Reflections on Blue: Oceans, Elements, Circulations

Session will present: On location

Since 2024, we have organized two CAA panels to discuss the Pacific Ocean’s ambiguous status in studies of art and visual culture. Presenters have reflected on the ocean’s role beyond an inanimate background and instead toward what Jennifer Roberts terms an “agentive force” which can shape art historical canons and perceptual regimes. Panel presentations will be developed into an edited anthology to illustrate the Pacific as “method” (following Chen Kuan-hsing) to reshape the formal, geographic, and epistemic boundaries of visual art and material cultures of the circum-Pacific world.

Third in this multi-year series, Reflections on Blue invites global explorations into the material, semiotic, and environmental operations of bodies of water (oceans, rivers, deltas, mangroves, etc.) and their strategic spaces (dams, ports, ships, aquariums, etc.) on the production and circulation of art and material culture from prehistory to today. Inspired by the recent rise of the Blue Humanities and the “oceanic turn” in literature and media studies, this panel will highlight original engagements with how the “elementality” of blue matter is represented and inscribed to move away from positivistic rejection and primitivist acceptance of nonhuman agency. Potential themes include: engagements with the Circum-Pacific and Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Circumpolar Arctic, and diasporas across these liquid spaces; environmental art; Indigenous aesthetics and geontology; oceans in artistic exchange; resource extraction; art as a sensing technology; formalism; critiques of anthropocentrism.


Keywords:
Geographic Area: Transpacific
The Environmental Turn
Topics: Materiality
Topics: Ecocriticism
Topics: Asian Diaspora

Chairs:
Hyeongjin Oh, Independent Scholar and Eric Mazariegos, Dumbarton Oaks Research Lib & Collection

Hydrologic Imaging: Blue Matter and the Limits of Representation
Christoph Rodrigo de la Torre, University of California San Diego
Diving as Art Historical Praxis: Towards a Blue Spectatorship
SaeHim Park, Xavier University of Louisiana
The Qayaq and the Bering Sea
Phoebe Springstubb, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract Submissions Closed