[1] From: Elize Mazadiego <emazadiegoucsd.edu>
Subject: Conceptual Cartography: Spatial representations in Conceptual Art

Conceptual art is broadly considered a movement that accelerated the
processes of internationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Early proponents of
Conceptual Art differed from preceding generations of artists in their
aspiration to connect individuals and ideas beyond geographic expanses.
Conceptual art’s reductive quality of the art object into dematerialised
forms mobilised a vision to transcend spatial and geographic boundaries and
configure a global network of artists and work. Artists differentiated
existing forms of the international through the conceptualist artwork’s
capacity to further expand and decentralise art’s traditional topography.
Cartography is a defining feature in many Conceptualist artworks, from
Douglas Huebler’s maps that chart journeys with a felt pen on ordinary
topographical road maps to Felipe Ehrenberg’s Tube-O-Nauts Travels that
document the artist’s continuous journey on London’s Underground over
17 hours with diagrams on subway maps.

Of interest to this panel is the interface between Conceptual Art’s
spatial imagination in the 1960s to 1980s, and the variant ways in which
artists employed a cartographic language as a process and production of
space-making. In particular, how do these practices encode new territories,
subvert systems of representation, re-order, de-centralise, reify or expand
geography and its signification. How were artists engaging with or
producing a globalised, networked, transnational, de-territorialised and
in-flux geography. Along these lines, we invite proposals for papers that
explore different forms, media, strategies, theories and concepts, as well
as geographic and temporal frames of reference.

Please email paper proposals to emazadiegoucsd.edu. Provide a title and
abstract (250 words maximum) for a 25-minute paper (unless otherwise
specified), your name, and your institutional affiliation (if any). Please
make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper
because it will appear online, in social media and in the printed
programme.
You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within
two weeks.