Appel à communication : Six nouvelles sessions pour le congrès annuel de la College Art Association (CAA) (New York, 15-18 février 2017)

Les détails concernant le Congrès 2017  de la CAA se trouve ici.  Des appels à communication sont proposés pour six nouvelles sessions  avec comme date limite le 30 août 2016 (sauf la session 5 portant sur la catastrophe). Les propositions doivent être expédiées aux coordinateurs des sessions.

1. Approche sensorielle dans la peinture américaine
2. Nouvelles perspectives sur l’Asie du sud
3. Désastres naturels, temps sacré et eschatologie
4. L’autoportrait comme performance
5. La Catastrophe et l’écologie de l’art
6. Histoires féministes de l’art

[1] Sensorial Apprehension in American Painting
[2] New Perspectives from South Asia
[3] Natural Disasters, Sacred Time, and Eschatology
[4] Self-Portraiture as Performance
[5] Catastrophism and the Ecology of Art
[6] Feminist Art Histories

[1]  Sensorial Apprehension in American Painting
Chairs: Elizabeth Buhe (Institute of Fine Arts NYU, ebuhe@nyu.edu)
George Philip LeBourdais (Stanford University, glebourd@stanford.edu)

This panel asks how the vitality of American painting has been bound to bodily apprehension, to the spaces painting creates, and, especially, to entanglements of the two. What are the possibilities of non-visual hermeneutics, proprioception, or methodologies that embrace a broader suite of the human sensorium? Is seeing enough for believing?
Many moments in American painting bear out such questions. Frederic Church’s dramatic 1859 display around The Heart of the Andes included opera glasses for close scrutiny of painted surfaces, emphasizing viewership’s physical spectacle while also releasing a mobile or otherly-embodied eye. In 1962, Barnett Newman announced that his paintings could make viewers feel “full and alive in a spatial dome of 180 degrees,” cutting against the historical grain of linear perspective. Today, Jacqueline Humphries asks what new spaces of experience her monumental abstractions might open onto at the same time that her slick, silvery passages reflect light and repel vision.

What historical episodes and artworks portray the dissolution of this binary between illusion and embodiment? To what extent have the core concerns of phenomenology, affect, new materialism, and formalism created tensions between surface legibility and corporeal presence? How have new technologies, materialities, and environments enabled readings that spill beyond a work’s framing planes? How might the “bodying forth” of painting implicate multiple regimes of vision or reframe tendencies toward ocularcentrism? Following the work of scholars like Martin Jay, Caroline Jones, and Nicholas Mirzoeff, this panel invites papers that explore more fully sensorial approaches to American painting.

[2] Is There an Aesthetics of Decolonization? New Perspectives from South Asia
Chair(s): Natasha Eaton, University College London (n.eaton@ucl.ac.uk);
Emilia Terracciano, University of Oxford (emilia.terracciano@rsa.ox.ac.uk)

What is the impact of decolonization movements on modernism? “Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon,” wrote Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a study devoted to the dehumanising effects of colonialism upon the individual as well as a call for the decolonization of people. International commentary on the current Greek debt crisis in the EU scarcely considers prior experiences of structural adjustment, labour exploitation, migration, refugee crisis and debt intransigence beyond Europe. But decolonization has a peculiarly non-European history, referring to political agendas arising in the South, which claimed self-determination from colonial rule. The aim of this panel is to identify the processes, politics and aesthetics of decolonization for art and art history in South Asia. Through a history marked by ruptures and displacements, we explore how artists endorsed, challenged and negotiated the present, as imperialism weakened its grip and took new forms. Artists resisted and reconfigured domination and homogeneity, ramifying struggles for self- determination on an international scale. This panel calls for new and urgent research initiatives around art and decolonization as for example that carried out by the special issue of Third Text: “Partitions: Art and South Asia” (2017, Editor: Natasha Eaton).

We welcome papers that address decolonization across a range of media and technologies: Comparative ‘Partitions’; ‘Islanding’; Border and Border Cultures; Violence, Nostalgia and Longing; Imagination and Struggles; Carto-imaginations and Uneven Geographies; De-territorialization; Labor Exploitation; Violence in the Postcolony; The Potentialities of Revolution; Refugee Crisis; Migration and Diaspora; Political Economy of Emergency.

Potential Subject Areas: 1) Art History-Twentieth-century Art; 2) Art History-South/Southeast Asian Art; 3) Art History-Critical Theory/Gender Studies/Visual Studies.

[3]   Natural Disasters, Sacred Time, and Eschatology in the Eastern Mediterranean
Chairs: Armin Bergmeier (Leipzig University), armin.bergmeier@uni-leipzig.de
Heba Mostafa (University of Kansas), h797m476@ku.edu

The impact of the environment and the natural world on the human condition has incited a growing scholarly interest in recent years. This panel examines representations of natural disasters (fire, earthquakes, plagues, etc.) marking sacred time and asks how catastrophic events in the natural world structured the historical perception of sacred time. In many cultures, the eschaton or the end of time was a crucial moment in sacred time, intimately linked to destructive forces in the natural world. In Judaism, theophanies were often accompanied by frightening natural phenomena. In Middle Byzantine times, Last Judgment scenes began to incorporate a river of fire that leads to hell and opens up into a fiery abyss; while in Islam, the Day of Judgment would be announced by a massive upheaval of the natural order of the world, from cataclysmic earthquakes to the parting of the heavens.

The panel queries how the relationship between natural disaster and sacred time was visualized and materialized in artifacts, architecture, and the design of specific sites. Some of the questions may include how natural disasters triggered expectations of divine agency or the advent of the eschaton. How were these events imagined, represented, or even counteracted? Which natural sites were associated with events in sacred time, and how were they architecturally and ritually framed or represented visually across various media.

[4] Imagining Bodies, Picturing Identities: Self-Portraiture as Performance
Chair: Chanda Laine Carey (New York University) (Chanda.L.Carey@gmail.com)

Picturing the self is a process that marks key avant-garde practices like that of Claude Cahun’s photography and Duchamp’s performance of alter ego Rrose Selavy. In Contemporary art, the role of photography in performance ranges from the work of art to documentation, as artists take their own bodies as their subject, often eliding, transforming, or performing identity. Photographers Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura have depended on their performative bodies and costumes to define their projects, while artists including Tehching Hsieh and Eleanor Antin have relied on photography to mediate the process of changes to their bodies in durational performances. Artists of African descent including Carrie Mae Weems, Lyle Ashton Harris, Renee Cox, and Omar Victor Diop have used photography as a performative medium to represent intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora. Ana Mendieta investigated her own appearance through the cosmetic, while Liu Bolin erases perception of a distinct identity with chameleon-like costume and cosmetics that allow his body to perform the appearance of space.

Examining the body at the nexus of identity, representation, the moment of the photograph and the fluidity of performance, this panel invites papers that investigate the performative dimensions of photographic self-portraiture, and the importance of self-portraiture to performance practices. Papers may address artists’ concerns with gender, race, sexuality, art history, popular culture, duration, costume, cosmetics, gesture, control, and creative independence among other interests central to the intersection of performance, photography, and self-portraiture.

[5]  Catastrophism and the Ecology of Art in Pre- and Early Modern Europe
Conveners: Joanne Anderson, The Warburg Institute: joanne.anderson@sas.ac.uk
Jill Harrison, The Open University: jill.harrison@open.ac.uk

Floods, fires, earthquakes, famines and plagues were catastrophic events in pre- and early modern Europe. They impacted heavily on environment and society by devastating resources, levelling infrastructure and displacing or destroying communities. The residual presence of such in the cultural memory could be long term and institutionalized. As Erling Skaug has recently argued (2013) in relation to change in Giotto’s late oeuvre, ‘disasters of a certain magnitude tend to cause breaks and abrupt changes in a historical course – for better or worse.’

Catastrophism is an emerging and productive way of thinking about art’s relationship to climate and environment and the circumstances of its production and interpretation. But it also has a venerable tradition within the discipline of art history itself. From Winckelmann’s climate theory in relation to the stylistic development of Greek sculpture (1755) to Millard Meiss’s theories about the Black Death and its instigation of an archaicising pictorial system (1951), the ecology of visual representation is a persistent framework for critical enquiry. It has the potential to align local events with universal histories, for example a synecdoche for the Apocalypse or the Great Flood.

This panel welcomes papers that explore catastrophes of art in the classical sense. By focusing on pre- and early modern Europe, it aims to push art historians to rethink the role of such events in our understanding of art and its production. It will seek to discuss and offer fresh perspectives on the concept of catastrophism and its relevance for the ecology of art.

Please email your paper proposals straight to the session conveners. Provide a title and abstract for a 25 minute paper (max 250 words). Include your name, affiliation and email. Your paper title should be concise and accurately reflect what the paper is about (it should ‘say what it does on the tin’) because the title is what appears most first and foremost online, in social media and in the printed programme. You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks. Do not send proposals to the Conference Administrator or the Conference Convener.

Deadline for paper proposals: 7 November 2016

[6]   Feminist Temporalities and Art Histories in the Middle East and North Africa
Chair: Ceren Ozpinar, University of Sussex (cerenoz@gmail.com)

This session seeks to explore feminist art histories and temporalities in the Middle East and North Africa. Despite the global interrogation of patriarchal discourses in art since the late 1960s, feminist art history has not yet fully acknowledged the geographical and the temporal spaces outside the EuroAmerican map. Feminist art history, which can be called ‘imperial’, or ‘normative’ as Meskimmon argues (2007), either in the form of an exhibition narrative or a scholarly book, tends to present a linear global narrative, which leaves out everything that does not fit into its temporal trajectory or the idea of progress. Feminist art in the Middle East and North Africa has been one of the least addressed practices in imperial feminist art history. A few exceptions, including diaspora artists Nil Yalter and Shirin Neshat have been featured, though only to turn them into stereotypical representatives of feminist art outside Euro-America. While the very existence of these feminist art histories intervenes in the progressive narratives of the imperial feminist art history, they also have an impact upon both art historical temporality and feminism(s) at large. We welcome papers that discuss modern and contemporary visual art from the Middle East and North Africa, which investigate notions of sexuality and gender, while they interrupt patriarchal narratives, or present diverse understandings of feminism. By doing so, this session aims to encourage new writing and reading strategies that displace both the canon of imperial feminist art history and vernacular art histories that do not usually accommodate feminist art.