[1] Critical Perspectives on Disability in Art and Visual Culture

From: Lynn M. Somers, lmsomersmac.com
Date: 27 Sep 21
Deadline: 1 Nov 21

Critical disability studies over the last thirty years have examined systems of power that shape codes of representation within images, objects, collections, and by extension, prevailing historiographies that define the limits of acceptability among human bodies, or what Tobin Siebers calls the ideology of ability. Advancing a theory of complex embodiment, he writes that disability, as a critical social concept, “enlarges our vision of human variation and difference, and puts forward perspectives that test presuppositions dear to the history of aesthetics” (2010: 3). The materiality of art is invested in affective embodiment, and from the classical period onward, historical narratives are rife with bodies deemed beautiful, perfect, and proportionate to their built environments. Although in the 19th and 20th centuries bodily discourses began shifting toward fragmentation, prostheses, and pain, those representations were labeled degenerate by oppressive political institutions. Interdisciplinary and intersectional disability studies—for example, “crip time” (McRuer, 2018) and “misfitting” (Garland-Thomson, 2011)—posit disability as a cultural minority identity (in opposition to medical models centered on individual pathology). These analytics expand the ways artists and scholars approach embodiment as an elastic human continuum. Two volumes on art history and disability (Routledge, 2016, 2021) offer important global correctives to ideologies of agency that have devalued disparate, contingent, and nonconforming embodied subjectivities. This session welcomes transdisciplinary studies of art in all media that (re)figure disability and theoretical approaches that look to enact radical change, reparation, or reforms to sociopolitical and aesthetic constructions of disability at both historical and contemporary moments.

Call for Papers deadline 1 November 2021. Please submit your paper proposal to the convenor lmsomersmac.com

Conference website: https://eu.eventscloud.com/website/5317/about/

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[2] Roads to Convergence behind the Iron Curtain: Remapping Conceptual Art in the Era of (Post)Socialism

From: Maia Toteva, maia.totevattu.edu
Date: 30 Sep 21
Deadline: 1 Nov 21

In 2010, the critic Peter Osborne argued that contemporary art is post-conceptual. Notwithstanding broad generalizations, it is undeniable that key traits of contemporary art are rooted in the notion of global conceptualism. Two decades after the closing of the blockbuster exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, scholars still ponder the dilemma that propelled the show’s ambitious agenda. Was conceptualism a unified movement that emerged in the West and spread worldwide, or did unique local circumstances give birth to multiple conceptual trends in distant geographic regions? What factors facilitated the development of a global phenomenon, and what transcultural considerations prompted the shift from the formalist preoccupation with material objects toward broader attention to the ideas and conceptual framing of artworks?

Reviving the quandary, this session reconsiders the conceptual practices of the Eastern Bloc before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. How did conceptual trends born in (post)socialist countries (e.g., Sots Art or Moscow conceptualism) relate to Western conceptual art, and how did such movements fit into the globalist narratives advanced by transnational alliances, international markets, and neoliberal ideologies? If Anglo-American conceptualism emerged in reaction to formalism as articulated by Clement Greenberg, while modernist movements in the Communist Bloc waned disrupted by socialist realism, what conditions prompted the inception of a “flexible and elastic” Eastern European conceptual art as a strategy of interrogating systems of socialism, capitalism, and political oppression? Raising such questions, we seek to reassess the role of (post)conceptual art in the eras of post-truth and post-socialism.

Call for Papers deadline: 1 November 2021. Please submit your paper proposal to the convenor: Maia Toteva, Texas Tech University, Maia.Totevattu.edu  Please include in your proposal a clear paper title, a short abstract (max 250 words), your name and email.

Association for Art History Annual Conference

The 2022 Annual Conference will take place in person over three days from 6 - 8 April 2022. There will be up to 36 live parallel sessions with 4, 6, or 8 papers delivered in each session. There will be multiple sessions taking place each day.

All 2022 sessions are open to 25-minute paper proposals. Session Timetables will be available for downloading nearer the event: https://eu.eventscloud.com/website/5317/

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[3] Digital Amateurism and the Platformisation of Art

From: Yvonne Schweizer, yvonne.schweizerikg.unibe.ch
Date: 1 Oct 21
Deadline: 1 Nov 21

Convenors: Yvonne Schweizer, University of Bern; Annette Urban, University of Bochum

This session seeks to critically examine the figure of the digital amateur who entered the art field beginning in the early 2000s. It aims to investigate the advent of digital platforms as a particular moment that blurs the hierarchies between amateurism and professionalism. Tales of deskilling and sharing, the celebration of collective creativity and vernacular aesthetics have since remained at the core of digital culture. At the same time, platforms offer the stage to highly commodified participatory promises as well as gendered images of craftsmanship and technical expertise.

We welcome papers that address models and politics of platform artistry, with a particular focus on how-to-practices, crowdsourcing and related forms of distributed authorship. We are interested in contributions that address social biases in platform art that result from the ambivalent promise of reversing the roles of producers and users. Papers might relate current practices to previous community-based media practices. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

- The aesthetics of digital amateurism: “bad photography”, “poor images” and the digital vernacular
- Queering forms of digital production: inverting, de-standardising and re-manualizing tools
- The artist as tutor: between promoter of practical knowledge and agent of cognitive capitalism
- The economic logic of platform artistry and the (re)distribution of skills: oscillations between routinised repetition of tasks and affectionate virtuosity, technological experimentation and hands-on practices.

Your proposal for a 25-minute paper should include a title, a short abstract (max 250 words), your name and email address. Call for Papers deadline 1 November 2021. Please submit your paper proposal to the convenors: yvonne.schweizerikg.unibe.ch and annette.urbanruhr-uni-bochum.de.

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[4] Collective Craft in Global Contexts

From: Valeria Fulop-Pochon, vf15404bristol.ac.uk
Date: 2 Oct 21
Deadline: 1 Nov 21

Association for Art History’s 48th Annual Conference
https://eu.eventscloud.com/website/5317/2022-sessions/collective-craft-in-global-contexts-/

Session: 'Collective Craft in Global Contexts':

This session seeks to investigate modes of community art production by reviewing the role of folk art and folklore, craft and applied art in diverse social, historical, geographical or political contexts with the focus on the 20th and 21st centuries. Cultural producers globally, working in traditional craft, design and applied art techniques through textile, clay, wood, glass, metal, paint, print and other media, have produced utilitarian and decorative objects for the benefit of their communities. From small everyday objects to large architectural spaces, made for domestic or public use, art-making has been essential in serving people’s physical, aesthetic, spiritual or ideological needs. Traditional folk art and its techniques have often been shaped or revived for social or political purposes. Rather than reflecting the ideals of institutions, collective art embodies the knowledge of the community and locality.

We invite proposals from academics, curators and artists that address collective craft making with the focus on folk art, folklore, craft, design and the applied arts, discussing a range of topics from social art practices, cross-cultural, transnational or transhistorical engagement; intergenerational practices, preserving cultural memory and heritage; collective art expressing ethnic or national identity; community folk-art serving social or political purposes. Understanding participation as an intrinsic media, we intend to leave the interpretation of ‘collectivity’ open. The session will explore how participatory communities organise themselves in multiple political and social contexts, from indigenous, socialist, to neo-liberal capitalist societies.

Call for Papers deadline 1 November 2021. Please submit your paper proposal to the convenors by email:

Valéria Fülöp-Pochon, Postgraduate Researcher in History of Art, Faculty of Arts, University of Bristol, vf15404bristol.ac.uk

Courtney Schum, Postgraduate Researcher in History of Art Faculty of Arts, University of Bristol, cs17825bristol.ac.uk, @courtschum

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[5] Rethinking Royal Manuscripts in a Global Middle Ages

From: Jacopo Gnisci, j.gnisciucl.ac.uk
Date: 4 Oct 21
Deadline: 1 Nov 21

ICMA Sponsored Session at AAH 2022, 6 – 8 April 2022, London (in Person)

Organized by Jacopo Gnisci (UCL) and Umberto Bongianino (University of Oxford)

This panel sets out to examine and compare the impact of royal patronage on the visual, material, and textual features of manuscripts produced across Africa, Asia, Mesoamerica and Europe during the ‘Global Middle Ages.’ As polysemic and multi-technological objects, royal manuscripts were produced in different forms and sizes, and from a variety of materials that could vary according to the taste, wealth, ideology, religion, and connections of their patrons and makers. Their visual and textual content could conform or deviate from existing traditions to satisfy the needs and ambitions of those involved in their production and consumption. Finally, pre-existing manuscripts could be appropriated, restored, enhanced, gifted, and even worshipped by ruling elites for reasons connected with legitimacy and self-preservation, becoming powerful instruments of hegemony, or symbols of prestige and piety. Because of this semiotic versatility, written artifacts provide ideal vantage points for understanding the agency of material culture in the creation and perpetuation of political power.
To what extent do the materials, texts, and images of royal manuscripts reflect the integration of pre-modern courts in networks of patronage and exchange? In which ways were these features adapted for different audiences and for female, male, or genderqueer patrons? How did they inform local and transregional notions of power and authority? How did communities that opposed royal authority situate themselves in relation to the political agency of written texts and their illustrations? When and how did such artifacts become imperial relics to be displayed, or symbols of a contentious past to be concealed or destroyed? What can manuscripts tell us about the royal patronage of other artistic media, dynastic rivalries, political alliances, and state-endorsed religious phenomena?

In pursuing similar questions, we are particularly interested in multidisciplinary papers that move beyond a Eurocentric reading of material culture by considering royal manuscripts from pre-modern polities traditionally seen as ‘peripheral.’ We welcome proposals that seek to apply innovative methodologies to the study of handwritten material and its circulation, questioning conventional assumptions about politics, culture, and religion, and privileging comparative approaches and transcultural artistic phenomena.

Call for Papers deadline: 1 November 2021. Please submit your paper proposal to the convenors:

Umberto Bongianino: umberto.bongianino[at]orinst.ox.ac.uk
Jacopo Gnisci: j.gnisci[at]ucl.ac.uk

Presenters in ICMA-sponsored sessions will be eligible for conference fee reimbursement (if virtual) OR travel reimbursement (if in person) via the ICMA-Kress Travel Grant (https://www.medievalart.org/kress-travel-grant).