[1] Love in Times of Crisis: Reparative Art Histories

From: Max Koss, maxkossuchicago.edu

This panel investigates writing about art as a practice of crisis. In the introduction to his seminal 1987 October issue (“AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism”), Douglas Crimp asserted that “AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it,” emphasizing “the imperative to know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them.”

Extending Crimp’s framework to the broader concept of ‘crisis,’ this panel investigates the implications for art history. Considering writing about art not merely a means for reflecting on art’s relationship to social, economic, ecological, and political crises, past and present, but a way of writing crisis into being, this panel presents reparative art histories of crisis in the spirit of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. We ask: if 'crisis' is indeed a construct, how can we make it a reparative one? What forms can such a practice of art history take?

Embracing the methodological implications of pursuing such reparative art histories, we invite papers, presentations, or performances that foreground the affective and ameliorative and are centered on empathy, pleasure, sociality, or love. We welcome contributions from art historians, critics, and artists working on any geographical region or historical period, engaging questions of class, race, gender, sexuality, climate, health, etc., from Cholera to Corona, La Conquista to the Orlando Shooting, and the Lisbon earthquake to our current climate crisis. Through these contributions, this panel affirms art history’s capacity for hope.

Due to the ongoing pandemic, this panel may take place entirely online. Although the range of digital media formats that will be supported might be limited, we encourage you to think creatively and expansively about the possibilities of online conferencing in the spirit of reparative art histories.

Send your proposal to hgraversenuchicago.edu and maxkossuchicago.edu and include a CV (~2 pages), your presentation title and abstract (max. 250 words), as well as a statement on why your proposal is a good fit for this panel (max. 100 words). You are also welcome to include images, though be mindful to submit them in an easily accessible format. Early submissions are highly encouraged and we cannot consider proposals received after Wednesday, September 16, 2020. Should your proposal be selected, CAA requires that you become an active CAA member upon acceptance.

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[2] Beyond the Painted Surface: Trompe l’oeil and Material Illusions in Art and Material Culture

From: Julie Bellemare, julie.bellemarebgc.bard.edu

Chih-En Chen, SOAS, University of London and Julie Bellemare, Bard Graduate Center
c_chensoas.ac.uk; julie.bellemarebgc.bard.edu

“Trompe l’oeil,” which means to “deceive the eye,” is often used to describe an illusionistic depiction of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. While trompe l’oeil has been produced for hundreds of years, existing scholarship has largely been limited to its deployment in European painting, yet the basic mechanisms of trompe l’oeil extend beyond painting to a variety of material emulations. Roman glass was cast to imitate precious stones, sixteenth-century potter Bernard Palissy recreated scenes of aquatic life in ceramics, and Chinese artisans fired enameled porcelain resembling fruits. Trompe l’oeil fools the eye, producing an object that appears real while being materially different from its referent, and is typically so skillful that it can be visually mistaken for the original by an uninformed viewer. This panel understands trompe l’oeil as an artistic device that has been employed transnationally and across mediums.

Moving across time and space, we invite submissions of papers that aim not only to explore the scope of trompe l’oeil in a global context, but also to decipher the manufacture and operation of this device in the history of art and material culture. Themes and questions worth considering include: What are the intentions of makers when using trompe l’oeil, and what are the responses of viewers to illusionistic surfaces? What are the technical means by which verisimilitude is achieved? How does trompe l’oeil relate to forgery, authenticity, and value? And in what ways do trompe l’oeil works serve to facilitate the transmission of artisanal knowledge across mediums?

To submit a proposal, please follow instructions on the CAA Annual Conference CFP page (https://caa.confex.com/caa/2021/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html). Deadline for submission is September 16, 2020.

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[3] Art and Cultural Heritage Spoliation in Time of Peace

From: Joanna Smalcerz, joanna.smalcerzikg.unibe.ch

For several years now, the organised clandestine excavation and export of antiquities out of war torn Syria and Iraq to Europe and beyond has thrust the Western demand for such artefacts and the resulting spoliation of Middle East into the centre of an international controversy. As the community of scholars addresses the legal, social, and ethical aspects of this situation, it is worth remembering that art and cultural heritage spoliation is seemingly an unstoppable process, which has a long history and occurs also in peacetime and within contexts permitted by law.
The aim of the session is to give attention to the historical situations when a large demand and competition for artworks or artefacts stemming from a certain geographical or cultural territory has led to effective acquisition campaigns that spoliated entire regions and countries of parts of their cultural heritage, as for instance Greece during the era of Grand Tour or the Ottoman Empire and the Netherlands in the late nineteenth century. What were the responses of the affected communities? What role did the differentiation between the local and the national patrimony play in the institutionalised response, especially in the late nineteenth century, driven by the idea of a nation? How did the loss of cultural heritage to (foreign) actors such as collectors and collecting institutions resonate within various social groups of the deprived communities? When does the economic benefit for a source area turn into damage of its cultural ecosystem?

Please send a proposal and a CV to: joanna.smalcerzikg.unibe.ch by 16 September 2020.

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[4] Global Design History Pedagogy and Ecological Justice

From: Margaret Schmitz, margaretjschmitzgmail.com

Margaret J. Schmitz, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and Chelsea Holton, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design
Email Address(s): margaretjschmitzgmail.com, chelseaholtonmiad.edu

EXTENDED DEADLINE: 10 October 2020.

Recent developments in ecocriticism, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory have made the links between design, colonialism, racism, and ecological violence clear. Eurocentric design histories tend to ignore these concerning interconnections. As we work to rectify this issue in higher education, this practical session looks to present new strategies for a global and decolonized design history education as a means of both putting these correlations in higher relief and disrupting the status quo for design students.
The problems contemporary designers are trying to solve can often be linked to unsustainable design decisions made in the past. As students and educators consider design’s contributions to climate change and the Anthropocene, our classroom discussions increasingly revolve around developing design solutions, such as posthumanist design, co-design, and biomimicry. In addition to those important methodological shifts, how can our classrooms also incorporate sustainable models from indigenous and non-Western knowledge systems while dismantling the formal, conceptual, and ideological power dynamics at play in outmoded Western design histories? Can ecological justice, as a mode of interpreting the histories of design, change how future designers consider their practice?
This session will offer a group of papers that take on these important themes. Papers will present new teaching strategies, lesson plans, and/or case studies and question how we, as historians and design educators, teach these histories in the wake of climate change’s global impact.

Abstracts are due to both session chairs by October 10th. Send application materials to the above email addresses.

For information on applying to this session please see: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2021/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html

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[5] Creative Capital: Historical Perspectives on Business and the Arts

From: Robert Gordon-Fogelson, gordonfousc.edu

Colin Fanning, Bard Graduate Center and Robert Gordon-Fogelson, University of Southern California
Email Address(s): colin.e.fanninggmail.com, gordonfousc.edu

In a 1946 Harper's Magazine essay, historian and critic Russell Lynes suggested that business should "drop the pretense of being a patron of the arts" to become "something better, something that makes more sense in our society: a good employer and a discriminating consumer." This pithy formulation alluded to an increasingly complex set of art-business relations, which, by the postwar period, involved such activities as advertising, corporate identification, industrial design, and office planning.
Historical attention to the interrelationships between business and the arts has tended to center on the postwar U.S. and Western Europe, foregrounding the aesthetic regimes of modernism; the charisma of (usually white male) artists, designers, and architects; or the leadership of ostensibly enlightened executives and companies. Recent scholarship has dug deeper by questioning the ideological blind spots of corporate design; critiquing narratives of entrepreneurial innovation; and recovering the role of consumers, educators, and governments in shaping the corporate landscape. At a time when the social and environmental costs of business-as-usual have become starkly apparent, this session seeks to intervene in this historiography by cultivating nuanced, pluralistic, and global understandings of the intersections between business and the arts, broadly defined. Proposed papers might consider topics including (among others):

- Shifting discourses on corporate patronage
- Critiques of art and design’s relationship to capital
- The ethics of art-business relations
- Professionalization in the arts
- The aesthetics of corporate culture
- Art and design in the gig economy
- Craft and handiwork in commercial contexts
- Visual techniques of marketing and merchandising
- Technologies of industrial organization

Proposals are due by September 16, 2020. For instructions on how to submit a proposal, please visit the 2021 CAA Annual Conference CFP page.

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[6] Shifting Grounds: Visualizing, Materializing, and Embodying Environmental Change in the Early Modern European World (ca. 1400–1700)

Chairs: Caroline E. Murphy (MIT) and Chloé Pelletier (University of Chicago) / Discussant: Lauren Jacobi (MIT)

During the early modern period (ca. 1400–1700), European communities conceptualized environmental change in new ways. As the so-called "Little Ice Age" increased the frequency of tempests and floods, among other catastrophic hydraulic events, and while slower cycles of erosion, ruination, and pollution continued their gradual and perpetual menace, humans yearned to understand the causes of these natural calamities, and to interpret what they might have meant about their place in the temporal world and the spiritual realm.

While literary scholars have long been interested in cultural responses to ecological phenomena, historians of art and architecture have only begun to scratch the surface on these issues. This panel therefore solicits papers that examine how early modern environmental change was visualized, materialized, and embodied in the form of images, objects, monuments, and landscapes. Recognizing the radical entanglements among human and nonhuman agents (both natural and divine) in processes of environmental transformation, we welcome diverse topics from across Europe and its varied global contact zones that draw from and expand upon approaches in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. We especially invite contributions exploring the viability of a longer history of the Anthropocene. In engaging environmental change within histories of early modern European art and architecture, our objectives are twofold: to reconfigure a subfield traditionally delimited by the anthropocentric, individualist narratives of Renaissance humanist and Christian historiographies, and to confront the origins of ideological assumptions that landed us in our current global climatic crisis--but may also suggest ways out of it.

TO APPLY, please email the following to cemurphymit.edu and chloepelletiergmail.com by SEPTEMBER 16, 2020:

1. Completed proposal form (available here: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2021/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html), inclusive of abstract of no more than 250 words
2. Shortened CV (~2 pages)

For more information on the 2021 CAA Annual Conference and general participation guidelines, please see the Call for Participation at the following URL:

https://caa.confex.com/caa/2021/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html

Contacts:
Caroline Murphy (cemurphymit.edu)
Chloé Pelletier (chloepelletiergmail.com)