CALL FOR PAPERS

Dematerialisation: The Entry into Postmodernity

Association of Art Historians Annual Conference 2004: Old/New?
University of Nottingham
1-4 April 2004

This is the first call for papers for a panel on the legacies of
conceptual art for more recent debates in art, art theory and
aesthetics. We welcome historical, theoretical and philosophical
contributions. Abstracts of 300-400 words should be sent by
e-mail to the organisers by 1st September 2003.

In the history of art there cannot be a shorter chronological
period that has been ascribed the status of cultural epoch than
1966-1972, the years surveyed by Lippard's classic document, Six
Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object (1973). The art,
criticism and theory of this epoch still provide key historical
reference points for contemporary art in Britain and in the USA,
and have been instrumental in securing the intellectual priority
of New York for subsequent debates around postmodernism. In
dominant art historical narratives Minimal art, anti-form,
systems, conceptual art, earth and process art have been
characterised as the entry into artistic postmodernity,
decisively challenging the hierarchies of aesthetic value
embedded in the forms, materials and mediums associated with
modernism, its institutional spaces and conventions of viewing.

This session invites papers that investigate the legacy of the
generative moment of 1966-1972. How did the aesthetic concepts
that emerged during these 6 years -- repetition, seriality,
theatricality, process, materiality, negation, structure, and the
situated, embodied beholder ­ inform the first waves of
theoretical speculation on the character of artistic
postmodernity? Was the process of dematerialisation conceived in
terms of the complete dissolution of Œthe aesthetic¹ as a unique
category of experience, or did the movements of 1966-72 offer a
radically transformed conception of the aesthetic? Is our
understanding of 1966-72 locked within the postmodernist critique
of modernism? Or does the art and theory of this epoch offer the
intellectual resources to think beyond the current congealed
radicalism of postmodernist paradigms?

Session Organisers:
Dr. Jonathan Vickery, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art,
Department of History of Art, University of Warwick, Coventry
CV4 7AL. tel. 024 76 523459 fax. 024 76523006. e.mail:
J.P.Vickerywarwick.ac.uk.

Dr. Diarmuid Costello, Senior Lecturer in the Theory of Art,
School of Arts and Humanities, Oxford Brookes University, Richard
Hamilton Building, Headington Hill Campus, Oxford OX3 0BP. tel.
01865 484982; fax. 01865 484952. e-mail: dcostellobrookes.ac.uk.

Dr. Diarmuid Costello
> Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory
and Leverhulme Research Fellow (2003-2005)
School of Arts and Humanities
> Richard Hamilton Building
Headington Hill Campus
Oxford Brookes University
Oxford OX3 0BP
> tel. 01865 484982
fax. 01865 484952
>

>
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/artsandhumanities/art/staff/diarmuidcostell
o/index.html