[1] Session: "Fugitive Visions: Art and the Eidetic Image"

Session Convenors:
Elizabeth Buhe, Institute of Fine Arts (NYU) ebuhenyu.edu
Amy Rahn, Stony Brook University (SUNY) amy.rahnstonybrook.edu

Deadline: 5 November 2018

Eidetic imagery – vivid pictures seen ‘in the mind’s eye’ – has been a powerful and ongoing source of artistic inspiration. Yet, modernist privileging of disembodied vision and positivist opticality has suppressed the realm of the eidetic: an expansive category that includes subjective spiritual, mystical, synesthetic, hallucinatory, and visionary experience.

This panel solicits papers addressing artists past and present who have employed eidetic imagery in the creation or content of their work, as well as from scholars crafting methodological approaches for understanding and historicising artists’ visionary processes. Can art stimulate eidetic experience in its beholders? How might a hermeneutics of the eidetic contribute to a more expansive art history? How do artists represent the invisible? What perceptual modalities and sensory crossovers are engaged in creating or apprehending such art? Can the highly individual nature of reverie or inner vision paradoxically allow artists to communicate with art’s diverse audiences?

Many art historical moments invite such questions. Prehistoric rock art’s intricate patterning is believed to derive from forms visualised during altered states, while, in the 19th-century, Symbolists instrumentalised individual visions in pursuit of sweeping artistic insight. More recently, Joan Mitchell claimed she painted ‘from remembered landscapes that I carry with me’. Following the work of scholars like Marcia Brennan, Todd Cronan, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, and Martin Jay, this panel invites papers that implement or productively critique methodologies such as affect, feminism, neuroscience, new materialism, and phenomenology to excavate traces of eidetic experience that haunt art’s past, but not yet its history.

To propose a paper
, please email your proposal directly to the session convenors using the contact details above. Provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 25-minute paper (unless otherwise specified), your name, and institutional affiliation. Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper, as it will appear online, in social media and in the printed programme. You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks from the session convenors.

You can find the session webpage here:
https://forarthistory.org.uk/our-work/conference/2019-annual-conference/fugitive-visions-art-and-the-eidetic-image/

Deadline for submissions: Monday 5 November 2018

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[2] Session: "‘Fiction with footnotes’: Writing art history as literary practice"

Session Convenor:
Tilo Reifenstein: t.reifensteinmmu.ac.uk

Deadline: 5 November, 2018

Jaś Elsner’s description of art-historical writing as ekphrasis plants the practice firmly in the purview of poetry, literature or fiction, though be it, in his words, ‘fiction with footnotes’. A similar propinquity between the creative work of the artist and that of the historian has been noted, among others, by Boris Groys, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes and Hayden White, who have indicated that far from being ignobled by the fiction tag, the discipline is perhaps ennobled to deliver on the irreducible multiplicity of its ‘objects’ which hitherto sat uneasily with a scientistic pursuit of linearity, resolution and teleological determination that also treats writing as a neutral expedient. Yet art historians seem reticent to embrace their literary selves as though it is safer on the side of the putative objectivity of language.

The aim of the session is to develop the characteristics of art-historical writing as a practice that necessarily not only negotiates the boundary of visual and verbal, but also manifests a literary fiction produced in the discursive framing of knowledge and meaning-making about artefacts, subjects, processes and their historic contexts. The session invites theoretical and philosophical approaches, as well as case studies, to writing as an epistemic practice of art-historical research. Conceptualisations of art history’s writing practice in view of fact, fiction and knowledge production, and critical readings of art history as Wissenschaft will help in framing the discipline as a practice that not only has to contend with political, institutional and ideological demands but also those of writing itself.

Please email your paper proposals direct to the session convenor: Tilo Reifenstein (t.reifensteinmmu.ac.uk) by 5 Nov 2018. Provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 25-minute paper, your name and institutional affiliation (if any). Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper because it will appear online, in social media and in the printed programme. You will receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks from the session convenor.

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[3] Session: "Recovering the Ritual Object in Medieval and Early Modern Art"

Session Convenors:
Dr Catriona Murray, University of Edinburgh, c.a.murrayed.ac.uk
Dr Halle O'Neal, University of Edinburgh, halle.o'nealed.ac.uk

Deadline: 5 November 2018

In the medieval and early modern worlds, ritual served as a legitimising process, a dynamic mechanism for mediating a transference or transformation of status. Objects played an essential part in this performative practice, charged with symbolism and invested with power. Distanced from their original contexts, however, these artefacts have often been studied for their material properties, disconnecting function from form and erasing layers of meaning. The relationships between ritual objects and ritual participants were identity-forming, reflecting and shaping belief structures. Understanding of how these objects were experienced as well as viewed, is key to revealing their significances.

This panel intends to relocate ritual objects at the centre of both religious and secular ceremonies, interrogating how they served as both signifiers and agents of change. The organisers specialise in early modern British art and medieval Japanese art, and so we invite proposals from a range of geographical perspectives, in order to investigate this subject from a cross-cultural perspective. We particularly encourage papers which discuss medieval and early modern ritual objects - broadly defined - as social mediators.

Issues for discussion include but are not limited to:
- Recovery of the everyday in ritual objects
- Embodiment
- Audiences and interactions
- Performativity
- Ritual object as emotional object
- Spatiality and temporality
- Re-use, recycling, removal
- Illusion and imagination
- Memory
- Thing theory

Please email your paper proposal direct to the session convenors, details above. Provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 25-minute paper, your name and institutional affiliation (if any).

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[4] Session: "Critical Pedagogies in the Neoliberal University: Expanding the feminist field in the 21st Century Art School"

Session Convenor:
Hilary Robinson: h.robinsonlboro.ac.uk

Deadline: 5 November 2018

Critiques of the neoliberal University are ubiquitous. Research is instrumentalized towards the production of quantifiable outcomes for the economy. Academic learning environments are evaluated for effective delivery of enterprising, if uncritical, citizens, into the global marketplace. Student fees and debt form a virtuous loop with employability agendas. To deliver its objectives, the corporate University speeds up performance demands upon permanent and precarious faculty colleagues.

Feminisms have long intervened in economies of knowledge production, asking critical questions concerning authority, inclusivity, and the role of education in empowerment and political change. What feminist pedagogies can we develop and maintain in the neoliberal corporate University? How can feminist reflexivity, creativity and aesthetics counter the anaesthetizing effects of education-as-commodity for ‘student-consumers’? Can we develop responsible, responsive, critically affirmative knowledge projects though learning and teaching? How can we foster collaboration, connection, inter- and cross-disciplinary feminist creativity and thought in the academy? How can feminist pedagogies function within neoliberal universities while also offering spaces for critique? How does money work in feminist-friendly ‘alternative art schools’ – who can afford to study, and who cleans the toilets? What are the pre-figurative or alternative practices? How can the “long march through the institutions” (Dutschke c.1970) function as transformative experience rather than as co-option or assimilation? If “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde, 1979) how can we undo, while remaking, pedagogies, and not fail ourselves as students and as academics? Is it sometimes OK to ‘go slow’?

We welcome proposals that critique, theorise, propose, and strategize towards environments that enact inclusive feminist pedagogies.
Marsha Meskimmon, Loughborough University M.G.Meskimmonlboro.ac.uk
Hilary Robinson, Loughborough University H.Robinsonlboro.ac.uk

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About the Conference:
The Association for Art History's Annual Conference showcases current research and critical debate about art history and visual culture. It takes place over 3 days throughout the UK, bringing together current research and critical debate about art, art history and visual culture.
The Annual conference is an opportunity to keep up to date with emerging research, hear leading keynotes, broaden networks and exchange ideas. It attracts over 500 delegates, speakers and publishers each year. Members of the Association for Art History get reduced conference rates.