[spectre] CFP: Institutionalizing Socially Engaged Art in the 21st Century (CAA, Washington DC, 3-6 Feb 16)

[Andreas Broeckmann]

From: H-ArtHist Redaktion <hah-redaktion at h-net.msu.edu>
Date: Apr 6, 2015
Subject: CFP: 2 Sessions at CAA (Washington DC, 3-6 Feb 16)

CAA 2016 Washington, DC, February 3 - 06, 2016
Deadline: May 8, 2015

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[1] Institutionalizing Socially Engaged Art in the 21st Century

Over the last decade, socially engaged art practice and discourse has 
been increasingly institutionalized and popularized. A plethora of 
exhibitions, academic and public programs and publications have been 
showcasing, practicing, teaching and theorizing socially engaged art 
through a number of different outlets. Examples include, new MFA 
programs in art and social practice, international conferences, 
exemplified by the multi-year Open Engagement and widely-publicized 
international forums on art and social justice organized by well-known 
institutions such as Creative Time. At the same time, a wide spectrum of 
socially engaged art initiatives throughout the world have adopted 
activist strategies and have tended to affiliate themselves with protest 
movements. Occupy Museums, for example, while ignited in 2011 when 
American artist Noah Fisher wrote and published its manifesto, has been 
inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement. In recent years, a growing 
number of artists, curators, critics, and students have been coming 
together to form institutions and organizations in response to failing 
democracies. For example, since 2013, Hungarian art practitioners have 
formed eclectic groups, such as the Free Artists group and United for 
Contemporary Art in Budapest to challenge non-democratic measures 
implemented by the extreme-right wing ruling political party FIDESZ.

This panel seeks to open critical discussion on the deeper implications, 
methodological aspects, questions and problematics that arise through 
these processes of (self)institutionalization. An emphasis on Central 
and Eastern Europe is especially welcome. We invite presentations from 
scholars, curators, critics and artists that explore some of the 
following questions: What are some of the recent artistic forms of 
institutionalized social practice and what are their particular aims, 
strategies and mechanics of operations? How do they inform artists' 
socially engaged art practices that are typically contingent upon a 
locality and work with specific publics? How do they either build upon 
or depart from canonized forms of institutional critique during the 
1960s - 1980s? Who is the audience of such process-oriented practices? 
Moreover, how do institutionalized and self-institutionalizing processes 
complicate our understanding of both the role of contemporary art 
institutions and of collaborative and participatory forms of socially 
engaged art? How do different political contexts, older, recent and 
becoming democracies, affect the meaning of institutionalized social art 
practice?

We encourage interested participants to submit proposals for papers that 
address such questions though specific case studies, yet broader 
theoretical perspectives are also welcome. As such, themes may also 
include: - Critical Subversion and Institutional Assimilation - The 
Political in Socially Engaged Art: Art Practitioners in Post-Cold War 
Central and Eastern Europe  - Self-institutionalizing and its Audiences 
- Current Practices and their Historical Genealogies

Please, send an abstract (1-2 pages, double spaced), a letter of 
interest, a CAA submission form and current CV by May 8 to organizers:

Sabine Eckmann, Washington University in St. Louis, Eckmann at wustl.edu 
and Izabel Galliera, McDaniel College, izabelpitt at gmail.com

CAA individual membership is required of all participants.

For general guidelines for speakers, see:
http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf

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