuf

[3]
From: Kirsten Lloyd <Kirsten.Lloyded.ac.uk>
Subject: CFP: Labours of Love, Works of Passion: The social (re)production
of art workers from industrialisation to globalisation

Edinburgh, Scotland, April 7 - 09, 2016
Deadline: Nov 9, 2015

Convenors:

Kirsten Lloyd, University of Edinburgh, kirsten.lloyded.ac.uk
Angela Dimitrakaki,Univesity of Edinburgh, angela.dimitrakakigmail.com

A term that emerged in feminist thinking in the 1970s, ‘social
reproduction’ refers to the ‘labour of love’ traditionally performed
for free by women in the home. Despite the crucial role it plays in
sustaining and replenishing the working population, this work is usually
excluded from accounts of ‘production proper’ and the economy at large.
In viewing its worth as other than economic, this labour of love connects
with accounts of artistic labour which is also seen as simply
‘self-rewarding’.

Arguably, the values associated with a gendered sphere during the rise of
modern art and 19th-century industrialisation have transferred to artistic
production within the 21st century finance- and service-led economy. Is
art, then, the exemplary case study in the socio-economic order of
feminised labour widely encountered in globalisation? How might we connect
this to the thesis that artistic critique led to precarious labour (The New
Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello 2005 [1999])? And, do the
above compel a rethinking into what connects modern and contemporary art?

This session invites papers that investigate the possibility of scripting
an alternative history of art of the last 200 years. We propose that the
concept of social reproduction must be embedded in the discipline’s
critical lexicon for the 21st century, especially as Marxist, feminist and
decolonial art histories are beginning to articulate an urgently required
bigger picture. By bringing into dialogue a range of approaches to the
thematic, methodological and research implications of such a move, this
session will also test art history’s potential as part of a militant left
humanities.

Email paper propsals to the session convenor(s) by 9 November 2015.
See more at: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session17