Call for papers:

AGENCY AND AUTOMATISM: PHOTOGRAPHY AS ART SINCE THE SIXTIES

'Agency and Automatism' is the culminating conference of the 3 year AHRC
research project 'Aesthetics after Photography,' co-directed by Margaret
Iversen (Dept of Art History & Theory, University of Essex) and Diarmuid
Costello (Dept of Philosophy, University of Warwick). The conference will
take place at

Tate Modern, London, 10-12 June 2010.

Taking as a point of departure the notable transformation in artists' use of
photography from 1960s to the present, the project considers its
implications for aesthetic theory. The art historical side of the project
tracks photography's transformation from anti-aesthetic, post-conceptual
document to large scale pictorial art. The philosophical side investigates
what distinguishes photography as a mode of depiction and an artistic
medium, particularly in light of recent artists' use of digital
technologies. Bringing these disciplines together promises to enhance our
understanding of one of the dominant mediums of contemporary art.

The conference aims to bring art history and philosophical aesthetics into
dialogue at the point of their intersection around questions of agency and
automatism in the photographic process. Such questions can be understood,
art historically, in terms of the recent history of artists' interest in the
medium, particularly those conceptual and post-conceptual artists who value
photography in so far as it might be thought to bracket artistic agency and
authorial control. This is manifest in the preference for unpretentious
snapshot effects, documentary value, and deadpan anti- or a-aesthetic
qualities in conceptual and post-conceptual art, as well as in uses of
photography for the appropriation and recycling of existing imagery.

Similar questions of agency and automatism have arisen in recent debates in
the philosophy of photography. Philosophers tend to start from certain
assumptions about the mechanical, causal or "mind-independent" nature of the
photographic process that are taken to distinguish photographs from other
forms of depiction. Given this starting point, a special case then needs to
be made for art photography, given its evident porosity to artistic
intention. By now almost all have rejected the extreme conclusion that their
underlying assumptions about photography as an automatic recording mechanism
preclude the possibility of fully-fledged photographic art. Nonetheless,
dominant conceptions of photography in philosophy still face problems doing
justice to artistic uses of the medium.

From an art historical point of view, this is ironic, given that photography
arguably entered the mainstream fine art canon when artists turned to the
medium to exploit the very features of its process that appear, from a
philosophical point of view, to be in tension with its status as art. Such
artists were interested in the non-art nature of photography as a new
resource and horizon of possibility for artistic practice. That is, many
artists valued photography in all the respects in which it seemed to evade,
rather than mimic, art with a capital 'A'. In view of this, one way to
understand the foregrounding of artistic intention in more recent large
scale, and often digital, art photography is as a rejection of this
post-conceptual settlement concerning the automaticity of photography.
Whether such practices go beyond conceptual photography or return
photography to the terrain of pre-conceptual pictorial art remains much
debated.

Given the centrality of these issues, and particularly the unremarked
interplay of their art historical and philosophical manifestations, we
invite papers that address key conceptual antinomies in this debate - not
just agency and automatism, but a wide range of cognate notions such as
intention and causality, mind and nature, decision and chance, picture and
document, icon and index, expressive vs. deadpan style, etc - or consider
specific artists since the 1960s whose work bears on such issues in
illuminating ways. Invited speakers include: Carol Armstrong; Cynthia
Freeland; Robin Kelsey; Joel Snyder; Jeff Wall.

Submissions should consist of a 300-500 abstract, addressing the conference
theme, and an accompanying 1-2pp abbreviated CV. The deadline for receipt is
1 December 2009, and we aim to notify in January 2010.

Please e-mail all submissions to both Dawn Phillips and Wolfgang Brückle,
the project research fellows at: Dawn.Phillipswarwick.ac.uk;
wbruckleessex.ac.uk.

Dr. Wolfgang Brückle
Senior Research Officer
Department of Art History and Theory
University of Essex
Colchester CO4 3SQ
United Kingdom
+44 01206 872200 tel (admin)
+44 01206 872606 tel (direct)
wbruckleessex.ac.uk