CALL FOR PAPERS - Invisible Culture

Invisible Culture, Issue 11, Fall 2007
http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/
Deadline for Papers: June 10, 2007
Issue 11: Curator and Context

In his 1965 book Museum Without Walls , Andre Malraux critiques museum
conventions of display that deaden art of the past. In fact, over time
the artworks have morphed, affected by their surroundings, and taken on
new lives as different kinds of aesthetic objects. Three years later,
Roland Barthes would identify the death of the author and the emergence
of the reader in the making of meaning. These writers' prescient
articulations of the fusions - and confusions - of art object, context,
artist, and viewer foresaw today's hyper-interaction of art media and
the overlapping of roles in the museum and beyond.
What these texts leave out is the seemingly unmarked presence of an
intermediary between the artwork and the viewer ╜ the curator ╜ and the
world she has traditionally inhabited ╜ the museum. ⌠The gallery space
is no longer neutral,wrote Brian O'Doherty in 1976, at a time when
artistic practice turned the ideology of the gallery space upon its
head. While underlining the pertinence of the museum's physical and
contextual impact on the reception of art, he too neglects the curator.
Douglas Crimp's seminal text On the Museum's Ruins laid bare the
changing state of the museum by examining shifts in art practice and the
rising significance of photography as challenges to the institution. To
continue rethinking the museum as a site for art display and the
interlinked roles of the artist, artwork, curator, and viewer follows in
the steps of these theorists and their peers, to say the least of the
decades of artists who have interrupted conventional modes of display in
museums through strategic creative applications. As globalization gives
way to new cosmopolitanisms, and new media art transforms the site of
the museum into the virtual realm, what has become of the curator? By
some accounts the role of the curator may be in decline as alternative
art spaces, tactical art interventions, and virtual museums refute her
role and the institutional power it implies. The other side might see
instead a curatorial practice that takes on a multiplicity of roles ╜ as
artist, as architect, as nation - and has increased significance in the
frenzied world of the international art fair.
Invisible Culture invites papers and projects concerned with
contemporary (post-1960s) curatorial and museum practice. Submissions in
the form of 2,500-6,000 word papers from all disciplines, as well as
digital projects (virtual museums, online art exhibitions, and
internet-based endeavors, for example) are welcome. Entries may include
but are not limited to investigations of the following topics:
∙ the relevance and changing role of the curator
∙ artist as curator
∙ curator as translator
∙ criticism and interpretation of exhibitions
∙ models of curating and display
∙ new media projects, the virtual museum
∙ ethics of display
∙ histories of curating
∙ visual anthropology
∙ sense studies, anthropologies of the senses
∙ changes in culture and science museums, museums of natural history
∙ curator as mediator of cultural exchange
∙ architecture and context
∙ global visual culture
∙ problems of cultural translation
∙ alternative exhibition sites
∙ challenges to exhibition display: performance, video and installation
art
∙ the interactive exhibit
∙ hybrid art forms and multimedia displays
∙ museum studies
∙ communication/audience studies
∙ cultivation of art audiences
∙ curating and the expansion of global art markets
∙ collections, collectors and curators
∙ curating the biennial/international art fair
∙ cosmopolitanism, diasporas of artists and curators at home and abroad
∙ display and the politics of identity
∙ authorship
∙ emerging area and regional curatorial networks
∙ developments in institutional critique
∙ the location of the frame

Submissions and inquiries should be directed to Mara Gladstone, Graduate
Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester at
[email protected].

Deadline for submission is June 10, 2007.

*Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture* is a
peer-reviewed journal dedicated to explorations of the material and
political dimensions of cultural practices: the means by which cultural
objects and communities are produced, the historical contexts in which
they emerge, and the regimes of knowledge or modes of social interaction
to which they contribute.

http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/