The Twenty-first Century Body

Last call! The submission deadline for Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s show “The Twenty-first Century Body” is Monday August 10th. It’s wholly FREE to enter artwork for consideration.

Here are the details from their Call for Art:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a French philosopher who lived from 1908-1961. His theories begin in a desire to do justice to lived, embodied experience in all its ambiguity; our bodies are both objects for others and the locus of our own subjective perceptions, residues of past habits and creative orientations toward the future, radically individual and inescapably intertwined with other bodies and the movement of politics and history. Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre is interdisciplinary in nature, maintaining that there are multiple ways to approach the same phenomenon and engaging debates across a diversity of fields including philosophy, psychology, biology, politics, literature, and aesthetics. His landmark essays “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945) and “Eye and Mind” (1961) ground a radical aesthetic theory that builds on the complex relations between perception, bodily experience, and the work of art.

We intend an exhibition that collectively depicts what it is to be a body and embodied at the dawn of the twenty-first century while also holding together a diversity of mediums, subject-matters, levels of expertise, artistic technologies, degrees of realism and abstraction, temporalities, and perspectives. Such juxtapositions and multiplicities are encouraged by Merleau-Ponty’s work and speak to the contours and contradictions of life in our own time.

ELIGIBILITY

Open to artists of all levels of expertise working in any medium, including videos, installations, sculpture, textiles, painting, performance pieces, etc., whose work is expressive of the theme of “The Twenty-first Century Body.” Artistic approaches to this theme that are directly or indirectly suggestive of MerleauPonty’s philosophical interests such as perception, ambiguity, nature, and politics are welcomed and submissions that make use of twenty-first century artistic technologies are especially encouraged.

Full details:

https://www.wpi.edu/Images/CMS/HumanitiesArts/Merleau-Ponty_Circle_Call_for_Art_2015.pdf

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