Call for papers: SocialEast Seminar on Art and Espionage

Proposals for papers are invited from art historians, curators and artists that examine the art and visual culture of Eastern Europe and beyond in both historical and contemporary contexts. Papers are sought for the SocialEast Seminar on Art and Espionage, which will be held at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London on Friday 27 February 2009.*
*
This SocialEast Seminar considers the involvement of art during the Cold War with espionage, both on the level of international exchange and in specific national contexts. It deals with attempts within the Eastern Bloc to monitor artists through surveillance and networks of informers, the role of art espionage as an instrument of Sovietisation, and the methods used to control the involvement of artists in the international art world. There will also be discussion of the parallel role of Western organisations in activities from cultural espionage to the use of art as a propaganda weapon. The seminar will also consider artistic responses to the phenomenon of spying and the wider legacy of artistic espionage for the topography of contemporary art.

To suggest a paper for the SocialEast Seminar on Art and Espionage, please send a 200 word proposal and biographical note to Dr. Reuben Fowkes by email

The deadline for submitting a proposal is *Monday 22 December 2008*.

For more information see: http://www.socialeast.org

Conference: L’histoire de l’art depuis Walter Benjamin

Colloque EHESS (CEHTA)/INHA, Paris
5-6 décembre 2008

Colloque sous la direction scientifique de Giovanni Careri (EHESS, Paris) et
Georges Didi-Huberman (EHESS,Paris). En collaboration avec le Département des études et de la recherche de l’INHA, dans le cadre du programme Histoire de l’Histoire de l’Art (HHA)
Coordonné par Anne Lafont (INHA, Paris)

Institut national d’histoire de l’art
salle Giorgio Vasari
2 rue Vivenne, 75002, Paris
www.inha.fr

Le monde de la recherche philosophique, historique et littéraire a depuis longtemps reconnu la valeur toujours plus décisive que représente l’oeuvre de Walter Benjamin. Ce penseur hors normes a revisité un grand nombre de notions cardinales pour les sciences humaines, proposant de nouveaux modèles d’historicité comme de nouvelles façons de lire et de regarder les oeuvres de la culture, depuis l’art baroque jusqu’à la photographie et le cinéma des années trente en passant par la poésie romantique, le roman moderne, l’architecture urbaine ou le théâtre expérimental. Il reste aux historiens de l’art la tâche de faire un point sur la valeur d’usage de notions telles que l’aura, l’image dialectique, l’anachronisme, le montage, la “lisibilité” ou la reproductibilité technique. Le colloque s’interrogera sur les conditions d’application à l’histoire de l’art d’une théorie de l’historicité qui se présente en faisant recours au terme d’”image” et à celui d’”image dialectique”. Il s’interrogera aussi sur l’esthétisation du
politique à l’époque moderne. Quelle est la portée des analyses de Benjamin dans les conditions “bio-politiques” actuelles, quelle place y jouent les nouvelles technologies, et comment peut-on penser le rapport entre esthétique et éthique dans ce contexte ?

VENDREDI 5 DÉCEMBRE (salle Giorgio Vasari)
MATINÉE
Présidence :
Giovanni Careri

9h30 Giovanni Careri et Georges Didi-Huberman (EHESS, Paris) :
Présentation du colloque.

10h Sigrid Weigel (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin):
“The Painting as Lightening Flash for the Long Thunder Roll of Thought”.
The Role of Art for Benjamin¹s Epistemology.

11h Georges Didi-Huberman (EHESS, Paris) :
Illumination, imagination, montage.

APRÈS-MIDI
Présidence :
Pietro Montani

14h Antonia Birnbaum (Université de Paris-8) :
Silence tragique et stade préliminaire de la prophétie : une ” ressemblance
non sensible “.

15h Giovanni Careri (EHESS, Paris) :
Il n’est pas de tâche plus importante pour l’histoire de l’art que de
déchiffrer les prophéties.

pause

16h15 Xavier Vert (EHESS, Paris) :
Image dialectique et contamination dans La Ricotta de Pier Paolo Pasolini.

17h15 Présentation de l’ouvrage
Face au réel. Éthique de la forme dans l’art contemporain.

SAMEDI 6 DÉCEMBRE (salle Giorgio Vasari)
MATINÉE
Présidence :
André Gunthert

9h30 Pietro Montani (Università La Sapienza, Rome) :
Du ” politique ” de l’image.

10h30 Éric Michaud (EHESS, Paris) :
L’art comme préparation au danger. Remarques sur ” deux fonctions de l’art “
selon Walter Benjamin.

11h30 Jean-Louis Déotte (Université de Paris-8) :
Les appareils urbains de Benjamin.

APRÈS-MIDI

Présidence :
Éric Michaud

14h André Gunthert (EHESS, Paris) :
Le risque de la culture mineure.

15h Muriel Pic (Université de Neuchâtel) :
La métaphore du regard anatomiste chez Walter Benjamin.

pause

16h15 Bernhardt Rüdiger (ENBA, Lyon) :
L’expérience de l’arrêt. L’art face au réel.

17h15 Discussion finale

Conference: Iconotopoi / Bildkulturen (Cultures of the Image)

The Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill
University is proud to host the joint eikones-McGill Graduate Conference

Iconotopoi / Bildkulturen (Cultures of the Image)

December 3 to 5, 2008

With the global communication enabled by digital media, images circulate all around us today: they move freely across the same linguistic divides that sometimes render discourses impermeable. Whereas economic borders are increasingly dissolved by the transnational flow of consumer goods, linguistic barriers maintain divisions between academic practices across different cultures – barriers which also affect the study of ‘mobile’ images. The joint McGill-Eikones Graduate Conference Iconotopoi /Bildkulturen (Cultures of the Image) aims to identify and challenge these cultural and linguistic barriers within the academy, so that the study of images may one day become as mobile a practice as its objects of inquiry.

Conference Programme and Schedule
Wednesday, December 3, 2008 (Arts Building, West Wing)

5:00 – 5:30: Conference registration, Dept. of Art History and
Communications Studies (AHCS)

5:30: Opening Keynote / AHCS lecture series presentation, Arts W-215
Words of welcome by Prof. Christine Ross, AHCS, McGill
Keynote lecture by Prof. Andrew Piper, Dept. of German Studies, McGill:
‘Overwriting, Afterimages: A History of the Intermedial Line’

7:30: Opening Reception, Dept. of Art History and Communication Studies

Thursday, December 4, 2008 (Ferrier Bldg. room 230)

9:30 – 11:00: Panel 1 – Image as Evidence?
Stefana Lamasanu (McGill AHCS), Ingrid Hölzl (Academy of Fine Arts,
Vienna), Mladen Gladic (eikones/Princeton)
Chair: Carolina Cambre

11:00 – 11:15: coffee break (room 223)

11:15 – 12:45: Panel 2 – Word / Image
Christine Mitchell (McGill AHCS), Paloma Lopez Grueninger (eikones),
Christiane Hille (Humboldt)
Chair: Birgit Mersmann

12:45 – 2:15: Lunch break (pick up lunches in room 223)

2:15-3:45: Panel 3 – Polysensorial Images
Horea Avram (McGill AHCS), Anna Friz and Jason Rovito (Communications and
Culture, York/Ryerson), Stéphane Montavon (eikones)
Chair: Tamar Tembeck

3:45 – 4:00: wrap-up

5 à 7: Thomson House, 3650 McTavish St., Martha Crago Lounge (pink room),
main floor

Friday, December 5, 2008 (Ferrier Bldg. room 230)

9:00 – 11:00: Panel 4 – Imaging Memory and Transformation
Yasmine Nachabe (McGill AHCS), Jan von Brevern (eikones), Carolina Cambre
(U of Alberta), Birgit Mersmann (eikones)
Chair: Lalai Manjikian

11:00 – 11:15: coffee break (room 223)

11:15 – 12:45: Panel 5 – Imaging Knowledge
Tammer El-Sheikh (McGill AHCS), Nina Samuel (eikones), Stefanie Klamm (Max
Planck Institute)
Chair: Claudette Lauzon

12:45 – 2:15: Lunch break (pick up lunches in room 223)
Jakub Zdebik (Concordia), Jason Hill (U. Southern California)
Chair: Christiane Hille

3:15- 3:30: coffee break (room 223)

3:30 – 4:30: wrap-up roundtable discussion
Horea Avram, Mladen Gladic, Ingrid Hölzl, Jan von Brevern
Chair: Prof. Andrew Piper

5:30: Closing Keynote / AHCS lecture series presentation, Arts W-215

Prof. Ludger Schwarte, eikones, ‘What you see when you get Bild – and why it
makes sense to use one concept rather than two (picture, image).’

7:30: Closing Reception, Dept. of Art History and Communications Studies

For further informations visit:http://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/iconotopoi/

Call for papers: Studies in Visual Culture

2009 Popular Culture Association & American Culture Association Annual Conference
April 8 – 11, 2009
New Orleans, Louisiana

The Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association will hold their joint annual conference at the New Orleans Marriott between April 8-11, 2009. The conference serves as an important site of creative, intellectual, and cultural exchange and encourages a wide variety of participants to stimulate dialogue across a variety of disciplines. The Visual Culture strand of the PCA/ACA Conference is an important element of the conference and encourages presentations in traditional, non-traditional, and emerging areas of study. We are currently seeking proposals for sessions and individual presentations that engage with issues, ideas, and practices related to all areas of visual culture, including but not limited to: Traditions and conventions associated with visual culture Studio art practices and/or theories Image theory Interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and intermedia projects
Architecture; Art history and theory; Photography; Journalism and photojournalism (television and print media); Film and cinematic culture; Public art (graffiti, murals, public commissions and installations);
New media and computer-based issues in visual culture; Advertising; Graphic design; Design history and theory; Visual culture and everydayness; Comparative studies and multiculturalism in visual culture(s); Subversion and visual culture; Modes of “reading” and experiencing the visual; Verbal, visual, and performative relationships; Ideologies and the visual; Iconographic studies; Post-9/11 issues in visual culture; Aesthetics; Alternative media.
Please submit via e-mail a 250-word abstract for your proposed presentation or session no later than November 30, 2008, to Royce W. Smith, Visual Culture Chair for the Popular Culture Association. Please do not hesitate to e-mail any questions you might have regarding this exciting opportunity.

Call for papers: Making Memory, Making History: Ideas and Identities Beyond Borders

The History Graduate Student Association at Indiana University invites paper submissions by graduate students for its 2009 conference entitled Making Memory, Making History: Ideas and Identities Beyond Borders.

The year’s conference seeks to engage with a variety of sources and perspectives related to the movement of ideas and identities, whether figurative or literal, across and beyond borders. Addressing themes that are particularly relevant to a contemporary audience, both inside and outside the academy, our hope is to engage with historical topics that not only cross disciplinary boundaries, but that reach within and beyond the social and academic borders that influence our understandings of self and society. We welcome submissions from various disciplines, time periods, and geographic focus. The conference is intentionally broad and invites multiple interpretations of complex issues such as national and transnational identities, migration, globalization, media and visual culture, urban studies, material culture, memory, violence and trauma.

This year, in accordance with our themes, we are integrating our conference with an exciting public arts and media event.
The conference will coincide with the opening reception of a photography exhibit by artist Jonathan Moller at the Mathers Museum followed by a presentation by the artist and guest note speaker from Indiana University. The exhibit, accompanied by the publication of a book entitled Our Culture is our Resistance, has received international attention and acclaim. Please submit the items and information below no later than Monday, December 21st. The HGSA Conference Committee will evaluate abstracts and inform participants by January 5, 2009 of their acceptance and panel assignment. Full papers are expected by the 16th of February, 2009. For visiting graduate students, we will organize accommodations with IU graduate students participating in the conference. The conference is free to IU graduate students in any field. Non-IU students must submit a registration fee of $30. For more information, please visit our website at http://www.indiana.edu/~hgsaconf/
Please submit the following information via e-mail as an attachment.

1. Paper abstract and title (no more than 250 words)
2. Institutional affiliation and title/position
3. Contact information: name, e-mail address, postal address, telephone/fax numbers

The Paul Lucas Conference in History History Department Indiana University 742 Ballantine Hall Bloomington, IN 47405-7103

Jennifer Boles
Heather Vrana
The Paul Lucas Conference in History
History Department
Indiana University
742 Ballantine Hall
Bloomington, IN 47405-7103

Email

Call for Papers/ Art Presentations: Seminar in Visual Culture

Theme 2009: Money Money Money

Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies
School of Advanced Study,
Stewart House, 32 Russell Square,
WC1B 5DN London

The seminar aims to create a forum for practicing artists, researchers, curators, students, and others interested in visual culture to present, discuss and explore the various aspects of a given theme within the field.
In 2009, to keep apace with the present credit-crunching times, the theme is Money.

While the media are providing us with endless analyses of the credit crisis from all imaginable economic angles, it is now perhaps time to look at how artists and writers are responding to Nasdaq and FTSE100, to shiny coins and colourful banknotes and to the repetitive images of worried brokers shouting into their mobile phones. After all, money is itself an object of design and has long been the subject of the creative arts and the credit crunch has not only inspired economists and journalists. The seminar aims to look at the relationship between art, money and the everyday in times of crisis and of affluence.

Sessions will include screenings of artist films on the theme, followed by one or two speakers and time for discussion. The seminar offers opportunities for artists to present new (and existing) work.

Please send proposals for art presentations (200 words plus images) or
academic papers (200 words) to Ricarda Vidal

Dates and times:
6.30pm – 8.00pm: Thursday 29 Jan, Thursday 26 Feb, Wednesday 25 Mar,
Thursday 28 May, Wednesday 24 June

Dr Ricarda Vidal
49 Dalmeny Road
London N7 0DY
United Kingdom

Call for papers: Transnationalism and Visual Culture in Britain: Émigrés and Migrants, 1933-1956

9-11 September 2009 Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Deadline for proposals: 15 November 2008

Keynotes:

Dr Marian Malet (Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, University of London)

Brigitte Mayr and Michael Omasta (Synema – Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, Vienna)

Historically British visual culture has been shaped by trans-cultural cooperation, exiles, émigrés and migrant workers. Besides multi-faceted collaboration across geographical and cultural boundaries, the political situation in the mid-twentieth century in continental Europe prompted various migration movements. Many professionals, artists and intellectuals left their home countries as a response to the establishment of totalitarian regimes first by Italian, German and Spanish fascists and later by communists in central and Eastern Europe. Others arrived in Britain almost by chance – caught out by war or redrawn national boundaries. To a significant number Britain offered a new – often permanent – home. Among the large group of émigrés who helped to change the face of visual culture in Britain were film producers such as Alexander Korda, art historians such as Nikolaus Pevsner, filmmakers such as Karel Reisz and Lotte Reiniger, ceramic designers such as Grete Loebenstein and Agnete Hoy, architects such as Walter Gropius and Erich Mendelsohn, avant-garde artists such as László Moholy-Naghy, and photographers such as Bill Brandt.

This international and interdisciplinary conference looks at the cross- fertilisation and trans-national contact of British visual culture from the year the Nazis seized power in 1933 to the uprising in Hungary in 1956. Its wide focus invites papers on the avant-garde as well as on popular culture, centres of immigration as well as marginalised communities.

Presentations may feature analyses of individual émigrés, trajectories of migrants, specific studies of cross-cultural contacts, specific artefacts, schools of thought and theory, places of migration and trans-national cultural life, film, photography, material visual culture, fashion, journalism, television, architecture, academic life, the avant-garde, design, race, gender, national identities, etc.

Topics of trans-national aspects of visual culture in Britain not included in the above list are also welcome. Panel proposals are also welcome but we ask each presenter to submit his or her own paper proposal. Roundtable sessions and international participation are strongly encouraged.

Please send 150-250 word proposals to

Dr Tobias Hochscherf Conference Co-organiser Northumbria University School of Arts and Social Sciences Lipman Bldg. Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST United Kingdom Phone: ++44(0)191-227-4932 Email: tobias.hochscherf@northumbria.ac.uk