Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE)

University of Brighton, UK
11th Annual, International, Interdisciplinary Conference:

7-9 September 2016

Radical Interventions: Politics, Culture, Society

Call for Papers

Panel: Art, design and radical political intervention

The artistic avant-garde at the turn of the 20^th century radicalized art as they imagined themselves and their practice to be at the forefront of a double battle waged against the established order of art and society. Constructivists rejected 'bourgeois art' and blurred the distinction between art and design to build the new post-revolutionary socialist society. Berlin Dadaists resorted to photomontage to denounce art, capitalist social relations, and eventually Nazism. Students from the Beaux-Arts in Paris formed the 'Atelier Populaire' in 1968 and took their silkscreened posters with them to the streets in collective acts of détournement of authoritarian structures of power. Revolutionary artists and their works, in film and in print, travelled across the "Third World" in solidarity with struggles of decolonization and global anti-imperialism.

What are the legacies of these radical forms of leftist political intervention through the arts since the 1970s?

• What theoretical conceptions of the role of the artist/designer, political art/design have these canonical cases provoked?
• How have they negotiated or contested questions of aesthetic autonomy?
• How have they been translated, appropriated and perhaps transfigured in and through the particularities of political contexts and across global geographies of struggle?
• What discursive continuities and alternative displacements and substitutions might be traced through their histories?
• Do contemporary 'activist' art and/or design practices still offer a radical promise? Or do these practices index the incorporation of radical political intervention in a neoliberal conjuncture of global art/design markets and NGOs?

This panel seeks 20-min. paper proposals that respond to these questions through critical analysis that is grounded in theoretical enquiry and/or empirical case study of any specific geographical setting.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words by 4 April 2016 at the latest to Zeina Maasri: zeinamaasri@gmail.com

Panel Organizer: Zeina Maasri (University of Brighton, UK / American University of Beirut, Lebanon)

For further information about the conference and updates visit: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/cappe-conference/radical

For further information about the centre visit the CAPPE website:
http://www.brighton.ac.uk/CAPPE

Image:
Le vote ne change rien La lutte continue 'Voting won’t change anything The struggle goes on'. Atelier Populaire Paris 1968.