The 44th Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Symposium
Friday, October 23, 2009
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
Keynote Speaker, TBA
Graduate students in any discipline are invited to submit abstracts for “Incongruities,” the 44th Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Symposium. To be held on October 23, 2009, the symposium will provide a forum for emerging scholars to discuss the roles that incongruity, disjuncture, and dissonance have played in definitions and uses of art throughout history. Contributions on any artistic medium (sculpture, print media, photography, architecture, film, painting, performance, etc.), period, and region are welcome.
Papers may address incongruity as a formal device in specific instances of artistic intention, production, and reception; in relation to historiography; or as a methodological concern. How has incongruity been used as a mode of humor, irony, or the grotesque? When is incongruity used as an artistic strategy, and when is it an unintended consequence? How can incongruent elements embedded in an individual object or group of objects affect its own context-bound reception, acculturation, and use? How can incongruity lead to a fragmentation of subjectivity or an ambivalence of identity? As objects move between cultures, how do slippages of meaning occur? How can we understand incongruity as a form of engagement, as a position of mobility or resistance? How can that which is incongruent be understood as a productive failure, one that leads to new possibilities?
Questions of methodology may include the following: What role has the concept of incongruity played in the historicizing of art? When does the disjunction between method and object push us to expand the frameworks of art history? Have specific methodologies, such as that of post-colonialism and post-structuralism, thematized the issue of incongruity more so than others? When does incongruity become essential in designating objects as art or non-art?
How are incongruities themselves transformed? How and when do incongruities in art embody existing antagonisms, strengthen into paradox, or create new conflict? How can incongruity—by definition that which is incompatible and does not come together—remind us of the established norms of quotidian experience? How do incongruities negotiate experience through disjuncture?
Abstracts of 300 words or less and a current curriculum vitae are due by 5
p.m on May 15, 2009.
Submissions may be e-mailed to
ah-incongruity@ucla.humnet.edu or sent by mail to:
AHGSA Symposium 2009
UCLA Department of Art History
100 Dodd Hall
P.O.
Box 951417
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1417