metropolis m

Founded in 1911, the College Art Association, or CAA, is the professional association of artists, art historians, and visual arts professionals in North America, with over 14,000 members. Between February 9th and 12th, the CAA held its annual conference at the Hilton New York in midtown Manhattan. This conference is one of the most important events of the year for academic artists and scholars in the United States and abroad, and offers one of the few opportunities for those in these broad fields to gather to assess contemporary conditions and explore new directions of research. Over the past decade or so the organization has revised the format of the conference, and the four-day affair now includes not only scholarly panels, but also poster displays, exhibitions, artist talks, tours of local galleries and museums, and, a number of events coordinated with important venues at the conference site, which this year included the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Centennial Reception), Sotheby’s and the Museum for African Art.

With the 2011 annual conference, the CAA also inaugurated the celebration of its centennial year. To this end, the conference committee organized a series of seven specially designated Centennial Sessions charged with "spark[ing] new conversations and foster[ing] new approaches to sharing and exchanging knowledge." For each of these sessions, the committee asked two well-established members of CAA to organize a session around designated “core concepts related to the visual arts, such as diversity, experience, feminism, globalization, medium, technology, and traditions.” According to Paul Jaskot, past President of CAA (2008-2010), the organizers of each session were specifically chosen from separate fields, given free reign to address the designated topic, and encouraged to develop alternatives to the conventional session format, which typically includes four to five presentations followed by a discussion.

Exemplary of the successful efforts among the Centennial Sessions were “Global Art Histories/Multiple Modernities,” organized by Leslie-King Hammond and Sarah Lewis, “Our Demons,” organized by Rebecca Zorach and Renee Stout, and “Art/Technology Global Sample” organized by Chris Csikszentmihályi and Mark Tribe (founder of Rhizome.org). In the first two sessions, the speakers were given only a limited time for their presentations and encouraged to speak more freely and broadly about the designated topic. This resulted in a number of very compelling presentations, such as those by Paul Chaat Smith, Nyland Blake, roycrosse, and John W. Ford. For their session, Tribe and Csikszentmihályi took a different approach and arranged for twenty-three speakers to participate via Skype. This non-physical format allowed participants from distant places to show their work and engage in a lively conversation about digital developments and new media art, while also providing an intimate (even “homely”) setting.

With their novel formats and the involvement of senior scholars and artists, these sessions explored compelling alternatives to the traditional scholarly panels that still dominate the line-up of the conference. At the same time, they made clear the limits of any session at such a large conference as their success rested on the compelling personal narratives offered by the speakers. Although it would be great to have more presentations of their quality at future conferences, these sessions do not offer a coherent plan for revising the annual conference. Indeed, other Centennial Sessions varied little from the traditional panel format and in almost all of them the size of the audience prohibited a productive discussion after the presentations. As whole then, the Centennial Sessions presented an uneven picture of the possibilities for future conferences. Another significant shortcoming of the Centennial Sessions was their failure to explore the chosen topics in relation to the history of the CAA itself. The designation “Centennial Sessions” seemed at first to indicate the intention not only to engage key topics in the contemporary field, but also to reflect on the history of the organization, and the arts in America more broadly. Such a process would have been welcome as part of the centennial celebration, but unfortunately the conference did not provide a forum for this kind of reflection. Instead, the emphasis lay on the future of the CAA rather than its past.

Globalism

One notable theme that emerged from the Centennial Sessions and several other panels such as “Global Perspectives in the History of Art” and “The Internationalization of the CAA,” was the increasing effort of the College Art Association to involve scholars and artists outside the US and to provide its members with more opportunities to partner with international organizations. In “Global Perspectives in the History of Art,” for instance, chaired by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Princeton University) and Jennifer Milam (University of Sidney), the panelists came from vastly divergent places such as Turkey, Colombia, and Saudi Arabia. While this international approach addressed criticism of the CAA last year, when the panels on globalism were occupied mainly by Western scholars, this global panel showed that it is not an easy task to bring together scholars from around the globe under a common denominator as the papers were interesting in themselves, but the dialogue between them difficult. The invited guests for the Centennial Session “Globalization,” chaired by Kaufmann again and James Elkins (School of the Art Institute Chicago), all came from universities in the US, which resulted in a panel discussion that was overall too general, however much the panelists advised the audience to look at art from the perspective of its own region. The art historical questions concerning globalism, and how to approach the challenge of “global art histories” methodologically are, in short, complicated and need additional time to be sorted out.

Art historical analysis seems a lot easier in specific “global spheres.” In the past decade or so China and Africa have been strongly represented at the CAA conference. In this centennial year, however, the CAA hosted only one session on African art, and a panel on Chinese art was absent altogether. In their place were several sessions on the Middle East, such as “Modern Arab Art” and “Writing the Middle East.” These sessions indicate a change of emphasis in (global) art history, theory, and criticism to yet another oft-ignored region. Although this may be partially explained by current political events, the Middle East still promises to be the next cultural hub, from Beirut and Dubai to Cairo. In “Writing the Middle East,” Claire Davies made a case for the “artist-as-art historian,” which makes sense in the context of the Middle East because of art history’s neglect of its artistic production. The ‘artist-art-historian,’ or the artist who is aware of his own historical conditions, can be effective in adjusting this imbalance by writing himself ‘into’ art history, as Walid Raad has done convincingly.

Another panelist, Alexandra Dika Seggerman offered an in-depth analysis of a strategically chosen painting, The Charter (1962) by the Egyptian artist Abdel Hadi Al-Gazzar. Seggerman discussed four existing interpretations of the painting (respectively "Western," "mythological," "monographic," and "critical"), and then contributed her own reading of the work, demonstrating the complex signification of the painting and at the same time developing a multi-layered art historical conceptual framework for Middle Eastern art. The remaining papers included the next attack on the “Eurocentric gaze” of art history (Dena Al-Adeeb), and an up-to-date review of Middle Eastern artists (such as Kutlug Ataman, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Shirin Neshat, and Walid Raad), all of whom fit into—and contribute to—the category of “contemporary Arab representations,” as described by Catherine David. A touching moment of exuberant joy occurred when one person in the audience stood up to announce the breaking news received on his cell phone that Hosni Mubarak had resigned.

Design

The conference included a number of sessions devoted to topics in design, including “What’s Art Got to Do With It?: Design Writing in the Twenty-First Century,” “Locating the Design Commons,” and “Architectural and Spatial Design Studies.” The presence of these panels is evidence of the growing importance of design and design studies within the academy. A parallel to visual studies, design studies comprises the full range of disciplinary approaches that take design as their subject, with the particular aim of moving beyond the traditional methodologies and focuses of art history. This shift is a reflection, in part, of a culture in the US that increasingly prizes only academic disciplines that make tangible, and preferably economic, contributions to society, a category from which the arts and humanities are increasingly excluded. In this era when demands for disciplines to prove their value or face budget cuts are common, design has benefited by positioning itself as the place where art is transformed into a productive practice.

The dominance of professional concerns within the design discourse was on display in the session “Locating the Design Commons,” which was devoted to exploring the ways in which design can interact productively with other disciplines in the academy. While the presentations, especially that by Heather Corcoran, offered several interesting examples of effective collaborations within a academic settings, they also demonstrated the relative absence of sustained self-reflection within the design community on the profession’s deep and unavoidable enmeshment in the cultural and ethical values of contemporary society. This absence has been heightened by the increasing celebration of design as a form of professional training especially well-suited to contemporary culture, in which networks and systems have joined objects as the subjects of design.

If “Locating the Design Commons” explored topics well within the conventional professional boundaries of design, then the conceptual limits of the discipline were productively interrogated by participants in “What’s Art Got to Do with It?: Design Writing in the Twenty-First Century.” This session directly addressed the often indistinct boundary between art and design in order to consider how best to assess design in a culture shaped increasingly by the user-driven potentials of new design and manufacturing technologies at the personal as well as the industrial scale. While this kind of discussion of the relationship between design and art, interactive media, and science, is in a more advanced stage in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, it is much needed in the US. As a discipline that cannot be other than complicit in the dominant culture, design is uniquely positioned to consider the ways in which that culture can be interrogated effectively from within. In particular, more critical attention needs to be paid to the aesthetic choices made by designers, a subject that the discipline still struggles to address at all. Although the discourse around design continues to be uneven, the kind of discussion that occurred in “What’s Art Got to Do with It?” demonstrates a fruitful approach that must be pursued.

(New) Media

The sessions on (new) media, including that organized by Tribe and Csikszentmihalyi mentioned above as well as those organized by Edward Shanken on “New Media, Art-Science, and the Mainstream Contemporary Art: Toward a Hybrid Discourse?” were unexpectedly engaging this year. To date, the media sessions at the CAA conferences have been problematic for anyone knowledgeable about developments in the arts and the media. Other conferences where media art, media art history, and media aesthetics have been hotly discussed and shown over the years, such as Ars Electronica, DEAF, and, since 2005, the more scholarly Media Art History, have been considerably more inspiring places than the conventional art historical podium of the CAA. Yet this year these sessions initiated a welcome shift in approach toward media, which gives hope for this relatively new but challenging area of scholarship at the CAA in the future.

Shanken chaired a diverse and rich session on (new) media, in which he, too, deviated from the regular CAA format. The session consisted of four successive panels, whereby two to four panelists were given 10 instead of the usual 20 minutes for their presentation. Each panel was a well-balanced mix of art historians, artists, curators and scientists, which kept the dialogues on the arts and the media lively. Jamie Allen, Jean Gagnon, and Ji-hoon Kim delivered interesting papers in the first panel. Allen discussed the development of an artistic counterculture in the 1960s and early 1970s on the intersection of art, technology and science, and subsequently explained how this avant-gardist culture transformed into the cyber culture communities of the 1990s. Gagnon made a strong case for the precision of technological terms in the field of media (from common terms such as "instrument" or "tool" to his own invention of "apparelle"), but his focus on technology overlooked the equally necessary reflection on a media-specific vocabulary of aesthetic concepts. Kim undertook an analytical effort in this direction for the heterogeneous field of expanded cinema, which he tried to grasp through the concept of “interface.” Kim criticized mainstream art institutions that are still reluctant to show this expanded cinematic culture, but he did not recognize that his own conceptual tool of “interface” in turn excludes non-digital cinematic experiments of major visual artists such as Pierre Bismuth, Douglas Gordon or Pierre Huyghe.

Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of media at the Whitney Museum and author of Digital Art, discussed the major characteristics of new media art in the second panel. She too felt the need to criticize severely the art world at large, from Bourriaud and relational art (“relational aesthetics syndrome”) to art history as a whole (“art history has a problem”). Paul has greatly contributed to the field of new media arts through her books and her shows, but she does not seem to realize that she herself is part of the historically developed and deeply antagonistic rift between art history and media studies that developed in the postwar period, which is unproductive for both fields: art history and media studies, in other words, share that “problem.” With her combative rhetoric, Paul altogether undermined the session’s good intentions of bridging art history and media studies in a bastion of art history, the CAA.

Good papers on media appeared in other sessions as well, including “What is Visual Studies?” In this session Guiliana Bruno (Harvard University) argued that traditional concepts of the canvas and the wall are being affected by the screen, which should not be conceived as a window onto the world but as a surface. This screen condition of contemporary art and architecture, Bruno continued, requires a form of texturology; that is, an analysis of the complicated layers and textures—or “visual fabrics”—of the screen. The panel on visual studies was interesting on the whole because in a sense the rationale for the field was implicitly or explicitly questioned by most presenters, from Florian Dombois in his straightforward attack “Why not Sound?” to W.J.T. Mitchell, a founder of the field, who stated in his presentation delivered via Skype that visual studies is not exclusively devoted to the visual field. Taken together, these papers raised the question as to whether visual studies is still an adequate term or has become a subcategory of media studies.

Art History

One of the main draws of the annual CAA conference is the opportunity to see how the field of art history is being actively reshaped through the consideration of new material and the search for new methodologies as evidenced in the selected sessions (The flourishing of this particular aspect of the conference is well demonstrated by the significant increase in the number of session proposals over the past few years; for this conference over 400 proposals were submitted for about only 120 slots). Four sessions at the conference illustrated particularly productive efforts to shift focuses within the field: “Architecture, Space, and Power in the Early Modern Ibero-American World,” “What’s in a Name? Reconsidering Tibetan Stylistic Taxonomies,” “New Approaches to the Study of Fashion and Costume in Western Art, 1650-1900,” and “Under Construction: Building a New Context for Asian American Art.” In the latter, Mark D. Johnson (an expert in the field) made a convincing case that Asian American Art is a category as necessary for American art history as the more commonly accepted ‘African-American.’ In fact, he claimed that some works produced by Asian-American artists are among the best that American art has created in the twentieth century. This small session, organized by the Asian-American Women’s Art Association, also stood out among the feminists sessions: while the somewhat all too nostalgic session, “Feminism and the Cooperative Model,” focused on white American feminist practices in the 1970s and avoided the deep questions of class and race, the Asian-American session brought up relevant global issues of identity (“Asian American artist, Asian-Woman Artist, Chinese American Artist, Chinese Feminist Artist, Does it Matter?”), and other questions of diaspora.

Yet other sessions addressed problems and challenges that the discipline faces, most directly the early session devoted to “The Crisis in Art History.” In this panel, a selection of prominent art historians including Stephen Murray, Patricia Rubin, and David Joselit, proposed a number of shortcomings in contemporary art historical practices, from the weak status of the humanities and the academy generally resulting from the global economic crisis to more specific intellectual concerns such as the increasing emphasis on the contemporary within the discipline, a shift well evidenced by the growing number of jobs for art historians working on modern and contemporary art. Not surprisingly, many of the problems identified by the participants in “The Crisis of Art History” were evidenced at CAA itself, where there is substantial pressure on junior scholars to conform to established modes of both research and presentation. This pressure comes not only from within the community but also from the fact that the conference serves as the site for early-round interviews for the vast majority of academic jobs in the US and Canada. Without addressing this problem, the CAA conference risks becoming simply a large job fair. Even as the conference gains much-needed vitality from the presence of so many junior scholars, more senior scholars must also participate in order to present their work and to engage with junior scholars and encourage their work.

The session “Critical Histories,” organized by the Society of Contemporary Art Histories, was equally concerned with disciplinary matters. The session was chaired by Tim Griffin (Artforum) and Christine Mehring (University of Chicago). The main topic was the new field of contemporary art history and the questions of how far the conflation of history and contemporary is a contradictio in terminis, and what exactly do these new kind of historians-cum-critics produce in terms of art history and criticism? It must be noted that there was an interesting tension between the older luminaries, including the art historian Tomas Crow and the critic Barbara Rose, and the younger scholars on the panel such as the German Diedrich Diedrichsen and Carrie Lambert-Beatty. Although the first group warned of the loss of good old-fashioned criticism and the kind of scholar molded by authoritative figures in the field today, the younger scholars found the new model productive for thinking critically about contemporary art history on the grounds of their awareness of historical conditions instead of following a dated linear idea of art history. Unfortunately, the panel did not address more specifically how the methods developed in contemporary art history could be mobilized for important challenges and concerns such as the rise of media and questions of globalism, which could have helped to show the undeniable benefits of the new approaches.

Unexpected Sessions and Events

One of the charms of CAA is that there are always a few interesting sessions that you happen to drop into more or less accidentally (often after another session is disappointing). This was the case with the session on the art critic Lawrence Alloway. Every single presentation had something to offer about the life and work of this prolific British art critic and curator, who worked in the United States in the 1960s and is known as the inventor of the term Pop art. The session as a whole tried to move beyond the conventional view of Alloway as an advocate solely of Pop because he allegedly had an interest in a wide variety of art practices such as feminism and other socially engaged art. Alloway, as Richard Kalina summed up, was a pluralist at heart. Nobody less than Linda Nochlin delivered an excellent and detailed talk on the paintings of Alloway’s wife, Sylvia Sleigh Alloway, to whom the session was dedicated (she passed away in 2010). Sylvia painted male nudes with great sensibility in a non-heroic, gentle, and personal fashion, thus going against stereotypes in the history of painting, such as those by the great French painters Delacroix and Ingres. The session closed with a lively debate on elitism in mass culture versus vulgarism in high art; “high” and ”low” in the field of photography; the anthropology of pop; and the relationship between Alloway and Marshall McLuhan.

Another unexpected event took place in the café at the MoMA, where the well-known Fluxus artist Alison Knowles extended her “identical lunch” performance for the duration of the CAA. Knowles conceived the idea of the identical lunch in the 1960s, when she invited her friends to join her. This modest Fluxus event consists of eating a lunch that is exactly the same as that Knowles used to eat herself every day: “a tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with butter and lettuce, no mayo, and a cup of soup or glass of buttermilk.” We happened to bump into the lunch on the very last day that it was performed, Friday, February 11, 2011, and thus were able to share an identical lunch with Knowles, not realizing that the last part of the meal was to eat bits and pieces of the tuna sandwich mixed up with the buttermilk. While this seemed an appalling mishmash to us at first (a sentiment expressed as well by the faces of the other guests at the table), it was in fact almost enjoyable, proving, perhaps, the success of the Fluxus project: to turn everyday routine into an authentic, even aesthetic, experience.

Centennial Book

As mentioned in the opening paragraph, the conference committee for the centennial edition of the CAA did not reflect much on its own legacy, as one would have hoped of an organization with such a leading role in the field of art history and the visual arts. Indeed, it would have been nice to have had at least one session in which members and participants of this CAA could have met key figures from the historical CAA community (past directors, former editors, oldest members, etc) to talk about the history and future direction of the organization. While this was a missed opportunity, it must be added that the book that the CAA published to celebrate the centennial, The Eye, the Hand, the Mind, partially made up for it.

The book, edited by Susan Ball (the executive director of CAA for twenty years), is a rich and carefully researched collection of essays on the history and multifaceted legacy of the organization. The book is written by authors who all have a deep affinity for the CAA and is loosely organized around the sixteen goals in its constitution, such as the first one, “to promote art interests in all divisions of American colleges and universities.” The contents of the book comprise one informative essay after the other. It opens with an essay on the historical context of the founding of the CAA in 1911, and its links to other learned societies that emerged with research universities in the US. The book also discusses the history of its various journals (The Art Bulletin, The Art Journal, and even the relatively recent on-line caareviews.org); the CAA’s relationship with museums and artists; and, of course, the history of the annual conference and its career services (which was professionalized in the 1970s). The book gives an adequate and accessible first overview of the CAA in all its diverse aspects and illuminates its history, ambitions, and intentions throughout the years. It does a superb job in answering all of those questions that its members might have accumulated over the years with no resource to consult. The book closes properly with a speculative essay by former president Paul Jaskot on “The Next 100 Years”, thus including the consideration of both the past and the future of the CAA that was so missed at the conference itself.

We would like to thank our PhD students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Samantha Alfrey, Robyn Mericle, Cara Smulewitz, and Georgina Ruff for their excellent contributions to this review by their in-depth reports of specific sessions.

Sjoukje van der Meulen

(PhD Columbia University) is assistant professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Utrecht University with a research focus on contemporary art in the European Union

Recente artikelen