[ecrea] Material Culture in Action - 7-8 September 2015, Glasgow School of Art, UK

Material Culture in Action:
Practices of making, collecting and re-enacting art and design


DATES: 7-8 September 2015,

Keynote speakers:
Prof Guy Julier
Prof Esther Leslie
Ian Helliwell


Glasgow School of Art, UK

This two-day international conference will investigate new directions in 
material culture studies by focusing on creative, critical and 
theoretical engagement with the material culture of art and design, both 
within and beyond the art school. The material culture of art and design 
covers a wide range of art practices, from professionally designed works 
within the art school, to the less official works of the self-taught 
amateur. An emphasis on processes means paying close attention to places 
of production; from the art school, the studio, the print workshop, the 
pressing plant, the factory, the street, to the discrete - yet equally 
significant - realms of domestic life. Although places of consumption 
and display have been readily mapped out in academic and non-academic 
literature (Attfield 2007; Bronner 1989; Zola 1883), little has been 
written about the eminently complex environment of the studio and the 
art school.
As such, the aim of this conference is to discuss these under-explored 
areas in material culture studies. For instance, traditional approaches 
fail to fully engage with the multi-materialities and 'plasticity' or 
flexibility of works of art and design, or with the affective resonances 
of objects (Andrews and O'Sullivan 2013; Moran and O'Brien 2014). We 
would like to engage more explicitly and more closely with the sensorial 
aspects of the object and realms of seeing, touching, hearing, making. 
By recentering our attention on material practices and processes, on 
artists and makers, we may be able to reconcile the study of material 
culture with that of affect and aesthetics-and politics.

We hope to generate a cross-disciplinary dialogue, engaging theorists 
and artists, thinkers, makers and collectors/connoisseurs of objects. 
Suggested areas of discussion include, but are not limited to:

.       THE ART SCHOOL: objects, meanings and subjectivities in the making

-       Un/made and un/finished objects and narratives
-       Archives and indexes: Making with the archive / Reenacting the 
archive
-       The Glasgow School of Art and C.R. Mackintosh
One could embrace the art school as a place where traditional skills and 
canons are perpetually (re-)invented and sustained, as well as a unique 
repository for ultra-specialised - and sometimes obsolete - knowledge 
and hand skills (which are generally lost in the 'outer world', having 
long fallen out of use). The art school, as a living archive, conversely 
allows for further re-enactments of the past. Rather than freezing 
traditional skills, it releases, re-presences and remediates them, as it 
leads to the creation of new works of art and design. The incorporation 
of new techniques into traditional craft, and most notably the use of 
digital tools, would also be a fruitful area of inquiry.  One could also 
ask who is in charge of the 'narrative' of the art school - and explore 
the idea of the art school as a self-authored or self-fashioned 
institution, whose role is constantly being (re)negotiated and 
re-inscribed into the cultural narrative. Presentations addressing the 
indefectibly entwined stories of the Glasgow School of Art and C.R. 
Mackintosh would be particularly welcome. One could contemplate the 
living, collective memory of the art school, as it was notably expressed 
in a spontaneous outburst of novel narratives, grassroots projects and 
other creative and emotional responses after the fire of May 2014. At 
the same time, the struggle to maintain a unified and authored 'image' 
of the art school in the aftermath of the event is equally worth 
reflecting about. The debates surrounding the reconstruction of the 
Mackintosh Library, as they crystallise the tension between experts' 
'authoritative' voices and less official voices, between the weight of 
the past and the school's ambitions for the future, need to be examined.

-       Materiality and narrative of the self
-       Attachment, entanglement and appropriation
Art school students can be thought of as self-fashioning professionals, 
and most broadly as young adults engaged in varying processes of 
self-creation and self-narration through material practices. The role 
and processes of making could be explored in relation to 
identity-formation, where the maker and the object exist in a 
relationship of co-constitution.

.       MULTI-SENSORIAL and AFFECTIVE MATERIALITIES: touching, seeing, 
hearing, making

Recent studies of materiality have commented upon the multi-sensoriality 
or intersensoriality of objects (see Howes 2006), which invites us to 
engage in the realms of seeing, touching and hearing. This 
multi-sensorial and multi-sensual aspect of material culture is also 
that which resists attempts of narration or rationalisation. How can 
this crucial multi-sensoriality be reflected in writings about material 
culture? Complementarily, the very specific status of works of art must 
be reflected upon, as that which resists categorisation and systematic 
thinking, and may elicit affective rather than rational responses 
(Andrews and O'Sullivan 2013; Lyotard 1979).

-       Pleasure and practice: craft (activism), amateur practices, DIY 
and vernacular cultures
Of particular interest is the continuous appropriation, within the art 
school, of vernacular cultures, and the repurposing of various amateur 
practices. The inclusion of 'clumsy'/DIY aesthetics, notably within 
visual communication (in the form, for instance, of unruly elements: 
irregular typography, 'unprofessional' drawings or doodles, graffiti), 
is worth thinking about. It represents an example of the continued 
dialogue between the vernacular and the art school, and the paradoxical, 
potentially subversive, transformation/re-valuing (in all the senses of 
the term) of the amateur fabrication into an art object.

.       TYPOLOGIES OF COLLECTING

-       The connoisseur and the amateur collector/hoarder
 (Un)official curators and popular archivists
Literature on collection, collecting, the archive and the index accounts 
for a large part of the canonic corpus of museum studies (Pearce 1998; 
Karp and Lavine 1991; Pomian 1990), the collection being - in a 
simplified manner - the 'body' of the museum (and of its faraway 
ancestor, the cabinet of curiosities). The notion of the personal 
archive as a creative resource, the dynamic relationship between archive 
and practice, have regrettably received less attention (despite a 
forthcoming exhibition at the Barbican: Magnificent Obsessions: The 
Artist as Collector).
Similarly the roles of the non-professional collector, the hoarder and 
'do-it-yourself' curator are less often evidenced. The contributions of 
everyday collectors and fans to the preservation of alternative stories, 
ephemera and small-run artefacts such as fanzines, artists' books and 
prints (Herrada 1995; Vale 1996; Darms 2013), commercial labels, 
advertisement packagings (Oka 1967; Robert Opie's scrapbooks) is crucial 
to the writing of the (unofficial) history of everyday art and design. 
The figures of amateur collectors and curators may offer precious 
critical voices in the (un)doing of design history (Baynes 1976: 32).

.       The seen and the invisible, the disappearing and the lost
Part of the nature of objects eventually lies in their fluidity. There 
is a residual element, something which resists and cannot be fully 
grasped; a raw, polymorphous (perhaps even amorphous) and transformative 
quality of material culture which exists in time. This element of change 
perhaps is what can lead to original questioning of the limits of 
material culture studies, of the dysfunctions, the 'mistakes', the 
excessive; when the machine no longer works, when the art work breaks 
apart. This is true not only of physical artefacts but also of digital 
ones (Gabrys 2013).
The use, repurposing and assemblage of found objects, ready-mades, 
fragments and more general debris is common in contemporary art 
practices. The poetics of ruins may offer a critical route into 
processes of (private/collective) memory, aging and disappearance. This 
may also allow one to reflect upon larger processes of consumption, 
recycling, excess and waste.


.       IM/MATERIAL CULTURES

-       Haunting, hybridity, and the interpenetration of the material 
and the immaterial
-       Digital materialities and practices
The notion of haunting and hauntology is useful to examine the multiple 
temporalities at work within objects, especially as they become 
obsolete, age and slowly fall into disuse. The concept of haunting - 
which defines that which is between the material and the immaterial 
(Derrida 1994; Pile 2005) - may allow for a more complete thinking on 
the immaterial and the dematerialised nature of objects as they 
circulate in digital contexts. It can also be used to address 
multi-media installations and works of art. An emphasis on media and its 
ruptures or breaches (Kelly 2009) may allow us to combine the 
multi-sensorialities, multi-materialities and multi-temporalities 
embodied in complex digital art objects (Julier 2006: 6). An urgent 
challenge for material culture studies is the development of new tools 
and frameworks to address dematerialised worlds or digital objects 
which, though they cannot be directly grasped, continue to fashion the 
(art) world and need curating (Graham and Cook 2010).
The hybrid nature of digital craft and 'fabriculture' (Bratich and Brush 
2006), the relationship between the localised homemade artefacts and 
their global, corporate distribution (through platforms such as Etsy) 
are worth addressing.

We will welcome proposals for 20-minute papers, 60-minute panels and 
5-minute poster presentations, from researchers and practitioners. 
300-word abstracts and short biographical notes - as well as any 
enquiries - should be sent to Dr Frances Robertson 
((Fr.Robertson /at/ gsa.ac.uk)) and Dr Elodie Roy ((E.Roy /at/ gsa.ac.uk)) before the 
15th of March 2015. Candidates will be informed of the outcomes in April 
2015.

We hope to publish a selection of conference papers in an edited book.


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