(November 16-20, 2011): “Artistic Employ and Aesthetic
Production.”
We are seeking paper proposals (200-250 words)
for inclusion in “Artistic Employ and Aesthetic
Production,” a
session we are organizing for this year’s AAA meetings in
Montreal, Canada. The session is organized by Ritu Gairola
Khanduri at University of Texas at
Arlington and M. Gabriela Torres at Wheaton College, MA.
If you are interested in being considered for
inclusion please forward your abstract (200-250 words), name, and
affiliation to M. Gabriela Torres at Wheaton College, MA
(torres_mgabriela@wheatonma.edu)
before March 1st, 2011. Feel free to contact us prior
to submission as we are also happy to answer any questions you may
have.
Artistic Employ and Aesthetic Production
Artists are a different sort of worker. Like
those working in industry they too labor and are remunerated to
create goods that will be sold or distributed to others, they are
different from other workers in the ways that they make meaning of
their productive acts. Do the aesthetic aspirations artists have
for their work—as art—make their everyday practices as
workers
more intensely acts of self production? Does the work of art
change with the changes in media environments of production?
Looking at the experience of artists working in print and
online media, this session explores they ways that artists
work often unwittingly to create meanings about themselves through
their work. The work of creating
themselves through their art is traces tensions familiar to other
workers: making a living wage, finding satisfaction in labor,
attaining respect and stature, and creating an enduring body of
work. The public artists discussed in this session, however, create
themselves and their legacy through a
negotiation of the tension between art—divorced from quotidian
constraints—and the work of making art.
--
Gabriela
