CAA News

The Summer 2009 issue of Art Journal has just been published. It will be mailed to those individual CAA members who elect to receive it, and to all institutional members.

“The marginalization of time-based projects in histories of twentieth-century art is overdetermined,” writes the editor-in-chief Judith F. Rodenbeck in her introduction, “as has long been recognized, by the movement of the human body and, in the case of dance, by gender.” The five essays in the current issue reconsider those margins and offer more inclusive points of view.

Featured in the order of their appearance are: Juliet Bellow, “Fashioning Cléopâtre: Sonia Delaunay’s New Woman”; Nell Andrew, “Living Art: Akarova and the Belgian Avant-Garde”; Kate Elswit, “Accessing Unison in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility”; Janice Ross, “Atomizing Cause and Effect: Ann Halprin’s 1960s Summer Dance Workshops”; and Philip Glahn, “Brechtian Journeys: Yvonne Rainer’s Film as Counterpublic Art.”

Updated May 14, 2009.

Like most universities, art museums, and learned societies, CAA has been significantly affected by the global economic downturn. The Board of Directors made difficult decisions at its May 2009 meeting that nevertheless will allow CAA to maintain the high quality of member services and programming. Strategic reductions and other measures have been instituted throughout the association to balance the budget and keep core programs, publications, and services in operation. With this careful financial planning, CAA remains dedicated to supporting members and the visual-arts community at large through our advocacy, career services, publications, and conference.

Annual Conference

The 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago will commence on Wednesday evening, February 10, with Convocation and the Gala Reception. All 120 planned sessions will be presented over the following three days, Thursday, February 11 to Saturday, February 13, with the addition of extended evening hours. No sessions will take place on Wednesday.

Publications

Newsletter: Beginning July 2009, CAA News will only be distributed online in a new reader-friendly design. This allows us to save printing and mailing costs and help to preserve coverage of core programs and publications. CAA’s website, www.collegeart.org, will become the primary hub of up-to-date information on the organization.

Journals: CAA’s longtime support of the journals is absolutely central to the mission, and the association is fully committed to maintaining them now and in the future. The Art Bulletin and Art Journal will continue to be published. Illustrations, however, will be limited to black and white for 2009–10, except where editorial and budget decisions may allow the insertion of color. caa.reviews will be unchanged, with new book reviews, exhibition reviews, and conference and symposia reports published regularly. While the CAA Board of Directors has determined the budget restrictions necessary for this part of the association, the editors-in-chief will work closely with staff and editorial boards to make sure that any further reductions are implemented with a strict attention to quality consistent with the identity and mission of the journals.

Grants and Fellowships

Two programs in CAA’s grant-making arm will be suspended for 2009–10: the Professional Development Fellowship Program for graduate students and the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. However, the Annual Conference Travel Grants and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant will both continue, and the CAA Annual Exhibitions, also funded by a grant, will take place at the Chicago and New York conferences.

Katy Siegel is incoming editor-in-chief of Art Journal and associate professor of art history at Hunter College, City University of New York.

During my tenure as editor-in-chief of Art Journal, I would like to publish a wide-ranging series that assesses contemporary art—its making, exhibition, criticism, history, and social uses. This series could include the kind of state-of-the-field essays that have traditionally been written about historical areas of study for The Art Bulletin. It could also mean more focused historiographic subjects, such as the evolution of “the contemporary” or the rise and fall of postmodernism. Or theoretical discussions of, for example, the relationships between the modern and the contemporary (questions of periodization being of special interest), or more speculative considerations of the changing role of contemporary art in current economic, technological, and social conditions.

I welcome approaches that are ambitious and generalizing, but since “the contemporary” is not really a single unified disciplinary object, I am also seeking writing that is partisan and partial, local and medium-specific. While one person might approach postmodernism from a historical perspective, as an object in the past, another might argue for its continuing validity under current conditions. Different authors might investigate the social meaning of “the contemporary” as opposed to the modern in particular countries at particular moments (the US at midcentury, China today), or for particular institutions, such as the museum, biennial exhibition, or university/college course.

I would like to hear from curators, teachers, critics, and artists about their own concrete experiences in relation to these large, abstract questions. I am interested not only in a wide range of topics, but also a diversity of approaches to those topics: art criticism, discussions, shorter polemical essays, and artists’ projects are all possibilities in addition to the scholarly article.

For more information, please write to katy.siegel@gmail.com.

In her introductory editor’s letter to the recently published Spring 2009 Art Journal, Judith Rodenbeck underlines the notion of retooling in the issue. The authors and contributors, she notes, confront three areas in particular: how the expansive global art world thrives in non-Western countries; how art education is undergoing progressive change outside traditional art academia; and how a history of early computer art can inform contemporary practice.

Gail Gelburd’s essay, “Cuba and the Art of ‘Trading with the Enemy,’ ” looks at Cuban-American relations over the past fifty years and their effect on cultural exchange. In her essay “Urban Claims and Visual Sources in the Making of Dakar’s Art World City,” Joanna Grabski discusses the Dak’Art Biennale in relation to Senghorian Négritude, the city’s School of Fine Arts, and Dakar’s urban fabric.

During the past several years, Art Journal has investigated retoolings in pedagogical issues. “The Currency of Practice: Reclaiming Autonomy for the MFA,” developed from a roundtable discussion that took place at the CAA Annual Conference in 2007, explores alternatives to traditional graduate degrees such as often-nomadic, nonaccredited schools, organizations led and run by artists, and programs for PhDs for artists.

Moving forward by looking back, three essays explore the history and practice of digital art. The artist Paul Hertz presents an overview that draws on his recent cocurated exhibition, Imaging by Numbers: A Historical View of the Computer Print. A computer scientist and pioneering artist, Frieder Nake, examines early European computer artists and their work, which he calls “algorithmic images accepted as art.” Patric D. Prince, a scholar, artist, and collector of computer art, provides a short history of computer-generated imagery and digital printmaking in America before the era of the home computer.

Reviews include texts on recent projects by Boris Groys (a collection of essays and an exhibition) and a book on Marcel Duchamp and artists’ labor. Letters to the editor include two replies to an Art Journal article, “Steps to an Ecology of Communication: Radical Software, Dan Graham, and the Legacy of Gregory Bateson,” from the Fall 2008 issue.

The Winter 2008 issue of Art Journal has just been published. The table of contents is posted on the CAA website, and your printed copy will arrive in the mail this month.

In the Forum, Suzanne Hudson and Anne Byrd collected papers first presented at their cochaired CAA session from the 2008 Annual Conference in Dallas–Fort Worth. Entitled “I’ll Be Your Mirror, or Why and How Do We Work on Living Artists,” the section presents essays and responses from Hudson, Byrd, Ágnes Berecz, Huey Copeland, Phyllis Tuchman, and Johanna Burton. Richard Meyer’s essay here “ ‘Artists sometimes have feelings,’ ” won CAA’s 2009 Art Journal Award, to be awarded at the upcoming conference in Los Angeles.

Features include “Toward an Aesthetic Marine Biology,” a deep-sea investigation by J. Malcolm Shick, a professor of zoology and oceanography, of underwater imagery in historical and contemporary art and its use in his classroom. Two other texts on pedagogy round out the section: Julia Morrisroe and Craig Roland consider “A Collaborative Approach to Preparing MFA Art Students to Teach at the University Level,” and Harrell Fletcher leads a conversation with his students on the MFA in social practice that he developed at Portland State University.

In Reviews, Lisa Frye Ashe examines the exhibition Morris Louis Now: An American Master and its catalogue, published to accompany a show that originated at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2006 and traveled to San Diego and Washington, DC. In related art-historical areas, Harry Cooper reviews Mark Godfrey’s book Abstraction and the Holocaust, and Gail Levin looks at the exhibitions Action Painting (on view in Basel, Switzerland in 2008) and Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976 (opening on February 13 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, after stops in New York and St. Louis), while also reviewing their catalogues.

Art Journal, published quarterly by CAA, is devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and visual culture.

Art Journal Seeks Reviews Editor

The Art Journal Editorial Board invites nominations and self-nominations for the position of reviews editor of Art Journal, for a three-year term, July 1, 2010–June 30, 2013 (preceded by half a year as reviews editor designate, from January 1 to June 30, 2010).

Working with the editorial board, the reviews editor is responsible for the commissioning of all book and exhibition reviews in Art Journal. He or she selects books and exhibitions to be reviewed, commissions reviewers, and determines the appropriate length and character of reviews. The reviews editor also works with authors and CAA’s manuscript editor in the development and preparation of review manuscripts for publication and is expected to keep abreast of newly published and/or important books and recent exhibitions in the fields of twentieth-century and contemporary art, criticism, theory, and visual culture. This is a three-year term, which includes membership on the Art Journal Editorial Board.

The reviews editor attends the three annual meetings of the Art Journal Editorial Board—held in the spring and fall in New York and once at the CAA Annual Conference—and submits an annual report to CAA’s Publications Committee. CAA reimburses the reviews editor for travel and lodging expenses for the spring and fall meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but the reviews editor pays these expenses to attend the Annual Conference.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, CV, and contact information to: Chair, Art Journal Editorial Board, CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Deadline: April 15, 2009.

Art Journal Seeks Editorial-Board Members

CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for two individuals to serve on the Art Journal Editorial Board for a four-year term, July 1, 2009–June 30, 2013.

Candidates are individuals with a broad knowledge of modern and contemporary art; institutional affiliation is not required. Applicants who are artists, museum-based scholars, or scholars interested in pedagogical issues are especially invited to apply.

The editorial board advises the editor-in-chief and assists him or her to seek authors, articles, artist’s projects, and other content for the journal; guides its editorial program and may propose new initiatives for it; performs peer reviews and recommends peer reviewers; and may support fundraising efforts on the journal’s behalf. Members also assist the editor-in-chief to keep abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference and other academic conferences, symposia, and events in their fields.

Each year the editorial board meets twice in New York and once at the CAA Annual Conference. CAA reimburses members for travel and lodging expenses for the spring and fall New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but members pay these expenses to attend the conference.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, CV, and contact information to: Chair, Art Journal Editorial Board, CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Deadline: April 15, 2009.

Katy Siegel, associate professor of art history at Hunter College in New York, is the new editor-in-chief of Art Journal. She will begin her three-year term on July 1, 2009, and her first issue will appear in spring 2010. Siegel succeeds Judith Rodenbeck of Sarah Lawrence College, who has led the journal since July 2006.

In addition to her work in the City University of New York system, teaching at both Hunter and the Graduate Center, Siegel has also been a senior critic in the Yale University School of Art and was a visiting associate professor at Princeton University from 2007 to 2009. She earned her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in 1995.

Siegel has published widely on modern and contemporary art, with essays in books and catalogues for Richard Tuttle, Dana Schutz, Takashi Murakami, Lisa Yuskavage, Bernard Frize, and more. Among her own books are Abstract Expressionism (forthcoming from Phaidon, 2010) and Art Works: Money (with Paul Mattick; New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004). She wrote the primary essay for Jeff Koons (Berlin: Taschen, 2008), and Reaktion Books will publish her latest project, ‘Since ’45’: Contemporary Art in the Age of Extremes.

A contributing editor to Artforum, she has written criticism, essays, and reviews for the magazine since 1998. Siegel also maintains a public face, participating in panels and delivering lectures and papers nationwide. At the 2009 CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles, she is chairing a session entitled “The Age of Extremes.”

Her recent guest-curated exhibition, High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–75, with the artist David Reed as advisor, traveled internationally from 2006 to 2008 to great critical acclaim.

The editorial board of Art Journal seeks interested CAA members to join us at the 2009 Annual Conference in Los Angeles for a roundtable discussion on art and transnationalism.

Art in the twentieth century has been deeply shaped by exile, travel, and diaspora. Since about 1990, “globalization” has been driven by the trajectory of global finance and transnational capitalism, which in turn have intensified transnational circulation and art practice. Seen through this lens, the contemporary artist is a producer of commodified sameness, and even an unwitting vector for capitalist penetration into the peripheries. But transnational practice and exchange may also foster new imaginaries and solidarities at variance with capitalism. Can such practices transform the local by enabling a more direct social address? Postcolonial theory and globalization studies are enabling new ways of writing histories of modernisms as crossnational cultural forms. Thinking through transnationalism may productively reconfigure the disjunctive relationship between a local or national art history and a “global” art history of the modern and contemporary era.

Led by Art Journal editorial-board member Iftikhar Dadi, the roundtable discussion will be recorded and may provide material for publication in a future issue. The discussion will take place on Thursday, February 26, 2:00–4:00 PM, at a conference location to be announced.

Participation is by invitation. Please send a brief email describing your interest in the topic and how you foresee contributing to the discussion to mid1@cornell.edu. Invitations to participate will be sent around February 1. Deadline: January 20, 2009.

Attendees of the CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles are invited to meet the editors-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews at the CAA booth in the Book and Trade Fair. Discuss the journals, present your ideas, learn how to submit material for consideration, and ask questions. Richard Powell of The Art Bulletin, Judith Rodenbeck of Art Journal, and Lucy Oakley of caa.reviews will be at the booth on Friday, February 27, 2008, 10:30–11:30 AM.

The editorial board of Art Journal seeks interested CAA members to join us at the 2009 Annual Conference in Los Angeles for a roundtable discussion on art and transnationalism.

Art in the twentieth century has been deeply shaped by exile, travel, and diaspora. Since about 1990, “globalization” has been driven by the trajectory of global finance and transnational capitalism, which in turn have intensified transnational circulation and art practice. Seen through this lens, the contemporary artist is a producer of commodified sameness, and even an unwitting vector for capitalist penetration into the peripheries. But transnational practice and exchange may also foster new imaginaries and solidarities at variance with capitalism. Can such practices transform the local by enabling a more direct social address? Postcolonial theory and globalization studies are enabling new ways of writing histories of modernisms as crossnational cultural forms. Thinking through transnationalism may productively reconfigure the disjunctive relationship between a local or national art history and a “global” art history of the modern and contemporary era.

Led by Art Journal editorial-board member Iftikhar Dadi, the roundtable discussion will be recorded and may provide material for publication in a future issue. The discussion will take place on Thursday, February 26, 2:00–4:00 PM, at a conference location to be announced.

Participation is by invitation. Please send a brief email describing your interest in the topic and how you foresee contributing to the discussion to mid1@cornell.edu. Invitations to participate will be sent around February 1. Deadline: January 20, 2009.