ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS Annual Conference 2004: Old/New?
University of Nottingham
1-4 April 2004

CALL FOR PAPERS

PANEL: 'Dematerialisation: The Entry into Postmodernity'

PROPOSAL DEADLINE : 1 NOVEMBER 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theory of this epoch still provide key historical reference points for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 'the
aesthetic' 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?

Each speaker will have 30 minutes: 20 minutes for paper and 10 for
questions.

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. Mobile: 07801-544-956
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.