Call for Short Papers: 1972, or thereabouts
The Centre for Research in Visual Culture invites proposals for short (ca. 5 minute papers) that respond to our current research theme ‘1972, or thereabouts’ to be delivered at a launch event on the 1st of February.
Inspired by the fifty-year anniversary of John Berger’s ground-breaking television series (and subsequent book project) Ways of Seeing, the CRVC will be programming a series of events throughout the 2022-2023 academic year that consider how the study and display of visual culture has changed since the early 1970s. Ways of Seeing was not an isolated phenomenon, in 1972 Michael Baxandall’s book Painting and Experience Fifteenth Century Italy was also published, as well as TJ Clark’s Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution – a year later, Clark established the Social History of Art MA at the University of Leeds. Beyond the UK and in the year prior, Linda Nochlin published her essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists’, which represented another major intervention in how visual culture was studied and written about. In that same year, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted Contemporary Black Artists in America, an exhibition that was picketed by both the Artists Worker’s Coalition and the Black Arts Movement for its tokenistic and narrow gesture towards representation.
For those interested in sharing research on this theme, please view the above examples as starting points. The CRVC is particularly interested in opening-up ‘1972 or thereabouts’ to disciplines beyond art history, and geographies beyond the UK and the US, and to events beyond those taking place in museums, universities and academic publishing. In addition to the launch event on the 1st February 2023, there will also be a chance to share more substantial papers at a symposium tentatively planned for April. The ambition for the theme overall is to start a conversation that will spark new research projects as the year unfolds. As such, we would encourage proposals for short papers that take up tangents in current research, research in progress, or indeed, new research projects entirely.
Please send a few sentences on your proposed paper to Mark Rawlinson [mark.rawlinson@nottingham.ac.uk] and Chloe Julius [chloe.julius@nottingham.ac.uk]