Canadian Art Review (RACAR) : Special themed issue

Call for proposals Guest editors : Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, Jean-Philippe Uzel Humour in the visual arts and visual culture: practices, theories and histories Since the 1990s, more and more artists have been exploiting the processes of irony, parody, absurd, grotesque and carnavalesque, harnessing them for artistic purposes. As Jacques Rancière explains, “Humour is the virtue to which artists nowadays most readily ascribe: humour that is a minimal, all too easy to miss, hijacking or deflection in the way of presenting a sign sequence or arrangement of objects.” Indeed, in following what were already long-established practices, contemporary artists perceive a specific potential in humoristic strategies as a cultural weapon meant to attack complacency in politics, identities and cultural practices. They play with acquired knowledge, knowledge that is found in nature or in cultural production, opening through humour a space for critical distance that is often seen as political in itself. If this interest in humour as a procedure of de-legitimisation and critique is prevalent in current artistic practices, it is however not new to the history of art. Recent studies propose that humoristic strategies in art have often been swept to the margins of scholarship, mainly because of the discipline’s biases against mass-produced objects (such as prints and illustrations) and popular culture. These studies have also revealed the paucity of interpretative tools available to art historians interested in examining such works—beyond the obvious analysis of subject matter. Rancière’s insights, attesting to an increasingly normalized correlation between an ‘ironic imperative’ permeating both contemporary visual productions and the critical language used to assess them, effectively raise the question of these other, historiographical ruptures; of what might be missing in art history’s methodological and theoretical framework.      For this special issue of RACAR, the editors welcome historical/critical approaches to a broad spectrum of modes of humour in the visual arts and in visual culture, of which satire, irony, parody, the comic, the absurd, the grotesque and the carnavalesque are the most prevalent. Case studies may address either historical or contemporary productions (or indeed both) that invoke these modes of humour. Comparative approaches, offering global perspectives on diverse constructions of categories of humour and their functions within different visual cultures, are also welcome. We are keen for these studies to engage with the emerging research and theoretical models that will enable our discipline to more comprehensively account for humour in visual art practices. Our hope is that the resulting papers will enable to us to call into question established ways of categorizing these productions and thereby shed light on the historical processes used in their construction and in their articulation to the art historical record. Abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a 100-word bio-bibliographic summary, should be sent to the editors by November 15, 2010, to the following address : hardy.dominic@uqam.ca  Authors whose proposals are accepted will be notified by December 1 2010. Manuscripts of 6500-7000 words will be required by June 01, 2011 and will be submitted to an external peer-review process. It is anticipated that publication will take place in the Spring of 2012.