[1]
From: Marika Knowles <marika.knowlesgmail.com>
Date: Jul 17, 2017
Subject: CFP: Session at CAA: The French Fragment 1789-1914

Los Angeles, California, February 21 - 24, 2018
Deadline: Aug 14, 2017

The French Fragment, 1789–1914

Chairs: Emily Eastgate Brink (University of Western Australia), emily.brinkuwa.edu.au; and Marika Knowles (Harvard University), marika.knowlesgmail.com.

Deadline: August 14, 2017

In 1979, Henri Zerner and Charles Rosen launched their influential analysis of Romantic aesthetics with a description of the Romantic fragment as “both metaphor and metonymy.” In France, post-Revolutionary artists gravitated towards visions of ruins, butchered bodies, papery sketches, and other manifestations of human transience. Evolving out of this love of pieces, fragments took on a variety of forms throughout the nineteenth century. Romantic artists responded to the spectacle of ‘bric-a-brac’ salvaged from aristocratic interiors, medieval sculptures loosed from cult settings, and collections of ethnographic curiosities comprised of objects from ‘elsewhere.’ Eventually, as artists turned to the spectacle of modern life, the fragment as an object, figure, or ‘other,’ ceded to forms of fragmentary vision. The late nineteenth-century artistic proclivity for cropped bodies, blurred outlines, and decorative vignettes trafficked in fragments, amplifying what Michael Fried has identified as the modern tension between the morceau and tableau. Nearly forty years after Zerner and Rosen’s publication, this panel seeks to reassess and reinvigorate approaches to the fragment in French art of the long nineteenth century. We welcome multiple approaches to the fragment, including critical definitions of the term. How did the fragment change, or remain the same, over the course of the long nineteenth century? What is the relationship between the fragment and its presumed ‘whole’? How did the fragment represent and articulate relationships within France’s ongoing colonial enterprise? How did new visual technologies, such as lithography, photography, and the cinema, affect the status of the fragment in France?

Please send your submissions to co-chairs Emily Brink, emily.brinkuwa.edu.au and Marika Knowles, marika.knowlesgmail.com. Submissions should follow the general guidelines for participants as
detailed in the 2018 CAA Call for Participation:
http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf

[2]
From: Sami Siegelbaum <samisiegelbaumgmail.com>
Date: Jul 17, 2017
Subject: CFP: CAA Panel: Regionalism in the Global Era

Los Angeles, February 21 - 24, 2018
Deadline: Aug 15, 2017

Regionalism in the Global Era

Chair(s): Damon Willick, Loyola Marymount University, damon.
willicklmu.edu; Nicole Woods, University of Notre Dame,
nwoodsnd.edu

For much of the twentieth century, regionalism in art was viewed
as naïvely provincial in contrast to modernist styles associated
with particular urban centers. Such artistic capitals also countered parochial notions of national traditions. This hierarchy was exacerbated in the US after WWII as the cultural climate of the Cold War further marginalized the regionalism associated with New Deal social realism to the point that, by 1972, art critic
Peter Schjeldahl could proclaim, “New York’s gravitational field
is so strong that any American working in a mainstream mode
will, should he become influential, more or less automatically
be a ‘New York artist.’” Soon after Schjeldahl’s proclamation,
economic and technological transformations would lead to the
theorization of a new globalized network for contemporary art.
While lessening the dominance of any one particular center or
aesthetic, the new system likewise marginalized the regional
as both aesthetically and politically regressive. This panel seeks
papers that trace a counter-narrative to the history of a globalized aesthetic that emerged from a few privileged centers of artistic production. Pertinent questions include: How have artists working in the US since 1945 asserted regional identity? In what ways can art produced in certain cosmopolitan centers be considered “regional”? What have been the consequences of deliberately resisting global influences in favor of local references? How does the “regional” offer new ways for thinking through contemporary art’s position within global systems? How have the shifting grounds caused by globalization changed the notion of regional identity in art?

[3]
From: Jaleh Mansoor and Laura Moure Cecchini <laura.mourecgmail.com>
Date: Jul 18, 2017
Subject: CFP: CAA session: How Many Ways to Miss the Mark? Lucio Fontana between Formalism and Historicity

How Many Ways to Miss the Mark? Lucio Fontana between Formalism and Historicity

Internationally renowned for his singular idiom of slashed and punctured paintings, Lucio Fontana’s oeuvre has provoked much recent research. Exhibitions in Paris (2014) and Milan (2015), and studies by Anthony White (2011), Pia Gottschaller (2012), and Jaleh Mansoor (2016), have complicated previous generations’ view of Fontana solely as an eccentric representative of postwar gestural aesthetics. Indeed, from the mid-1920s to 1968, Fontana experimented with a variety of media, from ceramic to jewelry, from painting to neon. Fontana’s integration of artistic methods and collaborations with architects and designers opened the way for later generations of artists who queried and dismantled categories and genres. And yet Fontana’s own seemingly peripatetic if elegant transgression of boundaries among media continues to go unaddressed. This lacuna around the question of genre and artistic processes might be the only common ground among the studies cited above. Maybe more than any other artist, Fontana has suffered from the conflict between formalist and historicist readings, and between philological and critical examinations of his production. On the fiftieth anniversary of Fontana’s death, we hope that new lines of inquiry might offer a cohesive sense of his oeuvre and open onto new questions around problems of genre and style. We invite contributions that address unexplored aspects of Fontana's work while challenging prevailing methodological approaches and avoiding hagiography. We seek papers that offer an original exploration of Fontana’s at once odd and remarkable practice, in order to offer a more complex approach to artistic praxis in the interwar and postwar periods.

250-word proposals should be sent to the session chairs by 14th August 2017: Jaleh Mansoor, University of British Columbia jalehmmail.ubc.ca and Laura Moure Cecchini, Colgate University lmourececchinicolgate.edu.

Submissions should include:
1. Completed session participation proposal form, located at the end of
the CAA CFP brochure
(http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf).
a. Your name should appear exactly as you would like it listed in the conference program and conference website.
b. Your affiliation must appear as the official, recognized name of your institution (you may not list multiple affiliations).
c. Please include an active CAA Member ID (all participants must be current members through February 24, 2018; inactive or lapsed members will be pulled from participation on August 28, 2017).
2. Paper/project abstract: maximum 250 words, in the form of a single paragraph. Make sure your title and abstract appear exactly as you would like them published in the conference program, Abstracts 2018, and the CAA website.
3. Email or letter explaining your interest in the session, expertise in the topic, and availability during the conference.
4. A shortened CV.

Chairs will determine the speakers for their session and reply to all applicants by 28th August 2017.

[4]
Chair: S. Hollis Clayson (Northwestern University), shcnorthwestern.edu

A Second Talent: Art Historians Making Art

The material turn has intensified the call for hands-on studio training for art history students at all levels. It has also increased the pressure on art museums to include highly technologized object analysis in exhibitions. A SECOND TALENT seeks contributions from art-making art historians who will scrutinize the connections between their immersion in a medium (making) and the complex particularities of interpretation (talking and writing). The session seeks papers that will actively query and pinpoint the value for art history of specialized artifact knowledge, focusing specifically upon the benefits of literal engagement in the production of art. Once an art historian (young or old) learns the technical details of an art process and gets her hands dirty by entering the absorptive sphere of art-making, what is the effect on her practice of art history? Does immersion in art process change art historical interpretation? Should it? It is hoped that contributors will question the self-sufficiency of materiality through the lens of their own experiences of the links between matter and meaning. A consideration of making as research would be welcome. Papers are expected to combine a self-aware narrative (“here’s my art”) with an interrogation of the hermeneutic gains or losses caused by the acquisition of a second talent.

Please send your submissions to S. Hollis Clayson, shcnorthwestern.edu.

They should follow the guidelines for participants detailed in the 2018 CAA
Call for Participation:
http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf

S. Hollis Clayson
Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Art History and (by courtesy) of History
Northwestern University

Department of Art History
Kresge 4305, 1880 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208 USA
shcnorthwestern.edu

[5]
From: Claire Howard <cfhowardutexas.edu>
Date: Jul 18, 2017
Subject: CFP: Surrealism's Subversive Taxonomies

106th College Art Association Annual Conference, Los Angeles, February 21 - 24, 2018
Deadline: Aug 14, 2017

Surrealism’s Subversive Taxonomies
Chairs: Sean O’Hanlan, Stanford University, sohanlanstanford.
edu; Claire Howard, The University of Texas at Austin, cfhoward@
utexas.edu

This panel considers the Surrealist appropriation, subversion, and deployment of the visual form and taxonomic structure of the encyclopedia across the twentieth century. In a 1955 interview with Ferdinand Alquié, André Breton famously claimed that Surrealism was never interested in the loss of reason “tout court,” but in the things that reason made man lose. While this certainly operated on the level of the object — a prime example includes Max Ernst’s appropriation of natural history illustrations and anatomical diagrams in his collages — the fabrication of alternative versions of Enlightenment and nineteenth-century structures of knowledge also reflects something of Surrealism’s historical project of reclamation. From the group’s earliest journals in the 1920s and intended “glossary of the marvelous” at the Bureau of Surrealist Research, to their challenge to the museum’s empirical and colonial ideologies in exhibitions spanning the 1930s to the 1960s, the Surrealists assembled countless compendiums that sought to organize and inventory even as they subverted the rationalist aims of their formal precedents. We invite papers that engage this critical tension between systematic research, documentation, and classification and the centrality of chance, the unconscious, and dreams in Surrealist practice. What was — and what is — the Surrealist order of things? How did these models help transmit surrealist knowledge across geographical and temporal borders? Submissions that consider the circulation of Surrealist objects and ideas, including the presence of such methods in contemporary artistic practice, are welcome.

Please send proposals to co-chairs Sean O’Hanlan (sohanlanstanford.
edu) and Claire Howard (cfhowardutexas.edu) by August 14, 2017. Submissions should follow the general guidelines for participants
and proposals for papers detailed in the 2018 CAA Call for Participation: http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf

[6]
From: Zahra Faridany-Akhavan <zfakhavanaol.com>
Date: Jul 20, 2017
Subject: CFP - Art in Middle Eastern Diplomacy (Session, CAA 2018)

Los Angeles, California, February 21 - 24, 2018
Registration deadline: Aug 14, 2017

Submissions are sought for a session at the College Art Association conference, Los Angeles, 21-24 February 2018
Organizer: Zahra Faridany-Akhavan Independent scholar. zfakhavanaol.com
Deadline for Submissions to the organizer: 14 August 2017
All speakers have to be individual members of CAA by 28 August 2017.

Session Title:
Art in Middle Eastern Diplomacy
Chair: Zahra Faridany-Akhavan
Session Abstract:

Artistic expression in the Middle East has undergone a revolutionary renaissance in the last two decades. This increasingly dynamic movement of the contemporary art of the Middle East is often produced in contexts fraught with political, social, and military conflict, or at the crossroads of tradition and modernity. In this time of particular discord and disconnect with the Islamic world, this panel examines the contemporary art of Iran and the Middle East as the “soft power” that can build creative links between the past, the present, and the future while communicating knowledge and promoting cultural diplomacy through a variety of platforms. Forging relationships where politics cannot, the arts increasingly engage governments through artistic dialogue and exchange. Highlighting the diversity of expression, this panel seeks to examine the multi-faceted and complex development of the contemporary art of Iran and the Middle East through its artists, influences, and politics.

[7]
From: Emily Morgan <emorganiastate.edu>
Date: Jul 21, 2017
Subject: CFP: Histories of Fake News

Los Angeles, CA, February 21 - 24, 2018
Deadline: Aug 14, 2017

In the past year the apparently novel phenomenon of “fake news”
has received a great deal of attention. Misleading or false stories
in the news, or from news-like sources of questionable derivation,
turn out to have remarkably extensive power to sway popular
opinion. The question of what constitutes “news” at all, and by
extension what constitutes truth, has become pressing. The notion
that false or inaccurate reporting might have real influence on
real events seems to have caught many people by surprise. No
historian of art or visual culture, however, ought to be shocked
by these developments: art has always been post-truth. Images
— whether in houses of worship, museums, or the pages of the
newspaper — have always served the ends and the truths of those
who create, commission, and circulate them. Visual meaning has
always been manipulable. In the face of current popular soul-searching
over the meaning of information in a post-truth era,
this panel aims to take a long view. What would a history of fake
news look like? How might we bring historical depth and breadth
of vision to bear on this not-so-new phenomenon? The panel
welcomes submissions from historians of art and visual culture
focused on a range of eras, regions, and media.

Please send proposals to session chair Emily K. Morgan, emorganiastate.edu

Proposals should include:
1. The completed session proposal form, available online at the CAA website
2. Your active CAA member ID
3. Paper abstract, maximum 250 words, in the form of
a single paragraph. Make sure your title and abstract appear
EXACTLY as you would like them published in the conference
program, Abstracts 2018, and the CAA website.
4. Email or letter explaining your interest in the session, expertise
in the topic, and availability during the conference.
5. A shortened CV

[8]
From: Samine Tabatabaei <samintprotonmail.com>
Date: Jul 23, 2017
Subject: CFP: CAA session on the Middle Eastern Art: Agnotology of Contemporary Middle Eastern Art

CAA-Los Angeles
Deadline: Aug 14, 2017

Agnotology of Contemporary Middle Eastern Art

When the first exhibitions of contemporaneous art from the Middle East were presented to North American and European audiences in the last decades of the twentieth century, the absence of knowledge about Middle Eastern art on the part of those educated in North American and European schools became obvious. This panel is an attempt to systematize the gaps in our knowledge. The aim is to delve into the blind spots and obstacles to learning and engaging with, and writing about, contemporary art of the Middle East in local, regional, national, and transnational projects of archiving, writing, and mobilizing art historical knowledge. The term agnotology was coined by linguist Iain Boal and historian of science Robert Proctor for the study of culturally engendered ignorance; this panel probes the absence of knowledge of contemporary Middle Eastern art in the West, the cultural factors that induce it, and its effects on art practice and history. We invite contributions that explore (but are not limited to):

-subjection to trials and tribulations of the market,
-the canonizing efforts of European and North American art institutes,
-the instability of governments,
-competing ideologies,
-the uneven distribution of resources and disparities in infrastructures,
-the unquestioned biases of tradition,
- systematic amnesia,
-impractical regimes of preservation,
-outdated educational systems,
-cultural revolutions,
-negligence,
-arbitrary and unsustainable attempts at preservation,
-strategic funding priorities,
-parochial counter-histories,
-homophobia,
-and logistical limitations among other forces that have arrested, delayed, prevented, and overshadowed our access to knowledge.

Chair: Samine Tabatabaei,McGill University,
Email: samintprotonmail.com
Proposals are due to session chair by Monday, August 14, 2017.
Submissions must include:Completed session participation proposal form(located at the end of theCAA CFP brochure) with CAA member ID, paper/project abstract of maximum 250 words, a CV with the exact name and affiliation as you prefer to appear in the program.

[9]
From: Chun Wa Chan <gchanartumich.edu>
Date: Jul 24, 2017
Subject: CFP: Faithful Copies - On Replication and Creative Agency in Buddhist Art (CAA Los Angeles, 21-24 Feb 18)

Los Angeles, February 21 - 24, 2018
Deadline: Aug 14, 2017

Faithful Copies: On Replication and Creative Agency in Buddhist Art

Submission Deadline: August 14, 2017

Chair: Chun Wa Chan, University of Michigan

From architectural forms like the pagoda, to objects such
as icons, reliquaries, and scriptures that are handwritten or
printed, replication has remained one of the dominant modes
of production of Buddhist art across Asia. As Shen Hsueh-man
remarked, in most cases, these “copies” are regarded not only
as efficacious, but as authentic as their often lost “prototypes.”
This panel examines this seemingly mundane, yet highly
pervasive mode of the production and circulation of Buddhist art.
Foregrounding replication as a productive rather than derivative
process, this panel approaches Buddhist art within a broad range of contexts, inviting papers that address works made in the premodern Buddhist world, as well as those by contemporary artists that engage with Buddhist metaphysics. In particular, this panel asks: how is one to write a history of art when the boundary between the “originals” and the “copies” are dissolved?
If the referent is lost, what discursive devices are established to
guarantee that the copy is visually or spiritually faithful? How
shall we conceive of the act of copying when it entails not a
dismissal but a reassertion of creative agency? To what extent
does the physical labor involved in varying strategies of replication resonate with Buddhist ideas? Taken together, how does the case of replication in Buddhist art speak to the practice of art history, a discipline that often preoccupies itself with the issues of unique authorship and authenticity?

Paper proposals (maximum 250 words) are due by August 14 to Chun Wa Chan at gchanartumich.edu. For full submission guidelines, see http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf.