BOOM! Growth, Form and Sustainable Bodies 1946-1967

This conference is organised to coincide with the Richard Hamilton retrospective at the Tate Modern in February 2014, which will include the reconstruction of Growth and Form (ICA, 1951). Growth and Form negotiated a problematic that in the two decades after the end of WWII preoccupied different strands of artistic and architectural research across Europe. Namely, the effects of booming expansion – economic, demographic, urban, technological, material, visual – on the embodied subject within the context of a spreading capitalist pan-humanism championed abroad by the US. Some of the key historical coordinates that this conferences sets out to engage with in relation to cultural production include: Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man (1955), the baby boom, the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1954, the first tests of the H-bomb, postwar developments in cybernetics and artificial intelligence.

We encourage submissions for 30 minutes papers in the following areas of research: growth, reproducibility and sustainability as artistic strategies; urban growth, future habitats and exhibitions as habitats; technology, ecology and new sciences in art and exhibition making; humanism, ecology and sustainability; reproduction and feminist practices. We invite papers that address how artworks, films, images and exhibitions in the 1950s and early 60s mediated this experience within the boundaries of US-rescued Europe and explore the extent to which the local, national and global became increasingly interdependent for artists caught between the end of WWII and the early Cold War phase.

DEADLINE for submission: 31 January 2014

Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words. Please include your name, email address and institutional affiliation (where possible) at the end of the document.

Send to: BoomUCLgmail.com

Organised by Giulia Smith and Teresa Kittler