Special Issue Call for Papers 13.1: ‘Queer(ing) art, curation and collaboration’

Guest edited by: Dominic Bilton (the Whitworth and University of Leeds) and Dr. Chris Green (Edge Hill University).

This special issue of APS seeks contributions that interrogate and examine the relationship between art, exhibition making and queer practices as public acts. In January 2023 an exhibition opened at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester titled (Un)Defining Queer, a constituent-led exhibition that has been created by working with an intersectional group of people, who self-identify as LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and/or questioning, intersex and asexual). The project’s constituents have been researching the gallery’s collection to explore how we can use a queer lens to define what the term 'queer' means within the institution, a term which has often been used as a derogatory slur within society. However, in its more contemporary use 'queer' is used within the museum to redress the once exclusionary nature of the word and re-use it for positive representation and extends to the processes of decolonisation.

Constituent practice places relations between people at the centre of museum practice. Such practice emphasises the bringing together of different groups and communities to think about ways that collaboration might be generative and productive. Social relations, associations, interpersonal relationships and how art can be used to form and sustain these relations is at its heart. John Byrne et al. argue that a constituency is always in the process of both becoming and unbecoming and is as a result fundamentally collaborative. Drawing on the late Latin meaning of the word collaborare, that means co-labour he argues that, 'this notion of collaboration as shared or co-labour, and of labour as a socially produced resource, provides us with the means to both re-imagine the kind of work, or labour, that art has become and the role and function that the museum of the future could play within this re-imagining' (2018: 27).

The term queer is bedded with cultural history, which by its very definition is that which is at odds with normativity. Queer has been used as an insult and to many is still seen as such. You might now hear the term used in relation to queer kinship, queer support and queer care. Queer is a reclaimed term, one which many find this sense of kinship with and through. Queerness, it could be argued, is a gathering term and a connector, an 'umbrella' for all of those who do not quite fit in. Therefore, working queerly or queering work is a complex process as contemporary notions of gender or sexuality can be problematic because these concepts are nuanced, complex and individual. As Sara Ahmed states, 'to offer a queer way of working is not to start anew, with the light, the bright, the white, the upright; it is to start with the weighty, the heavy, the weary, the worn. When a history makes it hard to be, you feel that history as weight' (Ahmed, 2019: 227). This weightiness is why it is important that queer practices have a social element to them. 'Queer use: when we aim to shatter what has provided a container' (Ahmed, 2019: 209) that leads us to question, what can art learn from queer use? And what can queer use learn from art? What are the tensions and difficulties in working queerly? And what are the possibilities in deviating from norms?

This issue seeks to open up a space to discuss the possibilities of bringing together  social and queer practices in new and (re)imagined ways. The editors wish to use this call as an opportunity to reflect on not only the possibilities of queer approaches to exhibition making, but to think through the ways that galleries may become collaborative spaces for researching and community exchange, where constituent users are able to participate and challenge norms in order to reflect upon and enact social change and where friendships can be formed and collective action developed. This invitation extends beyond the institutional, and encourages responses from alternative modes of queer kinship, including DIY practices, grassroots movements, collectives and beyond.

Contributions may address (but are not limited to) the following:

• Queer constituent practice

• Queer curation

• Queer allyship

• Queer socially engaged art

• Queer publics (and counter publics), the queer commons

• Queer futurity

• Queer art and activism

• Queer culture and resistance

• Queer kinship and art practices

• Queer care

• Collaboration, co-authorship, friendship

• Queer art and labour

References:

• Ahmed, S. (2019), What’s the Use?, Durham: Duke University Press.
• Byrne, J., Morgan, E., Paynter, N., Sánchez de Srdio, A. and Železnik, A. (2018), The Constituent Museum. Constellations of Knowledge, Politics and Mediation, Amsterdam: Valiz with L’Internationale.

Proposed Timeline

Abstracts / proposals (300 words): 1 November 2023 to greech@edgehill.ac.uk and dominic.bilton@manchester.ac.uk

Decisions made: 1 December 2023

Deadline for submission of final papers: 30 February 2024

Publications: July 2024

General Call for Papers

Contributions
Full research papers and longer articles should be 6,000-8,000 words. They should include original research or propose new methods/ideas that are clearly and thoroughly presented and argued. Shorter research papers, from 2,000-3,000 words, exploring specific issues and raising questions (or putting a position for debate and response) are also welcome. Experimental approaches to writing and criticism, and visual essays/contributions are invited. Our reviews section includes public art commissioning and contexts, curatorial projects, exhibitions, publications/books, architecture/planning, performance/events, symposia/conferences/debates and artworks.
Please send proposals, suggestions and submissions to the Editor. 

Articles, to include a 250 word (max.) abstract, should be sent to the Principal Editor, who will also respond to preliminary enquiries about suggested contributions to the journal. Please do not send images until your article has been accepted. All images to be at least 300dpi.

Aims and Scope
Art & the Public Sphere provides a new platform of critical debate for academics, artists, curators, art historians and theorists, whose working practices are broadly concerned with contemporary art's relation to the public sphere.

The journal voices a critical relationship towards the traditional and conventional debates about the specific field of public art, as well as towards the broader discussions and art practices in the public sector and the public realm. Whilst ‘public art' has continually suffered from its mixed role as art and also town planning, in the UK, for example, the perceived success of Anthony Gormley's ‘Angel of the North' has since recruited public art for the purposes of ‘place-making' and the branding of cities.

There exists a growing body of contemporary art practice and theory that bypasses the constraints of public art, public sector and public realm, in order to explore how the most ambitious and challenging art of the day intersects with its publics, not only via public spaces and public institutions, but also through a whole range of techniques and technologies of social engagement. Such engagements link specific questions about public art to broader questions about art's role within the history of western democracy and art's active participation in opinion formation, free discussion and political action.

At the same time, critical art is re-emerging and is being re-evaluated by the likes of Chantal Mouffe, linking contemporary art to broader questions of counter-hegemonic struggle, dissensus and political transformation. These developments are evident in contemporary buzzwords such as ‘participation', ‘collaboration' and ‘collective action', which are becoming more central and further contested within contemporary art. Parallel to which are developments in art such as relational aesthetics and new genre public art, which are raising these very same issues within art's own internal logic.

This new constellation is the context for contemporary art's ‘social turn' and the ‘art of encounter'. Relational art, for instance, calls forth a public for art that is not made up of viewers: instead it is an art of activity, encounter and conviviality. Critics of this work have argued that it neglects antagonism (Claire Bishop), reduces otherness (Jan Verwoert), commodifies experience (Stewart Martin), and promotes ‘NGO Art' (BAVO). Simon Sheikh has also developed the critique of the Habermasian version of the public sphere in an account of post-publics. This field has been re-theorized recently by John Roberts in terms of art's immersion into ‘general social technique', which explains art's new found ability to adopt the skills and practices of social work, the service economy, political action and so on.

At the same time as opening art to the techniques and forums of political and social activity, it also links art, perhaps uncomfortably, to broader shifts in culture and society, such as the impact of ‘third way' politics. Art is more liable, therefore, to be instrumentalized by political leaders when it has already promoted itself as convivial, useful and helpful. The development of cultural policy and culture-led regeneration has seized on art's new settlement within the public sphere to cheaply implement social policy through art, and indeed art's relation to the public sphere has taken criticism as a result.

Art in the public sphere is also implicated in the enormous growth of the biennial and the rise of the über-curator as signature-name for events over and above the artists, because these spectacular events are often given themes that tie the exhibition to social issues within the public sphere and are routinely defended in terms of their positive local social impact.

Importantly, therefore, Art & the Public Sphere provides a critical examination of contemporary art's relation to the public realm, offering an engaged and responsive forum in which to debate the newly emerging series of developments within contemporary thinking, society and international art practice. The journal will develop a broad and complex set of discourses on the ‘public', ‘publicness', ‘making public' and ‘publishing', in the most conceptually ambitious sense. Questions about the public will be raised across a range of fields and positions by potential readers and contributors, including academics involved in: Fine Art, Art History, Art Theory, Architecture/Town Planning/Culture-led Regeneration, Cultural Geography, Cultural Studies, Politics, Sociology, and Philosophy (aesthetic, political, social and linguistic). This will ensure that Art & the Public Sphere successfully communicates the interests of the entire community involved in originating, propagating or analysing art practice within the public sphere.