CAA 2009: Operation Mindcrime

Professional conferences are often described as what we see here: meat-markets. Sweaty, nervous job candidates gather from all over the country to interview for jobs they probably won't get with sweaty, tired and gassy faculty in weird hotel rooms. To make matters worse, these conferences are frequently held in cold places in the middle of winter.



But, this year, the big art/art history conference (known in the biz as CAA) was held here in LA. A good choice by Old Ken's reckoning, as all that was required was a zip down the road ...



... and before you could say "the discourse of modernism and the modernism of discourse," there I was. Doing what, pray tell? Listening to some people rap about some stuff? Mixing it up? Hob-knobbing? Rubbing elbows with the high and mighty? Sneaking out of dismal sessions to make the scene at the book-fair? Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes!



Because I attended all of zero sessions last year—despite flying halfway around the world to attend the damn thing—Old Ken made a point of actually listening to some papers this year as well. Some, such as those by friend Dawna above, were insightful and interesting. Others ... not so much. Attendance was definitely down from last year, which is probably not surprising with the dismal economic situation and the fact that so many job searches have been canceled.



Still, there were some lively get-togethers and plenty of free drinks if you were feeling brave enough to do some gate-crashing. (FYI: the image above does not represent an open bar at a university party, although no doubt some good times could have followed).



One highlight for yours truly was definitely the Svetlana Alpers tribute session. As you'll recall from a previous post, Ms. Alpers has a central place in my heart and in my musical repertoire:

http://nicebirdrox.blogspot.com/2006/05/dream-song-or-svetlana-alpers-tribute.html

I had dreamed of smuggling a ukelele in and providing a serenade to the guest of honor, who we see in blurry form at right.

As is more-or-less accurately suggested in the song, Ms. Alpers has retired from academic art history and has parlayed her talents into a New York-based life as an art critic. Thus, when she was approached about being honored at CAA (so she informed an audience of probably 300+ at the conference on Thursday afternoon), she was hesitant. She didn't want the session to be about her or retrospective tributes to her past work; she wanted it to have a topic.

So, making the most of the intellectual parlor game dimension inherent in most of these conference sessions, she invented a topic ("painting/problems/possibilities") and, more importantly, assigned six images that the participants (who included Tom Crow, Stephen Melville and Carol Armstrong) had to speak to.



As we see them from left to right, top to bottom above, Alpers' choices were: Givanni Bellini's "Saints Christopher, Jerome and Louis of Toulouse" (1513, Chapel of Giorgio Diletti, Venice); Pieter Saenredam's "View across the Choir of the St. Bavokerk" (1636, National Gallery, London); Velazquez's "The Spinners" (1657-8, The Prado, Madrid); Leon Vidal, "Coffre dit d'Anne d'Autriche" (1873, MOMA, New York); Paul Cezanne, "La Montagne Sainte-Victoire seen from Bibemus" (c 1897, Baltimore Museum of Art); and Bradley Walker Tomlin, "Number 3, 1953" (1953, MOMA, New York).

So, in turn, each speaker was asked to speak to some or all of these images, using Alpers' work and key terms as stimulus to discussion. While the results certainly were not revelatory, it was amusing to observe how each speaker inevitably gravitated to one image over the others. (The weird photograph by Vidal, by the way, was very much the odd man out, as none other than Alpers herself spent very much time discussing it.)

"What was learned in the end?" we might ask. Well, to generalize about the conference as a whole we could say that certain topics remain in scholarly discussion at major national conferences far past what would seem to be their expiration dates. It's lovely to see old friends, even in a weird and stressful context like a professional conference. And, there's no time like the present to wear a horrible couch-killer suit!