The 41st Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Symposium
October 13, 2006
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA

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Postmark and/or email deadline for submitting abstracts is June 9, 2006.

Graduate students in any discipline are invited to submit abstracts for Lessons on Love, the 41st Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Symposium, the longest-running Art History student symposium in the United States. To be held on October 13, 2006, this event will bring together emerging scholars to share their research on any aspect of the visual arts relevant to this year's theme. The event will take place at the Hammer Museum, an important center of art and culture in the heart of West Los Angeles.

This symposium will invigorate love as a subject of discourse in art history at a time when its consideration in theoretical and political formations is badly needed. The theme considers current shifts in scholarship that employ love, as opposed to desire, as an analytical lens. What is love and how is it imagined and formulated in art? Papers may consider love in any form and in any relation to artistic creation—content, production, exchange, interpretation, function, etc. For instance, love has surfaced implicitly in recent artwork gathered loosely under the term “relational aesthetics,” which focuses on interpersonal exchange. Also, some artistic traditions, as disparate as Italian Baroque and Hindu temple sculpture, have articulated love for the divine with a sexual visual vocabulary. Papers may also address love as it has been neglected (and at rare times, embraced) by academia. For example, both queer and feminist interventions in art history have investigated the presence of forms of love and desire that have been suppressed by dominant historical narratives. One might also consider how authors, from Plato to Jacques Derrida, have attempted to theorize love or offer it as a revolutionary possibility.

Other questions to consider may include: Is it possible to write productively on art that we love? Why has the topic of love become taboo in art historical discourse? Can love be a revolutionary tool in art and art history? What methods (e.g., psychoanalysis, iconography, etc.) allow for the consideration of love when analyzing artworks? How are social and cultural conventions of love communicated and propagated through art? How is love, in its various forms (e.g., filial, erotic, platonic, divine, etc.), manifested in artistic practice? How has art treated the complicated relationship between love, sex and desire? How have artists employed love to alter or challenge positions of power in colonial situations? How is art used to preserve lost love (e.g. funerary arts, dedications, memorials)? Can art production, collection or reception serve to satisfy one’s desires?

The keynote speaker this year will be George Baker, who is an Assistant Professor of Art History at UCLA, a long standing critic for Artforum magazine, and an editor of OCTOBER Magazine and OCTOBER Books.

Abstracts of 300 words or less, along with a C.V., must be postmarked or sent via email by June 9, 2006. Submissions may be e-mailed to <ahsympos@humnet.ucla.edu> or mailed to:

AHGSA Symposium 2006
UCLA Department of Art History
100 Dodd Hall
P.O. Box 951417
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1417