The year 2015 witnessed a number of exhibitions and conferences devoted to James Gillray’s bicentenary and the artist’s graphic work. But Gillray after Gillray is a study day aimed at discussing Gillray’s posterity and visual heritage across several areas of British and European culture in the course of a century.
British caricaturists frequently claim to work in the wake of Gillray’s satirical spirit (Ralph Steadman, Gerald Scarfe, Martin Rowson, Steve Bell) and as such manifest their debt to the artist’s approach to the body and to politics. Other artistic forms, on the other hand, may be derived from the Georgian era but in a less obvious manner, for instance, The Chapman Brothers’ envisioning of Capricios is indebted to Goya’s series, but the title Like a Dog Returns to its Vomit twice appears to be closer to motifs such as digestive discomforts and uncontrolled regurgitation recurrently exploited by Gillray in his prints and drawings.
Looking at graphic afterlives and avatars of Gillray’s caricatures and his particularly vitriolic sense of satire is also an opportunity to extend current critical views from editorial cartooning and contemporary art onto a whole range of satirical forms in mass media. Issues that may be raised, though not exclusively so, may range from art-historical approaches to case studies of post Georgian era reception.
Submissions are invited that engage with examples of graphic satire dating from any point across the last 250 years and that address the following questions, among others:

- What traces of Gillray can be identified in contemporary painting, installation art, video or even TV ?
- How can we engage with the notion of morbid comic as for instance demonstrated in the works of the Young British Artists.
- public space and the aesthetics of graphic satire
- politeness, decorum and Rude Britannia from 1790 to nowadays
- British tabloids as part of Gillray’s influence and heritage
- what exactly is « rude » in British visual and mass media culture ?
- how far can Gillray been viewed as a founding father of a specific approach to visual satire
- art, visual satire as something deliberatly spectacular and shocking
- art, commerce and visual satire then and now

Please send proposals (of no more than 250 words) for 20-minute papers to Brigitte Friant-Kessler et Morgan Labar (b.friantfree.fr et morganlabargmail.com) before 15 October 2015. This study day will be held in French and English.

Brigitte FRIANT-KESSLER
Maître de conférences en langues et cultures anglophones
CALHISTE EA 4343
Université de Valenciennes
Brigitte.Friant-Kessleruniv-valenciennes.fr
ou b.friantfree.fr

Morgan LABAR
Doctorant contractuel en Histoire de l’art (ED441)
HiCSA, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
morganlabargmail.com