[Jennifer Buckley]

The 1978 University of Iowa symposium on Dada was the first major conference on the subject to be held in North America, and the first anywhere to integrate literature and the performing arts in the study of a movement then associated almost exclusively with the visual arts. The conference introduced new interdisciplinary methods and advanced the study of the avant-garde in several fields. Equally transformative was Iowa’s establishment in 1979 of the International Dada Archive, which would go on to become one of the world’s first digitally accessible repositories of avant-garde artifacts.

In February 2018, the University of Iowa celebrates the history of Dada and “neo-Dada”/Fluxus on campus with the two-day symposium Dada Futures, held in tandem with an exhibition at the University of Iowa Museum of Art.  We seek to highlight how museums, libraries, universities, and the general public have shaped our understanding of avant-garde movements. Through a hybrid format of keynote addresses, themed panels, film screenings, and group discussions held on campus and in downtown Iowa City, this meeting considers the power of interdisciplinary art and research evident in our past, and aims to develop the practices that will sustain its future on campus and beyond.

We invite participants to consider how different modes of presentation and interpretation can enliven or petrify the radical dissent that often motivates avant-garde practice. How might various forms of engagement with these practices and works activate the past, and also transform the present – as all vanguards intend to do? We further encourage participants to take up theoretical and technical conversations on the documentation and preservation of avant-garde art (especially time-based arts); on the conservation of works made using ephemeral or residual media (tape, early film and video, etc.); and on the promise and pitfalls of digital surrogacy. The symposium will conclude, as did the 1978 conference, with an evening of live performance. There is no registration fee.

We invite 250-word abstracts for talks on the following subjects: Dada temporalities; Dada genders; Dada’s disciplinary histories; the near-simultaneous emergence of Dada/avant-garde studies and African art history at the University of Iowa; Dada and Fluxus archives as interfaces; avant-garde infrastructures; sustainable models for supporting vanguard activities, pedagogies, and repositories.

Please send abstracts to jennifer-buckley@uiowa.edu by 1 October 2017.

• This topic was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Jennifer Buckley.

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