Call For Papers
*submission has closed
Though reality may seem to be opaque, there are privileged zones - signs, clues - which allow us to penetrate it.
—Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” (1989)
Like forensic inquiry, the history of art history and criticism is rife with approaches to the visual field that stem from notions of objectivity and authenticity. In reconstructing cultural contexts or linking discrete phenomena across an artist’s oeuvre, art historians have attempted to parse the precise workings of images, and sometimes even surgically isolate the “essence” of their objects of study. Such forms of reconstruction entail filling in for what is irretrievably missing or making generalizations, and so speculation creeps into archival research, uses of critical theory, and writing techniques. Speculative practices can also intervene in cultural memory when actively and reflexively mobilized by challenging the canon, reclaiming lost voices, or shielding bodies from the legacy of racist disciplines such as physiognomy. Whether adopted as an artistic or historical methodology or taken as an object of study, the idea of speculative forensics can help investigate the interplay of evidence and interpretation as well as the politics of scholarship. Where do speculation and forensics converge in art history and artistic practice, and what does this convergence mean for the way objects tell us about the world and vice versa?
In his article on the theory and history of knowledge and its relationship to power, Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg establishes the value of conjecture as an alternative to scientific approaches. He also poses questions that continue to challenge us today regarding the nature of reality and the different cognitive values of voluntarily and involuntarily made signs, such as earlobes in paintings or footprints. In the first section of the essay, Ginzburg locates art history, Freudian psychoanalysis, and criminology or detective work as belonging to the same epistemological paradigm. Both Ginzburg and scholars on carceral machinery understand “crime” as a political category defined by the state in order to protect property and expand policing and prisons instead of addressing the conditions that motivate people to use harm to solve problems. In our current context defined by the struggle for Black liberation, what does it mean to link art history and criminology? Can we reckon with art history’s own overreliance on methods and institutions that developed around the need to value and protect property, from connoisseurship to museum collections of looted objects? Can we abolish forms of policing within our discipline?
The 55th Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Symposium, Speculative Forensics, presents an opportunity to address some of these questions by gesturing toward conjectural elements stowed away in a range of art historical methodologies. We invite submissions that engage critically and creatively with the promises, politico-intellectual entanglements, and shortcomings present in outdated, extant, or emerging approaches to the study of art. Papers might expound upon histories occluded by what bell hooks has described as “interlocking systems of domination,” like white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, while reflecting on art history’s capacity, or lack thereof, to access those histories. For example, they might delve into a topic for which archival sources are lacking and reexamine art history’s relationship to the archive. We invite submissions that engage a range of disciplinary perspectives and that consider art, broadly conceived, from a variety of time periods and geographies.
About
The annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Symposium is the longest running symposium of its kind in North America. Initiated in 1965, the symposium provides a forum for graduate students to present original research in a scholarly format. Organized collectively by a cohort of students, the symposium is organized around critical themes and issues addressing the history and current state of art historical scholarship. Past themes and keynote speakers include: Distraction, Paul Mpagi Sepuya (2019); Alterations, Juliana Huxtable (2018); (Re)Mediation, Lisa Salzman (2015); Translations, Jonathan Hay (2012); Standard Procedure, Beatriz Colomina (2011); Incongruities, Helen Molesworth (2009); ARTifact, Alan McCollum (2000); and Crossings, Belongings, Presence, Trinh T. Minh-ha (1998).
Speculative Forensics will take the form of an open workshop and discussion conducted via Zoom over two days. On Friday, November 6, participants organized in panels will deliver 15 minute presentations with UCLA students and a keynote speaker serving as respondents. On November 7, keynote speakers will give presentations followed by an open discussion drawing on the previous day’s activities. Interested participants are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 350 words along with a CV to speculativeforensics@gmail.com by August 31, 2020. Accepted participants will be notified in September.
Possible topics might include:
Archives and absences
Memory and mourning
Fiction, parafiction, narrative, and counternarrative
The virtual and the real
Built and ecological environments
Activism and research-based art practices
Historiography and art historical methodology
Play, chance, and contingency
Figuration
Conservation, restoration, and the lives of objects
Forgeries
Anachronism, presentism, and temporality
Memory and mourning
Lines of flight and resistance
Legal systems, criminality, and human rights
Divination and the occult
Signs, symptoms, and medical history
Archives and absences