COVERT CULTURES: ART AND THE SECRET

STATE, 1911-1989
CALL FOR PAPERS

CRASSH, University of Cambridge

Friday 4th - Saturday 5th February 2011

Keynote Speakers: Prof. Adam Piette (Sheffield), Dr Trevor Paglen (artist
and experimental geographer)
The early years of the twentieth century saw the birth of the age of the covert state.
Crises of international relations, nationalisms and revolutionary politics led
governments to create secret institutions whose activities would long remain hidden
from citizens, while those same governments sought through stricter legislation to
map and control the flow of their own sensitive information. As the century
progressed, espionage and surveillance moved to the centre of popular culture, while
real intelligence agencies became more advanced and more powerful, using cultural
production as a weapon in the ideological battles of the Cold War. More recently,
covert activity has returned to the public consciousness, with espionage, secret
weapons programmes, torture and civil liberties again at the forefront of debates on
the conduct of the modern state.
This renewed interest has coincided with the centenary of British intelligence
services, and has been well served by the flourishing field of intelligence history. Yet
the relation of this new, clandestine world to art has remained relatively underexamined. From the spy novels of the First World War to the CIAs secret funding
of art exhibitions and Encounter magazine in the 1950s, visual art, film and literature
have acted in complicity with, as well as in resistance to, the aims of secret state
action. This conference which will take place in the centenary year of the 1911
Official Secrets Act hopes to investigate the terms on which art and intelligence
meet, and the cultural ramifications of that interaction. We invite twenty-minute
papers from researchers in the fields of intelligence history, art history, film studies,
geography, sociology and English and European literatures.
Topics of discussion will include, but are not limited to:
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Restricted Spaces

Cultural Complicity and Manipulation

The Visual Culture of the Secret Services

Berlin: Intelligence East and West

Defection

Torture

Surveillance

Spy Fever and Public Paranoia

Declarations of interest with an abstract of no more than 300 words, and

accompanied by a brief resume, should be sent to the organisers at
covertcultures@gmail.com as soon as possible and no later than Friday 29 October
2010. Accepted papers will be announced on Friday 5 November 2010. Finalised
papers should be submitted by Friday 7 January 2011 and will be circulated to
participants prior to the event. The organisers will also actively solicit papers.

www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1330