Call for proposals for College Art Association Conference panel entitled:
FICTIVE ART
Conference dates: Feb. 19-22, 2003, New York City
Deadline for proposals: May 13, 2002.
Proposals may be submitted to the chairs by email. All participants must be CAA members. Detailed submission guidelines can be found online at: http://www.collegeart.org/caa/conference/2003/callforparticipation.html
Chairs:
Antoinette LaFarge (alafarge@uci.edu); University of California, Irvine; Dept. of Studio Art, UC-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697.
Lise Patt (licip@pacificnet.net); Institute of Cultural Inquiry; ICI, 1512 S. Robertson, Los Angeles, CA 90035.
PANEL DESCRIPTION
This panel will consider the rise of fictive art--works in which artists deliberately combine textual and visual strategies to produce works that straddle the boundary between art, fiction, and history. Reflecting Elaine Scary's distinction between the made-up and the made-real, these "whole worlds" rely on a wide variety of fictive strategies and authenticating devices ranging from the nature of photography as objective witness (Nicolas Kahn and Richard Selesnick's Circular River project; Warren Neidich's Unknown Artist) to an appeal to the authority of specific cultural forms such as the museum (David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology), scientific research (Joan Fontcuberta's Sputnik project; Beauvais Lyons's Hokes Archives), and the encyclopedia (Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus). Many recent fictive art projects are computer games (Myst and Riven) or exploit the role-playing potential of the Internet (the Kingdom of Talossa).
We invite artists working in this area to present their work; and we invite critics, historians, anthropologists, and others to address such questionsas: What accounts for the current explosion of this kind of work, and is it best categorized as art, fiction, pseudo-science, or something else? Should fictive art be theorized along the same lines as the fictive reality discussed in the literary theory of Wolfgang Iser and others? What is the relationship of these works to such historical antecedents as Raymond Roussel's "New Impressions of Africa"? Does this work create more anxiety than pleasure in the viewer? How does fictive art manage to keep reality in view even while overstepping its bounds?