Still kicking.

COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION ANNUAL CONFERENCE

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

FEBRUARY 22-25, 2006

Since its founding in 1912, the annual conference of the College Art Association (CAA) has expanded to serve an abundance of needs, both professional and educational. The breadth of its mission has made it one of the major American academic conferences in the arts, with nearly two hundred sessions, a forum for practicing artists, a Career Fair with a centralized interview facility and professional development functions, a Book and Trade Fair, a social event with receptions, and a launching pad for local exhibitions. CAA's efforts to expand the mission of the organization while maintaining a core of excellence in terms of promoting scholarship and studio practice were fully tangible during the four packed days of this year's ninety-fourth annual conference, held in Boston. The diversity of professions, institutions, and professional roles requires the conference to create an expansive program year after year. This diversity has prompted the CAA organizers to continually expand its programs to maintain interest for all in attendance.

For many of this year's 5,400 attendees, the CAA conference was linked to the search for full-time employment. While the job postings formerly collected in the publication CAA Careers are now found online, the annual conference still hosts on-site personal interviews in the legendary interview hall and hotel suites. This year, 170 institutions interviewed for positions in academia and museums. The Book and Trade Fair is another perpetual highlight, this year featuring more than one hundred exhibitors, most of them scholarly presses or art suppliers, although some arts organizations were present as well.

The convocation served to inform participants of the state of the organization as well as to honor numerous awardees. In her presidential address, Ellen K. Levy discussed changes at CAA. Levy called attention to the complex intersections of technology, visual culture, and law in the form of copyright, intellectual property, and legal use of technology, stressing the "need to find ways to build visual culture into our legal systems." Internal changes at CAA include positions of leadership: outgoing President Levy introduced President-elect Nicola Courtright and honored long-time Executive Director Susan Ball, who is departing this year.

The awards ceremony recognized outstanding publications, teaching, criticism, and distinguished bodies of work. Awardees included Elizabeth Murray (Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement), Linda Nochlin (Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art), and Andrea Zittel (Distinguished Body of Work Award) as well as Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who received a Special Award for Lifetime Achievement on Behalf of the Arts and Humanities.

The convocation culminated in a keynote address given by Arthur C. Danto, Emeritus Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and art critic for The Nation. Danto's keynote, "Art and Interpretation," stressed the necessity of interpreting art beyond its solely aesthetic properties. Danto concluded by discussing "The Art of 9/11," a 2005 exhibition that he curated for the nonprofit exhibition space apexart in New York City. Danto suggested that works of art continue to be important because they function as "embodied meanings."

The scale of the CAA Annual Conference is such that any account of the conference sessions is bound to be partial and situated. Each time slot featured thirteen to eighteen concurrent selections. What follows, then, are observations from sessions on contemporary art history and visual culture. Visual culture, a topic that has allowed for lively debate in CAA conferences of recent years, has become thoroughly entrenched in the field of art history. This situation seems to have left the practiced field of visual culture at a critical impasse. If visual culture at CAA in preceding years was framed by a sense of urgency, as it was defined against "traditional" art history, the era of battling definitions now seems to be over.

The official session of the Visual Culture Caucus, "The Politics of Visual Culture," chaired by Laurie Beth Clark, lacked common ground, a disconnect which became palpable when one of the panelists suggested that to make a difference in the real world, each of the people in the room should donate one dollar to Hurricane Katrina disaster relief. This drew an indignant response from an artist in the audience who questioned why the panelist excluded art from "the real world." Indeed, where do we operate if not in the real world, and is donating a dollar the best that we, as artists, critics, historians, and educators, can do? As the panelist failed to respond, a promising opportunity for dialogue fell flat.

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"Transnationalism and Visual Culture"--the other session sponsored by the Visual Culture Caucus--included thought-provoking contributions by Jonathan Beller, Jill Casid, and Renee Green, but a misgauging of the allotted session time not only prevented discussion but also cut short discussant Jennifer Gonzalez's remarks on the relationship between territoriality and sampling.

The contemporary art history sessions at the Annual Conference emphasized context over theory, as art historians sought to anchor artists and works into social movements, biographical trajectories, intellectual climates, identity, or geographic sites. In the session "Installation Art in the Age of Globalization," chaired by Lewis Kachur and Rosemary O'Neill, several papers analyzed the contemporary international biennial culture. "Contemporary Art: Institutions and Exclusions," chaired by Terry Smith, focused on a range of topics from "Exilic Art" by Kinga Araya to Marina Grzinic's account of contemporary Central European art. "Collectivism and Its Repercussions in 20th-Century Japan," a session chaired by Reiko Tomii and Midori Yoshimoto, and "Contemporary Asian Art: Strategies, Negotiations, Renegotiations," chaired by Rebecca Brown and Sarita K. Heer, featured papers on recent Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Korean art, while Piotr Piotrowski's session "Art and Democracy in Central Europe" focused on the ideologically and historically marked European region. All of these sessions delivered what they promised in terms of the speakers' geographic diversity, as many of the presenters come from and work outside the United States.

The session "Minimalism and the Common Culture: Art and Politics in the 1960s," organized by John Curley and Robert Slifkin, was standing-room only. The papers proved that the 1990s surge of interest in 1960s art is far from over; indeed, as panel discussant Patricia Kelly memorably noted, it is finally "time to shake the Greenbergian hangover" of clinging to the notion of minimalism as an autonomous art. In a similar vein, the panels "Gordon Matta-Clark and Architecture," chaired by Gwendolyn Owens and Philip Ursprung, and "Before and After Institutional Critique," chaired by Matthew Jesse Jackson and Andrew Perchuk, steered away from the theoretical toward concrete detail, albeit with a more muted sense of urgency.

The annual CAA conference remains a central venue for art educators, but its relevance for other arts professionals--including practicing artists with or without college affiliation--should not be overlooked, as the conference packs a formidable punch in facilitating an exchange of ideas, inspiration, social relations, and last but not least, professional opportunities in art-related fields.

KIRSI PELTOMAKI is an artist and an assistant professor of Art History at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

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For more information about CAA see www.collegeart.org.