Closing the Modern-Postmodern Divide - Toward a History of Visual Parody

CAA-IAWIS Special Session

New York, February 14-17, 2007

Chair, Lauren S. Weingarden
Florida State University

Deadline: July 14, 2006

In the visual arts a post-modernist critique has been launched against a
modernist paradigm circumscribed and defined by Clement Greenberg. In this
encounter, formalism is taken as the target to deconstruct and
demythologize. However, it can be argued that such a discourse reinforces
the evolutionary historiography about modernism as a progressively abstract
means of representation. As a result, the post-modern critique continues a
dialogue with that which it devalues, and in doing so, further validates the
history it wants to discredit. The topic of this session seeks to locate,
excavate, and substantiate another modernist genealogy. This project
proposes a history that issues from nineteenth-century practices of irony,
parody, paradox and defies an evolutionary, progressive development, a
history that is impelled by a subversion of the status quo, whether that be
a conventional means of representation or a dominant social norm or
ideology. What is of concern here, is that irony, parody, and paradox have
also been identified as the characteristic motives of the post-modern
episteme. Critics and historians across the disciplines have rendered
parody central, if not unique, to postmodernists' strategies for subverting
modernist values and practices.

This (re)occurrence of parodic practices raises a fundamental question
regarding the viability of modernism and postmodernism as distinct, if not
oppositional, historical periods. Alternatively, by shifting our focus away
from a purist modernism to a subversive modernism, a historical continuum
between the nineteenth century and the late twentieth century comes into
view. Papers are invited that address such a continuum, either by treating
individual artists or movements. Proposals from all disciplines that
contribute to such a history will be considered. Special consideration will
be given to those papers that cut across disciplines to show how
word-and-image exchanges, that codify parodic practices, bring together what
are traditionally considered discrete domains of cultural practice.

Send 1-page (250-word) proposal to:

Professor Lauren S. Weingarden, Florida State University,
lswlhsmsn.com<mailto:lswlhsmsn.com> (please indicate CAA-IAWIS proposal
in
"Re:" line)

Lauren S. Weingarden