CALL FOR PAPERS
Panel: Dematerialisation: The Entry into Postmodernity
Association of Art Historians Annual Conference 2004
University of Nottingham, UK
1-4 April 2004

This is the first call for papers for a panel examining the legacies of conceptual art for subsequent art, art history and theory. Abstacts of 300-400 words should be sent direct to the panel organisers by e-mail (see below) by 1st September 2003.

In the history of art there cannot be a shorter chronological period that has been ascribed the status of cultural epoch than 1966-1972, the years surveyed by Lippard's classic document, Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object (1973). The art, criticism and theory of this epoch still provide key historical reference points for contemporary art in Britain and in the USA, and have been instrumental in securing the intellectual priority of New York for subsequent debates around postmodernism. In dominant art historical narratives Minimal art, anti-form, systems, conceptual art, earth and process art have been characterised as the entry into artistic postmodernity, decisively challenging the hierarchies of aesthetic value embedded in the forms, materials and mediums associated with modernism, its institutional spaces and conventions of viewing.

This session invites papers that investigate the legacy of the generative moment of 1966-1972. How did the aesthetic concepts that emerged during these 6 years -- repetition, seriality, theatricality, process, materiality, negation, structure, and the situated, embodied beholder – inform the first waves of theoretical speculation on the character of artistic postmodernity? Was the process of dematerialisation conceived in terms of the complete dissolution of ‘the aesthetic’ as a unique category of experience, or did the movements of 1966-72 offer a radically transformed conception of the aesthetic? Is our understanding of 1966-72 locked within the postmodernist critique of modernism? Or does the art and theory of this epoch offer the intellectual resources to think beyond the current congealed radicalism of postmodernist paradigms?

Session Organisers:
Dr. Jonathan Vickery, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art, Department of History of Art, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL. tel. 024 76 523459 fax. 024 76523006. e.mail: J.P.Vickery@warwick.ac.uk. Mobile: 07801-544-956

Dr. Diarmuid Costello (info below)