Deadline for abstracts: 4 November 2024
More details at Art & the Public Sphere. (Scroll the 'Call for Papers' tab)
We invite submissions for the upcoming Special Issue of Art & the Public Sphere published by Intellect Books on ‘Afterlives of Public Art’.
Edited by Cathryn Klasto, Maddie Leach & Mick Wilson.
This issue builds upon the international symposium Fountains, Failures, Futures: The afterlives of public art held in Lund, Sweden in September 2023. The symposium was organised as part of the Formas-funded research project The Fountain: An art-technological-social drama which orients itself around a dysfunctional modernist fountain commissioned by the Swedish state for Lund University in 1967.
The focus of Fountains, Failures, Futures was to use this modernist case study as a catalyst to explore questions of sustainability and custodianship of public artworks and whether ‘failed’ works can be revitalised and thought anew. This special issue will offer a continued exploration of these ideas with a number of contributors from the symposium and invited authors through this open call.
Scope
Research and discussion of public art frequently focuses on conditions of emergence and production for public works. However, this special issue starts at the other end – thinking about the afterlives of public art with respect to processes of decline, decay, acts of reparation and reimagination, transformation and change. We are interested in how this raises implications for authorship and ownership, and what challenges it presents for commissioners, artists, architects, and urban designers. How can producers, owners and custodians of public artworks and the communities and publics living with these works anticipate and accommodate complex afterlives of public art?
These questions draw connections to contemporary processes of revision and contestation of historic monuments, tensions which can also be related to other, seemingly benign, artistic objects situated in city squares, urban parks, on redeveloped waterfronts and university campuses – objects that are often commissioned without consultation and with intentions of permanence or longevity. These are valid and challenging implications for public art custodianship, and how changed environmental conditions and societal shifts can affect durational limits for public artworks.
With this open call we are particularly interested in submissions that target this word ‘afterlives’, including (but not limited to) case studies of public artworks and their communities that refuse, adapt, resist erasure, transform, renew and flourish.
We also welcome theoretical positions on broader interconnected themes within the field of public art such as political urban-rural ecologies of the built environment, ethics, temporality and duration and cosmologies of co-existence.
Submission guidelines
Authors should submit an abstract between 250–300 words including six to eight keywords. The abstract should include the title of the proposed contribution and not include the name(s) of authors. Authors should also state clearly the proposed word count of their contribution (between 3,000–6,000 words) and a description of image use (please do not include images).
All abstracts should be submitted through the journal’s Pubkit platform. You will need to register an account to do this. Please follow instructions on the website.
Proposed timeline
Abstracts / proposals: 4 November 2024
Decisions made: 18 November 2024
Deadline for submission of full papers: 18 December 2024
Publication: June 2025
All submissions will go through the journal's peer-review process.
Picture credit: Peo Olsson, 2024.