My colleague John Tyson (National Gallery of Art) and I are organizing a session at the 2017 College Art Association Conference in New York. Link to full CFP below.
Full CFP_Meteorological_Impulse_CAA 2017
CFP: The Meteorological Impulse in Art: Modernity,Postmodernity, and the Atmospheric Turn
Chairs: John A. Tyson and Ellen Tani
Call for Papers for Session at College Art Association (CAA) 105th AnnualConference (New York, NY, February 15-18, 2017)
Deadline for abstracts: August 30, 2016
Meteorology, the science of atmospheric conditions and phenomena—especially related to weather—emerged as an area of study in the seventeenth century. Weather reports have regularly appeared in newspapers since the late 1800s. With the rise of the ecology movement in the 1960s, weather’s intersections with other systems became an ever more urgent issue; calls to recognize our embeddedness in the atmosphere came soon afterspace travel enabled its first images to circulate. This panel will analyze artistic corollaries to meteorology, a field with a history deeply intertwined with modernity’s.
Weather is metaphorically rich. In many romance languages the word refers to time and climate conditions. From trade winds and Schumpeter’s Gale, to political storms and racial climates, meteorological invocations occur in conjunction with systematic shifts ineconomics and politics. Artists have depicted weather for numerous reasons: Frederic Church imagined patriotic cloud formations in Our Banner in the Sky (1861); Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings reflected society’s fascination with meteorology. From the 60s onward, artists transitioned from representing weather to drawing on its processes. Works with a meteorological impulse, such as Carolee Schneemann’s Viet Flakes (1965) or Robert Barry’s gas releases (1969), radically acknowledged flux and subverted the certainty of vision. New understandings of environments, works with a “systems esthetic” (Jack Burnham), or “dematerialized” art (Lucy Lippard) emerge when considered in light of an atmospheric turn. We welcome papers that plot art’s meteorological impulses, expand notions of art as atmosphere, or examine the role of weather in art from c.1850 until today.
Please send 250-word abstracts and other items detailed in the full CFP to Ellen Tani (Bowdoin College Museum of Art, ellen.tani@gmail.com) and John A. Tyson (National Gallery ofArt, j-tyson@nga.gov).
