Condition rhetorically encompasses vast references: an immediate state (flaking on a canvas reveals the poor condition of a painting), a manipulable nature (leather must be conditioned before use), the overarching atmosphere (weather conditions or the human condition), and a temporal position (the conditional tense). It also implies intimate ties with the body, the condition of the individual and the collective. To condition a body involves training towards optimal health, whereas a body with a condition must grapple with illness. Social conditions—semiotic systems, political hegemony, nation-state borders—prescribe and constrain our capacity to move through the world while we, in turn, condition ourselves and our surroundings to enact desired states of being, living, and working. In the words of Tina Campt, condition enacts the tense of the “will have had to happen.” Art can imagine multiple ideas of the past and of contingent futures. Art can embody transformations that must take place to bring about a liveable world or remake the past to claim a different present.
The Nineteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium asks: what possibilities might thinking through condition offer in response to urgent calls for new forms of community, meaning, and direction amidst environmental, social, political, economic, and public health crises? What conditions illuminate and/or complicate ongoing relationships to history and the archives? What are the material enactments of conditioning? As a tool in building worlds, realities, and relations, how can we think through the multifacetedness of condition(-ing, -al, -ed, pre-)?
We welcome submissions exploring art, architecture, visual, and material culture across all of the Americas, including the Caribbean, North, Central, and South America.