Conceptual art is broadly considered a movement that accelerated the processes of internationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Early proponents of Conceptual Art differed from preceding generations of artists in their aspiration to connect individuals and ideas beyond geographic expanses. Cartography is a defining feature in many Conceptualist artworks, from Douglas Huebler’s maps that chart journeys with a felt pen on ordinary topographical road maps to Felipe Ehrenberg’s Tube-O-Nauts Travels that document the artist’s continuous journey on London’s Underground over 17 hours with diagrams on subway maps.
Of interest to this panel is the interface between Conceptual Art’s spatial imagination in the 1960s to 1980s, and the variant ways in which artists employed a cartographic language as a process and production of space-making. In particular, how do these practices encode new territories, subvert systems of representation, re-order, de-centralize, reify or expand geography and its signification. How were artists engaging with or producing a globalized, networked, transnational, de-territorialised and in-flux geography. Along these lines, we invite proposals for papers that explore different forms, media, strategies, theories and concepts, as well as geographic and temporal frames of reference.