[1] The Tool: Cultural Expressions, Histories, Rhetoric, and Agency

From: Francesco Freddolini <francesco.freddoliniuregina.ca>
Date: 06.07.2017

Chairs: Francesco Freddolini, Luther College, University of Regina, francesco.freddoliniuregina.ca; Carmen L. Robertson, University of Regina, carmen.robertsonuregina.ca

When addressing the materiality and technical qualities of artworks across a wide variety of Western and non-Western discourses, as well as across periodizations, the materials — e.g. oil, tempera, acrylic, marble, bronze, wood, glass beads, hide, digital media — are often the only element mentioned and explored, while the tools that shaped those materials are rarely investigated as an inherent part of the making process. This session aims to bring the tool — e.g. brush, chisel, drill, spatula, hand — to the fore of discourses on materiality and the making of art. When we look at objects through the lens of the tools that shaped their existence, significant questions arise: How does a tool contribute to or construct meaning through the effects it produces? How do its traces, visibility, or obliteration contribute to or articulate style? How did artists choose, design, or modify their tools and why? How have tools been described in historical and/or historiographical texts? How did tools influence artists’ practice, then and now, and across cultures? The tool, as a vehicle for material analysis, has the potential to break down Western hierarchies, invite fresh ways to consider materiality, and provide a productive lens to explore art making and its technologies over space and time. We seek papers that explore the agency of the tools, their rhetoric — intended as their capacity to articulate systems of meaning and knowledge — and their histories, and we are especially interested in contributions investigating both Western and non-Western traditions, across a wide chronological span.
Selected papers may be considered for publication in a forthcoming edited volume.

Paper Proposals are due August 14 to francesco.freddoliniuregina.ca and carmen.robertsonuregina.ca

Submission Guidelines: http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf

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[2] Breaking Down Barriers: The Visual Culture of the Border in Late Antiquity

From: Laura Veneskey <veneskeywfu.edu>
Date: 06.07.2017

The visual culture of Late Antiquity (c. 200-700 CE), the period during which the polytheist Roman state transformed into Orthodox Byzantium, has often been considered in terms of large-scale developments within the empire, driven by shifting religious preferences and associated political, social, and cultural changes, or in terms of the relationship between center and periphery. However, while scholars of Byzantine and later medieval art have long been interested in artistic interactions across borders, between Byzantium and its neighbors, historians of late antique art have been less focused on the border’s role in defining, limiting, or diffusing artistic and architectural forms. In light of the contemporary rise of nationalism and growing anxiety over the permeability and permanence of borders, this panel aims to investigate the role of the border in the art and architecture of the late antique Mediterranean and beyond. To what extent did borders act as barriers to the movement of people and ideas or instead facilitate artistic interaction between different populations? Did borders strengthen or weaken “national” artistic preferences and tastes? How did visual culture contribute to the formulation or performance of identity within contested areas or frontier zones? Did cultural boundaries operate in the same way as political ones? Papers in this panel might consider the role of borders or frontiers in shaping artistic interaction in the Mediterranean region in the period; objects or buildings produced in border regions; artists, objects, raw materials, or ideas in motion; or artworks as diplomatic gifts.

Deadline: 14 August 2017

Please send proposals to Sean V. Leatherbury (Bowling Green State University, sleatherburygmail.com) and Laura Veneskey (Wake Forest University, veneskeywfu.edu). For full submission guidelines, see: http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf

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[3] Eccentric Images in the Early Modern World

From: Marta Faust <marta_faustumail.ucsb.edu>
Date: 07.07.2017

Trompe l’oeil paintings, anamorphic portraits, anthropomorphic landscapes, pictorial stones, reversible heads, and composite figures are doubly eccentric. Often dismissed as curiosities and aberrations, they have been marginalized and de-centered within art history. Frequently, they demand that the viewer take unorthodox positions, looking at them from extreme angles from more than one physical location or shifting from one perceptual mode to another. Rather than trivializing such pictures as mere games, virtuosic trivia, and forms of entertainment, this session invites papers that explore how such eccentric images explore issues concerning perception, artifice, and both human and natural creativity. What different modes of artistic production and perception do they require? What questions do they pose about cognition, viewing experiences, and alternate subject positions? What questions do they raise about the role of viewers in constituting the work of art? How do images that seem to change before one’s eyes engage with period notions of paradox, volatility, and mutable forms? How do they establish conditions for a more self-aware beholder? We welcome submissions addressing any aspect of eccentric imagery, from any cultural perspective, in the long early modern period (ca. 1400–1800 CE).

Send paper abstract (single paragraph, 250 words maximum), paper title, and abbreviated CV including mailing address, email address, phone number, and institutional affiliation (2 pp. maximum) to the Session Chair, Mark A. Meadow, University of California Santa Barbara, (meadowarthistory.ucsb.edu); and Co-Chair, Marta Faust, University of California Santa Barbara, (marta_faustumail.ucsb.edu) by August 14, 2017. Panelists must be current members of CAA from Sept. 1, 2017 through Feb. 24, 2018.
Full submission guidelines:
http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf

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[4] Re-Staging Exhibitions: Past, Present, Future?

From: Nicola Foster <n.fosteropen.ac.uk>
Date: 08.07.2017

The turn of the twenty-first century is witnessing a growing number of exhibitions which explicitly claim to repeat and/or re-stage earlier exhibitions; for example, the 1989 China Avant Garde (restaged in Berlin 1993); the 1937 Degenerate Art (re-staged LA in 1991 and NY in 2014), and many others that are less politically visible, including historical (medievalist) retrospectives. In re-staging exhibitions curators acknowledge earlier curatorial practices in order to adopt a critical approach for examining how these exhibitions re-construct, re-write and re-present the past. The methodological model was established by Amelia Jones’s study of re-enacted performance-art exhibitions in her book Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (2012), showing how reinterpretation of the past is always productive for both the present and the future. Hans Ulrich Obrist insists that “there is an entire history of unrealised art institutions, which in their dormant state have the potential to inform what an institution of the twenty-first century could be.” His use of Edouard Glissant’s theory of the museum as mondialite (globality) argues that history could be seen through the model of 'creolisation'– the past is not only the already-narrated, but also that which has been lost/ignored in existing accounts. This session invites explorations into curatorial practices which acknowledge earlier exhibitions and therefore seek to repeat and reinterpret the past – we question how the re-staging of earlier exhibitions in different geopolitical spaces might highlight curatorial practices that were once perceived as peripheral due to cultural/political differences and to changing historical/political narratives.
Abstracts should be sent to the Chairs:
Jane Davidson - janechindavidsonalumni.reed.edu and Nicola Foster - n.fosteropen.ac.uk

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[5] Molds as Cultural and Material Mediators

From: Hannah Wirta Kinney <hannah.kinneyhistory.ox.ac.uk>
Date: 09.07.2017

Molds, used in a variety of artistic and artisanal practices, are understood as a means of creating an exact likeness. Through the use of the mold the maker is able to pull forth an (supposedly) unmediated image of a subject that already exists — the wrinkled face of a deceased person, the scales of a lizard, or the ornament of an ancient monument. But beyond the transmission of the form mediated by the mold, the touch of the mold to the subject it imprints has been seen in different historical moments as having particularly potent social power in not only capturing the subject’s likeness, but also its interior qualities. In the case of death masks, for instance, the mold that imprinted the face was also seen to facilitate the transfer of their essence into the cast positive, thereby making the absent person present. By freezing the fleeting subject, the mold thus creates temporal stasis. It is due to molds that we are able to study plaster casts of ancient monuments that have since been destroyed or worn away by time. Considering molds’ social, and not simply practical, function therefore opens up broader questions about mimesis, temporality, memory, and presence, as well as the influence of likeness and creativity upon them. This session seeks papers that explore the mold as more than a tool, but instead a means of making that is integral to the way in which the objects that result from it functioned and were understood.

Deadline for submissions is August 14 by email to Hannah Wirta Kinney, University of Oxford, Hannah.Kinneyhistory.ox.ac.uk; Emily Knight, University of Oxford, Emily.Knighthistory.ox.ac.uk

For complete instructions on how to submit see: http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf

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[6] Art and Criticism in the Anthropocene

From: Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard <galoisaic.edu>
Date: 10.07.2017

Art criticism is currently at the forefront of a global revolution — the demise of art history as the central epistemological optic on art, combined with the critical fragmentation brought by visual culture, has enabled speculative realism to reshape art criticism as a new, politically charged tool. At present, posthumanist subjectivities appear indissolubly intertwined with capitalist forces and biosystems that are perceived from non-anthropocentric perspectives. Therefore, the reconfiguration of methodologies, approaches, and optics demanded by this new ontological turn situates art criticism as a productive, multidisciplinary forum by which to address challenges posed by the Anthropocene. This panel seeks to gather a number of original submissions from scholars and artists whose professional engagement revolves around the sociopolitical dimensions defining art in the current stage of the Anthropocene. This pivotal concept is leading artists, as well as art historians and art critics, to reconsider the roles played by capitalism and ecosystems in the reconfiguration of non-anthropocentric positions. More specifically, this panel will gather global perspectives on art criticism’s new political implications, showing how experimentation and multidisciplinarity map out new aesthetic territories; how new anthropogenic perspectives can help reconfigure concepts in art as a non-anthropocentric means to explore human/non-human relations; examining the effort and trajectory of criticism as an interface that can flex beyond its traditionally linguistic focus, thereby surpassing the acknowledged strategies of Western aesthetics; and exposing the ethical implications of cultural production by unpacking networks of material and socio-economic accountability as the imperative dimension which art criticism must attend.

Chair(s): Giovanni Aloi, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, galoisaic.edu; Caroline Picard, The Green Lantern Press, carolinesector2337.com