[1]
From: Hanna Hölling <hanna.hoellingbgc.bard.edu>
Date: Mar 23, 2015
Subject: CFP: The Explicit Material: On the Intersections of Cultures of Curation and Conservation (Washington DC, 3-6 Feb 2016)

The Explicit Material: On the Intersections of Cultures of Curation and Conservation

In recent years, research and education initiatives have emerged that strive to combine perspectives of conservation with other humanities’ disciplines in the study of material culture. These are based on the belief that such cross-pollination can spawn new insights and contribute to our knowledge of both the object and the culture that produced it.

This session aims to explore the relationships between curatorial and conservation philosophies across a range of institutions, focusing on the ways in which these apparently divergent fields shape thinking about—and the practices of—collecting, exhibiting, and caring for objects. The “explicit material” approach (Latin “explicare:” “to unfold,” “unravel, “explain,” or to make visible) advances a way of thinking about the materiality of objects as they enter our collections and undergo a transformation from their previous context(s) to a museological one.

Our interest in conjoining curatorial expertise with conservation knowledge and the long tradition of combining hand and eye sensitivity to materials and technical processes derives from the conviction that insufficient attention has been paid to the benefits of interdisciplinary thinking about the materiality of objects. Conservation emerged as a field profoundly preoccupied with the nature of artworks. However, with the development of increasingly sophisticated tools of examination and analysis, the primacy of the object and the physical constitution appear to have gained ground in both academic und museological discourses. In fact, conservation has now become recognized as a field that has much to contribute to the humanities given the greater knowledge its findings afford us concerning how humans shape and use materials and objects.

This session invites an interdisciplinary dialogue between people already engaged in the museological discourse, and those willing to establish links between the fields of conservation and curation. Participants may include conservators, curators and academics including art historians and theorists, anthropologists, as well as makers and shapers of materials. We regard curation as a set of philosophies and practices engaged with collecting, contextualising and displaying objects. Conservation, in turn, is understood here as a field engaged in revealing and documenting evidence of the life of an object and ensuring its continuation on both physical and conceptual levels.

We welcome proposals on topics such as display, continuation, and archiving of artworks, and especially presentations concerned with aspects related to collecting, exhibiting and preserving of recent art and artefacts, “digital objects,” and performance.

Please, send an abstract (1-2 pages, double spaced), a letter of interest, a CAA submission form and current CV by May 8 to organizers: Hanna B. Hölling, hanna.hoellingbgc.bard.edu and Francesca Bewer Francesca_Bewerharvard.edu

CAA individual membership is required of all participants.

For general guidelines for speakers, see:
http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf

[2]
From: Elyse Speaks <espeaksnd.edu>
Date: Mar 26, 2015
Subject: CFP: Session at CAA (Washington DC, 3-6 Feb 16)

Housework: contemporary art and the domestic

Domestic spaces, objects, and materials have traditionally been regarded as ranking relatively low on any aesthetic scale. Yet the home and its trappings have increasingly emerged as subject and source for contemporary artists and practices around the globe. In part, this may have to do with the way that the domestic realm has increasingly been theorized as a site of subversion and resistance among marginal cultures. This session will look at how a use and consideration of the domestic has underwritten the practice of contemporary art in diverse and contradictory ways. Why it is relevant to employ the domestic as source and subject now? What might the use of everyday materials have to do with gender today? Consideration might be given to the domestic in multiple forms such as amateur practices, the adaptation of hobbies, and the employment of domestic objects, fragments, and materials. Or one might examine the appropriation of domestic acts, situations, and behaviors. This panel seeks to examine all papers that conceive of the domestic and/or the home in the broadest sense as space or concept.

For more information:
http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf

Please send an abstract (1-2 pages, double spaced) and current CV with contact information to the chair, Elyse Speaks, University of Notre Dame, espeaksnd.edu. Please also remember that anyone who participates in your session MUST be an individual CAA member.

[3]
From: Assaf Pinkus <pinkusaspost.tau.ac.il>
Date: Mar 27, 2015
Subject: CFP: Session at CAA 2016: "Thinking through the Body": The Passion of the Martyrs in Medieval Art

“Thinking through the Body”: The Passion of the Martyrs in Medieval Art

In his groundbreaking works on somaesthetics, Richard Shusterman challenges the nature of sensory experience in knowledge, memory, behavior, and self-fashioning, overcoming traditional dualisms about mind and body. Taking this approach, the session seeks papers that reflect on sensory and bodily comprehension and somatic response to medieval artworks and the ways in which these were meant to be physically experienced. It aims to examine Passion representations—the Pietà, the tortured bodies of Christ, of female and male martyrs, and of victims of violent behavior—in relation to the viewers’ bodily involvement. How do the materials (stone, wood, pigment, color, precious stones,) scale, and media of the artwork evoke somatic experience? How were late medieval artworks devised to stimulate the senses and cognitive processes or to evoke eroticism? What is the relationship between visual and material excess and viewer perception?

Please send abstracts to Mati Meyer, matimopenu.ac.il and Assaf Pinkus pinkusastauex.tau.ac.il by May 8, 2015. All participants must become members of CAA. For format, guidelines, eligibility, etc., consult the CAA website:
http://www.collegeart.org/proposals/

Assaf Pinkus, Tel Aviv University
Mati Meyer, The Open University