Call for Papers

Dada and Surrealism in Play

Session at the Annual Association of Art Historians Conference, University
of Glasgow, UK, 15-17 April 2010, convened by David Hopkins and Debbie
Lewer.

This session seeks to explore the relationship between Dada, Surrealism and
their legacies and notions of the infantile, the child-like and the
adolescent. As is well known, both Dada and Surrealism generated objects
that were toy-like and strategies that were game-like, but comparatively
little work has been carried out on these aspects of the movements. We
welcome papers that deal with "transitional" objects’ and babble, with
rhymes and rituals, with toys and children’s games, with puppets and dolls,
with playing cards and puzzles, with tall-tales and make-believe, with jokes
and ruses, with bluffs and disguises. We are similarly interested in related
artistic strategies that are playful, humorous, roguish, regressive, badly
behaved, transgressive and so on. The role of toylike objects and play in a
critical politics of dissent is an area of special interest. Particularly
welcome are papers which trace paths out of the Dada and Surrealist
traditions into the present; whether via Fluxus games or the rudery of the
yBas.

The session aims to produce a different conception of its topic than one
afforded simply by an appreciation of the influence of child art’ or the
veneration of the spontaneity of childhood. We are more interested in how
and why artists and theorists in the Dada and Surrealist vein sought to
return to child-like states and conditions or to re-animate the
paraphernalia of childhood, in ways which were often perverse or
recalcitrant, and not necessarily nostalgic. Dada, Surrealism and their
legacies are increasingly made to appear as "serious", morally worthy and
grown-up when in fact these attitudes were frequently anathema to them. We
hope, then, to put Dada, Surrealism and their legacies back into play.

Please refer to the AAH website for full details of the conference of which
this one-day session is a part: www.aah.org.uk. As detailed on the website,
if you would like to offer a paper, please submit your proposal of no more
than 250 words, including your name, contact details and institutional
affiliation by no later than 9 November 2009 to BOTH session convenors:

David Hopkins, University of Glasgow
d.hopkinsarthist.arts.gla.ac.uk

Debbie Lewer, University of Glasgow
d.lewerarthist.arts.gla.ac.uk