[1] At the Expositions: An Art History of National Displays of Culture, Technology, Design

Victoria L. Rovine, University of Florida and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Please send proposals to: vrovineufl.edu

From the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, expositions and world’s fairs were presented throughout Europe, North America, and elsewhere. These multimedia events incorporated architecture, fine art, performance, design, fashion, and a variety of mass media. They were key instruments for the projection of national identities. As extraordinarily prominent visual expressions, the fairs provide material for a wide range of art historical analysis. Proposals may address the fairs as works of art, as political statements, or as museums of culture, arts, and technology. What were the artistic impacts, intended and unintended, of these governmental celebrations? How did these events use the arts to depict national identities? How did their presentation of the non-Western “other” shape public opinion, and how did the arts of these colonized cultures figure in their presentation? How did artists respond to the displays of technological and industrial advances at the expositions? And what was left out of these celebrations of national achievement?

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[2] In the Field: Artists’ Use and Misuse of Social Science since 1960

Organized by Catherine Spencer (University of St Andrews) and Ruth Erickson (University of Pennsylvania). Email: catherine.spencerst-andrews.ac.uk and rutheesas.upenn.edu

Two simultaneous turns occurred in the 1960s and 1970s: a social turn in the arts and a cultural turn in the social sciences. Although vitally important to multiple intellectual histories, the transformative overlaps between the visual arts, sociology, and anthropology are rarely explored in depth. They have informed artistic and research practice from the 1960s to the present, shaping conceptual art, institutional critique, social art practice, new-media art, and curatorial strategies. We invite papers that examine artistic appropriations of theories, methods, and ways of visualizing data from sociology and anthropology, and interrogate their ramifications for disciplinary boundaries. How have artists in the field used and misused the social sciences? In what ways have they assumed or subverted the sociological gaze to negotiate gendered, national, and neocolonial perspectives? What are the consequences of reconceiving established categories like land art and public art as social science enterprises?

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[3] Unfolding the Enlightenment

Chairs: Alyce Mahon, University of Cambridge (am414cam.ac.uk) and Nebahat Avcioglu, Hunter College, City University of New York (navcioglhunter.cuny.edu).

What was the value of the Enlightenment for the artist, and how have artists responded to it since? While the Enlightenment is a well-known critical and historical paradigm, associated with an established set of ideas and objects in science, philosophy, literature, and art, this panel asks how we might go beyond existing formulations by seeking to understand the Enlightenment in terms of the expression of flexibility and hybridity in non-canonical art forms such as costume albums, carnets de voyages, livres d'artiste, and performance art. From the late eighteenth century to the present day, artists have explored the Enlightenment and its legacy in various media and historical and geographical contexts. They have challenged and undermined its obsession with knowledge, truth, and classification and exploited its preoccupation with the relationship of ethics to aesthetics, the private to the public, art to the state, and the collector to the museum. We welcome proposals which aim to ask what forms have been taken by these representations of the Enlightenment and its legacy, and what insights they have offered.