[1] 1919: German Visual Culture at the Crossroads

From: Nina Lübbren <nina.lubbrenanglia.ac.uk>
Date: January 7, 2019
Deadline: January 25, 2019

‘That is rebellion! [...] Love, sensual ecstasy shall defeat convention, rationality.’ Thus wrote the poet Theodor Däubler in 1919 of Gela Forster’s sculptures. It was a sentiment that animated many artists and other creatives in this crucial year in German history. At a time when people in Germany were dealing with war trauma, military defeat and political murder, but also with universal suffrage, revolution and the foundations of democracy, visual making could be seen as one vehicle for avant-garde renewal and ecstatic rebirth. It is a year that is poised between the old and the new, a year full of hope and enthusiasm in which artists joined revolutionary groups (like the Novembergruppe) and tried out new identities that broke open norms of gender, sexuality, reproduction and race. But it is also a year full of the portents of what, in hindsight, we know to have come later with the rise of right-wing extremism and nationalism. Did 1919 mark the beginning of something new? Or was it the endpoint of something else, a kind of last gasp of pre-war optimism and artistic experimentation? Or did 1919 already gesture towards the end of a beginning? These are the questions we will be asking in this session.

The panel commemorates the centenary of 1919 in visual culture in Germany. We invite proposals for individual papers that probe any facet, medium or artistic grouping of the visual and artistic field of 1919. We welcome papers that link cultural production in fine art, architecture, urban planning, design, photography and film to political events, particularly if the discussion addresses more than one medium. Topics might include (but are not limited to) women practitioners; queer practices and readings; analyses of specific monuments, memorials and urban projects; new modes of exhibiting, selling and marketing cultural wares; non-traditional media; We also invite papers that critically examine the claim that 1919 represents a caesura and that argue for continuities as well as ruptures.

This is a Call for Papers for a panel / session at the German Studies Association conference, to be held in Portland, Oregon, 3-6 October, 2019. The panel convenor is Nina Lübbren, Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge, UK).

Please send a 400-word proposal for a 20-minute paper to nina.lubbrenanglia.ac.uk with the subject line 'GSA 1919-2019'. Deadline: 25 Jan. 2019

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[2] Revisiting Lustmord in the #MeToo Era

From: Kristin Schroeder <kas2cgvirginia.edu>
Date: January 7, 2019
Deadline: January 26, 2019

Sponsored by the Visual Culture Network

Description: Maria Tatar’s Lustmord (1995) called into question the ubiquity of the mutilated female body in Weimar’s artistic productions, exposing the centrality of sexual violence in modern culture. With Lustmord as a point of departure, this interdisciplinary seminar moves beyond Weimar, employing its imagery and texts as tools with which to consider the entanglements of sexual violence with power, gender, race, sexuality, religion, and class.

We take Tatar’s use of case studies as a model for this interdisciplinary seminar. Shedding light on the “drive to disfigure the female body” in Otto Dix’s depictions of eviscerated corpses; locating the concealed body of the victim in Fritz Lang’s M; and tracing the “confluence of literary modernism and sexual violence” in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Tatar problematized these representations and called attention to their transformative power and complicitous nature.

Together, we will consider the representation—and even aestheticization—of sexual violence in German visual art, film, and literature, and history. Amidst a #MeToo culture of accountability, how can we expand upon formal, biographical, and psychological analyses to confront the political, educational, and cultural stakes of pervasive sexual violent imagery throughout history? This seminar is sponsored by the German Studies Association’s Visual Culture Network. Colleagues working with visual media are especially encouraged to apply.
Goals and Procedures: Our objectives are to analyze past and present representations of sexual violence and to process the impact of the #MeToo movement on our research and teaching. Participants will read reviews and selections of Maria Tatar’s Lustmord; select a relevant case study (image, text, film clip, short play, archival document, etc.); and prepare a 1,000-1,500-word descriptive analysis of their case study in relation to the assigned readings.

Conveners will circulate required readings three months in advance of the seminar. Participants will submit descriptive analyses one month before the seminar, which conveners will divide into thematic categories and make available to all participants in a shared Dropbox. Each day of the seminar will consist of convener introductions, participant presentations, close reading, and thematic group discussions.

Proposals: To be considered, please submit a 250-word abstract along with your CV to the GSA application portal at https://www.xcdsystem.com/gsa. Seminar enrollment opens on January 5th and closes January 26th. We will inform applicants of our decisions on January 31st.

Please contact conveners with questions:
Kristin Schroeder, kas2cgvirginia.edu
Mary Hennessy, mhennesumich.edu
Katy Holihan, kholihanumich.edu

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[3] DDR 1980-1989: Structure, sequence, dynamics, and mediality of 1980s East German artists books

From: Isotta Poggi <ipoggigetty.edu>
Date: January 9, 2019
Deadline: January 31, 2019

In the 1980s, the last decade of the German Democratic Republic, East German art witnessed an extensive production of artists books ("Künstlerbücher") and unofficial magazines made throughout polycentric artistic networks, collaboratively and across media. Disrupting the conventional illustrated book distinction between image and text, these artists books were highly interdisciplinary, combining printmaking, poetry, photography, and collage in innovative and dynamic ways. Ranging from high-end limited editions to the forerunners of today’s zines, such experimental publications were produced mostly by small independent presses ("Eigenverlage") working beneath the surface of the official artistic canon, but were ultimately canonized by book scholars such as Jens Henkel, whose bibliography "DDR 1980-1989: Künstlerbücher und originalgrafische Zeitschriften im Eigenverlag" is now one of the most authoritative reference works on the genre.

According to Johanna Drucker’s "The Century of Artists’ Books" (2004), 20th-century artists books fall into categories such as auratic objects, verbal explorations, narratives/non-narratives, agents of social change, conceptual spaces, documents, or democratic multiples, among others. Building on Drucker’s methodology, this panel will begin to tackle these fascinating yet understudied cultural artifacts by investigating what might constitute an artist book with regard to its structure, sequence, dynamics, and mediality. In addition, it will examine how these highly collaborative and interdisciplinary East German works may or may not fit within the categories established by Drucker for the genre of 20th-century artists books in a broader transnational context on either side of the Iron Curtain.

Who were the artists, publishers, printers, distributors, and audiences who played a major role in the flourishing of this genre in 1980s East Germany? How can the sequential narrative in these books be interpreted? What kind of distance did these authors and artists assume in relation to state power? How did they engage with past and contemporaneous cultural currents, including the avantgarde and dissident cultural movements across the political spectrum? Was the interdisciplinary, collaborative approach to this genre unique to the GDR? If so, what political, economic, and cultural circumstances might explain this? And if not, what transnational resonances exist between these artifacts and analogous enterprises abroad?

This interdisciplinary panel aims to convene scholars who have studied these "Eigenverlag Künstlerbücher/originalgrafische Zeitschriften" from varied yet intersecting perspectives, individually or collectively; it also seeks to bring the "Eigenverlag Künstlerbücher und Zeitschriften of the Getty Research Institute" (Los Angeles, CA) (https://bit.ly/2RIhlAE) into dialogue with the holdings in other collections/archives across the Atlantic. Topics may focus on poetry and literature, graphic/visual arts, printmaking, photography, alternative art spaces, printing presses, galleries, and artists books production, all of which should be discussed in relation to the GDR and/or its transnational contexts.

Please send abstracts (350-600 words) accompanied by a brief bio to ahorakovawm.edu and ipoggigetty.edu by January 31, 2019.

Organizers:

Anna Horakova, College of William & Mary (ahorakovawm.edu)
Isotta Poggi, Getty Research Institute (ipoggigetty.edu)

If you have problems connecting to the "Eigenverlag holdings of the Getty Research Institute" click on (or copy and paste in your browser) the link below:
http://primo.getty.edu/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?srt=title&srtChange=true&frbg=&vl(96033584UI1)=all_items&&indx=1&fn=search&dscnt=0&scp.scps=scope:(GETTY_EAD2),scope:(GETTY_NEWBOOKS),scope:(GETTY_ROSETTA),scope:(GETTY_ALMA)&vl(1UIStartWith0)=exact&vl(21781791UI0)=any&vid=GRI&mode=Basic&ct=search&srt=rank&tab=all_gri&dum=true&vl(freeText0)=Henkel,%20J.%20DDR%201980-1989&dstmp=1546987210094

Further information about the GSA conference can be found here: www.thegsa.org/conference/current-conference