A.S.A.P.'s launch conference "ASAP/1: Arts of the Present" was held October 22-25, 2009, downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, at the cozy, award-winning Crowne Plaza Hotel. The conference featured work by more than 110 scholars and arts practitioners working in the visual, literary, and performing arts; a book exhibit by Scholars Choice; an evening reception at the Ewing Gallery of Art on the UT campus; and an evening reading by author Ngugi wa Thiong'o. The conference organizer for ASAP/1 was Amy J. Elias, Associate Professor of English at the University of Tenneseee. The conference was hosted by the Department of English at the University of Tennessee.

The conference kicked off with an opening night reception and plenary talk by Anton Vidokle at the Knoxville Museum of Art. Vidokle is an installation artist whose work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Lyon Biennial, Dakar Biennale, Lodz Biennale, and the Tate Modern, London. The second plenary speaker was Sianne Ngai, whose talk was titled "Zany Science." Ngui is Associate Professor of English at UCLA and the author of Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005), which has generated energetic discussion in literary critical circles. Our keynote speaker was Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who spoke on "Language and the Arts of the Present." An internationally recognized writer from Kenya, Ngugi is the author of Weep Not, Child (1964), the first novel in English to be published by an East African. He is the author of ten novels, eight major books of postcolonial theory, a collection of short stories, three plays, three children's books, and numerous interviews, and his most recent novel, Wizard of the Crow, was published in English in 2006 to international acclaim.

"ASAP 1: Arts of the Present" challenged participants to address the society's founding questions: What are new or current directions in the contemporary arts? What do the contemporary arts have to teach us? How we can help to give the arts direction and a voice? Papers explored the following questions solicited by the Conference Call for Papers:

• What are the new developments in literature (or painting/sculpture, architecture, performance) today, culturally and formally? What shifts? What debates?
• How does literary, visual, and/or performce art today recuperate, revise, revolt against, or rehearse the aesthetic aims and social interventions of art past?
• What are the aesthetic, ethical, and political commonalities shared by the literary, visual, and performing arts? What divides them?
• In what ways do formal, cultural, or political concerns shape specific techniques and/or production of literature, painting, sculpture, theater, media art, performance art, dance, and/or music?
• How should we understand or redefine historical periodization in relation to contemporary literature? visual art? drama? What is the relation of the contemporary arts to such movements as Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Altermodernism?
• How should we understand the contemporary arts' relation to theory and criticism? to such perspectives offered by marxisms, postcolonial theory, poststructuralism, formalisms? What new theoretical perspectives and vocabularies are provoked by today's arts?
• What new approaches are needed to address new intermedial arts? relational arts? remediating arts?
• What works and artists in contemporary literature--or painting and sculpture, or media art, or drama, or music, or film--are forging new paths and opening new formal possibilities?
• How do today's arts define beauty, creative practice, and art's place in the social world?
• For the arts of the present, what is new, what is old, and what stands outside of the language of paradigms and post-ness?

   
   
   
   
Conference Programs: