History Graduate Student Symposium

CALL FOR PAPERS

Incongruities

The 44th Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Symposium
Friday, October 23, 2009
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
Keynote Speaker, TBA

Graduate students in any discipline are invited to submit abstracts for
"Incongruities," the 44th Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student
Symposium. To be held on October 23, 2009, the symposium will provide a
forum for emerging scholars to discuss the roles that incongruity,
disjuncture, and dissonance have played in definitions and uses of art
throughout history. Contributions on any artistic medium (sculpture,
print
media, photography, architecture, film, painting, performance, etc.),
period, and region are welcome.

Papers may address incongruity as a formal device in specific
instances of
artistic intention, production, and reception; in relation to
historiography; or as a methodological concern. How has incongruity been
used as a mode of humor, irony, or the grotesque? When is incongruity
used
as an artistic strategy, and when is it an unintended consequence? How
can
incongruent elements embedded in an individual object or group of
objects
affect its own context-bound reception, acculturation, and use? How can
incongruity lead to a fragmentation of subjectivity or an ambivalence of
identity? As objects move between cultures, how do slippages of meaning
occur? How can we understand incongruity as a form of engagement, as a
position of mobility or resistance? How can that which is incongruent be
understood as a productive failure, one that leads to new possibilities?

Questions of methodology may include the following: What role has the
concept of incongruity played in the historicizing of art? When does the
disjunction between method and object push us to expand the frameworks
of
art history? Have specific methodologies, such as that of post-
colonialism
and post-structuralism, thematized the issue of incongruity more so than
others? When does incongruity become essential in designating objects
as art
or non-art?

How are incongruities themselves transformed? How and when do
incongruities
in art embody existing antagonisms, strengthen into paradox, or create
new
conflict? How can incongruity—by definition that which is incompatible
and
does not come together—remind us of the established norms of quotidian
experience? How do incongruities negotiate experience through
disjuncture?

Abstracts of 300 words or less and a current curriculum vitae are due
by 5
p.m on May 15, 2009. Submissions may be e-mailed to
ah-incongruityucla.humnet.edu or sent by mail to:

AHGSA Symposium 2009
UCLA Department of Art History
100 Dodd Hall
P.O.
Box 951417
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1417