Dr Luke Skrebowski: 'Art and Fiction since the 60s', CAA 2018

At the CAA's 106th Annual Conference Dr Luke Skrebowski will be chairing a session on “Art and Fiction since the 60s”. Our PhD student Alice Butler will also be speaking, delivering her paper "Kathy Acker’s 'Close-conceptual-writing'.

This session sets out from the position that contemporary art engages with fiction in historically distinctive and formative ways. Yet it acknowledges that we do not currently have a critical history of the role of fiction in art since the 1960s and that this is needed in order to understand the genealogy of our artistic present.

Consequently, the session will begin to construct just such a history, starting from the destabilisation of the traditional system of the arts that was consequent upon the collapse of medium-specific modernism.

Papers discuss theoretically-informed aspects of the relationship between art and fiction since the 1960s; John Douglas Millar (Kingston University) will be speaking on “Avant-Gardism and the 'Lyric I' in Contemporary Autofiction”, Colby Chamberlain (Columbia University) will deliver a paper entitled “Physician’s Notes on the Death of the Author ”, and Jacob Stewart-Halevy (Tufts University) will discuss “Conceptual Art and Literary Minimalism”.