[ecrea] CFP: Seeing Others Seeing: Interpersonal Experience in Contemporary Art

Seeing Others Seeing: Interpersonal Experience in Contemporary Art
College Art Association Conference (February 11-14, 2015, New York)
Cristina Albu, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Dawna Schuld, University of Indiana, Bloomington
Email: (albuc /at/ umkc.edu) <mailto:(albuc /at/ umkc.edu)> and (dlschuld /at/ indiana.edu) 
<mailto:(dlschuld /at/ indiana.edu)>

By the end of the 1960s, reflective sculptures, light environments, 
performances, and art and technology projects called viewers’ attention 
to how they perceive at a subjective and intersubjective level. 
Influenced by Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and 
Husserl, artists pursuing phenomenological inquiries took human 
perception to be their primary material. Phenomenal art not only 
questioned the premise of art as representation; it showed that 
aesthetic experience is contingent upon variable factors that escape the 
artist’s direct control (e.g., body motion and social circumstances). 
The largely introspective and self-referential phenomenal art practices 
of the 1960s and 1970s have proved consequential for a more recent 
generation of artists who cultivate sensorial uncertainty and 
interpersonal awareness. This panel invites papers on the genealogy of 
phenomenal art and the transformations in art viewership it posits. What 
might be appropriate methodological tools for interpreting the reception 
of phenomenal art? How do art participants act in the context of art 
environments that set their emotional and behavioral responses on 
display? Why has the phenomenal tendency been revitalized in recent decades?

Deadline for proposals: May 9. Please email your proposal along with an 
updated CV to both chairs (see contact information above).

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Cristina Albu
Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Art History
University of Missouri-Kansas City
http://info.umkc.edu/art/portfolio/albu/