CFP: Copy That!: Reproduction and Pedagogy/Graduate Student Symposium (30 Nov; 28 Mar; Princeton, New Jersey)

Copy That!: Reproduction and Pedagogy
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Keynote speaker: Amy Powell, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, University of California, Irvine

Six years before Walter Benjamin wrote the first version of "Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility," Erwin Panofsky published "Original und Faksimile Reproduktion," (Der Kreis, 1930), a letter addressing the possibilities and problems of using photographic reproductions and plaster casts as objects in museum exhibitions and as pedagogical tools. While both authors attended to questions of authenticity, simulacra, aesthetic experience, and function, Panofsky, unlike Benjamin, insisted that the reproduction could function autonomously as an aesthetic object independent of the original.

From Johann Winckelmann's famous refusal to travel to Greece and see original works of art to today's reliance on digital images and "virtual museums," art history is a discipline grounded in the study of reproductions. The W旦lfflin two-slide comparison has given way to the power point presentation, in which a lecture may shift among a seemingly infinite number of images, text, video, and websites. This time of shifting pedagogical paradigms within the discipline calls for an examination of the two trajectories mapped out by Benjamin and Panofsky and a re-assessment of the possibilities and limitations of learning from reproduction.

With these ideas in mind, this conference seeks to explore the intersection of the discipline of art history, pedagogy, and reproduction. How have different historical understandings of pedagogy shaped the relationship between the copy and the original, reshaped technologies of copying, and changed the reception of the copy?

Topics could include but are not limited to:
-artistic workshop practice (medieval model books, Renaissance drawing books, Japanese master-pupil, "the Factory")
-dissemination and changing conceptions of original artworks through the mediums of printmaking and photography
-the birth of the artists' monograph
-the copy and the lost original
-copy, deception, piracy
-appropriation art and its aftereffects
-the intersection of aesthetic experience and learning
-artistic practices and copy (drawing from plaster casts, painting from photographs)
-the relationship between technology and pedagogical models
-changing concepts of authenticity
-uses of image archives

Submissions from all areas of art history as well as related disciplines are welcome. Email abstract and CV in the body of an email to Caroline Fowler and Amanda Bock at gradsymp at princeton.edu by November 30, 2008. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words and final papers should not exceed 20 minutes in length. Selected speakers will be notified by December 20, 2008.

Email: gradsymp at princeton.edu