Appel à communication CAA : « Techniques of Reversal »

Techniques of Reversal
Jennifer L. Roberts and David Pullins, Harvard University, roberts6@fas.harvard.edu and pullins@fas.harvard.edu

This panel explores reversal as a generative operation across a wide range of media, geography, and historical contexts including printmaking, casting, counterproofing, and photography. While art historians have often assumed that a technical understanding of these processes is sufficient, this panel aims to elucidate how basic physical operations that demand an understanding of an image and its inverse might inform more abstract modes of thinking. How is reversal inherent to processes of reproduction and of conceptualizing images in three dimensions? How might formal solutions result from material and technological change? How might “negative intelligence” embody broader cultural beliefs and ideas or engage with problems of symmetry, bodily orientation, and oppositionality? We hope to explore the perspectives of both makers and viewers. And while we seek to highlight historical and geographic breadth and diversity of media (including such traditionally under- interrogated forms as marquetry, metalwork, or weaving), contextual specificity will also be crucial, notably in relation to materials and technology.

Proposals are due May 9, 2014. For information on submission, see: http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2015CallforParticipation.pdf