Tate Liverpool Research Forum – Call for Papers
Corporealities: Art, Transgression and the Body
Friday 2nd March 2007, 2pm – 5pm
Alongside its projection of classical beauty, art has always been fascinated by transgressing the boundaries of the body, from the anatomical waxwork displays of Renaissance Italy, and curious collections of people such as Peter the Great, the grotesque debauchery in Goya, through bodily performances by artists such as Joseph Beuys and Carole Schneeman, up to the modern tableaux of Jake and Dinos Chapman, or the uncanny bodies of Ron Mueck, for example. The capacity of these works to horrify and captivate in equal measure makes them a powerful and compelling underbelly to our vision of the civilised world.
To coincide with the first major retrospective of the art of the Chapman Brothers at Tate Liverpool, the research forum is inviting proposals for papers that deal with corporeal visions in artistic practice. Themes for discussion could deal with either historical perspectives or contemporary practice, or both, and could include, but are not limited to:
· Uncanny similitude – the culture of the copy
· The Grotesque and Classical Body
· Hyperreality in the artistic body
· Dissecting the body in contemporary art
· Anatomical waxwork display – historically and in modern art
· Visions of the Gothic in modern corporeal art
· Cultures of death & taxidermic strategies in art
· Transgressing the body through performance
· Feminist and Queer readings of bodily frontiers
The forum will be chaired by Dr Samantha Lackey, research fellow at the AHRC Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies.
Proposals for papers can be submitted to robert.knifton@tate.org.uk and should be no longer than one side of A4 in length. The deadline for submissions is December 15th.