[1] Picturing Infrastructure; or the Infrastructure of Picturing
From: Emily Doucet, emily.doucetmail.mcgill.ca
Date: 12 Oct 22
Deadline: 4 Nov 22

Art and art historians are irretrievably sunk into global infrastructures. Artists, photographers, engineers, surveyors, cartographers – both professional and amateur – have pictured the ‘infrastructural imaginary’ (Parks, 2015) on all continents. So, where infrastructure studies has emphasised invisibility, insofar as infrastructure apparently works unnoticed, until it breaks down (Bowker and Star, 1999), we can point to: pictures of/from ships or balloons; pictures shipped or flown; pictures lost in transit; pictures made of materials mined and transported (and pictures of mining); pictures of (and received at) ports; pictures at market; and pictures amassed around and through imperial and colonial projects. Such a vast transhistorical and global corpus may indeed suggest art history is uniquely placed to study infrastructure. Yet the provocation of this panel is twofold. A material/ist history of art, and perhaps even individual works of art, asserts the visuality of infrastructure against its apparent invisibility. Meanwhile, assembling pictures of infrastructure emphasises the underrecognized yet pervasive embeddedness of art and infrastructure.

This panel invites papers that think with images of physical infrastructure like bridges, ports, wires, cables, and roads, and invites considerations of other forms of picturing infrastructure such as shipping routes, logistics, art markets, global trade, and data storage, as well as studies of how infrastructure has shaped the field of art historical inquiry itself.

How do pictures move from here to there? How do the materials of pictures move from there to here? And how do we?

Please submit your paper proposals by November 4th, 2022 direct to the panel co-chairs:

Zoë De Luca (McGill University), deluca.zoegmail.com

Emily Doucet, (McGill University), emily.doucetmail.mcgill.ca