[ecrea] CALL FOR PAPERS: NEW INSTITUTIONS – UCSD VISUAL ARTS GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE

New Institutions
5th Annual UCSD Visual Arts Graduate Student Conference
University of California, San Diego

April 7, 2012

In April 2012, the Visual Arts Department at the University of California San Diego will host its annual conference entitled New Institutions. This conference seeks interpretations of twenty-first century changes taking shape in artistic institutions and their alternatives. Invited guests and attendees will help to position the tactical and strategic choices facing artists and writers.

With the expansion of art production into the social realm, alternative methods routinely assert themselves as counterfactuals to inherited models of exhibition and dissemination. Artists, curators, and collectives model themselves after all sorts of institutions or even abandon traditional institutional affiliation altogether, slipping in to and out of alternative styles and unconventional modes. These inventive tendencies take shape in light of cultural processes such as social networks and information globalization, neo-liberalism and financial collapse, and perennial returns to the political vanguards of the 1960s and ‘70s. How and why are artists mimicking institutions to critique and change them?

New Institutions is a term that indicates the increased integration of media, display, reception and promotion. The result is new kinds of cinema and time-based art, readymades, publications, press releases, schools, libraries, services, stage productions and works of literature, as well as forms of creative capitalism and businesses that don’t look much like other art-world institutions of the past. These expanding categories of artistic activity have comparable global features, though they occur under different conditions in separate societies around the world. How do artists or scholars orient themselves towards these changing institutions, integrating separate industries from the fields of entertainment, science, and technology? How do they change them? How has self-institutionalization in the art world changed over time with increased social integration?

Institutions are not to be considered only as conservative containers or bricks and mortar, but also as dynamic processes that may be both localized and/or drifting. Is it possible to conceive of an institutional borderland not only between continents and countries, but also between industries?

Participants are invited to add specificity to the heterogeneity of these expanding categories built on modeling institutions and exploring their alternatives.

Possible topics could include but are not limited to:
 - The role of art in the public sphere
- New forms of the readymade
- Artist publications and changes in art publishing
- New Institutionalism and the rise of the curator
- Latin American avant-garde of the twentieth and twenty-first century and other alternative histories of the avant-garde
- Self-institutionalization and self-design
- Groups, collectives, and collaborative art practices during and after modernism
- Art before and after the advent of the Internet
- Institutional critique in the twenty-first century
- Artist as curator
- Alternative economic models in art and culture
- Art and the entertainment sector (e.g. James Franco)
- Film and video art distribution
- Art and state institutions
- Problems of ‘biennialization’ (e.g. borders, nationalism, branding, stardom, etc.)
- Urban space and institutions

We are pleased to welcome Blake Stimson as our keynote speaker. Blake Stimson is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. Recent publications include The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (co-edited with Gregory Sholette), and Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (co-edited with Alexander Alberro).


*Applicants should email a CV and a 300 word abstract or description of the proposed presentation by February 15th (toucsd.visart.2012 /at/ gmail.com)<mailto:(ucsd.visart.2012 /at/ gmail.com)>. Selected participants will be notified by February 25.

Conference Coordinators: Samara Kaplan, Tim Ridlen, and Matthew Schum
University of California, San Diego



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