AAH2018

Call for Papers

Acts of acquiring, collecting, curating and reception of the object, are generally understood as reciprocal relations between the collector and the object of desire, whether institutional or individual, art or artefact. However, the content of that exchange or dialogue has often been taken for granted. Collecting for display and social advancement, collecting as speculation, collecting for love etc. have too often been accepted as self-explanatory, diverting academic enquiry elsewhere, and obscuring the complexities at the heart of collecting practice. This panel seeks to build on the recent development of scholarship in this field, exploring the push and pull between things and collectors, artists and institutions. It questions how dialogues between parties transform the status, values, identity and character of each.  We propose an object-based approach, focused upon these ‘conversations’, conversations that we invite from any historical moments and geographical location. We encourage participants to engage with issues of class, gender and race as they relate to collecting and especially to the dialogue between collecting and identity. Particularly welcome are collaborative papers from artistic practitioners, academics and museum professionals, that address these issues from their respective vantage points, and papers from those based in scientific and ethnographic collections.  Dialogues between individual collectors and their things could include: provocation and comfort, artistic inspiration and practice, tactical or impulsive, therapeutic or detrimental, sameness and difference, temporality and permanence, lived or fixed, animate or inanimate. Dialogues between stakeholders and institutions could explore: exchanges between collector/donor and museum, boundaries between public and private modes of display, academic approval and the canon, natural history collections and modes of knowledge, national pride.