Canons, Collecting, and Object Homes in American Art

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

Who defines the categorical homes for artists and artworks? Canons often determine which artists and works are taught in art history courses, how dealers market them, and where they are displayed in art museums, while limiting accessibility to and accurate knowledge of artists that fall outside those perimeters. For example, consider the narratives around self-taught, outsider, and folk artists; typically voiced by alleged experts in the field rather than the artists themselves, the dialogue around their work tends to market and categorize the artists in often marginalizing ways, which do not reflect the artworks or the ideas of the artists themselves. Today, art history programs are slowly restructuring traditional canonical teaching by reevaluating the types of works important for a more comprehensive understanding of art at any given moment or in any given location, while art museums are gradually obtaining works and restructuring their museum collections to keep up with these changes. Complicating this further, some artists define their work in ways that confront or reject categorical representation and ideas related to belonging within any “home” or category in the field of art.
In conjunction with the 2016 convention theme, this panel explores issues of belonging and home surrounding the making, collecting, marketing, and categorizing practices related to art in America. First, it traces the specter of plantation life in the U.S. south through an examination of three domestic portrait collections. The panel’s first paper explores the connections between genealogy, portrait collection, and domestic display as they unearth the specific role of portraiture in the U.S. south. Next, the panel looks at tropes of frontier masculinity as they frame canonical narratives surrounding earth art. The second paper addresses assumptions in the field of art history that connect notions of “the West” as a region and ideal and “nature” as installation material. Finally, the panel examines the ways transient art performance communities re-imagine and revise the U.S. military home in response to combat trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The final paper charts how the compulsory healing Veterans’ communities face upon returning home produces modes of communal identification and connection that function as a critique of the white, heteronormative kinship that structures U.S. combat and domestic spaces. It understands the transience and ephemerality of papermaking performance as constitutive of this critique. All three papers redefine the space of art production and display. Through the critical potential of these archives, the panel unearths alternative practices and histories that challenge the connections between art production, collection, and classification and masculine narratives of U.S. supremacy.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Frances Pohl, Pomona College (CA)

Individual Presentations

• Home Is Where the Art Is: Interpretation and Virginia in the American Canon - Janine Yorimoto Boldt, College of William and Mary (VA)

• Earth Art Cowboys: Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and the Construction of A Western Identity - Michaela Rife, University of Toronto (Canada)

• Remembering and (Re)defining Combat through Papermaking - Maria Faini, University of California, Berkeley (CA)

Comment

• Frances Pohl, Pomona College (CA)