POLITICKING ART HISTORY
2005 Graduate Student Symposium
History of Art and Architecture
UC Santa Barbara
Friday, April 29 2005

In 1928, Maurice Weseen, an early scholar of American slang wrote,
"Politicking, a coined word that has no recognized standing." A little over 75
years later, when "chatter" determines geopolitical intervention and political
candidates embark on "front porch tours," politicking is perhaps not so lowly
as to escape our attention any longer.

Politicking technically means to discuss or engage in politics. Since Weseen's
slight, however, politicking has taken on a rather negative connotation:
partisan machination, pork barrel myopia, and more generally, an official and
bureaucratic approach to (ex)change.

But to pin the term down belies its origins in slang, in the fast and loose of
the everyday, and continue to privilege idealized transactions between
individuals, communities, nations. For example, Jürgen Habermas, as critics
have pointed out, failed to consider that raucous, "irrational" conversation
rather than reasoned debate contributed to the making of the bourgeois public
sphere.

Traditional art history also deals largely in idealized transactions. We have
trouble making sense of the informal and personal, let alone the anarchic.
Politicking, and its close cousins, gossiping and kibitzing, remain for the
most part untheorized. In some ways, this symposium is a critique of art
history's artfully constructed public sphere, of its imposed civility on
societies.

Politicking can be political, however not all politicking is politics.
Politicking is:

• Criticism shared in passing
• Slips of language that break open meaning
• Friendly and not-so-friendly exchanges
• Pleasure and possibility in the ostensibly extraneous and unstructured
• Sly forms of distraction, meddling, lobbying
• Easy and unrestrained talk or writing, especially about bodies and the
social.

The line between politick and impolite is fine but worth tracing, tweaking.
Politicking is a critical stance, an upright maneuverability if you will. The
call is not just for interdisciplinarity, but for losing our disciplinarity if
only temporarily to access broader historical and theoretical debates. We
invite graduate students of the history of art and architecture to share
recent research and works in progress (20-minute presentation plus Q&A).
Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Art and architecture that champions/clamps down on not-so-civil society
• The place of the fragment
• Busy/bodies
• How might we account for less formal transactions between art and beholder,
artist and style, art and nation/globe?
• Friendly and not-so-friendly exchanges in the arts/criticism
• Artists/art historians/museums raising a ruckus
• How theories of art and architecture account for the informal, anarchic
• Envisioning a new/supplemental public sphere
• What constitutes evidence, context and rhetoric when politicking
• Methodological and theoretical problems with humor and pleasure
• Gray art markets.

Please e-mail abstracts of no more than 300 words along with your vita (or any
questions) to the organizers at the address below by February 28, 2005.
Participants will be notified by March 7, with a draft of your presentation
due by April 18.

George Flaherty & Summer Cameron
History of Art and Architecture
UC Santa Barbara
Arts 1234
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-7080
gflahertyumail.ucsb.edu