Saturday, March 4, 2006

CALL FOR PAPERS

Submission Deadline: January 16, 2006

Space Exploration Within and Beyond the Image aims to examine ways space is constructed in visual representation and through social experience from a range of cultural, historical and methodological perspectives. At least since the appearance of the English translation of Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form, research in art history in this country has been sensitive to the cultural and ideological conditions surrounding the mimetic representation of space. We can usefully juxtapose this reconsideration of space within the image with the discourse opened up by Henri Lefebvre’s influential The Production of Space, which theorized the production of social space beyond the frame and in the living world. Thus we can understand the formations of space both within and beyond the image as cultural constructions. The USC Art History Department’s 10th Annual Graduate Student Symposium will provide a platform for an extended consideration of the rhetoric of space understood as both “real” and represented.

We invite graduate students to submit papers addressing issues of space, specifically ways it has been framed, activated or otherwise produced in visual culture. Papers might address such media as sculpture, dioramas, landscape, installation art, performance, architecture and urban design, film, or tableaux vivants. Other areas of inquiry might include display, the plinth, theatricality and absorption, spatial schematics, interiors, ritual spaces, borders, and virtual space. We welcome submissions from all areas of art history and related fields. In addition, we invite submissions from practicing artists and filmmakers engaged with ideas and problems of space in their work.

Papers should be between 15 and 20 minutes in length. Abstracts of no more than 500 words, a current CV, and contact information should be submitted by Monday, January 16, 2006, via email or post to the address below. Some travel funding is available.

EMAIL: uscgradsymposium@gmail.com
POST:
Graduate Symposium Committee
Department of Art History
University of Southern California
VKC 351 – MC 0047
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0047