Academic Sessions: Glasgow 2010
AAH Annual Conference 2010
15 - 17 April, University of Glasgow
Materiality and Waste: Poetics of the Concrete in Modern Life
Session Convenors:
Maura Coughlin, Bryant University, mcoughli@bryant.edu
Jaimey Hamilton, University of Hawaii, jaimeyh@hawaii.edu
This panel invites interdisciplinary visual culture studies approaches to the mundane, concrete, local, overlooked and discarded materials of modern and contemporary life. While the abstract ‘deterritorialization’ processes and increasingly global commodity cycles of production and obsolescence often seem to characterize this long epoch, this panel explores the importance of understanding the local specificity material objects and concrete experiences.
Along with Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and other philosophers of the everyday, cultural anthropologist Tim Dant suggests that we form lived and embodied relationships with material objects; can we discuss these relationships without necessarily dismissing them as framed by nostalgia, imposed from outside authority, or generalized by international or global culture? What is or can be considered ‘material’ in our modern life? In what ways do messages and meanings of art and other aspects of visual culture invoke materiality? How do they depend upon both the concreteness of physical matter and the multivalence of their histories, uses, metaphors, allegories, etc.? How can materialist methodologies help us to understand the interaction between people and things – and articulate the power, politics, and poetics of a phenomenological basis of subjectivity in material culture?
Papers offer methodologies applied to visual culture, specific artistic approaches, or topics that include, but are not limited to representations or use of waste, filth, trash, obsolescence, commodities, the discarded, junk, thrift, bricolage and the material basis of subjectivity.
Speakers:
William Smith (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University)
To Breathe Dust: Marcel Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Hygiene
Rosemary Shirley (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Keep Britain Tidy: Litter, Anxiety and the Non-Metropolitan Everyday
Gregory Williams (Boston University)
A Glossier Shade of Brown: Imi Knoebel’s Raum 19
Nina Vestberg (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Processing Waste: Disposing of Photography in Contemporary Art
Lane Relyea (Northwestern University)
On the Changed Status of Debris in Contemporary Art
Elizabeth Legge (University of Toronto)
Two recent interventions in the history of stuff: the Angel of History in the IKEA ‘as is’ room