Call for Papers | HBA Sessions at CAA, 2017

Conflict as Cultural Catalyst in Britain
HBA Session at the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, New York, 15–18 February 2017
Chair: Michael J K Walsh (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Proposals due by 7 April 2016

Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night: it’s spritely waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mull’d, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.
–William Shakespeare, 1607, Coriolanus, Act IV Sc. V

This panel investigates the relationship between struggle and conflict (be it social, political, territorial, ideological etc) and artistic production in Britain and its empire. More specifically, ‘Conflict as Cultural Catalyst in Britain’ interrogates the contentious philosophical notion that art thrives in times of war, and expires in peace, and then asks whether art, as a form of social barometer, can anticipate / foreshadow conflict, or merely respond to it. How has cultural production derived from conflict been used to create specific social identities, national histories and contemporary concepts of memory in Britain and beyond? A range of historically and geographically diverse case studies is encouraged, spanning both the globe and the centuries.

If you would be interested in participating in this panel, please contact the chair at mwalsh@ntu.edu.sg, attaching your proposal, limited to 400 words, together with a brief c.v., by April 7th, 2016.

Transglobal Collecting: Co-Producing and Re-visioning British Art Abroad
HBA Session at the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, New York, 15–18 February 2017
Chair: Julie Codell (Arizona State University)

Proposals due by 7 April 2016

This session will focus on art collecting of British outside Britain. The study of art collecting has blossomed; studies of agents, dealers, collectors and auctions are subjects of recent conferences (three in London in 2016 alone) and publications.  Art collecting, both as a form of reception and as a form of art production (e.g., theories of Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, museology studies), created new contexts, meanings, audiences and interpretations for art. Collecting intervened into aesthetic, national, economic, hermeneutic and social valuations of art. This was even more dramatic and transformative when collectors of British art lived outside Britain. Panelists may consider questions such as (but not limited to): How was an artwork’s social and cultural functions re-defined/re-purposed by distant geographies? How did distant collecting blend local, national and global ideas and interests? Did transatlantic or colonial collecting have distinct cultural features, purposes and identities? Did collected British art affect production of local/indigenous art outside Britain and vice versa? How did collecting British art abroad shape museums and cultural exchanges abroad? How was art positioned to affect distant spectators culturally and nationally, and who constituted that public?

If you would be interested in participating in this panel, please contact the chair at julie.codell@asu.edu, attaching your proposal, limited to 400 words, together with a brief c.v., by April 7th, 2016.