Call for Papers
Abstraction and Difference

Session at the College Art Association Conference, Chicago

Co-chairs:
David Getsy, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (dgetsysaic.edu)
Tirza Latimer, California College of the Arts (tlatimercca.edu)

Conventional accounts of abstraction stress its universalism, purity,
and opposition to figuration. Non-figurative content, though, can also
open artworks to rogue identifications of difference, impurity, and
discrepant potentiality. Indeed, abstraction's refusal of mimesis has
made it a resource for artists and viewers who aim to inhabit the world
differently. This panel examines abstraction as a mode for defending
difference and as a strategy for circumventing the ways that bodies are
culturally marked and regulated. How does abstraction have the capacity
to postulate new genders, new sexualities, or new racial configurations?
Of late, transgender and queer artists, among others who do not inhabit
normative positions on the social spectrum, have returned to abstraction
as a platform from which to visualize previously unimagined relational,
corporeal, and artistic horizons. The panel will address such
contemporary practices as well as earlier historical episodes in which
abstraction provided a resource for those seeking to affirm difference.
We solicit scholarship about artistic practices that use abstraction to
destabilize cultural marking and/or create representational space for
difference.

E-mail abstract, c.v., and cover letter by 6 May 2014 to both panel
chairs. For full details of conference and participation requirements,
see http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2014CallforParticipation.pdf

College Art Association Conference
Chicago, Illinois, USA
12-15 February 2014