Art History and the "Chemical Turn"

Chemical processes and their regulation govern everything from hormone-based medical care to the combustion processes used in rocket fuel technologies. How might reckoning with chemical control help us grapple with art history's disciplinary formulations and its own ties to regulatory biomedical technologies? How have assumptions surrounding “controlled substances” shaped the institutionalization of art museums, cultural centers, or art history classrooms? How can artists, curators, and theorists practice “off label” thinking and so challenge the somaticization of politics at play within constructions of labor, resistance, and reform? These questions bring the “chemical turn” and “energy studies” within the humanities (shaped by Amber Musser, Mel Chen, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter, Zakkiyyah Jackson, and Karen Barad, among others) into conversation with the art-historical discourses of bioart, biohacking, transgenic art, pharmacopower aesthetics, and more.

By addressing how the state regulation of chemicality can be linked to anxieties about innovation and social order, this panel aims to develop a shared, critical vocabulary for understanding the role of aesthetics and discourses of embodiment within the management of biocitizenship, and state surveillance. How has such regulation shaped the logics of empire and borders, moving from the hormonal and molecular to the planetary? How are artists, curators, and arts organizers part of this dialogue? We seek papers that push at the multiscalar and biomediated sites of governmentality, challenge notions of toxicity, and/or rethink the long, historical arc of biopower via aesthetic practices that theorize alternative forms of relation, worlding, and speculative timelines of embodiment.