The Courtauld | Relationality in American Art

Whether in current critical discourse or recognized retrospectively, relationality has been central to the study of twentieth-century art. Art history is, after all, predicated on the study of relations between bodies, artworks and forms, and their contexts or communities. Moving beyond the simple situatedness of an artwork faced by a viewer, this conference foregrounds the concept of relationality as a means through which we might learn to encounter difference. Relationality is a key tenet of phenomenology, or the study of the structures of consciousness, and in this context it has returned every thirty years or so since its emergence in the first half of the twentieth century in the theorization of feminism, race, film, body art and most recently queer and trans studies to help scholars conceptualize the contours of subjectivity as non-oppositional and fluid. Addressing art of the Americas in the long twentieth century, this conference asks how relationality as an analytic might undo binaries and critique the persistence of a universalized maker and viewer within art history. The conference looks to modes of relation emergent within phenomenology in artistic discourse of the 1950s and 1960s and seeks especially to explore those conceived through historical and theoretical models in other periods. Presentations from artists and scholars will attend to relational models of form; the role of artworks in demonstrating conversational modes of knowing; the artwork’s potential to engender community or make space for difference; creative acts of co-emergence in making or viewing; and strategies of reading that focus on relationships that artworks and artists produce with audiences.