Call For Papers

Special Issue of Artlas Bulletin

During the last fifteen years, Latin American art has been added to canons of twentieth-century modernism and postmodernism, in an apparent triumph for the field. The myriad exhibitions and scholarly texts that have contributed to this explosion of interest have taken different approaches to the transnational, networked character of the modernism and contemporary art of the region. From Inverted Utopias’ “constellations” of similar tendencies across disconnected countries to The Geometry of Hope’s inclusion of Paris as a “Latin American city” to Perder la forma humana’s vast network diagram of 1970s and 1980s artists, conceptual frameworks for survey exhibitions of abstraction, conceptual and performance practices have drawn on models of circulation and geographical interconnection. Likewise, Andrea Giunta’s Vanguardia, internacionalismo y política, Claire Fox’s Making Art Panamerican and Sérgio B. Martins’ Constructing an Avant-Garde, among a surfeit of recent books, have explored national and regional histories in terms of the institutional endeavor to promote particular artists, countries, or alliances within the international field. These networked approaches are in part a result of curators and scholars simply following the historical movements of individual artists, movements, publications, and exhibitions.

How might this focus on international networks and circulation reorient existing models of Latin American art history? This issue of the Artlas Bulletin calls for articles that attend not only to institutional initiatives, but to the ways that connection and movement have been incorporated into modern and contemporary works of art by Latin American artists. We welcome studies that consider networks and mobility as subject matter within representational art or art writing, as embedded in the forms of artworks themselves, or both. Topics might include, but would certainly not be limited to, manifestos written around the peregrinations of artists within and beyond the region, aesthetic philosophies grounded in mapping or reorienting geographies, relationships between abstraction and movement, the walks, marches or other mobile actions in public space, the use of maps as informational content or surrogate bodies in conceptualism and performance art, and explorations of border politics.

Artlas Bulletin is a free, online-only, peer-reviewed journal published by École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Deadline for submissions: April 15, 2014
Please email to daniel.quiles4gmail.com