by Jon Lackman | 9 March 2009 | Conferences
CAA is over. The most heavily blogged CAA ever, it produced more coverage than we can cover here. A selection:
“Frenchy but Chic” wrote:
A strange phenomenon has occurred this week in downtown Los Angeles. Hordes upon hordes of pallid, humorless and bespectacled killjoys, dressed in drab, unseasonal clothing, sporting strange unfashionable facial hair or absence of hair on top, regardless of gender, have assaulted the Convention Center … The problem with CAA, in all fairness, doesn’t reside with the organization itself, but in the fact that art history in America hasn’t exactly advanced as a discipline in general for a couple of decades now. IMHO it has remained stagnant for many of the same reasons that make “America The Concept” unpalatable to foreign populations: insularity. It’s all very well to go all anti-Western and to try to advance the cause of minorities within the art discourse, or to brandish political art as the only type worth studying, etc. but the problem it creates is a tiny, micro-sectioned view of art: take a small slice of the sample, hold it under the microscope, and use that tiny sample to draw conclusions … Meanwhile, there’s a partial loss of general knowledge about art history … It pains me to see people discoursing about Public Art without having any idea of what Alois Riegl has published about monuments. In 1903. Or that art historians would use the word “wunderkammer” without having read Julius von Schlosser … I’m happy the Getty (the GRI) went out of its way to publish Aby Warburg’s complete writings (the essay on International Astrology is a personal favorite) but I think they should provide the US art historians with a complete series panning the corpus of the discipline, so Pliny the Elder and Philostratus and Vitruvius and Vasari and Winckelmann, etc. would be readily available. Aside from the discipline ancestors, there are loads of foreign art historians (German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) who are only partially translated or not translated at all in English, and sometimes British historians whose publications are not available here … it would do the US practitioners of art history a lot of good to have this general corpus available, and it would help everybody to get out of the post-Greenberg-post-October-post-Critical-studies miasma we’ve been collectively immersed in for too long (I also think a hefty dose of sociology and anthropology would do everybody tons of good). In addition, and this is for all art historians on the planet, not only the CAA attendees: I strongly advise you hang out with real artists, even if your specialty is 17th century Dutch or Precolumbian or whatever. It will give you a better understanding of the challenges of actually making art, which in turn could help you understand the how and why of the way art looks. So you can talk about it without having to resort to the tired clichés and/or the theoretical crutches you’ve been forced-fed in graduate school.
Judith Baumann wrote:
The CAA conference was noticeably poorly attended. Armies of empty seats in vast lecture halls made the few participants seem insignificant. Talking with one of the interview hall organizers, I was told that there was a 40% decline of particpating institutions interviewing for advertised positions compared to last year, which was already slim pickings. Apprently, since December, over 50% of positions advertised on the CAA website dried up. Only 70 schools were interviewing for positions. I think that CAA is going to have to reinvent its annual conference as it’s certainly no longer a viable resource for newly minted MFA holders or “emerging professionals” to find a job.
Irene Borngraeber wrote:
I came back, loaded with books, but disappointed. The College Art Association … had very little to say when it came to actual contemporary production … Panelists on “Historicizing the Present…” and “What is Contemporary Art History” seemed to be more interested in talking about their own work than proposing solutions for the philosophical dilemmas involved in studying contemporary art–or answering the main question posed … Instead of re-hashing the classics, why aren’t art historians studying living artists, or taking risks writing about talented individuals who haven’t been “made” yet? … I want to hear statements worth defending and historians really thinking about what it means to be a modern academic studying events that aren’t yet–and may never be–historic.
Representatives of Hol Art Books attended and blogged:
The morning started with not books, but a panel on John Cage where-in every utterance, every little sound seemed as if it were part of an orchestral procession: the clearing of a throat, the melody from a cell phone, shifts in chairs, the swish of pants rubbing together, the cry of a woman during Q&A: “He wasn’t in the closet! Your scholarship is putting him in there!” And for the final note: the lights mysteriously went out and an audience member exclaimed, “Hi John!”
And:
CAA 2009 opened with much anticipation for the success of panels, job interviews, and books in a year of economic anxiety. The crowd seems smaller this year; yet, CAA never fails to disappoint as the single largest gathering of mismatched black separates possible … Thursdays’ biggest session and the buzz of the hallways was certainly the launching panel of the newly formed Association of Contemporary Art Historians – with easily 250 – 300 audience members packed in with little standing room to spare figures from Pamela Lee and Miwon Kwon to Richard Meyer and Grant Kester took on the disciplinary dilemma “What is Contemporary Art History?”
CAA’s official blog was also at its liveliest ever this year. Benjamin Lima also wrote on the panel “What is Contemporary Art History?” Among the provocative questions raised there: When does a stack of press releases become a reception history? Should projects in Turkish, Chinese, and Japanese contemporary art be grouped with “contemporary” or national programs, both, or neither? Can you convince a roomful of kids born in 1990 that the 1940s are a part of the present?
Ed Schad celebrated a talk by Samuel Edgerton on Renaissance perspective:
The best talk I’ve been to so far, it laid out the history of perspective as born of theological and medieval concerns and rooted in a sort of divine rather than secular geometry … This was an amazing talk, the kind of thing that makes wandering around this building in a morning haze a wonderous thing.
Katie Anania’s favorite however was “Queering Craft”:
I’m kicking myself this morning for walking into yesterday’s “Queering Craft” session late, as the Q & A was one of the most spirited, funny, and collegial that I’ve seen all week. Predictably, most of the panel participants were under 30, and most moved beyond the footsore discussions of authenticity that bog down similar panels
Final question: Will Olu Oguibe ever make to CAA? As in 2007, he was scheduled to attend this year but ultimately did not.
CAA is a disaster of an organization, a thrilling mediocrity of a conference. Fewer panels with better papers would improve things slightly, but the whole organization seems to be blithely unaware of or unwilling to deal with the truly monstrous problems facing the discipline–the need for massive curtailment of graduate programs, support of young professionals beyond the “emerging professionals” claptrap, ethical use of adjuncts, etc. Instead: a packed panel session on Contemporary Art where one would be surprised to learn that art before 1945 exists. The whole ordeal is an intellectual cesspool, and meanwhile the organization has failed to serve as a means of steering the discipline as a whole. It’s a macabre dance, though maybe the MLA and AHA are just as bad.
Though I hardly think the problem is that we need MORE Riegl studies…
american education is insular and the problem lies in that it does not teach the importance of learning foreign languages. i had several interviewers that were astonished i could speak four languages. also, why should a press publish something that has no demand?? believe me, i would love annotated reprints of all the scholars i am interested in, but the demand for these scholars’ writings is probably low even in their own countries. it is up to us to read them in their original languages or to get photocopies of earlier translations.
also i am not sure how becoming friends with a contemporary artist will help our knowledge of dutch or mayan art. i really don’t. their notions of who created art and the function of their art was so different that this is not a valid recommendation, especially in the general terms in which it is stated. contemporary production might shape how i see the art of the past but the challenges contemporary artists face are not as illuminating.
and about studying yet to be discovered artists?? are you kidding me? this whole career is a crap shoot and i should dedicate my dissertation, or article to someone who might or might not be important, therefore relegating my own career to obscurity? given the dearth of teaching jobs, i can’t see a better way to remain unemployed.
it is possible that emerging talent is best covered by art critics, and i know that a lot of scholars are, in fact, reconsidering obscure figures that have been slighted by the canon.
so are you asking us to study passing fads? fascinating.
Also here:
http://artforum.com/diary/id=22217