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ART ASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2012 all our relations
Artistic Directors: Catherine de Zegher and The 18th Biennale of Sydney: all our Gerald McMaster relations (27 June – 16 September 2012) bos18.com
ART ASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND ANNUAL CONFERENCE 12–14 JULY 2012 UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY NATIONAL ART SCHOOL ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES together < > apart
Major supporters
Supporters
The conference is supported by the Australia Council, the Power Institute, Art History and Film Studies, Sydney University Museums, Sydney College of the Arts and United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney; and the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales; the National Art School; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; and the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.
The information contained in this publication was correct at the time of printing. The Conference Organisers bear no responsibility for withdrawn or altered papers. The views expressed within this publication are those of the authors and not of the Conference Organisers. All text is as provided by speakers.
Published by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) Rm 225, Lvl 2, Fisher Stack F04 The University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia
ISBN: 978-0-9873469-0-2
© Copyright 2012
Design and print production: Peter Thorn Printed using Forestry Stewardship Council approved paper
Except as provided by copyright legislation, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright owners. Copyright in individual conference papers remains with the authors. Requests for permission should be sent directly to the authors.
Front cover (detail) and title page: Franz Erhard Walther Connection (Head) 1967 Copyright Timm Rautert and Franz Erhard Walther Foundation. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc., New York
2 CONFERENCE CONVENORS
Dr Susan Best School of Art History and Art Education, University of New South Wales NSW Regional Representative: Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Donna West Brett PhD Candidate, Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney Treasurer: Art Association of Australia and New Zealand
2012 CONFERENCE COMMITTEE
Dr Ann Stephen, President: Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, Senior Curator University Art Gallery & Collections, Sydney University Museums, Univer- sity of Sydney Anthony Bond, Director, Curatorial, Art Gallery of New South Wales Virginia Mitchell, Head of Public Programs and Education, Biennale of Sydney Dr Toni Ross, School of Art History and Art Education, University of New South Wales Professor Anita Taylor, Director, National Art School Dr John Di Stefano, Postgraduate Coordinator, National Art School Professor Colin Rhodes, Dean and Director, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney Associate Professor Ann Elias, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney Professor Mark Ledbury, Power Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, Director of the Power Institute, University of Sydney
CONFERENCE ADMINISTRATION
Katrina Liberiou, Conference Coordinator, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Louise Mayhew, Office Manager, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand
CONFERENCE WEBSITE http://www.aaanz.info
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FOREWORD
Welcome from the president It is my great honour and pleasure to welcome you to the 2012 AAANZ conference at the University of Sydney. We chose to hold this year’s conference early in July to coincide with the third week of the Sydney Biennale.
In small nations, conferences play a particularly important role offering mutual support as well as crucial opportunities for exchange and networking across the region, central to the intellectual and institutional lineage of art-making and art historical writing in the region, giving artists, students, scholars and critics alike a regular forum in which to exchange ideas. Over the next two days 200 papers will be given by a diverse mix of scholars, curators, students and artists.
We were very fortunate to receive sponsorship from the Sydney College of the Arts to support two student scholarships to attend the conference and from the Power Institute, University of Sydney to enable Helen Molesworth’s visit. In addition, we would like to formally acknowledge the financial and in kind support of the Australia Council, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Biennale of Sydney, College of Fine Arts, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, the United States Study Centre, Sydney University Museums and the Power Institute, The University of Sydney.
I would like to offer my thanks to the conference committee led by the convenors Susan Best and Donna West Brett, working with our conference coordinator, Katrina Liberiou. Their dedication, imagination and fund-raising activities have enabled members to come together this year. Most of the work is hidden so please, thank them at the conference when you see them.
They have been ably assisted by a broader committee comprising: Colin Rhodes and Ann Elias (Sydney College of the Arts), Mark Ledbury (University of Sydney), John di Stefano and Anita Taylor (National Art School), Toni Ross (University of NSW), Anthony Bond (AGNSW) and Virginia Mitchell (Biennale of Sydney).
This conference also launches our new conference web-site, so a special thanks to our designer Nest, our web manager Dr Elisabeth Findlay, and our business manager, Louise Mayhew. Thanks also to the Executive and our long-standing treasurer, Donna West Brett, who has greatly assisted the conference.
Ann Stephen, President AAANZ
4 Welcome from the Convenors We are delighted to welcome you to 2012 AAANZ conference in Sydney, “Together<>Apart” programmed to coincide with the 18th Biennale of Sydney. The conference theme was designed to complement (and to investigate) this year’s biennale theme “all our relations.” It focuses on the very broad idea of relations and relationships as well as allied terms such as collaborations, networks and partnerships. An exciting range of papers has been assembled to address the myriad ways in which such terms can be examined.
We are very pleased to have two very distinguished keynote speakers, Dr Helen Molesworth and Professor Thierry de Duve. Helen is a leading curator, who recently received a Curatorial Excellence award from Bard College in New York and is currently chief curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2009– 2012. Professor Thierry de Duve is an outstanding scholar, curator and art critic. He curated the Belgian section of the Venice Biennale in 2003 and his exhibition Look! 100 Years of Contemporary Art was a ground-breaking reappraisal of the meaning of contemporary art. Both of our keynote speakers have very generously agreed to hold master classes for some sixty postgraduate students selected by their universities to attend.
Conferences like this are only possible with a great team, some of whom we would like to expressly thank here. First, we would like to thank our president, Ann Stephen, for her consistent support, her great energy and enthusiasm, and her tireless devotion to making this conference the best it could possibly be. Equally important has been the assistance of our conference coordinator, Katrina Liberiou. She has been invaluable in calmly and patiently helping us pull it all together. We thank our student volunteers who have given their time to ensure the smooth running of venues and registration. Finally, we thank all of you: the participants who make a conference like this a vibrant and invigorating intellectual event.
Susan Best (University of New South Wales)
Donna West Brett (The University of Sydney / Art Gallery of New South Wales)
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PANEL S
Abstract relationships 11
Activated surfaces, spaces & light: 13 the intersections between installation art & architecture
Art and participatory design 15
Backs, fronts and contemplatory spaces: art in tension with networks 18
Camera connectere: relational portrait photography 21
Collaboration and connection in the Asia-Pacific 23
Collaborative painting and drawing 25
Contemporary painting re-expanded 27
Conversation, collaboration, & communities: 30 the role of the artist & the formation of publics
Exhibition practices and permeable relationships 31
Friendship and rivalry 33
Home work – the work of homing 36
Image-space and the currency of art history 39
Mediating visual histories 41
Modernism, everyday life and collective creativity 45
Of materialities and the making of time in relational art 48
Performance art – is it a sideshow? 50
6 Perilous relations: bioaesthetics and eugenics 51
Relational contemporaries 54
Relational models of curating & art making: 57 local histories & indigenous practices
Relations between art & consumerism 60 – modes of interaction with art in a neo-liberal experience economy
Roundtable: toxic blooms 64
Sensing the collective in contemporary art and aesthetics in Asia 69
Structuring ways of seeing 71
Surface and deep histories: 74 critiques, & practices in art, architecture, & design
The aftermath: photography, memory & history 77
The dialectical spirit in art 80
Together but apart 83 – European art in public & private collections in Australian & New Zealand, 1840–1940
Why don’t we talk more often?: 87 points of convergence between visual & performing arts spaces
Words & relations between artwork & audience in the museum 89
Open session 92
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K EYNOTE SPE AKERS
Professor Thierry de Duve 10 Dr Helen Molesworth 10
SPE AKERS
Akenson, David 47 Cox, Matt 69 Handran, Christopher 62 Alderton, Zoe 92 Daly, Anna 75 Hanfling, Edward 96 Allen, Larissa 92 Davidson, Henry 63 Hansen, Frances 25 Ansted, Darryn 81 Davidson, Kathleen 22 Harris, Jennifer 85 Archer, Carol 25,25 De Lorenzo, Catherine Haseman, Shane 17 Arden, Holly 30 71,72 Haysom, Rob 81 Baitz, Joanne 93 Devetzidis, Areti 94 Hill, Michael 34 Bannon, Robyn 92 Di Stefano, John 36,37 Holden, Susan 82 Barnes, Carolyn 55 Dickson, Nicola 81 Holt, Matthew 15 Baxendell, Lydia 97 Doley, Kelly 95 Homewood, David 96 Bento, Bernardo 64 Donaldson, A. D. S. 93 Horton, Jessica L. 88 Berghuis, Thomas 69 Downey, Georgina 18,19 Hughes, Helen 78 Berry, Jess 19 Duggins, Molly 76 Inglis, Alison 73 Blas, Lisa 64 Dyer, Katie 38 James, Alexander 66 Braddock, Chris 56 Edwards, Rebecca 84 Jansen, Monique 25 Brand, Louise 58 Fairskye, Merilyn 64,66 Jasper, Adam 82 Brauer, Fay (Fae) 51,53 Farrell, Charlotte 48 Johnston, Melinda 97 Brettkelly-Chalmers, Featherstone, Julia 66 Jones, Garry 58 Kate 56 Ferng, Jennifer 34 Jones, Stephen 63 Brodyk, Andre 27 Ferran, Anne 64 Kairuz, Eduardo 67 Brooke, Julie 39 Feuerman, William 14 Kalionis, Jennifer 16 Brown, Jenny 65 Finegan, Ann 32 Kay, Jonathan 79 Burchill, Janet 65 Fisher, Sibyl 57,59 Keeney, Gavin 35 Burton, Laini 74 Fracaro, Michelle 91 Keep, Dean 77 Butler, Rex 93 Fraser, Suzanne 84 Kelly, Caleb 50 Butler, Sally 94 French, Blair 51 Kelly, Wendy 11 Callaway, Anita 58 Gallagher, Sue 87 Kent, Elly 97 Cameron, Jonathan 65 Galstyan, Vigen 43 Keulemans, Guy 63 Campbell, Barbara 50 Garnsey, Eliza 78 Kimberley, Jonathan 59 Carruthers, Victoria 80 Gibson, Prue 95 Kreckler, Derek 67 Chandra, Mohini 37 Glogowski, Dominika 46 Laing, Melissa 86 Chatterjee, Anuradha 74 Goddard, Julian 11 Lakin, Shaune 21 Clayton-Greene, Kim 97 Goffman, Sarah 32 Larsson, Chari 83 Coates, Rebecca 55 Goldberg, Michael 61 Lendon, Nigel 47 Cole, Georgina 34 Gray, Sally 20 Lentini, Damian 87 Connerton, Kim 13,14 Gruner, Billy 55 Lim Chye Hong 91 Cooke, Ian 71 Greig, Ian 96 Lionis, Chrisoula 38
8 Little, Stephen 98 Pattison, Micaela 52 Spiteri, Raymond 39,40 Loveday, Tom 27,28 Peacock, Dianne 76 Stanhope, Zara 30,31 Lowry, Sean 28 Peers, Juliette 19 Starrs, Josephine 68 Macdonald, Fiona 40 Pennings, Mark 60,61 Stoddart, Jane 16 Mackenzie, Kyla 99 Perren, Claudia 13 Stupples, Peter 45 Malor, Deborah 98 Pestorius, David 35 Sujir, Leila 38 Maravillas, Francis 23,23 Peterson, Giles 60 Swan, Rodney 44 Marcello, Flavia 75 Pitt, Elspeth 22 Tai, Mikala 24 Marr, Alexander 36 Plumb, Leslie 49 Tello, Veronica 79 Marsh, Anne 51 Prosser, Cherie 80 Teh, David 69,70 Maxwell, Anne 51 Rainey, David 73 Titmarsh, Mark 29 McDonald, Gay 90 Rankin, Elizabeth 35 Touma, Josephine 89 McIntosh, Walter 44 Rashidi, Maryam 31 Toussaint, David 76 Mclean, Ian 60 Read, Richard 18,18 Tsai, Jaime 80 McNamara, Redmond, Monique 87 Tuato’o Ross, Cathy 68 Andrew 45,46 Reed, Stewart 83,85 Tyler, Linda 33 McNeil, Peter 20 Reid, Alison 37 Veal, Clare 70 McNeil, Georgina 99 Reid, Callum 100 Vercoe, Caroline 54 Mendelssohn, Rey, Una 60 Vishnawathan, Kedar 69 Joanna 71,72 Riddler, Eric 71,72 Volfson, Julia 46 Miller, Steven 71 Roberts, Margaret 31,33 Volz, Kirsty 76 Minissale, Gregory 54,54 Roberts, Mary 42 Wallace, Caroline 88 Monden, Masafumi 21 Robinson, Todd 17 Waller, Ruth 12 Monro, Gordon 12 Sangster, Gary 90 Warren, Kate 100 Moore, Catriona 95 Scliar Mancini, Watts, Oliver 53 Morris, Katherine 58 Bianca 49 Wellington, Robert 41,41 Morse, Meredith 89 Shanahan, Rebecca 79 Wenn, Christopher 87 Mortlock, Grace 13 Sharp, Kristen 23,24 West Brett, Donna 77 Noble, Anne 67 Shelton, Ann 77 Whateley, Ella 12 North, Stella 75 Shorter, Mark 29 White, Sheona 90 Nowak, Jolanta 40 Shumack, Kaye 15 Whitely Robertson, O’Regan, Eve-Anne 62 Silverton, Martin 43 Heather 90 Palmer, Daniel 22 Slade, Lisa 83 Witton, Candice 42 Panigirakis, Spiros 16 Smith, Ellen 68 Wolf, Erika 101 Pape, Toni 48,49 Smith, Tim 52 Woodcock, Ian 15 Park, Yiwon 26 Sorzano, Rigel 100 Wynne-Jones, Victoria 57 Patrick, Martin 99 Speck, Catherine 71,72 Zagala, Stephen 21,23
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KEYNOTE SPE AKERS
Professor Thierry de Duve On Art, Democracy and the ‘Human Family’
In the very first sentence of its preamble, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights upon which modern democracies are founded mentions ‘the inherent dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.’ Let’s notice the postulate that was slipped into that first sentence: to be a human being is to be a member of the human family. There is no institution to which ‘Together Apart’ — the oxymoric motto of the conference — applies better than the family. With the help of Kant’s notion of sensus communis, I would like to show that, whereas in the political realm of ‘all our relations’ (to quote the motto of the Biennale), the ‘human family’ is a highly problematic concept, in the aesthetic realm of our relation to art, it legitimately acts as the transcendental foundation of democracy.
Dr Helen Molesworth Josiah McElheny: Some Pictures of the Infinite
Josiah McElheny: Some Pictures of the Infinite traces the artist’s long-term interest in the problem of time: historical time, archeological time, revolutionary time, and, most recently, cosmic time. This task is a difficult one––both aesthetically and philosophically––for it asks, how does our culture represent that which is fundamentally unrepresentable: the infinite quantity of time and space? In recent years, McElheny has turned his artistic energies toward more scientific ends, his fascination with Big Bang theory driving his efforts to picture the origins of the universe. Using forms drawn from the history of modernist design, the history of social revolution, and the histories of utopia, McElheny explores the staggering size and scale of cosmologic time, culminating in the spectacular installation Island Universe.
10 ABSTRACTS
from very different methodologies and PANEL complex aesthetics. By questioning the role of materiality, paint, colour manipulation, ABSTRACT working in series, and experiment with the sub-strata or support, artists working RELATIONSHIPS within the broad spectrum of abstraction demonstrate concerns that are very different CONVENOR to the concerns of the past three generations DR WENDY KELLY of abstraction.
The title of this conference struck me as being a perfect description for where the JULIAN GODDARD genre of abstraction, particularly non- objective abstraction, finds its self today. Neo-concrete abstraction and social The non-figurative is “apart” from main interface stream considerations. As described to me by a prominent gallerist, it is a “niche The appearance of ‘neo’-concrete art in the market”, marginalised by the need for past twenty years has brought with it the need narrative and an image of the tangible. In to reassess the validity of such practice in a this post post-modern world the genre of very different cultural mix to that from which it abstraction in is philosophically persona emerged in the 1920s. non grata. On the other hand, those This paper examines some of the difficulties who practice the genre, and there are and advantages associated with the re- many, have developed extraordinarily articulation of this practice given recent sophisticated approaches and complex theoretical formations such as Relational interpretations. As we are in an era of Aesthetics and the revival of Pragmatism. In questioning and re-evaluating, I feel that doing so I will discuss the work of a number it is appropriate to include an examination of contemporary practitioners (van Der of abstraction and its raison d’être Ploog, Tremlett, Gottin and the AC4CA) in contemporaneously as approaches to relation to the above but also in terms of how abstraction have shifted dramatically. For their practices form both a continuum and artists working within the genre, it has the a rupture in the history of this artistic trope, ability to become a deeply personal visual suggesting the need for the original distinction language and marginalisation has had the between abstraction and Concrete art to be effect of the formation of networks and redeployed and extended to encompass a groups far more so than, say, landscape stronger social interface. artists or those who work with still life. The desire to support abstract practice through being aware of each others work has meant that both formal groups such as Artist Run Initiatives and informal connections have come together to communicate and exhibit. Artists take approaches that come
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DR GORDON MONRO at ANU presented “This Way Up” a series of exhibitions and a symposium focused on new New connections: abstraction and the developments in abstraction. This fostered computer discussion of the diverse ways in which this new generation of abstract painters differs The computer is a machine for manipulating from their predecessors. abstract entities. I discuss a class of art In this paper I will discuss various themes works that are based on abstract entities which have arisen in such forums and present incorporated in computer programs. A work examples of contemporary approaches to of this sort has an abstract core in a computer abstraction featured in “This Way Up”. program, and an external presentation, for example a digital video, as the displayable Ruth Waller is a Canberra-based painter and work. The multiple layers in these works open Head of Painting at ANU School of Art. She is up new connections between abstraction represented by Watters Gallery in Sydney and and representation; for example the visual Helen Maxwell in Canberra. outcome may be completely abstract, but the computer program may contain a representation of something concrete, or it ELLA WHATELEY may embody a process inspired by something in the world. The questions that arise are quite The metaphysics of space as device and different from those traditionally surrounding subject in contemporary abstract painting abstraction. This paper outlines how the language of The inherently abstract nature of the abstraction is uniquely placed to revisit computer provides the opportunity and the enquiry into the metaphysical nature of necessity to rethink the relationships among humanity without political or religious abstraction, representation, metaphor and narratives and their implications. reference. Through attempting to reconstruct known Gordon Monro is a generative artist: much spaces, painters have historically imagined of his practice consists of writing computer other spaces in which to conceptualise programs that generate part or all of an and interpret humanity’s importance in the artwork. world. This paper examines how the spatial mechanics of painting, often utilised in the service of abstraction, remain a key element RUTH WALLER in contemporary abstraction’s methodologies and aesthetics. It draws on paintings, both To paraphrase Richard Hamilton, “Just what historical and from the author’s practice, to is it that makes today’s abstract painting so demonstrate how the application of opposing different, so appealing?“ spatial devices creates new discordant spatial relationships for the viewer. It will Studio–based Higher Degree Research explore how this juxtaposition of conflicting programmes in university art schools can spatial mechanisms, including the projective serve as hubs which work to bring into focus reflective surface alongside recessive current developments in contemporary art perspectival mechanics, embody a facilitative practice and foster serious consideration of ambiguity. This paper will show how in the nature of the creative process. contemporary abstraction, the language of Responding to a recent surge of interest in represented space becomes both device abstraction evident in the work of faculty, and subject through which painting creates a postgraduates and alumni, in 2010 Painting place for metaphysical enquiry.
12 Ella Whateley is a PhD candidate in Painting, Dan Graham on the other hand activates School of Art, Research School of Humanities the space of his pavilions through visual and the Arts, Australia National University. movements as a sudden change in condition She has lectured at Massey University, New and form. What begins in architectural Zealand and currently tutors at ANU. language as a simple modern glasshouse develops into an opulent flood of images where the visual cannot be distinguished from the physical. While Jurgen Mayer H. combines our environments physical and PANEL digital components on a completely new level of perception. He arrives at a new ACTIVATED SURFACES understanding of activated space where the individual mobility of the future is strongly CONVENOR related to the developments of digitally DR KIM CONNERTON augmented urban spaces, automated driving University of Technology, Sydney and personalized data exchange between the human body and its environment. In this panel Activated Surfaces will be Dr Claudia Perren is a curator, architect and examined in a an cross-disciplinary way that lecturer in Architecture at the University highlights an interdependent relationship, of Sydney. She is interested in hybrids, including: James Turrell and Jean Nouvel’s in questioning architecture through other use of light to activate buildings interior and disciplines, and challenging the traditionally exterior surfaces, how perception, specifically fixed relationship between form and matter for defined as the relationship between eye and the benefit of an integration of time, variation mind, becomes distorted by physiological and development of form into architecture. changes after a young architect has a Her writings have been published in Australia, stroke, the surfaces and spaces of Blu, Dan Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Graham and Jurgen Mayer H argues for a Republic, Singapore, Spain and Switzerland. strong perceptive and cognitive relationship between art and architecture in the process of activation, and the role of the architectural installation as a domain of experimentation GRACE MORTLOCK and a vehicle to be more inclusive to the non-architect in contemporary architecture. Architectural exhibitions and installations Architectural exhibitions provide an opportunity to display the architectural DR CLAUDIA PERREN profession and the design process for both the professional community and the general Sensing active space public. Through an exhibition a dialogue is set up to generate innovative design and This paper investigates activated Surfaces educate the public. Even so architectural and Spaces in the work of Blu, Dan Graham exhibitions are often deemed inaccessible. and Jurgen Mayer H. It argues for a strong This is because architecture and the creation perceptive and cognitive relationship between of a building is communicated by a visual art and architecture in the process of language, understood by few. activation. The Installation provides the opportunity for an In a process of activating non-significant architect or firm to convey the concepts, driving urban spaces Blu’s narrative wall paintings forces and ideas that underpin their ethos. The interpret the architectural language of public installation negates the common problem when spaces and reinvent them into new shapes. exhibiting architecture, the lack of built reality.
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The architect is allowed to spatially test ideas, that challenge everyday perceptions and have physically rendering their research. clear spatial implications. An architectural installation crosses between William Feuerman is the founder and principal art and architecture and it is this intersection of Office Feuerman, a Sydney-based design and combination that intrigues me. office, founded in New York, and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney. An architectural graduate of Sydney University she curated the 2011 Graduate Exhibition, aMaze. An exhibition that transformed the 1960s DR KIM CONNERTON era Wilkinson Building through the use of large- scale inflatables and maze like plastic walls. Activated surfaces, spaces and light: the In 2010 she exhibited her architectural intersections between installation art and architecture installation Synaesthesia at the Sydney College of the Arts. In 2009 she undertook Within and without, by installation artist, an internship at the Peggy Guggenheim James Turrell, National Gallery of Art, Museum in Venice, Italy. The internship Canberra, 2010 and Jean Nouvel‘s building, allowed her to investigate curatorial practices. L’institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, 1987 She assisted in arranging an exhibition on are both structures that use natural light Futurism and conducted paid tours of the to activate surfaces. Both engage in a museum collection. She is currently working contemporary dialogue about technology and at Dunn + Hillam Architects. Her ongoing area interactive and relational installation art and of research is architecture exhibitions, galleries architecture. and transient structures. The building skin of L’institut du Monde Arabe, mimics the workings of an aperture in a camera. The external view, depicts a grid WILLIAM FEUERMAN of windows. Each window has an aperture in the center that open and close and let Visual surfaces varying degrees of natural light in. Similarly, in Within without, Turrell harnesses sun and The work to be presented, part of ongoing moonlight to activate the building‘s surface. research in both practice and academia, Examining the intersections, crossovers, demonstrates how perception, specifically overlaps and distinctions between installation defined as the relationship between eye and art and architecture will generate discussion mind, becomes distorted by physiological pertinent to the contemporary dialogue of changes. understanding the implications of installation In 2007, Feuerman suffered from an acute, art and its relationship to architecture. isolated stroke that affected the coordination In 2010 I completed my PhD titled: Exposure: of his eyes. The relationship between his eye Self-Portraiture, Performativity and Self- and brain brought about a new way of seeing. Inquiry by art practice (video and photography As a designer, he was in a unique position to installation) and thesis. I have shown my graphically document this disability, exploring photographic and video installations in New a neurological perceptual distortion with York, Sydney, Canada, Spain, and London. accuracy. Additionally, I teach in architecture theory and Continued work uses machine apparatus, studio, art history, design theory and studio, light studies and 3D technologies to examine and sculpture at UTS, COFA and USYD to how new ways of seeing can be translated under-graduate and post-graduate students. into dynamic visual surfaces and installations
14 participation, architecture students participate PANEL in audience work about place, inhabitants engage as potential clients, politicians and ART & PARTICIPITORY prominent development players engage in DESIGN future scenarios. PastCityFuture engenders conversations at every step that work with and articulate agency, relationality and temporality CONVENOR in urban design. DR MATTHEW HOLT UTS: Insearch Ian Woodcock is an architect, urban designer, researcher and teacher. Since 2009 he has Participatory design is a form of user- collaborated with Melbourne-based artists one centred design which not only attempts step at a time like this on the audience work to understand the needs of the user but PastCityFuture. encourages the direct participation of users in the entire design process, and therefore is a form of co-creation. As a result it is often DR KAYE SHUMACK experimental, interactive and focused on research. It is also consciously community- Participatory design and place mapping in based, involved in promoting open forms Lilyfield, Sydney: shared learning and public of communication and knowledge sharing space and in generating alternative modes of living Drawing on a theoretical framework from (as such participatory design is grounded in critical cartography and studies in human democratic ideas of self-determination and geography, this paper explores the usage of active citizenship). Much of contemporary participatory mapping as a form of hybrid art too emphasises audience participation, co-production of local contexts to map interactivity and the processes of Lilyfield, an inner-west suburb of Sydney. This documentation and research. approach to visualisation has resonance for the field of information design where unique features of a local context are recorded to IAN WOODCOCK capture informal aspects of everyday life, producing new insights as shared knowledge, Here and there and then … and then? and in proposing a practice for capturing Audience work and urban design emotional responses that are deeply situated PastCityFuture, an audience work in within the local. Mapped features include development by the author and Melbourne- the routes of the local mail delivery, the based artists one step at a time like this, uses location of significant trees and the traces a series of small sites in Melbourne’s city of early morning dog walkers through the centre, incorporating architectural designs streets to the local park with residents driven by narrative input from communities providing anecdotal stories and emotional of interest in the city. Partly conceived as reactions. This paper describes and evaluates walking tour, sites are augmented via images the Lilyfield mapping project as a work- and information on a hand-held device in-progress, and reflects on some of the showing changes since European settlement emerging themes and new insights about this and through a series of future time-points, local place as shared participatory learning responsive to scenarios about scarcity of oil, within the context of art, design and critical climate change, demographic shifts and so cartographic practice. on. By assembling relations that loosely mimic Kaye is Associate Professor in design and development processes and variously invite visual communication in the School of
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Humanities and Communication Arts at JENNIFER KALIONIS UWS. She is a practicing artist, design theorist and media producer. Current We’re in this together now: projects include mapping as participatory destructive emotions and the audience as practices of critical visualisation around local accomplice in contemporary art contexts including transport mobility, urban landscapes and food systems. For the contemporary art audience the emotional stakes of being an observer may be high, particularly when together they share an DR SPIROS PANIGIRAKIS experience that elicits and inflicts destructive emotions and harm. This paper focuses on An artist and a bookroom works of art (particularly by Australian artist Mike Parr) that appear to be grounded in This paper proposes a theoretical and theories of active citizenship, but which through historical contextualisation of an artist- deception or coercion entrap the observer as a designed bookroom from a practice-driven blameworthy accessory. Together, the audience perspective. The Melbourne artist-run are implicated as guilty witnesses and more initiative West Space inviting me to design broadly impotent citizens whose inaction and and construct a functional bookroom for connivance in the artwork mirrors real world their new premises initiates an investigation culpabilities. Apart, individual observers cannot on the autonomous and heteronomous leave the emotions of guilt and self-loathing constitution of the art-object in relation to in the gallery space but carry this sensation the field of furniture, design and relational with them as a memory and a confession. art practices. A link is made to Jorge Pardo’s These artworks are reinforced by sensations of Project (2001) a redevelopment of DIA’s discomfort and loathing, which may outlast the foyer and bookshop. Pardo’s provocative antagonism of the initial reception. disavowal of the design field whilst flagrantly Jennifer Kalionis is a PhD candidate and tutor dealing with a client brief, dominant authorial at the University of Adelaide. stylistic tropes, outsourced fabrication and function is critiqued. Pardo’s curious inclusion in relational art discourse will JANE S TODDART also be investigated. Pardo on the one hand privileges the material and structural A bird in the hand: contemporary design and languages of autonomous sculpture and on ‘matters of concern’ the other the commercial imperative of design functionality, over the socially-driven forms An artist is attuned to her materials and the and provisional materiality favoured by the work in hand, sensitive to their moods and artists he is grouped with. possibilities. In The Voices of Things (2009) Spiros Panigirakis is an artist and educator. Alphonso Lingis talks about the artwork In 2011 he completed a practice-driven PhD. captivating the artist, guiding her hand, going He explored how presentational devices beyond the meaning she had envisaged… and organisational frameworks influence the The work has a life of it’s own. Bruno Latour construction of meaning, form and sociability. has argued against the Modernist divide that places human agency and culture on one side, and a passive Nature that waits to be discovered on the other. He describes a world where non-humans have agency as well; scissors, feathers, fashion motifs, bird flu…
16 As ecological crises press in on us from all the qualitative characteristics of play and sides, we begin to see our design works difference. less as discrete objects that we alone have authored, but increasingly as what Shane Haseman is a Sydney based artist, Latour describes as ‘matters of concern’ writer and academic. He has exhibited where public and political issues of ethics, extensively throughout Australia, and is a environment, sustainability and consumption lecturer in painting at Sydney College of the all add their own finely tuned design Arts. He received his PhD from The University decisions to the mix. of Sydney. Jane has practised as a bespoke milliner for 25 years. She is currently engaged in an ethnography of the lives of some hats for her TODD ROBINSON Masters of Design at COFA. Touching objects
I present work from a doctoral research DR SHANE HASEMAN project examining the role embodied understanding plays within creative practice. The Situationist International holds a The research utilises objects that are surprising influence on the fields of made to solicit physical engagement and contemporary art, design, and architecture, exploration. The artefacts are employed especially through its theoretical and aesthetic within participatory sessions, called activities of the dérive, psychogeography, Touch and talk sessions, involving shared détournement and unitary urbanism. It examination of those artefacts with myself has also influenced these fields increasing and other practitioners. Responses to the fascination with notions of participation, created artefacts are video recorded. As co-creation, interactivity, experimentation, practice is shared ways of doing, acting, and open forms of communication. Yet the thinking and feeling this kind of being-with- influence may be skin deep. The Situationists other-practitioners enables a dialogue, with themselves considered contemporary art, potential to generate insights inside practice. design and architecture as representative of This strategy aims to generate knowledge in recuperated forms of spectacular culture, response to the embodied understanding a divorced from ‘real’ dialogue, experimentation practitioner brings to situations. This views and interaction, and entirely distinct from intersubjectivity of practice as shared bodily the revolutionary ‘praxis’ they sought to ways of being-in practice. I conclude with develop from both the legacy of the historical reflections on the inter-relationship between avant-garde and the political tradition of this kind of methodology and the artistic Hegelian Marxism. This paper will locate the enquiries pursued by a number of artists, stakes of the Situationist’s renewal of these particularly Lygia Clark in the 1960s that dual and potentially contradictory notions sought to engender a more intimate and of praxis. In doing so it will open to debate empathic relationship between art-object, the significance of contemporary usages of artist and spectator. their aesthetic ideas and our contemporary desire to reevaluate Situationism and bring Robinson’s practice traverses fields of it up to date. It will ask also whether such sculpture, installation and fashion. He is a reevaluation might be better served engaged in doctoral research examining by first attesting to the Situationist’s the relationship between bodily experience quixotic modernity that, paradoxically and and artefacts in creative practice. He ambivalently, remains open to contemporary lectures Fashion & Textiles, at University of use due to its avant-garde emphasis on Technology, Sydney.
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city as the staging ground for the workings PANEL of culture. More than merely built spaces, in both their models cities are the crucibles BACKS, FRONTS AND for networks. De Certeau maintains that city CONTEMPLATORY dwellers are constantly in negotiation with the ‘Concept City’ that attempts to regulate and SPACES: ART IN police their lives. In reprisal, daily personal peregrinations contribute to the subversive TENSION WITH practices of everyday life. Goffman claims that space can be divided between front regions NETWORKS and back regions: front regions are places of public performance (like restaurants), back regions are places of rehearsal or preparation. CONVENORS DR GEORGINA DOWNEY WINTHROP PROFESSOR University of Adelaide RICHARD RE AD University of Western Australia WINTHROP PROFESSOR RICHARD RE AD The artist and studio; the artist and world University of Western Australia Images within images proliferate within paintings of the interior spaces of artist’s To read, to dream, to imagine, and to studios that are redolent with implications of contemplate their position in the world, artists’ dependency upon and independence eighteenth century women retreated to a from the community they work for or against. room; the boudoir, which took its name from This paper explores impulses that fronts the French word bouder, to pout or sulk. and backs of paintings in studio paintings Since then, studios, bathrooms, cabinets, articulate towards communities outside the fashion design studios, dressing rooms, studio represented in the painting. One concealed spaces and a host of other impulse is for fronts and backs to turn the ‘back’ regions for the rehearsal of self, have studio into a theatre of the outside world, joined boudoirs as spaces that encourage drawing in its contents as if it were the contemplation. subject of a laboratory experiment. Another This panel explores contemplatory spaces, is to convert the studio into a sanctuary from places and representations thereof, as these those pressures and banalities of the outside support subversion. We consider how spaces world that would impede the serenity required dedicated to reverie may provide at least the for the contemplative perfection of the possibility for challenges to the hegemony painting process. Others include presenting of professional and commercial networks the studio as an arena for assault upon the ‘gone bad’. By ‘networks’ we mean dominant public sphere or a prison of isolation arising systems including the art world, universities, from the world’s neglect. the fashion industry, the global media, et Richard Read is Winthrop Professor of Art al; that frequently reduce contemplation to history at the University of Western Australia. spectacle for consumption. He is working on the history of complex Contemporary ideas about societal spaces do images in global contexts. not give much value to contemplatory spaces. To wit, both Michel De Certeau and Erving Goffman conceive the planned spaces of the
18 DR GEORGINA DOWNEY paper will argue that the atelier and the apartment were an integral part of Coco Networks of connection in bathroom imagery Chanel’s self-staging and performance of in the early 20th century: Stevens, Degas and professional identity. In particular, Chanel Bonnard enacts what Walter Benjamin describes as ‘the phantasmagoria of the interior’– the This paper contends that paintings of reverie that the subject experiences within female bath time have a lot to tell us about private space that provokes creative thought. spaces of refuge, privacy and contemplation As such Chanel associates herself with the in the modern age. I probe well-known contemplative musing of the artist in his representations of female bath time through studio, rather than the feminine domestic the mechanics of bathing. The bath rooms sphere. Through analysis of photographs of in focus here are those in Alfred Stevens’, Chanel in these private spaces, this paper The Bath 1873–74, Edgar Degas’s Woman will argue that the atelier and the apartment in a bath sponging her leg, 1884, and represent her reinvention from a kept woman Pierre Bonnard’s The Bath 1925. I argue into a liberated woman – so affirming her that the modern bathroom through its identity as Modern. dedication to private contemplation was a site of transformation from the Victorian to the Dr Jess Berry’s research centres around the modern age. In the process the trope of the interplay between visual culture, material nude in the interior eventually replaced the culture and consumerism. Her most recent nude in the landscape since it occurred in a publications have focused on contemporary location that was not a traditional ‘space of art’ Australian fashion, fashion cities and fashion but became one because of its status of one of photography. the 20th century home’s newest spaces. Dr Georgina Downey is a Visiting Research Fellow in Art History at the University of DR JULIETTE PEERS Adelaide. She is completing an edited volume By no means an afternoon tea party: titled Domestic Interiors: Representing home E. Phillips Fox’s interiors from the Victorians to the Moderns (Berg Publishing, 2012). Her writings have appeared Australian Edwardian paintings, since Mary in ANZJA, the Journal of Australian Studies, Eagle’s association of Rupert Bunny’s the Journal of Australian Cultural History, production to Marcel Proust’s complex Broadsheet, Artlink and Photofile. evocations of emotion and memory, no longer have to be read as narrative glimpses into Edwardian social life and history. This DR JESS BERRY paper reads E Phillips Fox’s interiors to emphasise their willful and constructed The artist, the atelier and the apartment – the nature, their unreliability as “reportage”. interior spaces of Coco Chanel Shifting and recycling objects undercuts the For early twentieth century fashion designers “truth” that later generations have located the salon’s interior was a spectacular in these works by revealing the potential for exhibition environment – a theatre for catwalk the mise en scene to colour and direct the models to display haute-couture garments. pictorial narrative and indicates how painted While the salon offered a gilded frame interiors proffer – in Fox’s case – information through which to consider the commercial that is not necessarily textually recorded performance of fashion, private interior in the sometimes patchy written sources. spaces would provide the backdrop to the The function and dynamic of Fox’s network artistic concerns of many designers. This of domestic props will be overviewed to
19 together < > apart consider how the set-dressing represented studio photography and public/private space. Fox’s desires rather than his actual working and living environment. Fox’s “genial” Peter McNeil: Professor of Design History at scenes of Edwardian life not only are self- UTS and Foundation Professor of Fashion referencing and self-cannibalising and thus Studies at Stockholm University. Currently also melancholic, but reveal a persistent Investigator within Fashioning the Early heterosexual candour. Modern: Innovation and Creativity in Europe, 1500-1800, a one-million EURO EU funded Juliette is an art, design and cultural historian project. Editor and co-editor of nine works based at RMIT and also with a wide freelance on fashion, including the best-selling Shoes art historical practice, recent publications (2006; 2011); Nordic Fashion Studies (2012); include essays for Bertram Mackennal AAANZ award winners: Critical and Primary AGNSW 2007, Art Love and Life QAG 2011 Sources in Fashion (4 vols, Berg, 2009) and and Images of Modern Evil Heide Museum The Fashion History Reader (Routledge, of Modern Art 2011, and in press for the 2010). Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, Laurence Wilson Art Gallery, UWA 2012. She won the 2010 AAANZ Journal of Art essay prize. DR SALLY GRAY Popular Culture, Jurassic technologies, fashion, women artists and nineteenth century Some rooms: art, space, and the decorative sculpture are amongst her particular interests. in the urban queer world-making of David McDiarmid and friends In the liminal temporal space between PROFESSOR PETER MCNEIL the demise of pre-war bohemia and the inauguration of the notion of the ‘creative The interior as dandyisme: reading the ‘Villa city’, low-rent terraces and subversive Windsor’, 4, Route du Champs d’Entraînement, pedestrian track-ways are the site of Paris experiments in the visuality of queer world- making. This paper explores urban cultural The ‘style politics’ of both the Duke and geographies of decaying 1970s inner Sydney Duchess’ wardrobe and the arrangement in a landscape not yet recuperated through of their Paris residence, redesigned from gentrification. Connections to New York and 1953 by the celebrated firm Jansen, are little San Francisco, and significantly dance- remarked upon. This paper will consider clubbing, are important in the politicisation the function of the aesthetic ‘dandyism’ that of the decorative in the art and design of characterised the design of this interior, Australian queer artist, David McDiarmid. created through a distinctive combination of The post-disco underground dance-club materials and textures. The dwelling enacted was a quintessential back-place of reverie a series of orchestrated movements through and transcendence for its initiates, some of a set of mnemonic spaces, creating the whom, like McDiarmid, were experimenting suggestion of both theatrical ‘set’ and also with the queering of interior and exterior fixed ‘frame’ for this semi-marooned couple. urban space. Particular attention is paid to the private spaces of a shared ‘boudoir’ (sitting room) Sally Gray is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the and distinctively decorated and individual University of NSW (2010–12) where she bath, bed and dressing rooms. Analysis is is supported by the Australian Research conducted using the history and concepts Council to, among other things, write her of kinesics (cultural history of gesture), gift forthcoming book which encompasses exchange, care and creation of the ‘self’, cities, creative friendship circles, art and trans-atlantic taste, the history of ‘glamour’, clothes. Her published work appears in the
20 leading journals in her field and in books Technology, Sydney. His dissertation analyzed on art, fashion and cultural history. Sally the relationship of the aesthetics of fashion is an independent curator, most recently and gender identity within a transnational co-curating A Short History of Facial Hair at world. ‘The Fashion Space’ Gallery, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London (2011). She is curator of The Urns Project at Wollongong City Gallery (2013), and guest PANEL curator of Don’t Forget to Remember: David McDiarmid at the National Gallery of Victoria CAMERA (2014). CONNECTERE : RELATIONAL DR MASAFUMI MONDEN PORTRAIT Floating in a dreamlike room: The Virgin Suicides and Sofia Coppola’s visuality PHOTOGR APHY
In one of the memorable sequences of Sofia CONVENORS Coppola’s 1999 film adaptation of The Virgin SHAUNE LAKIN Suicides, the Lisbon girls are portrayed as Monash Gallery of Art contemplating together in a girlishly decorated bedroom, after being confined to their home. S TEPHEN ZAGALA In a sense, these girls seem to recreate Monash Gallery of Art the clichéd image of imprisoned fairy-tale maidens, be it ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Florine’ If our everyday use of photographs on in The Bluebird or ‘Rapunzel;’, destined to noticeboards, fridges and mobile phones is dream, sing or contemplate in a confined anything to go by, we all intuitively understand space until their rescue, generally by a man. that a photograph is a powerful device for Particular attention is paid to the aesthetic establishing and maintaining relationships of ‘sweetly girlish’ bedroom spaces such as with people and places, events and this, the visuality of Coppola’s narrative, and things. Photographic documentation gives the concept of the girls ‘ imprisoned’ in both significance to inter-personal experiences. We a space and a filmix aesthetic. But is this film use photographs to hold friends and family merely a metaphoric narrative of an idealized close, and we continually revisit these images vision of ‘girlhood’ which is both aesthetically to re-invest them with memories and desires. enchanting and restricting? Rather than Viewed in this way, the photographic image reading it in this derogatory manner as becomes a space for creating connections straightforwardly symbolic of feminine and repositioning ourselves in a world that oppression, this paper proposes another remains alive with emerging relations. reading. Coppola’s film might exemplify the attempt to reevaluate and possibly assign Photographic theory has explored the novel meanings to the notion of ‘passivity’; integrative potential of photography for that being in a submissive position could many years now, drawing largely on the draw central attention to subjectivity, and work of sociologists for whom the practice of hence assigning a degree of ‘power’ to the photography performs an important symbolic character. and ceremonial function within family life. Moving away from this, this panel seeks to Masafumi Monden recently earned a PhD explore the proposition of photography as a from the Faculty of Design at the University of social agent, one which creates, elaborates
21 together < > apart and reinforces social relations, in portrait she recently completed her PhD. Previously photography. Topics may range from 19th she was Curator of International Photography century studio photography and cartes de at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. visite culture, activist photographic practice of the 1970s and 1980s, and photography in contemporary social media. Particular DR DANIEL PALMER attention will be given to research examining artists whose practice has engaged critically Photography as social encounter: Micky with portrait photography as a social, Allan’s My Trip integrative agent, such as Sue Ford, Carol Jerrems, Nan Goldin, William Yang, etc. This paper explores the use of the camera as a vehicle for social interaction, with a focus on Micky Allan’s My Trip (1976), the record DR KATHLEEN DAVIDSON of a seventeen-day road trip by the Australian artist around Victoria. Allan described the From portraits of individuals to professional project as follows: “At Christmas I set out in networks and the circulation of new my car on a trip, with a map, but no other knowledge: the carte de visite as social plans. I took a photo of everyone who spoke agent in Victorian natural history to me, and offered them the camera to take a photo back. On the left in each pair is my In Victorian natural history the reliability of new photo of them, and what they said to me. knowledge usually centred on the figure of On the right is the photo they took, and what the individual naturalist. This raises questions they said when taking it.” My Trip’s personal about the ways in which scientists sought to journey can be read as a form of self-portrait. present themselves. In this paper, I examine Yet Allan’s embrace of photography was the significance of photographic portraiture undertaken as a means to establish a more for this diverse and geographically-dispersed socially-engaged art practice, focusing on community, the visual strategies used, and everyday life beyond the artist’s studio. how their portraits were deployed for various purposes. Exploring the social agency of Daniel Palmer, Senior Lecturer in the Art photographs, I consider the implications Theory in the Faculty of Art, Design & of empire and the significance of colonial Architecture at Monash University, has and transnational participation in the global published widely in the fields of photography economy of science and culture. These socio- and contemporary art. political influences account for, in part, the way photographs were valued as both objects and images; that is, not only as static repositories ELSPETH PITT of cultural content and specialist knowledge but also as agents that functioned over space Seeing selves: collective identities in and time, engaging different communities nineteenth century photographic portraiture of interest. I argue that cartes de visite culture promoted this way of thinking about This paper considers cartes-de-visite the relational role of photography within the portraiture and its capacity to describe the natural sciences: as an activity that connected collective identities of nineteenth century individuals – creating and enhancing formal photographic subjects. The paper will suggest and informal networks – and as a fascination that studio imageries (painted backdrops, shared throughout Victorian society. screens and papier-mâché props) reflected the construction and assumption of distinctly Kathleen Davidson is a sessional staff ‘Australian’ identities as the nineteenth member at the University of Sydney, where century progressed.
22 Whereas studio sets of the 1860s, for relational portraiture in the milieu of 1970s example, placed sitters among the classical photography by examining work by Australian architecture and cultivated gardens of Europe, photographers Sue Ford, Ponch Hawkes, Rod imageries of the 1880s began to incorporate McNicol, Carol Jerrems and Wes Stacey. elements of native flora and fauna. Eucalypt and acacia branches were artfully arranged in Stephen Zagala is the curator of the numerous portraits; allusions were also made photography collection held at Monash Gallery to Australia’s growing agricultural industry, by of Art, Melbourne. His recent exhibitions the inclusion of spades, fence-palings and include Brummels: Australia’s first gallery of small hand-ploughs. photography and Afterglow: performance art and photography. The paper will use the Noye Collection as the focus of its explorations. Acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2004, the Noye Collection comprises over seven-thousand PANEL nineteenth and early twentieth century photographic objects. COLLABORATION & Elspeth Pitt has worked in research and curatorial capacities at the Victoria and CONNECTION IN THE Albert Museum, the British Museum and the ASIA-PACIFIC National Gallery of Australia. She is currently Acting Associate Curator at the Art Gallery of CONVENORS South Australia. DR FR ANCIS MAR AVILLAS University of Technology, Sydney STEPHEN ZAGALA DR KRISTEN SHARP Relational portrait photography in the 1970s RMIT The 1970s was a watershed moment in the history of Australian photography. Curatorial DR FR ANCIS MAR AVILLAS departments committed to photography were established, art schools began Creative assemblages: collaboration and incorporating photography studies into their community in Asia-Pacific art curricula, a number of new books surveying contemporary Australian photography The recent turn to the dynamics of were published, and galleries dedicated to relationality and interconnection in exhibiting photography started to appear. contemporary art theory has coincided with Fortified by this emerging infrastructure, a heightened awareness of the complexities a new generation of photographic artists of context and the limitations of identity explored the medium’s capacities for personal and community as organising tropes of art expression and conceptual experimentation. and exhibition practice. Since its launch in While those championing photography as 2010, the Edge of Elsewhere exhibition series an artform in the early twentieth century (2010–12) organized by Campbelltown Arts tended to focus on the landscape genre, this Centre and 4a Centre for Contemporary new generation demonstrated a renewed Asian Art in Sydney, has sought to redefine interest in portraiture. Central to this interest and expand the boundaries of exhibitionary in portraiture was a belief in photography as and artistic practice through complex forms a tool for encouraging and elaborating social of collaboration and engagement with the networks. This paper will highlight the turn to diverse local communities from Asia and
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the Pacific in the outer western suburbs collaboration by drawing attention to the of Sydney. Drawing on a number of case social dimensions of art production. These studies that form part of an independent new forms of collaborative art practice evaluation of Edge of Elsewhere, this paper challenge conventional ideas on artistic will explore the multifaceted complexities of subjectivity, geo-cultural identity and methods collaboration and community engagement of art research. through an examination of the different ways they are conducted and negotiated. In Dr Kristen Sharp is the Coordinator of Art particular, this paper will examine how artists History and Theory in the School of Art in the exhibition have mobilized a range of at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. approaches and ideas to produce particular Sharp researches in the areas of cultural aesthetic and social effects within and across studies and art history, with a particular local and transnational contexts. interest in contemporary art in urban spaces, collaborative practices in transnational art Dr Francis Maravillas is Associate Researcher projects and contemporary Asian art. She is at the Transforming Cultures Research Centre currently working on an Australian Research at the University of Technology, Sydney, Council Linkage Project (2010–2013), Spatial where he also lectures in cultural studies. Dialogues: Public Art and Climate Change, a His research interests include contemporary transnational collaborative project located in art and visual culture in Asia and Australia, Melbourne, Shanghai and Tokyo investigating curatorial practice and international exhibitions the role of art in public discussions on climate and art in urban spaces. His work on Asian change. art in Australia appears in various journals and exhibition catalogues as well as recent edited collections. MIKALA TAI
The creative economy of art in Shanghai DR KRISTEN SHARP This paper looks at the various ways in which Synthesis and fractures: mapping new the Shanghai art world is supported and methods of collaboration in the Asia-Pacific advanced by large corporations. While art region and big business have always intersected, the Conventions of collaboration, participation manner in which multinational corporations and ethnographic research in art are being have influenced the evolving structure of the re-formulated through an increasing number Shanghai art scene has been particularly of transnational research-based art projects. notable. For a city that has had little in the These projects employ multiform platforms way of artistic and cultural support from of delivery and interaction between artists government bodies, Shanghai’s economic and publics across geo-cultural territories. In progress has lead to new avenues of order to document and analyse the complex cultural and artistic development in the processes of exchange and dialogue that city. The resulting art scene of Shanghai is occur ‘behind the scenes,’ new models unlike any other in the world as it has been and methods of ethnographic research are shaped in negotiation between artists, arts required. This paper will explore the use of administrators and corporate sponsors. ethnography-based methods in art research Through an analysis of key museums and drawing on recent collaborative examples artistic practice, this paper will examine how from the Asia-Pacific region. Such methods Shanghai’s economy has indirectly funded, highlight the politics of labour, subjectivity supported and encouraged the development and geo-cultural identities involved in of the city’s local art scene from a grassroots
24 level through to the palatial expanses of key entail forms of social intervention. Among exhibition spaces. In particular, this paper the projects discussed in Conversation will explore the complex relationship between Pieces are Wochen Klausur’s Intervention art and economy in Shanghai by examining to Aid Drug-Addicted Women and Suzanne the role that real estate companies such as Lacy’s performance with 220 teenagers Zendai have had in developing curatorial entitled The Roof is on Fire. The One and exhibitions and fostering curatorial talent, and the Many discusses projects by Thomas the way in which banks such as Minsheng Hirschorn, Superflex, Francis Alÿs, Santiago have played a key role in the development Sierra, Park Fiction, NICA, Ala Plastica, Huit of a cutting edge museum with significant Facettes, and Dialogue. However, at present international programming. there is a relative dearth of scholarly work on collaborative contemporary painting and Mikala Tai is currently completing her PhD at drawing. College of Fine Arts, UNSW examining how the social and economic character of major Chinese cities have influenced their local art scenes. She currently teaches at RMIT where DR CAROL ARCHER she will be lecturing in ‘Contemporary Asian Art’ in second semester of 2012. She also Contemporary painting and drawing: works for Asia Pacific Contemporary – an a theoretical toolbox initiative that seeks to promote art from the This paper introduces a number of Asia Pacific within Australia. contemporary collaborative painting and drawing projects, demonstrating the range of such work, the variety of processes by which it may be generated, and the PANEL diverse questions that it places on the agenda. Drawing upon the perspectives COLLABORATIVE of practitioners (including the speaker) as well as art historians, cultural theorists PAINTING & DRAWING and philosophers, a ‘theoretical toolbox’ designed to facilitate a more comprehensive CONVENOR understanding of contemporary collaborative DR CAROL ARCHER painting and drawing is proposed. Lingnan University, Hong Kong Archer teaches in the Visual Studies Department at Lingnan University. Her Charles Green’s The Third Hand (2001), research on modes of contemporary Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces (2004) collaborative painting and drawing is and the latter’s The One and the Many supported by a Research Council of Hong (2011) are key works in the scholarship on Kong grant. modern and contemporary collaborative art. Green’s work discusses conceptual works (Kosuth, Art and Language), the FR ANCES HANSEN & ‘anthropological aesthetic’ of the Poiriers, MONIQUE JANSEN the Boyle Family and the Harrisons, the environmental installations of Christo and Alongside Projects: An Improvisational Jeanne-Claude, the performances of Marin Drawing Event Abramovic and Ulay and Gilbert and George, and Ian Burn’s ‘value-added landscapes’. Alongside Projects: An Improvisational Both of Kester’s books focus on works that Drawing Event, was a collaborative drawing
25 together < > apart exhibition between Monique Jansen and YIWON PARK Frances Hansen. It took place at the Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Dunedin, New 3ppod Zealand/Aotearoa from the 6–9 March 2012 as part of the Blue Oyster ‘2012 Performance 3ppod is a collaborative art project consisting Series.’ Operating as artistic tourists, the of three Asian female artists from Korea, artists scoured the local vicinity, collecting China and Taiwan. The aim of the project is to materials that were deconstructed and investigate the role of drawing as a medium incorporated into an improvisational drawing to interact with different spaces at both the event, which formed a kind of site-specific personal and cultural level. urban bricolage. The core ideas of Alongside This collaboration proceeds from an Projects involved an investigation into the investigation into the complexity of the generative and improvisational nature of individual’s relation to personal space. From drawing and how collaboration might be this, the group’s comfort and discomfort employed in what is conventionally seen as zones are explored. This latter engagement - a solitary act. It intended to directly engage the cultural space – is not obvious: the artists with the conventions of drawing but challenge do not engage in cultural exchange directly, the intimate and individualistic nature of it, by yet their cultural backgrounds are implicit in employing collaboration to drive the process their creative process. and outcome of the work. Working ‘along- side,’ explored the idea of drawing as a form By ‘talking’ through drawing in this way, the of communication: talking through making/ artists develop a range of creative dialogues. making through talking. Collaboration and This process involves understanding each improvisation drove the work, as the artists others’ visual languages and adapting responded to the stimulus of the materials, themselves within the framework of a each other’s actions and conversation. given surface, medium and content. This interpretive engagement with the work Frances Hansen’s art practice manipulates is almost like speaking three different the disciplines of painting, drawing, languages. Unlike in our verbal language assemblage and illustration. She works with system, this process in the universal system traditional media as well as found objects and of visual language ultimately enhances (rather appropriated images to invent and produce than hinders) collaborative output. new aspects of her chosen materials. Hansen’s book Keepsakes was published in Yiwon Park is a Sydney-based artist from 2011 by Hardie Grant Books, Victoria. South Korea. She is undertaking a Masters by Research at COFA, UNSW. Yiwon has Monique Jansen’s drawing and painting been exhibiting her work in both Korea and practice focuses on labour, process and Australia. making, obsessive endeavour, accumulation, modesty of materials, frugality and restraint. Her exhibitions include Inheriting the Netherlands at Te Papa Museum of New Zealand and For Keeps: Sampling Recent Acquisitions at the Auckland City Art Gallery.
26 spatial issues for painting include surface and PANEL depth, seeing-in and seeing-as, authentic object within the socio-political world as well CONTEMPORARY as intention and reading. Traditional modes of painting conceal painting’s multi-valence PAINTING within the idea that painting is an “object.” Expanding, into other fields in the Kraussian RE-EXPANDED sense, unmasks painting’s multi-valences. CONVENOR Will this expansion result in a schizoid form DR TOM LOVEDAY of practice? Can painting, as it expands from Sydney College of the Arts familiar media into less familiar modes of practice reveal a strangeness, a doubled In a recent Sydney group exhibition, five nature, a schism? In this session, five artists artist-painters, Mark Titmarsh, Mark Shorter, will explore the ideas of expanded painting, Andre Brodyk, Sean Lowry and Tom both practice and theory. Loveday, each presented their collaborative engagement with the “Expanded Field.” The exhibition consists of bio-tech installation, performance, video, wall painting, sculpture, ANDRE BRODYK site-specific installation, together with Genetically modified painting painting on prepared ground and on canvas. As part of this collaboration, a collectively Andre Brodyk addresses the peripatetic authored text was produced to test the limits nature of painting by conceptualising a of networked, collaborative theoretical writing novel frame of reference. This concerns the and its relationship with art practice. emergent field of ‘Bioart’, one based on art forms assumed via technological interventions The proposed session consists of into living systems across the molecular, presentations by the artists. The topic of the micro, cellular and macro levels. session is the question of expanded media in painting in a collaborative exhibition. What is different and significant for painting here is that the artist has reconceptualised Rosalind Krauss’ well-known essay, Bioart specifically as extended painting “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” articulates instantiated in his hybrid installation entitled an expanded field for sculpture. Sculpture peripatetic painting, (genetically modified thereby moves beyond the limits of museum painting). architecture into the less amenable spaces outside buildings. The medium of sculpture, In proposing Bioart as an emergent extended according to Krauss, moves from objects in idea of painting, Brodyk addresses the space to space itself and in doing so, expands ambulant nature of painting beyond what is into other spatial practices, such as (not) conventionally prescribed to be ‘paint’ media, landscape and (not)architecture. According whereby painting is reinvested with a literal to Krauss, this dematerialises sculpture and biotechnological agency. can seem to lead to its dissipation. However, Krauss regards sculpture’s expansion as a According to Brodyk, historically any painting necessary part of maintaining the historical can be considered to exist in genetically viability of a field in a dynamic contemporary modified form. Brodyk’s argument here culture. however will elucidate the ready re-made nature of genetic interventions as a (new) Painting on the other hand is spatially genetically modified painting. This is not only multivalent in different ways to sculpture. The a revisualization for Bioart but importantly for
27 together < > apart this discussion, a re-extended biological move cross such boundaries use revealed schizoid in the idea of painting in the expanded field. thought as the “content” of their work. Typical of this is Yayoi Kusama, about whom one of Andre Brodyk is an internationally recognised the works is made. Bio(tech)artist & interdisciplinary researcher based in Newcastle & Sydney. Brodyk has an The result of such a theory is that extensive history of creative practice-based collaboration is not a problem of the research outputs involving experimental autonomy of psyche, as if working with molecular lab protocols as extended ideas of others were a threat to the artist’s creative creative inquiry. autonomy, but rather one of the compatibility of modes of self-negation. Artists exist within multivalent self-negation that is already DR TOM LOVEDAY collaborative, within themselves. To risk disrupting each multivalent self-negation is to Dilated painting risk not creative autonomy but creativity itself. Likewise, to assert that art must be political My exhibition “Re-expanded Painting,” is to assert the unity of self as psyche and Bipolar Bear, The Eyes of Yayoi Kusama and therefore tie art to traditional psycho-social Third Space, expand the medium of painting. forms of media and to deny what has come to Each work begins with the question of be thought of as individuality in art, or what is psycho-social identity of artwork as a question more properly called its capacity of speak for of medium. The psycho-social identity of each the Other. work is multi-valent and is revealed because traditional media are abandoned. Dr Tom Loveday is an artist and is a senior lecturer at Sydney College of the The problem with making such an argument Arts, University of Sydney. Tom exhibits is terminological. “Identity” and “being” are artwork regularly both in commercial and terms strongly associated with the unity of independent galleries as well as maintaining self as psyche which prejudices the clarity of an international and national research practice the argument. To more elegantly develop this in art and architectural theory. argument, Adorno’s or “resistance” will be connected to Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo- analysis. DR SE AN LOWRY I will be speaking about my own work primarily but will be placing it within a Overpainting theoretical framework that includes other artists and philosophers. The paper will draw Despite its inevitable absorption within from its theoretical context a position in which the market system, wall painting once painting is configured as a theoretical act represented part of a broad desire to eschew dealing with similar issues to philosophy. As the commodifiable nature of the art object such, the paper continues the general them by expanding the structural possibilities of begun in my PhD, Painting as the Image painting as ‘idea’. In marrying the readymade of Thought, Sydney College of the Arts, qualities of stock paints typically used University of Sydney, 2006. to restore white wall spaces following an exhibition with a deliberate strategy of My argument is that conventional media ‘concealing’ highly recognisable appropriated in all art practices mask the dynamics of material, Sean Lowry’s overpainted wall multivalent, “schizoid” thought. Art that paintings aim to shift the material confines of crosses the boundaries of conventional painting beyond the wall’s surface toward a media unmasks schizoid thought as a matter location that is literally inside the wall. First, resistance and transgression. Artists that by selecting a highly recognisable image
28 within the cultural and historical context of represents a reversed projection of “The the exhibition, and paying a commercial sign European”. More specifically, within the writer to reproduce it directly upon the wall, context of the imagining of the Antipodes, and second, by carefully transporting that Schleimgurgeln functions as a time-travelling image via the addition of partially transparent landscape painting critic. Moving seamlessly layers of ‘house paint’ toward the limits of through 200 years of Australian landscape visibility, Lowry seeks to evoke a ghostly painting, Schleimgurgeln promotes an unlikely feeling of familiarity rather than explicitly connection to their grotesque antecedents in exhibited critical distance. antiquity. Dr Sean Lowry is a Sydney-based visual artist, Mark Shorter is a Sydney based artist who electronic music producer, and writer. Lowry is works within the fields of performance art, currently a Lecturer in Creative and Performing installation, painting and sculpture. He has Arts at the University of Newcastle. performed his work extensively throughout Sydney and Australia.
DR MARK SHORTER DR MARK TITMARSH Schleimgurgeln: Song for Heysen 2012 Expanded painting and the phenomenology Performance art practices have played an of colour instrumental role in expanding painting The ontology of colour and the phenomenon discourse. This is exemplified in the theatrical of shine stand apart and are incommensurate experimentations of the early avant-garde and with the science of light, the psychology of the interrogation of the artist’s subjectivity seeing and the subject of vision. Understood in the post-war period. These performance phenomenologically colour makes things actions transformed painting into a gesture manifest by revealing them in their unique that transcended the canvas as the site presence rather than merely facilitating for creative expression and shifted it onto communication, representation or spectacle. the body. Interestingly, this development in Before colour is seen, before colour can be painting produced a rich array of grotesque looked at, colour looks at the painter in such imagery as the artist treated their bodies as a way that looking and seeing are provoked. creative devices to be exposed, penetrated In its ordinariness colour is captured and of course painted. and quantified by the grasp of scientific technical rationality. In its extraordinariness In his performance Song for Heysen 2012, colour demands a certain attentiveness, a Mark Shorter draws on this rich imagery to responsive lingering on the edge of the visible explore the complexities underpinning the and invisible. picturing of the Australian landscape. From grotesque conceptions of the antipodes Using Thierry de Duve, David Batchelor that predate mapping of the Southern and Martin Heidegger it will be shown that Hemisphere, to formal colonial landscape these ways of being with colour are enabled painting traditions, he presents a vision of by a formal evolution in painting whereby Australia destabilised by its virtual past. expanded painting addresses everything Instrumental to this critique is in the everyday world that carries colour. Schleimgurgeln, a performance alter- Expanded Painting, unlike painting, no ego conceived as an exoticised, primitive longer addresses an audience directly, an European Other. Just as the French novelist audience that might validate it through critical Gabriel de Foigny produced his own vision and financial response. Instead Expanded of ‘The Australian’ in 1676, Schleimgurgeln Painting addresses a non-human respondent,
29 together < > apart the medium of painting itself. By analogy, the of relations generated by social art, from medium of painting however deconstructed or antagonistic to neighbourly conversations? expanded, has become the entity to ‘whom’ Does art that takes the public as its subject the work of colour is addressed. or nurtures community collaboration Mark Titmarsh (born 1955, Ingham, necessarily have social effect? If participatory Australia, PhD, UTS, 2009) is a visual artist or collaborative art has a social role, how can working in painting, video and writing. His it be responsible for constituting, even at a current work executed under the rubric micro level, the sense of a public? of ‘expanded painting’ is painting about painting or painting that dissimulates into objects, videos and texts. HOLLY ARDEN
How significant are conditions of relationality in the form of art practices that take publics PANEL and communities as their subject? CONVERSATION, The various terms given to groups of people who form around artworks – its COLLABORATION, AND audiences, publics and communities – are, in many cases, only loosely defined within COMMUNITIES : THE contemporary art discourse. My research explores the distinct, and often political, ROLE OF THE ARTIST applications of these terms within the sphere AND THE FORMATION of contemporary art. For example, in the spirit of Jacques Rancière, a “public” is constituted OF PUBLICS by shifting political boundaries, which permit some persons to enter a shared realm, to CONVENOR form a public, while other individuals are Z AR A S TANHOPE excluded. Australian National University This paper is the second part of an argument that I began at last year’s AAANZ In the early 1990s, Nicolas Bourriaud’s conference. It continues my research into Relational Aesthetics offered a starting how contemporary artworks engage with point for discussion of the forms and “the people” as a more politically or even effects of art that inviting interaction and ideologically potent form of “the public”. I participation, and subsequently stimulated a will frame this paper around an analysis of raft of alternative discourses. The range and works by contemporary artist Harrell Fletcher. diversity of artists’ social art practices that People are the subjects, collaborators and have occurred in public space as well as the participants of many of Fletcher’s numerous art gallery both before and since Borriaud’s projects, which deal with themes of access, text have necessitated discourses that are elitism and the everyday. I will analyse the more responsive to the specificities of art, its ways in which Fletcher’s projects draw from collaborative participants, its audiences and members of the general public who become publics. This panel is interested in the space the “people” of his works, their subjects and between the interdisciplinary processes their participants. Secondly, I will explore how of social art practice and the effects and Fletcher’s works bring to light the individual implications of the varied nature of its stories of “everyday people”, and in doing relations. Do current discourses account for so, offer softly spoken critiques of art world artists’ processes and the consequent range politics.
30 Holly Arden is completing a PhD investigating tourism and other institutions. What distinct art and its publics in the Theory Program of benefits and risks would more interdisciplinary the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture, connections hold for the social artist? How Monash University. Holly has previously does the instrumentalisation of social art worked in a variety of curatorial roles, with a impact on the meaning or agency of art? I focus on public space. argue that a consideration of the fields that intersect with the processes of social art hold meaning for the role of social artists MARYAM RASHIDI and meaning of social art, and may assist in developing a more nuanced discussion of Communities as Co-Authors: the paradox of projects, currently still framed in the relational/ representation in dialogical aesthetics dialogic dialectic of Nicholas Bourriaud and Grant Kester. Using the example of the This paper focuses on the problem of participant-observation of anthropology, I representation in Grant Kester’s theory of update Hal Foster’s criticism from the mid dialogical aesthetics as elaborated in his 1990s of the artist as ethnographer, finding seminal book, Conversation Pieces (2004). both benefits and risks in employing the Kester argues that community-based, research-based methodology of anthropology dialogical art projects consist of collaborations in social art. between a “politically coherent community” (PCC) and an artist who is positioned in a Zara Stanhope is a Melbourne-based curator. “representational relationship” where he/ Institutional roles include Deputy Director, she “speaks through, with, about, or on Senior Curator at Heide Museum of Modern behalf of” this community. Kester generally Art, (2002−08); Director, Adam Art Gallery, characterises the PCC as a ‘voiceless’ Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand victim of social exclusion, marginalisation, (1999–2002), Assistant Director, Monash or stereotyping. Borrowing Pierre Bourdieu’s University Gallery (1993–1999). concept of delegation and political representation, Kester considers the artist as a delegate who, by ‘representing’ the PCC, grants it a ‘voice’. In this paper, I argue PANEL that there is a paradox between Kester’s attribution of such representational logic E XHIBITION to dialogical aesthetics, and his definition of “collaboration” per se in terms of an PR ACTICES AND egalitarian process of dialogue, exchange, and co-authorship between the artist and the PERMEABLE PCC. I conclude my discussions by proposing RELATIONSHIPS a ‘non-representational’ alternative to Kester’s model. CONVENOR DR MARGARET ROBERTS Z AR A S TANHOPE National Art School
The role of the social artist This session examines the relationships promoted by exhibition practices, including The artist takes numerous roles when working relationships between artworks and their on social art projects in public space, and is location, between artists and audience and unable to avoid the normative frameworks between exhibitions and art practices. The of funding agencies, the art market, cultural session will focus on exhibition practices that
31 together < > apart support the move away from the convention ANN FINEGAN of spatial and other autonomy in artwork. This convention was questioned throughout Kandosprojects the twentieth century, from Constructivism to Happenings to Relational Aesthetics. As the name implies kandosprojects Daniel Buren included his observations of the foregrounds itself as a project space rather negative effect of mobility on artwork in his than a gallery. Given that we have four large justification for his own site-related practice walk-in vitrines and ample interior exhibition in The Function of the Studio. In The White space we could easily have set ourselves up Cube, Brian O’Doherty claimed that gallery as a conventional gallery but that was never conventions adjusted during the twentieth our brief. We wanted to immerse ourselves century so as to contain artists’ attempts to in the broader rural social experiment of construct new relationships with the space what is now an ex-cement factory town, with beyond the frame. This session will discuss strong ties to farming. What interests us is three current exhibition practices in the light the permeability of our situation and the of the ongoing evolution of these historic town’s perceived ownership of the space, a developments. prominent shopfront. As such we have been fostering affiliations which may or may not be art-based, with a mix of shows initiated SAR AH GOFFMAN through art-display and kindred habits like shopping. I do what I do because you do what you do I propose to discuss a number of our projects The premise involves the simple relationships and the various permeabilities engendered between artists’ dialogues with one another. (works by Liz Day, Bronia Iwanczak, Jenny We depend on a layer of networks along Brown, Sue Pedley and Virginia Hilyard, Alex which a community is developed. Wisser and Georgina Pollard). I would go further to say that I feel inspired Dr Ann Finegan is a writer and educator, by my peer’s art works, work processes and who has worked across a broad range whether I like it or not, their actual work. I of institutions and disciplines. With a have come away from an exhibition or studio background in philosophy her current visit, wanting to rectify or adopt some of their research interests are data-mapping and ways of seeing, and producing work. Adopt questions of scale. and adapt. There are complications with being aware and in close contact with a variety of other DR MARGARET ROBERTS practising artists, in that I am aware that without their practice maybe my own would Project space practice not be what it is. I want to investigate this The paper will discuss project space practice idea further. as a form of exhibition practice that supports Sarah Goffman has been exhibiting regularly permeable relationships between audience, since 1992, and has shown extensively artwork and location. It will illustrate this around Australia and overseas. She has practice with the project space project been involved in numerous residencies both recently held by Articulate project space to nationally and internationally and is known as explore the capacity of this exhibition practice a forensic garbologist and trash converter. to reveal the thinking processes that go on in art making and the relationships artworks form with the places in which they are made.
32 It shows how artists understand project reconciliation. By focusing on the personal space practice today through the projects of and the particular, the theme of friendship Lesley Giovanelli, Alan Schacher, Terry Hayes, and rivalry offers an alternative way of thinking Kathryn Ryan, Heidelberg House, Joan about artistic production that looks past the Grounds, Chantal Grech and Toni Warburton, generalising categories of schools and styles the artists participating in this project. It will to the complexities of intimate relationships, discuss strategies each employed to engage which determine social networks and attitudes the material and spatial nature of the location, to art on a micro level. In addressing art to explore the performative potential of production through the exigencies of friendship process-work, and to address the potential and rivalry, this session aims to highlight conflict between the open-ended nature of the connections between personal feeling, the process to the relatively closed nature of ideological principle, and the artistic process. public exhibition. Margaret Roberts is an installation artist ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR who is currently Lecturer in Drawing at The LINDA TYLER National Art School and a co-director and curator at Articulate project space. Her thesis Botanical battles: John Buchanan and Art and the Status of Place was completed Thomas Kirk as illustrators in the colonial in 2009. herbarium The two titans of botanical illustration in nineteenth century New Zealand were PANEL Thomas Kirk and John Buchanan. Almost exact contemporaries, they were bitter rivals. FRIENDSHIP AND Their lifelong enmity in turn rehearses other familiar tropes: English versus Scottish RIVALRY heritage, Auckland versus Wellington as centres of scientific significance, and most CONVENOR tellingly, middle class versus working class DR GEORGINA COLE involvement in the colonial world of botanical National Art School, Sydney discovery and depiction. Even their religious thinking was opposed. A Baptist, Thomas Kirk embraced Charles Darwin’s theories of Personal relationships between artists and natural selection and descent from the apes, their friends and rivals have generated some whereas John Buchanan, a Morisonian, railed of the most fascinating and complex works against evolution, and fought its introduction in the history of art. While many works of art into school textbooks for biology. An suggest a singular relationship between the examination of the Buchanan-Kirk dynamic artist and the object of his or her perception, reveals what was at stake in working in the in reality, artists are embedded in intricate field of botanical illustration in the colonial networks of social relationships that have a context. strong impact on the subjects and strategies As Director of the Centre for Art Research, of their work. This session examines the role I administer The University of Auckland’s of friendship and rivalry in the production of art collection, manage programmes and art and art writing. It explores the making and exhibitions at the Gus Fisher Gallery, and meaning of works of art through the deeply also digital and on-site exhibitions under the felt connections and frictions that inspire auspices of the Window project. collaboration and competition, rivalry and
33 together < > apart
DR MICHAEL HILL seceded from the Royal Academy of Art, over which Reynolds presided, boycotting Looking for trouble: Steinberg vs Greenberg exhibitions, elections and academy dinners. While many studies have stressed The New York art critic and historian Leo Gainsborough’s conflict with Reynolds, this Steinberg began his career when Clement paper argues that Gainsborough’s Charity Greenberg was at the height of his powers. Relieving Distress, painted in the year of his Immediately, Steinberg called him out, secession, proposes a charitable resolution taunting his position in two essays of the of their aesthetic attitudes. In analysing early 1950s. Greenberg responded mildly the complex interrelation of allegorical and – he was accustomed to dissenters and by anecdotal form, this paper identifies in this now he was confident that he had history on painting a pictorial attempt to reconcile their his side. Greenberg reigned for the next ten divergent approaches through the concept of years; meanwhile, Steinberg continued to charity, a virtue of powerful artistic lineage in build his case, championing artists slighted the western tradition, and of contemporary as minor by Greenberg (Rauschenberg, social importance. Johns) and cultivating in his burgeoning art history scholarship a general position against Georgina received her PhD from the University those who would prefer art for its shapes of Sydney in 2010. She specialises in and patterns alone. When the tide turned eighteenth-century European art and lectures against Greenberg in the 1960s, Steinberg in art history and theory at the National Art was among the first to celebrate, in his 1968 School. essay, Other Criteria. The paper examines the (admittedly asymmetrical) dispute between two of the era’s major critics, setting it among DR JENNIFER FERNG the competing ethical positions of purity and ambiguity. Sociable neighbours and object design at the eighteenth-century Louvre Michael Hill teaches modernism and contemporary art at the National Art School. Eminent scholars of eighteenth-century His research interests include architectural sociability, or an individual’s desire to reconcile theory, portraiture, and the seventeenth his choices with the wishes of society, century. have relied upon theories of friendship, commerce, or epistolary correspondence to elucidate how artists were influenced by one DR GEORGINA COLE another. Architectural space at the Palais du Louvre, from corridors to allocated rooms Aesthetic reconciliation in Gainsborough’s for printing and metalworking, however, has Charity Relieving Distress been overlooked as a source and in fact, intensely shaped many types of artistic In the competitive environment of the collaborations. Among the artists housed there eighteenth-century London art scene, in the pre-revolutionary 1770s were Antoine- Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Joseph Loriot (mechanic), Claude-François Reynolds were often perceived as great Desportes (painter), Pierre-Simon Benjamin rivals. While they shared patrons, sitters, Duvivier (silversmith), Jacques LeGuay and a stake in the future of British art, they (engraver), Jacques Röettiers (silversmith), were staunch aesthetic opponents, whose and Charles-Nicolas Cochin (engraver). I differing approaches to the art of painting examine these artists to trace how their living caused considerable friction, particularly for conditions and working practices generated Gainsborough. Indeed, in 1784, Gainsborough intellectual exchanges between the decorative
34 arts, painting, and architecture. Sociable GAVIN KEENEY cooperation became engendered by the Louvre’s facilities, allowing simple proximity to Chris Marker and company create unexpected points of contact between artists, their peers, and their respective The paper re-visits the well-known early mediums of art. history of Chris Marker’s film work in the 1950s in association with Alain Resnais, Dr Jennifer Ferng is Lecturer of architectural Agnès Varda, and the Left Bank Group in history and theory in the Faculty of contradistinction to the Right Bank Group Architecture, Design, and Planning at the (François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer et al.), with University of Sydney. Jean Luc-Godard crossing back and forth between the two. What is less obvious is the origin of Marker’s intellectual project in PROFESSOR ELIZABETH RANKIN the late 1940s, inclusive of his apocryphal activities during the Second World War and Sharing apart(heid) his somewhat sketchy earlier years in Neuilly- sur-Seine (with Sartre as schoolmaster). The Under the constraints of South African study examines the interpersonal agency that apartheid, meaningful relationships across registers in all of his works, from these early the colour bar were well-nigh impossible. days through to the late 1960s and early Yet, despite being kept apart by legislation, 1970s, when he was making overt political black and white artists succeeded in forging films with the Paris-based collaborative friendships that were of mutual benefit. SLON (Marker’s Groupe Medvedkine vs. Although white artists were usually ‘senior’ Godard’s Groupe Vertov), culminating in his partners in such relationships as teacher or more recent installations in New York of still mentor, interchanges were by no means one- photography, where the principal interlocutor way, with ideas as likely to be picked up by becomes Everyman. mentors as by mentees. Gavin Keeney is a critic, writer, and editor This unusual enactment of ‘together-apart’ based in New York, New York. He is currently will focus on sculptor Sydney Kumalo, pursuing a PhD at Deakin University on visual taught by painter-printmaker Cecil Skotnes, agency in Art and Architecture. apprenticed to Italian sculptor Edoardo Villa, and promoted by German dealer Egon Guenther. Kumalo’s work demonstrates their importance for his development, but DAVID PESTORIUS equally Skotnes and Villa became interested in conveying an ‘Africanness’ in their art that ‘Ian’s Questions’? Art & Language today suggests reciprocal influence. Moreover, In the 1970s, the Australian artist Ian Burn Guenther established the ‘Amadlozi’ (Zulu (1939–1993) was a key member of the Art & for ‘spirit of our ancestors’) group including Language collective. However, since Burn’s Skotnes, Villa and Kumalo, who was, untimely death his name and important ironically, the sole African member. contribution have been slipping away in Elizabeth Rankin is Professor of Art History official accounts of Art & Language history. at Auckland University. Her research focuses What might be at stake in such deceit, to say on South African artists, particularly black nothing of the hypocrisy involved? This paper sculptors and printmakers, who were denied will chart the writer’s investigation of this formal art education under apartheid. art historical distortion, an investigation that prompted an extraordinary threat (in the guise of a song) from Burn’s former Art & Language
35 together < > apart collaborator, Mel Ramsden, who rather than belonging, highlighting the continual process admit and express remorse for obscuring of reimagining and reorientation. and minimising the place of friend’s work has continued to act like a common thug. This is If homing desire might describe the a sobering account, to be sure, but it is also a desire to feel at home in the betweeness salutary lesson for those who might question of displacement, it also describes in a the actions of ruthless artists determined to more general way the longing to belong. succeed in show business at any cost. This longing has perhaps more to do with reckoning with the disjunctures of the David Pestorius is a freelance art historian, traumas of displacement, and how they curator and gallerist. His projects include orient, disorient and reorient one in both Geometric Painting in Australia 1941–1997 a spatial/physical sense, and in a broader (UQ Art Museum, Brisbane, 1997), ED social and historical sense. This panel invites KUEPPER’S MFLL (international tour, 2003– art practitioners, curators and theorists to 2005), The Brisbane Sound (IMA, Brisbane, engage in articulating various aspects of what 2008), and MELBOURNE> CONVENOR Native North American architecture DR JOHN DI S TEFANO remains extraordinarily visible despite its National Art School relative dearth on North American land. In the series Frontier Lands, on view at the In her discussion of diaspora and migration, Sydney Biennale, Alan Michelson (Mohawk) sociologist Avtar Brah identifies homing desire considers how a problematic association as the desire to feel at home by negotiating between so-called traditional Native physical and symbolic spaces in such a way as architecture and a supposedly authentic to reckon with the idea of home as an originary Native identity calcified in American visual “mythic place of desire” on the one hand, culture. Inverting ethnographic practices of and on the other hand also with “the lived modeling Native American dwellings, with experience of the [present] locality.” The desire paper models of log cabins this contemporary for an originary home that was left behind Native artist scales down the architecture of is one that envisions home as fixed, and colonialism. When he depicts the cabin that tends to skew narratives of belonging almost Comanche warriors burn in John Ford’s movie exclusively towards the past, providing little The Searchers, Michelson channels memories room for the lived experience of the locality of colonial violence that destroyed tipi and in the present. It may thus be more useful to house alike. To show how Native Americans describe homing desire as the desire to feel at occupied settler-style buildings on their own home in the betweeness of displacement, in terms, Michelson models the 1820s print which movement itself might be considered an shop for a newspaper printed in the Cherokee extension of home. This opens up possibilities alphabet and English. Frontier Lands for a more dynamic notion of space and displaces associations of loss and authenticity 36 from Native American architecture to open DR MOHINI CHANDRA views of indigenous dwelling in modernity. Alexander Brier Marr is a PhD student in Plane views Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of ‘Plane Views’ are photographs taken from Rochester (USA). His dissertation considers aeroplane windows by tourists and migrants depictions of Native American dwellings, alike, giving self-reflexive witness to the ‘in- 1880–2012. between-ness’ of air travel as an experience of modernity. However, such images of celestial skies and earthbound topography are ALISON REID also reworked, through classical and popular culture, into the metaphorical dreamscapes of Caring, comfortable and relaxed – the art of diaspora imagination. Aleks Danko A collection of my father’s photographs, Aleks Danko is an Australian contemporary taken from planes during various family artist whose work examines the cultural migrations of the 1960s and 70s, between and political landscape of Australia, and the the globally scattered territories of Indo- diasporic experience of settlement through Fijian communities, are here linked to the the appropriation of cultural imagery and personal and collective narratives attached discourse. to their production and consumption. For Indians, whose ancestors were sent In a series of installations entitled Songs of to Fiji as indentured labourers, these Australia, Danko appropriates the cultural photographic processes can be seen as imagery of middle class Australia, where a uniquely cross-cultural form of self- every Australian family has a home of their expression, acting to make visual the own, on a quarter acre of land, a bit of aspirational desires of postcolonial diaspora garden, a Hills hoist and a Holden car. It communities. These fluid processes of is a place where memories create a caring, the imagination both map and articulate comfortable and relaxed environment; a contemporary diaspora as a ‘lived sense of belonging. experience’ challenging any notions of Juxtaposing this idealised narrative with his subaltern fixity. memories of home, home is not a place of Dr Mohini Chandra (PhD, RCA) is a visual comfort but rather a strange place which artist. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in must be negotiated. This negotiation allows the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Danko to create a unique space, an artist Wollongong. studio, where he is able to examine the strangeness of home and carefully, but not comfortably, explore a narrative of belonging. DR JOHN DI S TEFANO Alison Reid is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. Her area Becoming-home video of interest is the artistic practice of Aleks Danko and his contribution to Australian “Becoming-home video” extends the contemporary art. traditional notion of “home video” by examining specific video works by artists that rely on various conventions to document experiences of home and belonging within the context of transnationalism. Focusing on the act of witnessing inherent in these works, and based on the Deleuzian notion of becoming 37 together < > apart which stresses a continual on-going process forward understanding or representation of of actualization, works that are “becoming- home and homeland. home video” might be characterized by the distinct ways they foreground the Chrisoula Lionis is a PhD candidate at NIEA, makers’ process of investigating their own UNSW. Her PhD thesis locates its focus displacement whilst witnessing the unstable, on Palestinian national identity and the shifting and disappearing domestic realm relationship between collective trauma and of others. These works also highlight humour in Palestinian art and film. empathy, which in some way overrides the representational drive of much documentary- based practice towards a more performative PROFESSOR LEILA SUJIR mode of engagement. Resonances of home in 3D video spaces: Dr John Di Stefano is a Canadian visual artist/ spatial narratives of displacement filmmaker, writer, and curator, presently Postgraduate Coordinator at the National Migration brings with it a doubled sense Art School (Sydney). Current research of place, with the physicality of home and explores the relationship between identity, its absence playing off the containment displacement and transnationalism. of memory in our bodies that makes us resonant spaces. In my art practice, I have been working towards the construction of CHRISOULA LIONIS a felt space of displacement. 3D stereo video spaces are elastic and dream-like The last sky: dis-orientation and places, ephemeral, yet capable of extending contemporary Palestinian art a sensation of volume, physicality, and presence to the viewer. In a current work- In 1948, the state of Israel was founded in-progress, Chorus of Lungs, an artistic in historical Palestine. The exile, collaboration with Maria Lantin, we are dispossession and fragmentation generated exploring interior spaces as place and site. as a consequence of the events of 1948 Chorus of Lungs works with an ebb and flow were so cataclysmic for Palestinians, of images, a particle-like motion simulating that they describe it as Al-Nakba, or The breathing, moving between the individual Catastrophe. portrait to the larger grouping of the chorus, becoming a conversation with the viewer, not Since the Nakba, Palestinian art has necessarily in words. arguably been defined by the experience of exile and the nostalgia toward the lost Leila Sujir is an artist and a professor at homeland. Having moved increasingly away Concordia University’s Studio Arts Department from the idyllic representation of historical in Montreal. Her video works have been Palestine that dominated Palestinian art for shown in exhibitions in Canada, Australia, the many decades, contemporary artists are United States, India, and the UK. increasingly questioning the vexed question of what constitutes ‘home’, ‘Palestine’ and indeed ‘Palestinianess’. K ATIE DYER This paper will look to the work of artists The lookout Taysir Batniji and Larissa Sansour to explore a Palestinian art that is now characterized This paper addresses the themes in the by the compulsion to narrate the Palestinian exhibition The Lookout, a curatorial project story whilst also illustrating a complex exilic I have developed for the National Art identity that problematizes any straight- School Gallery (Sydney) which considers 38 how contemporary artists might negotiate not this embrace has reinforced disciplinary concepts of connection, connectivity, creating boundaries. Art history is still consumed by networks, relationships and communities debates over form and content, style and today. The artists in the exhibition—Anri iconography, albeit in now in the guise of Sala, Rania Stephan, Locust Jones, and social history and semiotics, the global and Justine Varga—interweave a sense of place the post-colonial. The promise art history and belonging in their work, and articulate once had for previous generations—as a changing ideas about art, the world and their cultural history of images—have largely own social situations as artists. They do so faded. through multiple approaches reflecting the mutating contemporary context in which they This session seeks to interrogate the limits exist. of art history by focusing on the question of the image. In what way can a renewed Purposely focussing on diverse studio emphasis on the image open art history to processes, the exhibition places the artist and other questions and experiences? What value artwork at the fore of the exhibition project is there in considering the image less as a from which ideas, resonances, differences autonomous entity than as a zone of contact, and associations take shape and speak to commerce and translation? In this context varied and various audiences. Concepts can a renewed emphasis on image constitute of globalization and regional specificity a space in which the methodologies of art are rethought through the framework of history can re-engage with the broader transnationality, and the exhibition responds ethical, social and political questions that to shifting geopolitical, cultural and social confront the world in the twenty-first century? realities as interpreted by artists. Katie Dyer is Curator at the National Art School Gallery, Sydney. She has also held JULIE BROOK E positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and The Drawing Center, New York. How the mind imagines itself: an analysis of medieval and renaissance images of the brain in art and science Understanding the Medieval and Renaissance PANEL conception of the brain could provide a new way to analyse the spatial composition of IMAGE-SPACE AND some early Renaissance paintings. At this time perception and cognition were believed THE CURRENCY OF to take place in a series of interconnected cells in the brain. Despite its anatomical ART HISTORY inaccuracies, the Medieval “cellular doctrine” is a sophisticated conceptual model in which CONVENOR perception, imagination, thought, reason and DR RAYMOND SPITERI memory interact continuously to generate a Victoria University of Wellington dynamic state of consciousness. Drawing on contemporary anatomical texts and diagrams, As a discipline art history is remarkably I will identify parallels between this complex resistant to concepts and methodologies from model and the spatial organisation of three outside its field of competence. Although paintings: Vincenzo Foppa’s The Three constituencies within the disciple have Crosses (1450), Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna actively embraced theory in the wake of the and Child (c. 1475–76), and Antonello da cultural turn of the 1980s, more often than Messina’s St Jerome in his Study (c. 1475). 39 together < > apart This hypothesis allows me to consider the DR JOLANTA NOWAK image as an active space in which I can explore connections between the theoretical, Reading Marcel Broodthaers through art conceptual and practical aspects of my history and aesthetics painting practice. Without underplaying the significance of Julie Brooke graduated from the ANU School post-formalist readings of Broodthaers’ of Art (Painting) with Honours in 2008. She is work (that it critiques the museum and a PhD candidate in the ANU Higher Degree examines the relationship between art, the Research program, and tutors in Art Theory. commodity, and the art institution), this paper will argue that Broodthaers’ work also raises aesthetic questions. For instance, as DR RAYMOND SPITERI Benjamin Buchloh has noted, melancholia is present in Broodthaers’ investigation of the Distorted images: modernism, surrealism and museum. Similarly, while he is careful to avoid art history any overtly political representations of the eagle, Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, The relation of surrealism to the discipline Département des Aigles, 1968–1972, of art history has always been fraught, resonates with the eagle’s iconic, and often characterized by misunderstandings, difficult, history. These affective experiences incomprehensibility, and elisions. Within are under examination here. What would it histories of modernism, surrealism has stood mean to, as Thierry de Duve puts it, “taste” apart, a literary intrusion into the medium Broodthaers’ work while also accepting the specific practices of painting and sculpture. critique his work performs? This question Although certain artists could be assimilated relates to our understanding of art history’s into the traditional modernist histories—Miró boundaries: how might post-formalist art and Masson, sometimes Ernst—other artists history sit next to aesthetic philosophy, and remained beyond the pale, too literary, too how might aesthetics open up art history vulgar, too anachronistic. More recently, to a deeper exploration of the relationship surrealism has been redefined through between the experience of art and an psychoanalysis (the uncanny) or dissident understanding of art’s relationship to ethics figures in the movement (Bataille and the and politics? informe), resulting in a redistribution of heroes and villains within a reconfigured Jolanta Nowak is Melbourne Research Fellow modernist canon. Yet both approaches to in Art History at the University of Melbourne. surrealism seek to reduce the diversity and She is researching the position of autonomy complexity of the movement’s history and in contemporary art criticism and the culture to the taxonomical imperatives of art implications that has for understanding art’s history, transposing questions about culture relationship with ethics. into question about art. What lessons can a renewed attention to the role of the image in surrealism bring to art history? DR FIONA MACDONALD Raymond Spiteri lectures in art history at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Inter-generational relations of conceptual His research focuses on the politics and art: protocol and difference culture of surrealism. The recent return to conceptual art as a model of practice through an art-historical curatorial focus on 1960s–70s conceptualism, and an engagement of 1960s–70s artworks 40 by contemporary artists, has been effected PANEL through mediations of the documentary artifacts of 1960–70s conceptual art. In turn MEDIATING VISUAL these mediations have conflated those image documents as both historical evidence and HISTORIES (historical) artwork, establishing a ‘first-wave’ canon and set of paradigms of conceptual art, CONVENOR and a historicized set of reproducible stylistic ROBERT WELLINGTON formalisms. University of Sydney However, what if we understand those documents as protocols for ongoing Recent studies have revealed the propositional frameworks? Approaching complicated, collaborative, mediated, and the ‘first-wave’ through its documentary often amiable relationships between rulers protocols activates those historical traits, and those they engage to produce images putting them back to work as practices in and objects to celebrate their own rule or the contemporary moment, a remediation that of their dynasty. This session will focus that requires the development of a critical on problematizing the traditional artist-patron collaborative thinking. relationship between heads of state and their official artists, looking specifically to the This paper will discuss these intergenerational production of images that celebrate past or relations through two projects: Thérèse contemporary events, as a means of creating Mastroiacovo’s Following Following Piece: accounts of history in all aspects of visual July 8, 2008 to June 2, 2010, and my (Re) culture. Association Area 2006. These contemporary remediations intervene in the structural Submissions are invited from scholars of all neutrality of the first-wave works, bringing into periods, from antiquity to the present, and focus the historical equilibrium that positions may deal with any media from the traditional conceptual art as an historical moment or an fine arts of painting, sculpture and print, to archive of historic resources. They also propose photography, film and new media. Some the discourses of conceptual art are not closed. suggested themes include, but are not limited to: proximity to power – court artists Fiona Macdonald is an artist based in and their place within the ruling strata; the Melbourne, and the Director of the Graduate patron-amateur – the creative partnership Theory Program, Faculty of Art Design & between artist and patron; the mediated Architecture, Monash University. Recent image – official structures and strategies for exhibitions include Power to the People: mediating the historical image; historiography Contemporary Conceptualism at the – re-imaging history to reflect current ideas; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, or ideological images – how political structure Bureau de change at the Walter Phillips is reiterated through the production of visual Gallery, Banff Centre, Canada, and (Re)Points histories. of View (Remake 1) at Optica: centre d’art contemporain, Montréal. ROBERT WELLINGTON The Petite Académie and the visual histories of Louis XIV At the start of the eighteenth century, Abbé Tallemant wrote a history of the small committee of savants who were engaged from 41 together < > apart the beginning of Louis XIV’s reign to interpret Castle, and has become a symbol of Germanic the history of their royal patron. In his account Romanticism. Together they forged an intense of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions, or creative partnership endeavouring to integrate Petite Académie, as they have come to be art, music and architecture into a single known, Tallemant claimed their involvement in aesthetic statement. every major royal commission from the early 1660s, to the end of the century. No aspect of Currently studying Museum Practice at the the visual culture of the Sun King’s court was Sydney Gallery School after completing a beyond the purview of the Petite Académie. Bachelor of Visual Arts in Photography from Auckland University of Technology. It has long been known that these elite men of letters drawn from the Académie Française played an active role in the ‘fabrication’ of ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR the King. However, this paper will argue that MARY ROBERTS they also were the official interpreters of Louis XIV’s visual histories through a process of His Majesty with the red crayon inscribing the images produced under their auspices, alongside the publication of official Between 1865 and 1872 Polish artist catalogues of the tapestries, paintings and Stanislaw Chlebowski produced a battle medals that represent the King’s deeds. painting cycle for Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz. This was, however, no conventional Robert Wellington is a doctoral candidate in commission. In a surprising departure from the department of Art History and Film at the more familiar regal patronal relations, these University of Sydney, preparing a dissertation twenty-six paintings were the outcome of titled ‘The Visual Histories of Louis XIV’. a unique, intimate artistic collaboration. Remarkably seventy-six of the Sultan’s red ink sketches from this creative partnership CANDICE WITTON survive in the National Museum in Cracow. Bringing these drawings and the paintings Between the wood and the world: King in Istanbul back together for the first time, Ludwig II & Richard Wagner in this paper I interpret the visual dialogue between artist and patron. What emerges are Many of Richard Wagner’s operas would not two distinctive forms of authorship; Sultan exist were it not for the support of his patron Abdülaziz as artist-patron and Chlebowski Ludwig II, King of Bavaria. In turn, Ludwig’s as a cosmopolitan artist-entrepreneur. “fairy-tale” castles can be interpreted as a The Sultan established the visual logic of physical manifestation of Wagner’s operas many works and his inclusion of Ottoman and ideas. Ludwig’s obsession with Wagnerian calligraphic inscriptions on some created a myth is pictured throughout the castles’ hybrid visual language that combines the interiors. Thematically decorated with mural word/image relationship of the Ottoman paintings and tapestries, each room is a direct miniature tradition with the western mode of visual representation of Wagner’s operas. easel painting. Ludwig’s architectural ambitions represent an attempted simulation of Wagnerian experience I explore the particular poetics and politics – to set art free from the materialistic of this Ottoman vision of the past in a period preoccupations of society. Today the castle when history making was a dominant form acts as simulacrum and is considered a failed of nation and empire building across the attempt to reconstruct Medieval ideology globe. This cycle, which invites an imaginative and mythologies. Now considered among affinity with the Ottoman Empire’s history the major works of European historicism, it through triumphant combat on the battlefield, was the model for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty coincided with new approaches to history 42 writing by Ottoman intellectuals that also is the principal source of the images used in adapted western modes. The paintings the Abdul-Hamid albums. created an historical narrative emphasizing the expansion and defence of the Empire’s Expanding the discourse on the subject I European borders. In the second half of propose that the visual lexicon of Abdullah the nineteenth century this narrative was Freres’ work hints at a complex strategy particularly resonant when those boundaries towards synthesised and amalgamated forms were again under disputation. Produced in of representation, which particularly suited to a period when diplomacy was as important the Sultan’s ‘synthetic’ modernising project as combat for the Empire’s survival and and its attempt to construct history. diminished military capacities necessitated Vigen Galstyan is a PhD candidate in Art alliances with the superior European powers, History at University of Sydney and Assistant these paintings also played a role in the visual curator photographs at the Art Gallery of culture of Ottoman diplomacy. Installed in his NSW. His research interests include Middle new palaces on the Bosphorus these military Eastern photography, Armenian cinema and history paintings, I argue, were intended to international poster art. impress upon visiting European royalty the cultural sophistication of the reigning Sultan and the proud historical legacy of the Empire on the world stage. MARTIN SILVERTON Mary Roberts is the author of Intimate Mediating visual histories Outsiders. The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, Duke, This paper addresses the topic of mediating 2007 and has co-edited four books. Her visual histories by examining aspects of the current book is on nineteenth-century Istanbul cinematic theory and film practice of Russian as a site of artistic exchange. filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986). His work is emblematic of certain problematic relations between artist and patron within VIGEN GALSTYAN official structures and strategies for mediating the historical image in the Soviet Union post- Stalin and in the shadow of the enormous The game of identity: Abdullah Freres and the influence of Sergei Eisenstein’s theories and Abdul Hamid albums practice of intellectual montage. Tarkovsky The albums of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II expresses what he calls a radical opposition depicting the Ottoman Empire between 1880 to Eisenstein’s way of using the frame to and 1893 have received critical attention codify intellectual formulae: ‘Eisenstein makes in recent years due to their unique political, thought into a despot: it leaves no “air”, cultural and aesthetic relevance to the nothing of that unspoken elusiveness which is post-colonial discourse on Orientalism and perhaps the most captivating quality of all art’. photography. Of course, the relationship between these two giants of Russian and World Cinema is The photographers whose work makes up not as starkly simple as this polarity suggests. these compendiums are ciphers whose The aim of this paper is to demonstrate some aims, intentions or backgrounds do not ways in which Tarkovsky presents his ideas or at best, only fleetingly figure in these about time, history, and cinema within the discussions. This paper looks to re-assess dynamics of the artist-patron relation. the collaboration between the patron and the artist through an analysis of the wider oeuvre I will examine two of Tarkovsky’s films – and background of the Armenian/Ottoman Andrei Rublev (1966) and Mirror (1975). photographers Abdullah Fréres, whose studio These two films offer unique responses to the 43 together < > apart issues at hand and more importantly, present RODNEY SWAN those responses in forms that are optimally expressed through cinematic means. Andrei Secret commissions – the artists illustrated Rublev explores the relationship between book and the French Resistance art and society in a series of episodes in the life of the 15th century monk and painter of Even as the victorious Nazi army entered icons, Andrei Rublev. The historical details Paris in June 1940, the invaders turned their of his life are meagre, although Tarkovsky’s minds to another front, the cultural war. stated aim was definitely not to make a The patchwork French resistance fought historical fiction biopic. Likewise, Mirror is back, determined to preserve France’s composed of autobiographical materials long artistic history and liberal aesthetics. and weaves an intimate tale out of family Resistance artists such as Fougeron, memories that resonate with a universal Fautrier and Pignon responded accordingly, experience of Russian history through an expressing their quest for freedom through aesthetic logic of dreams and poems, actuality tri-colour and semi-abstract art. During the films and historical texts. Both films attracted next four years, they promoted their cultural controversy and personal criticism from Soviet history using a symbolic talisman, the cultural authorities that were indicative of illustrated artist’s book, known to the French cultural and political tensions within the spirit as the livre d’artiste. of the age. Both films also pose questions about the purpose of art in society, and the This paper describes how these modernist rights and duties of an artist towards society artists worked at great risk to their lives and the state, particularly in repressive on this secret commission. These artists political circumstances. illustrated books, imaged and printed in hidden ateliers and distributed by secret Currently, Martin is pursuing postgraduate couriers, boldly reflecting the ideals of Free studies for a PhD in the Department of Art France. This paper will discuss how these History and Film Studies at the University book images, experimental and audacious, of Sydney with Dr Laleen Jayamanne and recorded the history of the occupation. Dr Richard Smith. His thesis, Untimely Mediations: Cinema and the Writing of History Rodney Swan, BSc(Hons), MTech, (some uses and abuses of the moving image MArtAdmin. Rodney is a Doctoral Candidate for historical thinking), is focused on how at COFA, UNSW, Sydney. A passionate cinema as an image of thought expressed collector of artist illustrated books, he is in montage presents historical material as researching the causes of the post WW II an untimely mediation. In 2009 Martin was resurgence of these books. Rodney has awarded a University Medal and a First Class presented papers on this genre and is Honours degree in History and Film Studies curating an exhibition on the topic. from the University of Sydney. The subject of his Honours thesis was the relationship between historical writing and cinema in the WALTER McINTOSH work of Gilles Deleuze and Andrei Tarkovsky. The patron as artist: Jerome Hill and New York underground film of the 1960s Filmmaker Jerome Hill (1905–1972) occupied the rare position of being both an award-winning artist and heir to an American fortune – his grandfather was railroad baron James J. Hill. Toward the end of his life, Hill 44 made the autobiographical documentary Film Portrait (1972). For this work, frequently PANEL cited as his masterpiece, Hill had access to a wealth of film and photographic material MODERNISM, from his prominent St Paul, Minnesota family. Hill’s re-purposing of this material in Film EVERYDAY LIFE Portrait transforms visual documentation of a AND COLLECTIVE family that built a railway empire into a more personal meditation on the nature of the CREATIVITY artistic impulse. Simultaneous to making Film Portrait, CONVENOR Jerome Hill was principal benefactor of the DR ANDREW MCNAMAR A Anthology Film Archives in New York City, Queensland University of Technology which provided a permanent home and regular screenings for much of the New York The critical and aesthetic ambitions of early underground film scene of the 1960s and modernism often entailed re-evaluating the 70s. By closely analysing selected sequences boundaries between everyday life and the from Film Portrait, we will see how Jerome Hill aesthetic. For example, Constructivism moved – influenced by the New York underground into what was called “production art,” or what he financially supported – was able to use we would now call design. As a consequence, avant-garde filmmaking techniques (such many projects were devised that also entailed as painting directly onto the emulsion of old re-configuring the traditional notion of the home movies) to intervene directly in the artist as well as challenging the traditional visual representation of his personal history. parameters and configuration of the work of art. Early modernism thereby could be Walter is a PhD candidate in the department of regarded as a contradictory project in that it Art History and Film Studies at the University both reinforced traditional ideas of the artist of Sydney. His thesis examines the way a as a unique creative force in society and poetic sense of subjective memory is created also proposed quite different ideas based on in autobiographical documentary films via collaboration, collective creativity, revisionist the interaction of image and voiceover. pedagogy, the social role of art, etc. Before embarking on his PhD studies, Walter completed a Master of Arts degree at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) in Documentary Editing. In 2008, PETER S TUPPLES Walter directed the award-winning documentary Projecting The Body, about Australian Malevich in Vitebsk: art into everyday life experimental filmmaker Stephen Cummins. In November 1919, in the midst of the Civil War following the two Russian Revolutions of 1917, Kazimir Malevich, a leader of the Russian avant-garde, became director of the art school in Vitebsk. Malevich lead a group of radical students in the development of his Suprematist ideas into an ‘art for the people’. The group collectively designed street banners, posters, slogans and façade decorations to change the exterior of this provincial backwater, for a brief revolutionary moment, into a new space, bringing art onto 45 together < > apart the street in an effort to raise the people’s Ms Volfson is an art critic and art business consciousness above and beyond that of consultant specialising in Russian art. She has current political and material concerns. MS in Economics from Florida State University and runs an art consulting firm ArtMers. Within Unovis, the research arm of the school, Malevich and his closest colleagues developed collective ideas for a utopian architecture as well as dynamic conceptual ANDREW MCNAMAR A image play, that also sought to raise the function of art to a new level of social Erich Buchholz: art-historical limbo dynamics. In 1972 Erich Buchholz declared, ‘art history Peter Stupples, in retirement, is currently is nothing but a forgery,’ and that there is little Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory difference between poor art-historical analysis at the Dunedin School of Art at the Otago and deliberate misinformation ‘spawned by Polytechnic He was formerly Associate some fictional system of aesthetics.’ Earlier Professor and Head of the Department of Art (in 1957) Duchamp had warned artists about History and Theory at the University of Otago. the futility of playing the victim: ‘In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator’ in order JULIA VOLFSON to bestow a social value on their art and to be included ‘in the primers of Art History.’ Russian Constructivism: laboratory Was there something paranoid about experiments under pressure of Soviet Buchholz’s claim to be marginalised by a Sociology ‘fictional system of aesthetics’? Buchholz In the wake of Christina Lodder’s himself asserted a system of aesthetics that groundbreaking study on Russian today looks no less fictional, being based Constructivism, it is commonly assumed that on collective ambition, the inspiration of the radical swing to the realm of utilitarian Gothic art, on perceptual renewal as well as application, or “productivism,” was the dislocation, and the pursuit of a mysterious natural outcome of the Constructivism’s own mathematical formula. Buchholz assumed the trajectory. I counter this shift was externally position of the archetypal modernist ‘extra- imposed by ideologically engaged sociological territorial’ in order to conjure a different kind theorists, in order to steer Constructivist ideas of modernism. into the new program of Productivism. The Andrew McNamara’s publications include: recent evidence shows that initially Laboratory Sweat—the subtropical imaginary (2011); Constructivism was largely ignorant of An Apprehensive Aesthetic (2009); Modern collective and social values. Instead, it Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in emerged from self-sufficient, a-compositional Australia, with Ann Stephen and Philip Goad “anti-aesthetics”, deeply rooted in the formal (2008). research of the Russian avant-garde, and the works of Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. If Russian avant-garde involvement with DOMINIKA GLOGOWSKI social utility did not originate from its own theoretical tenets, but instead resulted from Humanizing technology through art within a the new project, curated by the group of non- planetary society artists, then Productivism must be considered as an attempt to exert social control over Plastics entered the stage of our cultural artists in the interests of socialist project. landscape in the 1960s. The fabrics’ 46 translucent quality paralleled the almost entirely obscured by the religious, proclamation of intercultural exchange economic and gendered protocols of their in the communication era. In 1967, production. Following Gell, I propose ways Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi of interpreting their aesthetics, agency and presented a model for the US Pavilion at utility, and I examine the predicament of Osaka’s Expo that was to be held in 1970. the cosmopolitan viewer/beholder for their Levitating balloons and pneumatic walls and interpretation in the outside world. With these roofs transformed art into a catalyst for a characteristics in mind, and contra John participatory and interactive environment. Clark’s declaration that “it is an art historical Collaborating with artist and sociologist fact that modernity in all Asian art cultures John McHale, former founder of the British has developed out of contact with that of Independent Group and research associate Euramerica” (1998:49), I suggest that these to Richard Buckminster Fuller, Noguchi’s artefacts constitute an instance of a regional teamwork mirrors shared holistic worldviews. modernism – the Afghan Modern – which Nature, science and technology fused into a has emerged independent of any cultural universal bio-centric principle, embracing the dependency or external artistic influence. visitor as a World Citizen in a growing-together Planetary Society. Complicating one-sided narratives on Noguchi’s postwar landscape DR DAVID AK ENSON oeuvre that has mainly been read through the lens of nature as embodied Japanese identity, Give conflict a chance: social participation my talk offers ground for the reconsideration and disagreement of his quest on ‘humanizing’ technology through art. Whether we use the term “relational aesthetics”, “participation”, or “aesthetic Ms. Dominika Glogowski is doctoral candidate communities”, the recent return to political in Art History, artist and founder of artEC/ and ethical forms of art involves a return to Oindustry and focuses on the social role the avant-gardist strategy of collapsing the of science and technology in postwar distinction between art and life, but without transnational exchanges in art and architecture. the risks associated with the earlier avant- gardes projects, nor with the same potential for what Jacques Ranciere calls “dissensus” NIGEL LENDON or confrontation with the given sensible order. With participants being embedded in the Anonymous and yet modern: collective process the gap between art and audience, agency, unknown authors, and the Afghan production and reception, is all but collapsed Modern in much collective practice leading to an The contemporary artworks which narrate affirmative critical mass. This lack of critical peoples’ experiences of the Afghan wars distance reduces the role of the spectator from 1979 to the present present their inviting questions about how democratic such Western audiences with new challenges. collective practice can be. These artefacts – knotted woollen carpets Drawing on Kant, Ranciere and Duchamp, which are commonly known as “war rugs” a number of participatory events will be – are produced within a framework of discussed with the view to developing a collective agency which disguises the roles different understanding of democratic conventionally associated with authorship. participation, and in conjunction, a renewed The absence of an author in the conventional role for criticism will be suggested. Western sense is the consequence of the circumstances of their production – that are 47 together < > apart David Akenson is an artist and lecturer overlapping between the making of time in art theory at the University of Southern and space in the dynamics of a relational Queensland. His PhD Art in Parallax: art practice. As Erin Manning writes, it is Painting, Place, Judgment engaged the the making of time that guides the “how of art and life debate through the concept of experience” (2009: 54). parallax. Our presentation will suggest that a relational practice is the felt force of togetherness from which the work emerges in the “how” of its collective iteration. This is a force felt in the PANEL rhythm of experience that Stitching Time’s provokes. Such a force exceeds the art object OF MATERIALITIES as such, and requires a shift of attention from concepts of ‘form’ to those of technicity and AND THE MAKING OF processuality. Such an approach to thinking TIME IN RELATIONAL the engagement of process through the prism of time making as collective process ART punctures the contained significatory surface of subject/object, process/product, CONVENOR experimental/rehearsed binarisms, and thus require us to challenge the privileged position TONI PAPE of ‘the artist’. Université de Montréal The panel will use Stitching Time’s aesthetic, Throughout 2011 and 2012, artists and scholars conceptual, ethical, political and performative composing this panel have gathered to create dimensions as a springboard into a discussion and sew. These encounters constituted the of how an ecology of practices highlights an first phase of Erin Manning’s participatory ethic-aesthetic through the making of time work Stitching Time, installed at the 18th (Guattari, 1995). Sydney Biennale. The production of 2000+ handsewn pieces function as a relational score, activating a dynamic of gathering. The transcontinental Sewing Circles that have CHARLOTTE FARRELL stretched across Montreal, Sydney, Berlin, Florianópolis and Helsinki, invited the crafting Textures and intimacies of storytelling of compositions with a variety of fabric patterns, The unique way in which time and space buttons and magnets. Rather than an object- is made through the mythologising of oriented participatory process, the artifacts the experiential seems to have a curious produced emerged from “the crafting of facts relationship with the gesture of stitching. of experience”: collecting, composing, grouping I will touch upon the textural and sensual through the time of togetherness spent making- aspects of Erin Manning’s Stitching Time, with the collective (Massumi 2011: 57). before discussing roundtable storytelling This panel proposes a discussion of a as a force for intimacy. The performative crafting of relation that emerges from a aspect of attention and duration required focus on qualitative modes of time making. for such collaborative art process – namely Our main concern is the following question: the generous, intimate, dance-like exchange how does the art object (in its concept and between listening, storytelling, silence – is key materiality) invite and articulate engagements to explore how such themes cross my own with qualities and textures of time? Our practice as performance artist, researcher presentations will discuss the immanent and teacher. 48 Charlotte Farrell is a Theatre and Performance perspective, but from the collective Studies PhD candidate at UNSW. She is movements they elicit. Nevertheless relational writing about theatre director Barrie Kosky’s propositions rarely change over time, Australian performances, engaging with his remaining within a mode of reification of the work through the prism of affect. object. Drawing from the process of Stitching TONI PAPE Time my focus is set on the duration of gathering, particularly once the object created The time of Stitching Time disappears with the event, to consider rhythms of action and the formalities of The time of relational art is not that of object- perishing between bodies (participants, oriented art, which privileges products over audience, the artwork). The materials process. Relational art as we define it here involved in the relational practice are must conceive time differently and develop proposed as technical tools that enable the techniques to resist final form as its purpose. production of a territory for practices not yet To say that relational art gives process defined. With the idea of a perishing a shift precedence over products is to say that it is in the tradition of prescriptive participatory more interested in the becoming of things works is sought, suggesting that the object than in their being. In other words, it must doesn’t preexists the relational event, it is, focus on indeterminacies and potentialities rather the event that crafts the object. of the artwork, a making that allows the object to differ from itself in time. It is these Dr Bianca Scliar Mancini studied Art indeterminacies as well which make that Education and taught photography before relational art does not simply take place; it starting to work with Public Art. Currently she happens-with. Taking Stitching Time as its produces and researches relational events as point of departure, this presentation explores propositions to think the urban composition, the project’s underlying concept of topological in partnership between the departments of time and investigates how the artwork’s Architecture, Performance and Philosophy. relational techniques directly engage with this concept. LESLIE PLUMB Toni Pape is a PhD candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature at Rhythm and relational becoming Université de Montréal. His research focuses on concepts of time in film and television. The relational process facilitated by the sewing circles of Stitching Time, foregrounds shifting rhythms of experience. In such a setting, participants are pulled into a flux of DR BIANCA SCLIAR MANCINI intimacy and attention. This is most palpable From relational objects to choreographing as sewing gestures move in confluence with relationalities – variations of densities of conversation. For instance, as platitudes what matters shift into intimate exchanges, the relational experience contracts and a shift is perceivable Starting from the notion of anti-art, where within the continuous movements of stitching the invention of objects is secondary to the and button browsing. As conversations stutter relationalities triggered, this paper focus on and stall, the rhythm once again changes, and the idea of relational objects (Lygia Clark) and an uncanny and palpable sense of collective ‘choreographic objects’ (William Forsythe) ‘becoming’ emerges. This will explore how to investigate how material composition these shifts in rhythm foreground a transversal cannot be analyzed from a contemplative sense of becoming that activates and invites a 49 together < > apart kind of collective experience that is in contrast BARBAR A CAMPBELL to treatments of collaboration as sharing of tasks in tandem. Of interest are the ways in Shadow of the structure which different existential territories (such as sewing, eating and storytelling) can be My practice for the last 30 years has been brought into resonance with that experience of in the interdisciplinary field of performance, creating with which is an underlying interest of which is to say (for me), work in which time collaborative engagements. signatures structure other elements, be they objects, sites, texts, actions, or subjects Leslie Plumb is an interdisciplinary Artist (including audience, performer and audience working as a freelance Web Designer and as performer). Each performance project Developer. She is currently the Artistic Director summons its own duration, setting, objects for Inflexions, an open-access journal for and actions. Sometimes, these projects have research-creation sponsored by the Sense Lab. worked within the superstructure of ‘the institution’ (museum, archive, university, for example) in order to examine the very nature of the institution. In talking about some of PANEL these works, I will attempt to uncover a metaphor that suggests a relationship more PERFORMANCE ART symbiotic than the one that Sideshow/Main- – IS IT A SIDESHOW? Event seems to imply. Barbara Campbell began her PhD CONVENOR candidature in 2012 at Sydney College of the NICHOLAS T SOUTAS Arts, University of Sydney, researching how Sydney College of the Arts migratory birds direct human performance. Rose Lee Goldberg has always been insistent that performance art as we know it today has DR CALEB KELLY been made with a full knowledge of its history within and in relation to the visual arts, and Noise performed in the art museum that performance artists have always shaped In the last 20 years sound has grown into 20th century art. It was never separate from a fully blown field of research within the the visual arts but contingent in advocating for university and within the arts. There is change not only in the political and cultural currently a strong desire to show sound filled conditions but also in critically challenging art work and performances in art museums the formal aspects and boundaries of the and galleries. Sound however does not always visual arts. So why is it still considered a play ball, it interferes and interrupts the quiet margin both within the academy as well as and pious appreciation of fine art. Sound within exhibition events. Why have academics in performance can be highly spectacular, and curators continued to overlook the larger than life, extreme and dangerous, significance of performance art and include yet in the last ten years there has been a it peripherally as a sideshow, or as spectacle. conscious attempt to ‘curate’ it (as proven by How does performance art function in todays the number of ‘curated’ sound events). The contemporary art environment, particularly discussion will focus on recent work by Marco when the economy and market of objects is Fusinato and his investigations of noise in the so pervasive and complicit. Does performance museum. art still function with agency and with a capacity for resistance. Caleb Kelly is an academic, event director and curator working in the area of the sound 50 arts. He is the author of Cracked Media: & Self 1993). The problem with the ‘having The Sound of Malfunction (MIT Press) and to have been there’ argument is that it is in editor of Sound (MIT Press and Whitechapel danger of excluding scholars and viewers Gallery). who did not see the performance from writing about and/or reflecting upon these works. This forecloses on the history of the genre. DR BLAIR FRENCH This applies both to historical works and works that happen today. There is also the Nothing like performance issue of the performance made exclusively for the camera; works which never had a If we think of performance as ‘sideshow’ live audience but were made specifically to within the exhibition programming of be reproduced on film or video. This paper contemporary art, we might also add will explore the ‘liveness’ debates in relation a consonant and look to its status as to performance art and its ‘presence’ in ‘slideshow’ – that is, as a practice displaced the museum, critical literature and the art into image and trace forms; as a partially historical canon. sublimated, partially displaced, often wholly subsumed and always elusive form at the Anne Marsh is author of LOOK: Contemporary centre of post-installation conventions of Australian Photography since 1980 (2010), contemporary art. If the primary, temporal Pat Brassington: This is Not a Photograph and physical encounter with performance is (2006), The Darkroom: Photography and the often reduced to ‘sideshow’ as this session Theatre of Desire (2003) and Body and Self: abstract proposes as a discussion point, is Performance Art in Australia, 1969–1992 that perhaps directly related to the ubiquity (1993). of performance in all its expanded guises across contemporary art, guises so much more easily absorbed into both the exhibition and research institution? This presentation PANEL will focus on conditions and paradigms of ‘liveness’ through reference to recent PERILOUS RELATIONS : curatorial projects and specific concerns regarding the challenges ‘liveness’ poses for BIOAESTHETICS AND exhibition models. EUGENICS Dr Blair French is Executive Director of Artspace, Sydney and Curatorial Convenor for CONVENORS SCAPE 6 and SCAPE 7 Christchurch Biennials of Art in Public Space. Recent exhibition ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR projects include Nothing Like Performance at FAY (FAE) BR AUER Artspace. University of New South Wales ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR PROFESSOR ANNE MARSH ANNE MAX WELL University of Melbourne Performance art and its remediation While recent histories of eugenics have In 1993 I argued: “Performance art is a visual exposed how extensively marriage art practice which is located in a specific legislation, segregation and sterilization were time and place and involves the presence of institutionalized by modern nation states, the artist before his/her audience . . .” (Body few have explored how eugenics functioned 51 together < > apart more subtly and insidiously through their TIM SMITH relationship to the art and culture of the body. Although posited as practices that Ancestries written in a face: the story occurred separately from one another, of ethnographic portraiture in Northern by no means were they autonomous, let Australia alone innocuous. When viewed through the lens of Michel Foucault’s biopower, Francis Galton’s development of a process he bioaesthetics appeared to have acted as the called ‘composite portraiture’ drew on earlier perfect partner for inculcating eugenics in anthropometric approaches of photographic Australia, North and South America, Britain, comparison. This method, which aimed China, Japan and Europe - from France and to reveal the distinguishing features and Italy to Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Romania, therefore the distinctive nature of different Russia, Serbia and Turkey. Their mutually ethnic and social groups, followed on from endorsing and enhancing partnership was earlier attempts to map the different races of manifest by the absorption of eugenics into the world. body cultures and conversely, body cultures In 1869, the eminent anatomist and into Eugenic Societies, as demonstrated by physiologist, Thomas Henry Huxley initiated a Eugen Sandow’s physical culture in Britain, plan to assemble a collection of all the races La Culture Physique of Edmond Desbonnet of the British Empire. He was particularly in France, Belgium and Switzerland, Bernarr keen to obtain ‘photographs of Australian McFadden’s Physical Culture Schools Aboriginal peoples’, then regarded as among in America, and The Dupain Institute of the most primitive still living. Physical Education and Medical Gymnastics opened in Sydney by George Dupain. Their While Huxley’s project failed to realize its clandestine relationship was disclosed by the greater objective, many of its principles were paintings and sculptures portraying the fit absorbed into the aesthetics of nineteenth body in International Eugenic Conferences century ethnographic portraiture. Using and Exhibitions, Natural History Museums, Foelsche’s work as a case study, I will the Darwin Museum in Moscow, the German examine the underlying scientific aesthetics of Hygiene Museum in Dresden and the Great ethnographic portraiture in Australia during the German Art Exhibitions. late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Tim Smith is Senior Manager of RMIT Link. By focusing upon these manifestations, His PhD, at the University of Melbourne, this conference session seeks to illuminate investigates the photography of Paul Foelsche, how eugenics was able to function as a research that began at the Northern Territory bioaesthetic that was implicit not explicit, University. He co-curated the South Australian dissuasive not didactic and, following Museum’s exhibition, The Policeman’s Eye and Foucault’s theory of “docile bodies”, his biography of Foelsche is in Routledge’s unofficial, insidious and coercive. In Encyclopedia of 19th Century Photography. unravelling the binary spawned between the eugenically aestheticized body and the physiologically impaired one, as well as the “feeble-minded”, ethnic minorities and MICAELA PATTISON indigenous people, this session also seeks to expose some of the dire ramifications of these The art and science of modern reproduction: perilous relations. cultivating the eugenic being in early twentieth century Spain Students of eugenics in Spain are intrigued and at times bewildered by the prominent 52 place of Spanish anarchists in the upright breasts to signify what Maillol called dissemination of Galtonian principles, and “her promise of maternity”. Since floppy, by the development of cultural models for drooping breasts signalled degeneration, a stateless society founded upon eugenic depression, undesirable fertility and breast ideals, in which reproduction is recast as milk deficiency, these sculptures of upright “both an art form and a scientific venture.” breasts encapsulated woman’s pre and In this paper, the graphic art that featured in postnatal propensity for healthy conception Valencian anarchist cultural review Estudios, and bountiful nutrition. By focusing upon will be explored as a conduit through which the curious convergences between the to examine several key challenges that bioaesthetics and eugenics of the Third the Spanish case poses for the broader Reich and the Third Republic, as manifest understanding of the history of eugenics. by Maillol’s Mediterranean Classicism and Representations of maternity will be closely Thorak’s Nazi Classicism, this paper will reveal scrutinized, particularly the cover art work the tyranny imposed upon women to attain by graphic designers such as photomontage and maintain ‘upright breasts’. specialists, Josep Renau Berenguer and Manuel Monleón—responsible for some Fay (Fae) Brauer is Associate Professor in Art of the most iconic antifascist posters History and Cultural Theory at The University of the Spanish Civil War—in order to of New South Wales College of Fine Arts and highlight the manner by which eugenic Research Professor for Visual Art Theory, notions of womanhood were blended with School of Cultural Studies and Creative neomalthusian and pacifist principles. Industies at the University of East London. Art, Sex and Eugenics, Corpus Delecti, co- Micaela Pattison is nearing completion of her edited with Anthea Callen was awarded ‘best PhD dissertation in history. Her work explores book anthology of the year prize for 2008’ sex reform, eugenics and other sources by the AAANZ. Her other books include The of political and cultural conflict in Spain’s Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Second Republic (1931–39). Visual Culture (The University Press of New England) and Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the French Civilizing Mission ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR (Cambridge). Her new book projects include FAY (FAE) BR AUER Picturing Evolution and Extinction, and Visions and Visionaries: Symbolism, Science and The maternal breast: republican Occultism. bioaesthetics, nazi eugenics and avant-garde fascism DR OLIVER WATTS To regenerate the Western race, women in Duane Hanson’s bioaesthetics and the France and Germany were urged to rebuild democratic sovereign effigy their bodies and to monitor the outcome through the uprightness of their breasts. The This paper uses the work of Duane Hanson requisite sign of healthy fertility and feminine to discuss the way we are all interpellated by beauty in Neo-Lamarkian and Race Hygienist the law at the site of, and through our bodies. bioaesthetics, ‘upright breasts’ became the The paper inverts the traditional reading of focus of French and German puericulture and this work as visceral and corporeal and sees visual culture as epitomized by the sculptures the corpus instead as a symbolic political of Aristide Maillol and Josef Thorek. Not corpus. In this way it is perhaps not correct to only were their women sculpted with fully see them as an extension of sculptural history developed torsos, muscular arms and strong but part of a line through the traditional legs but also with naturally round, firm, sovereign effigy, or imago (the portrait busts 53 together < > apart of ancient Rome). The disciplinary society (or invites a consideration of contemporary art university discourse) turns the body into a not as a homogeneous phenomenon with site of knowledge, but is there an unspoken overarching techniques and strategies, but as political basis of our bodies, a ‘bare life’? In a collection of heterogeneities, each in their this case the cast becomes just the animal own way concerned with the production of ‘bare life’ that is waiting for its symbolic the new, from a set of specific parameters investment through certain means: the title, and motives which resist generalisation. How the occupation, the clothing, the medals and do we actively negotiate new possibilities hats. Hanson’s bioaesthetics show we are against a backdrop of widely differing all a number waiting to take our place in the traditions and trajectories, while at the same symbolic order. time resisting the passive spectatorship associated with such universalising clichés as Oliver Watts is an artist and art theorist. His ‘globalisation’ and ‘contemporary art’? work looks at the nexus of art and law as a corollary of political theology. DR CAROLINE VERCOE Public bodies/private selves: the quiet PANEL practice of Jeremy Leatinu’u RELATIONAL This paper compares the relatively emergent practice of New Zealand artist Jeremy CONTEMPORARIES Leatinu’u with that of American artist Adrian Piper, who has developed over decades CONVENORS a significant body of writing and art. It considers how their respective personal DR GREG MINISSALE histories have influenced their art as well The University of Auckland as how they engage with broader concerns relating to power, ownership and social DR CAROLINE VERCOE intervention. Art History, The University of Auckland Dr. Caroline Vercoe’s research is primarily What are the relations between different in the area of contemporary Pacific art and cultural manifestations of contemporary performance art. Much of her work engages art? How can we communicate concepts with issues relating to postcolonial concerns, about the nature of contemporary art without gender and representation. sliding into generalisations about globalisation and powerlessness? Rather than passively accepting contemporary art as just another DR GREGORY MINISSALE monolithic, global, capitalist phenomenon, this panel invites critical analyses of diverse A contemporary pointillism? contemporary modes of art and their antagonisms and interactions. Michel Tuffery (New Zealand), Ai Weiwei (China), Brian Jungen (Canada) and Rana ‘Participative’ art (Bishop, 2006) and Rashid (Pakistan) are four contemporary ‘relational aesthetics’ (Bourriaud, 1998) artists who adopt similar artistic strategies have drawn our attention to cooperative that contrast mass-produced and acts between individuals in artmaking, easily recognisable global images (what emphasising social interaction as creative. psychologists call a coarse-grained vision However, instead of relations between of objects) with local and culturally specific individuals in contemporary art, this panel details of facture (involving a fine-grained 54 vision of objects). Thus these artists use Rebecca Coates is an independent curator optical problems and gestalts as ways and writer based in Melbourne. She is to explore cultural contrasts. This paper Associate Curator at the Australian Centre for discusses how these artists introduce fine- Contemporary Art; sessional lecturer and tutor, grained visual details into the coarse-grained University of Melbourne, where she is also features of their artworks forcing viewers to completing a PhD. adjust focus. This adjustment in focus is used to suggest tensions between local cultural identification and globalisation. DR CAROLYN BARNES & Gregory Minissale lectures in art history DR BILLY GRUNER at the University of Auckland and is the author of Framing Consciousness in Art A new ‘art for artists’ model: a post 20thc (Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi: 2008) discussion on the primacy of the artist’s role and (forthcoming) The Psychology of in collaborating with others to make post Contemporary Art (Cambridge: Cambridge 20thc ideas available for use University Press). Art has various perceived uses, from achieving personal fulfilment and expressing resistance to supporting the emergence of creative societies REBECCA COATES and economies and driving urban renewal. Some uses are broadly social. Others are for Collaborating with the past artists and are purely constructive. Artists are The 2012 Adelaide Biennale of Australian a primary audience for other art makers, such Art, PARALLEL COLLISIONS explored how support being crucial for the delivery of new art ‘ideas form, converge and re-form through models. This paper discusses significant recent time.’ Collaboration, between artists, writers, collaborative activity between artists engaged architects, and the curators themselves, in non-objective and other kinds of reductive were inherent to this theme. For the first art in Australasia, Europe and North America. time, Biennale projects were presented in the Non-objectivity has a difficult relationship to Gallery’s permanent exhibition spaces, in the normative contemporary art, leading artists to Art Gallery of South Australia’s Elder Wing of act together in support of what has become, Australian Art. This paper discusses two of after modernism, a specialized practice. The these interventions: Tom Nicholson’s Evening paper explores the organic communicative Shadows (2010–11) a project in which he processes that have formed the geographically ‘attempted to re-animate a colonial image’, extended network that circulates artworks, taking H.J. Johnstone’s collection work ideas and artists in intrinsic and vital ways, Evening Shadows, backwater of the Murray, contributing to the continued, dynamic South Australia (1880), as its starting point. unfolding of non-objective art. Jonathan Jones similarly challenged notions The cornerstones of the network are a set of the grand colonial narrative of Western Art of artist-initiated exhibition venues: AC4CA by reinterpreting works from the permanent (Perth), CCNOA (Brussels), GKG (Bonn), collection that portrayed aspects of the H29 (Brussels), Haus Konstructive (Zurich), Murray-Darling River System. His project Hebel_121 (Basel), IS Projects (Leiden), created a new Aboriginal frame in which to Konsortium (Düsseldorf), Minus Space interpret a colonial past. Both works spoke to (Brooklyn), The Narrows (Australia), Non- universal concerns of reimagined histories, Objectif Sud (Tulette), ParisCONCRET social engagement, and the self-conscious (Paris), Peloton (Australia), Project Initiative evolution of a Western Art cannon. Tilburg (Tilburg), PS (Amsterdam), Raum 2810 (Bonn) and SNO (Sydney). Social 55 together < > apart media has been an important conduit for paper argues that the label ‘savage’ is always the development of the network and for already in excess of those ethnographic documenting the rich, global topology of non- and historical constraints. Through the objective art. The network models the value consumption of candies, or the activation of cooperative interdependence among artists of vaporous environments, these artworks and the sense of a shared artistic heritage provoke ideas of contagious and vital fields in supporting artistic diversity in the face of of affect that provoke unwitting forms of an affirmative, market-driven mainstream art participation that operate beyond the senses. world. It shows how differentiation and the stating of values are essential if contemporary Chris Braddock is an artist and academic. art is not to be confined to the choices See www.imageandtext.org.nz Braddock’s of established authoritative bodies and forthcoming book Performing Contagious institutional or biased constructed systems. Bodies discusses objects that stem from performance art through the theories of Dr Carolyn Barnes is a Senior Research Fellow animism in magic. in the Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology. Her research focuses on the unfolding of modernism in Australian art and K ATE BRETTK ELLY-CHALMERS design. Billy Gruner graduated in 2003 from Sydney Time-cycles: temporal experience in recent University after completing a range of degrees art practices dating back to the late 1980s – in the visual This paper will examine different theories arts. Worked from 1995 as a professional of temporal experience in relation to recent contemporary artist in Australia and abroad artworks. Time is unique in that while we and since that time also operated as an experience the temporal properties of objects independent scholar. or situations unfolding in the world at large— waiting for a bus or anticipating success—our experience itself extends in time (Phillips, DR CHRIS BR ADDOCK 2009). Whereas qualities of space or colour may be perceived with equal vividness, Contagious infiltrates: Dane Mitchell’s such experiences are not actually spatial or Radiant Matter coloured. Time, however, has the capacity to represent itself. A provocation: Jacques Derrida’s notion of the ‘trace structure’ is profoundly ‘savage’ in its Many recent artworks take advantage of assertion that the sign has a real connection time’s unique aspect by attending to the with its world. That word ‘savage’ is used by viewer’s sensation and experience of duration. late-nineteenth-century British anthropologists Studies of temporal-consciousness seek Edward Burnett Tylor and James George to identify a universal cognitive experience Frazer. They observed in ‘savage’ magical of time and may offer a useful structure practices a breakdown in oppositional for the discussion of various temporal structures of life/death, organic/inorganic, registers. Nonetheless, this paper will look subject/object, linked to a ‘force’ that precedes how divergent cultural understandings may those terms related and contagiously infiltrates challenge these homogenising philosophies all materiality beyond reason. This, it turns by focussing on the work of Haroon Mirza out, is a staple of Derridean deconstruction. and other artists. Discussing Felix Gonzales Torres’s “Untitled” (Lover Boys) series (from 1991), and Dane Mitchell’s 2011 Radiant Matter series, this 56 Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers is a doctoral Art History at the University of Auckland candidate in the Department of Art History examining how dance concepts are engaged at The University of Auckland. With a with in the work of selected New Zealand background in curating contemporary art, she contemporary artists. I am attending this also contributes to a number of Australasian conference due to the support of the art publications. Chartwell Collection. VICTORIA WYNNE-JONES PANEL “I will bark as a mad dog.” Particular instances of becoming-animal in performance RELATIONAL MODELS As part of his work Dance Like a Butterfly OF CURATING AND ART Dream Boy (2012) Auckland-based dancer and choreographer Josh Rutter moved MAKING: LOCAL around the performance space on his hands and knees and barking repeatedly HISTORIES AND at audience members. This primal, bestial INDIGENOUS PRACTICES instance of becoming-animal occurred in the context of Rutter’s attempt to construct a new Pakeha masculinity, one that oscillates CONVENOR between the ferocity of a mad-dog to the SIBYL FISHER dreaminess of a young man skipping and University of Leeds singing a love-song. The dog-performances of Russian artist Oleg Kulik (b.1961) manifest The nature of contemporary biennales and the Russian self who in relation to Western large-scale recurring exhibitions is that they Europe oscillates between conflict-mongering afford international curators, often from and a transparent borderline between East the global ‘North’, opportunities to arrive in and West. The first of Oleg Kulik’s “dog- cities and temporarily locate their practice performances” The Mad Dog (1994) Kulik within cultural contexts that can be new and transformed into a dog guarding the entrance unfamiliar. This system produces and supports to a Moscow art gallery, a contemporary a whole spectrum of curatorial approaches, Cerberus at the border between inside and from the transitory implementation of pre- outside, art and reality. formed exhibition themes, to the close curatorial engagement with local histories, Both artists use performances in contested politics and ways of knowing. and marginal spaces to highlight and politicise the relations in certain inter-subjective spaces The 18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations as well as the ways in which curators, art- ‘intends to focus on inclusionary practices institutions, corporate and political entities of generative thinking, such as collaboration, structure the ways in which instances of conversation and compassion, in the face of art are exhibited. Zones of indiscernability coercion and destruction’ (de Zegher, 2011). are thereby opened up enabling creative, The curatorial emphasis on relationality as a thought-provoking and often disturbing social mode of practice would seem to formulate interaction to take place between artists, strong connections to the local. Given institutional frameworks and publics. Australia’s own histories of colonial violence and resistance, relationality as an inclusionary Victoria Wynne-Jones recently submitted mode of practice arguably has a significant a Masters thesis as part of her Masters in part to play in the educational and reparative 57 together < > apart work already taking place with and by Louise Brand has worked at Wollongong City Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. Gallery in various curatorial roles since 1997. She has co-curated 7 exhibitions of work This panel therefore seeks to investigate by local Indigenous artists, including the relational models of curating, art making, major skills development project Pallingjang and other collaborations, where they engage Saltwater 2009. with, emerge from, or underpin local and Indigenous practices, both in Australia Garry Jones teaches in Indigenous Studies and and internationally. Where do relational creative arts at the University of Wollongong, curatorial gestures meet local histories? What and is completing a PhD in Visual Arts at the conversations do artistic practices reference Australian National University. or instigate, and how do these contravene, expand, or enrich existing traditions or ways of knowing? What questions are raised by DR ANITA CALLAWAY & Indigenous and other practitioners who work K ATHERINE MORRIS collaboratively, and what lessons are to be learned? The early childhood of mankind: the not-so- subtle art of infantilization In 1897, Mark Twain wrote that the art of LOUISE BR AND & GARRY JONES Tommy McRae was “not to be classified as savage art at all”; rather, in Twain’s Reflections on recent events in contemporary judgement, McRae lay somewhere “between indigenous arts and community cultural Botticelli and Du Maurier”. Nevertheless, development on the NSW South Coast McRae’s drawings were replaced in the The Pallingjang Saltwater exhibition series 1953 edition of Australian Legendary Tales, was established by the Wollongong City dismissed as “imitative, though lively—a Gallery in 1997 as a tentative step towards talent now frequently displayed among engaging with regionally based Indigenous aboriginal children”. artists, establishing a commitment to showing The reduction of indigenous culture to mere contemporary Indigenous art as it emerged ethnographic juvenilia was an established locally, and facilitating the development of colonial stratagem whose racist bias was greater public awareness of south coast commonly camouflaged as irrefutable Indigenous cultures today. The fourth and science. Baldwin Spencer’s belief that the most recent Pallingjang (2009–2011) began Aborigine him/herself was “a relic of the early with a broad collaborative plan to enlist and childhood of mankind left stranded” allowed skill up Indigenous curators, mentors and the extension of this cultural diminution to the facilitators, generating opportunities for portrayal of indigenous people themselves as geographically disparate practitioners across perpetual children. the region to come together, to ‘workshop’ issues of social and cultural importance In this paper we shall discuss the visual concerning traditional and contemporary art infantilization of Aborigines by twentieth- practices, and to develop new art making century illustrators such as Muriel Pornett, skills, leading to the production of new work. whose preliminary notes for her Mia Mia It was envisaged that such a program could Mites (1919) reveal her reliance upon establish broader institutional awareness of Spencer’s ethnographic observations to south coast arts and cultural identities, and give scientific credibility to her picture book. strengthen cultural dialogue and collaboration That most of these twentieth-century artists between Indigenous artists and art groups/ were women—whose cultural forebears had centres across the region. themselves been subjected to gendered 58 infantilization during much of the Victorian the University of Leeds and a BCA from the era—is an irony that cannot be overlooked. University of Wollongong. Anita Callaway is the Nelson Meers Foundation Lecturer in Australian Art at the University of JONATHAN KIMBERLEY Sydney. She is the author of Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth-Century Australia, Wanted: works of intercultural collaborative UNSW Press (2000) and currently Joint Editor non-fiction in Chief of Design and Art Australia Online. From a non-Indigenous perspective, Bruno Katharine Morris is a postgraduate student in Latours’ statement could just about sum up the department of Art History at the University the postmodern conundrum of intercultural of Sydney. contemporary art practice in Australia, This whole modernist mise-en-scène now appears to be the queer-est anthropological SIBYL FISHER construction, especially because Progress, under the label of Reason, was defined as Relational models / model relations the quick substitution of this odd nature Judy Watson and Moira Roth’s exchange in for subjective, local, cultural, and human, Gleanings, a project affiliated with the 18th all too human, values. The idea was that Biennale of Sydney: all our relations (2012) the more natural we became, the more As a part of the 18th Biennale of Sydney: all rational we would be, and the easier the our relations, the London-born art historian agreements between all reasonable human Moira Roth is producing a series of reflective beings. This agreement now lies in ruins, exchanges with Biennale participants. In the but without having been su-perseded by blog, titled Gleanings, Roth talks with the another more realistic and especially more artist Judy Watson (Waanyi people) about her livable project. In this sense, we are still work. Roth voices her interest in Watson’s postmodern. family background, her ‘cultural frameworks’ The established composition of intercultural and the materials and themes of her work. contemporaneity in Australia is yet to fully Bringing these histories into visibility is not open itself to international decomposition. new in the curatorial framing of Watson’s I discuss the idea of Working Exmodern practice per se. What is significant is the as central to my practice as an artist both opportunity afforded by Gleanings for readers solo and collaborative and contingent on and viewers to witness the intellectual the decomposition of postcolonial and relations develop between Roth and Watson, postmodern ideologies. I discuss how my as named and located participants. While commitment to working as an artist, arts this project has its limits, I ask what effects it manager and curator in remote communities instigates in terms of an ethical engagement in Australia re-composes all my relations. with Watson’s artistic practice and related histories. The paper considers how Gleanings Jonathan Kimberley is an interdisciplinary can be understood as a model for wider inter- visual artist combining solo studio practice cultural relations between non-Indigenous with long-term collaborative projects in and ATSI and other Indigenous peoples. How Australia and internationally. He is also can curatorial practice contribute to cultural Manager & Curator, Warmun Art Centre, shifts, and begin to prompt social change? Western Australia. BA (Fine Art) RMIT University, Melbourne (1990), MFA Sibyl is a PhD candidate at the University (Research), University of Western Australia of Leeds, England. She holds a BA from (2011). 59 together < > apart PROFESSOR IAN MCLE AN & Art Centre in Sydney (24 September to 4 DR UNA REY December 2011). Including urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Between Michael Nelson Jagamara and Islander participants, fifty artists from across Imants Tillers the Pacific, explored, in a rich variety of In 1986 Michael Nelson Jagamara was very ways, the compelling challenges of inter- upset to discover that Imants Tillers had personal and cross-cultural understanding, ‘painted over’ his painting. They have since reconciliation, bravery and leadership: in become friends but the episode still rankles fact what it means to be ‘modern warriors’ in Jagamara. ‘One day he will be punished. contemporary society. Those Sydney people will get him.’ Their Understanding our past is a means to under- current friendship revolves around a series stand ourselves, it locates us within history, collaborative paintings, begun in 2001 and it gives us a sense of identity and, within a continuing through today. This paper, based on community, it is this that builds individual interviews with Jagamara and Tillers, chronicles cultures that stand in direct contrast to their collaborations from the perspective of violence, alienation, colonialism and racism. each artist and asks how their experience might contribute to the vexed debate about Giles Peterson is an educator & curator intersections between Indigenous and non- based in New Zealand. Recent curatorial Indigenous artists, especially when they are of projects include: Samoan art: Urban, De a collaborative nature. Young Museum, San Francisco; and Tiaho: Photography from Oceania, Instituto Latino de Ian McLean’s most recent book is How Mexico, Mexico City. Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art. He serves on the advisory boards of the journals Third Text, World Art and National Identities. PANEL Una Rey completed a BA in visual arts Darwin in 1995 and has worked for several years in RELATIONS BETWEEN the Indigenous art sector, including remote art-centres. In 2009 she obtained a PhD ART AND CONSUMERISM from The University of Newcastle where she teaches art history and works as a freelance – MODES OF arts writer. INTERACTION WITH ART IN A NEO-LIBERAL GILES PETERSON EXPERIENCE ECONOMY Indigenous histories, local practices: Niu Pasifik Warriors Exhibition, Niu Warrior Festival, CONVENOR Casula Powerhouse Art Centre, Sydney. DR MARK PENNINGS Queensland University of Technology Niu Pasifik Warriors was an exhibition I curated in 2011 as part of The Niu Warrior This session will consider a range of Festival, an integrated public exhibition approaches to relations between art programme that included art workshops, audiences and ‘experiential’ and immaterial community forums and youth performance forms of contemporary art in a neo-liberal events organised by the Casula Powerhouse era. It can be argued that ways of looking at 60 art are increasingly informed by the structures DR MARK PENNINGS of neo-liberal logic, which encourages the consciousness of consumption. This session Consuming contemporary art: today’s art can therefore consider the influence of a audience and its relationship with art in the consumerist epistemology on the reception global experience economy and conception of contemporary art and the understanding of art audiences as This paper will examine the network of consumers. Another consideration will be relationships that exist between contemporary how audiences consume art predicated art audiences and ‘experiential’ art works. on ’experience’ and ‘immersion’, especially Ways of looking at art are increasingly in relation to more participatory modes of informed by the structures of neo-liberal art? Some of these consumption practices logic, which encourages the consciousness conform to what has been called the of consumption. This paper will consider the ‘experience economy’, a business model that influence of a consumerist epistemology on seeks to profit from intangible and experiential the reception and conception of contemporary forms of consumption. In this phase of the art and the understanding of art audiences global economy today’s art museums might as consumers. It can be claimed that today’s be understood as ‘experience centres’ for audiences ‘consume’ art like any other non-expert audiences seeking novelty and commodity, but the paper will also consider entertainment. This may also involve a how audiences might consume art predicated study of art and spectacles and how these on ’experience’ and ‘immersion’ and more serve populist agendas and the ‘democratic’ participatory modes of art. These consumption demands of new art audiences. A dominance practices are more in line with what has been of visceral forms of engagement with art over called the ‘experience economy’, and in which more intellectual or critical relations is also a today’s art museums might be understood as theme of interest, and may include studies ‘experience centres’ for non-expert audiences that challenge such assumptions. The role seeking novelty and entertainment. It also of tourism and its impact on the viewing indicates the prevalence of visceral relations conditions of art is also of interest as is the between audience and art works on a level not marketing of global biennales and their place previously seen. in global art tourism for so called ‘tourizens’. Mark Pennings is a senior lecturer in Also, if art museums provide free entry how Visual Arts at the Queensland University of is the notion of ‘profit’ determined, and is Technology. His major research interests it fair to ask such questions? This session included postwar, postmodern and could also examine the contradictory legacy contemporary art, video art and culture, the of relational aesthetics and its influence on experience economy, and social histories. He participatory and ‘experiential’ art. Finally, the has published articles and reviews in national session can consider how immaterial works of journals such as the AAANZ Journal of Art, a neo-conceptual bent may offer alternative Art and Australia, Eyeline, and Art Monthly. forms of ‘experience’ predicated on intellectually challenging and elitist relations between art and audience. MICHAEL GOLDBERG The force of desire/ the force of necessity: art and real politik in an age of the efficient market During the boom years of the 1980s, economist Milton Friedman’s neoclassicist 61 together < > apart Chicago School of Economics championed of discourse, such as myth and code that the ‘efficient market hypothesis’, which establish cultural doctrine, embed social right up until today underlies the abuses of pattern, and as Marx identified, enable the speculative capital and the hypermobilization fetishism of the commodity. Taking up the of money. This paper will address aspects thread of Adorno and Horkheimer’s remark, of art and a free-market economy that has “culture . . . amalgamates with advertising”, either driven or profoundly influenced political this presentation explores an on going pre- policy and social behaviour ‘from Wall Street occupation into the relation between art and to Main Street’. As a counterpoint to the advertising in the modern era, and aims to West’s capitalist economic model, the paper review fundamental systems imperative to includes a perspective on Cuba and a précis sustaining both in the era of mass culture. of the Havana Biennale, a cultural event that has assumed major significance in Cuba’s Eve-Anne’s work is currently divided between tourist driven economic development. The her consultancy in identity and branding basis of this discussion will be my relational and teaching art history at the University of performance/installation The Force of Desire/ Western Australia where she has recently The Force of Necessity in the10th Havana submitted her doctoral dissertation. Biennale (2009). Michael Goldberg is an artist and curator CHRISTOPHER HANDRAN teaching at Sydney College of the Arts. His research addresses art as an interventionist Serious fun: the contemporary art museum as strategy to counter the impacts of global convivial panopticon financial speculation. Contemporary artists’ concerns for subjectivity, spectacle and sensory immersion often play into the museum industry’s goals EVE-ANNE O’REGAN of entertaining audiences and the provision of value-added experiences. This museum Babyface: art and advertising as institutions complex can be contextualised by contrasting of the spectacle of the commodity Vilem Flusser’s media-based formulation The spectacle is not a collection of images, of the Apparatus with Michel Foucault’s but a social relation among people, mediated discussion of the dispositif. Tracing the by images (Debord, 1977). lineage of this hybrid model of the apparatus through to its contemporary manifestations, BabyFace was the manufacture of a mass- this paper will discuss works by Carsten produced commodity. It was launched Höller and Olafur Eliasson in relation to a to an international audience as a luxury model of the contemporary art museum cosmetic, yet the confusing and ambiguous as convivial panopticon. This seemingly presentation of the launch event shifted contradictory model is one in which the the site of leisure and entertainment, to a viewer’s own subjectivity is reversed, and disorientating space of experimentation, or that functions not as a laboratory of power, Kachur “painted dream”. but of engagement, in which Foucault’s characterisation of a seeing/being seen As research, the BabyFace project posits dyad is superceded by Eliasson’s mantra of a critique of the practice of art-making and ‘seeing yourself seeing’. It is also a model that interrelated systems of representation in testifies to the fraught relationship between context with advertising as an ontological art and audience in the experience economy. form of capitalist phantasm. This paper attempts to grapple with advanced forms Christopher Handran is a Master of Arts of communication common to both modes (Research) candidate at the Queensland 62 University of Technology. His research of Australian artists working in the 1970s explores the apparatus as both a practice who made electronic, video, interactive and methodology and an interpretive lens. light art, much of which subsequently led to what is now called new media art. See Jones’ recent book, Synthetics: Aspects of HENRY DAVIDSON Art & Technology in Australia 1956–1975, [MIT Press, 2011]. This paper introduces One Day Sculpture: an analysis of event- a means for understanding the relational specific art in New Zealand processes of interaction, the motivational forces that drive them, and the welding of This paper examines contemporary art these motivated interactions into a coherent practices which resemble experience activity through which a collaborative group economy ‘events’ rather than traditional fine may be recognised as a single social entity art mediums and constructs a set of identifiers that is peculiarly suited to the making of for such work, naming them ‘event-specific.’ technologically and ‘new media’ based The paper takes the recent international artworks, what ever forms these take. series of temporary public artworks, One Day Sculpture, that took place in New Zealand Stephen Jones is an Australian video artist. He in 2008–2009 as its central case study is researching the history of art and technology and re-frames this project as event-specific in Australia and his book Synthetics: Aspects art, focusing on the neo-liberal imperatives of Art & Technology in Australia 1956–1975, of experience, immersion and urgency was published by MIT Press in 2011. inherent in the project. Event-specific art is defined as transmediumistic, participatory, interventionist and temporary as well as reliant GUY KEULEMANS on documentation and the effects of media convergence and relational networks. These Italian radicals and Dutch conceptualists: the types of practices also interrogate notions sensation of affect in two movements of publicness and spectacle and position themselves in dialogue with entertainment and In the latter half of the 20th century, two leisure industries. The paper demonstrates how movements stand out in the field of product event-specificity involves certain practices of design for their similar approaches to looking that are present throughout the wider conceptual thinking and their challenges to visual culture and can be characterised by established modes of criticality. The Italian their brevity and instantaneity. Event-specificity Radicals of the 1960s and 70s sought to break is shown to be a particular modality of visual products free from definition as capitalist experience in the early twenty-first century. consumables. This approach resulted in experimental, affect-driven work, subsequently conceptualised through their shared counter- Modernist ideology. Dutch conceptual design DR STEPHEN JONES from the 90s and early 21st century, most notably identified with the brand Droog, uses Relational processes in the production of art similar methods to address a broad range of A very major part of contemporary art, social and environmental issues, however with especially art that utilises new technologies the distinction of having practitioners with for its production and manifestation, is built many varied and plural ideologies. Droog has within a collaborative framework. This paper been criticised for sardonically making their presents a framework that describes the concepts a marketable feature, reducible to a relational processes of this collaborative sales pitch. This occurs not necessarily with activity. It draws on a series of case studies the intent of the designer, but as a result of 63 together < > apart affect-driven working techniques producing The round table will constitute a variant form flexible and open concepts. of collaboration between artists and (possibly) others. As a departure from the regular Guy Keulemans is a multi-disciplinary conference panel structure, it will make a designer working in product design, graphics structural contribution to the conference and installation. Major themes are repair (and thematic. destruction), generative processes, and the environmental concerns of production and consumption. BERNARDO BENTO The project The Rocks was developed during a residency at the historical neighbourhood of The Rocks in Sydney. During this time I collected material (little rocks, postcards, ROUNDTABLE: TOXIC pieces of paper) that appealed to me while wandering around the neighborhood. I BLOOMS assembled the found material in the real world with other data gathered from the internet, CONVENORS my memory and imagination. The goal was to ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR ANNE attempt to map through my filter the mediated FERRAN environment of The Rocks, the one where the SCA, University of Sydney boundaries between real, fictional, individual and environment get blurred. According to ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR MERILYN Wikipedia, “Toxicity is the degree to which a FAIRSKYE substance can damage a living or a non-living SCA, University of Sydney organism”. Thus, if I see the elements that constitute the contemporary environment as This session of 14 participants, entails each substances, I wonder until what extent fiction speaker talking for 5 minutes about a specific damages reality, the individual damages project using three images. the environment and so on. I believe that to acknowledge the intensity of these toxicities Our session stems from our awareness that the is a central issue for us to re-engage critically term toxicity crops up in an extraordinarily wide with our surroundings. range of contexts. We accept that it may not be possible to reach the outer edge of this pool I was born in Curitiba, Brazil in 1984. I am of reference; for now the aim is to identify as in Australia since 2009 and am currently many of the strands of meaning / applicability undertaking the Master of Fine Arts at the that can flourish within it as we can. UNSW College of Fine Arts. Each participant will bring a project to the round table that they have developed in LISA BLAS another context, and to re-present it within the frame of toxicity. In my recent collage works I address issues of neighborhoods, borders, and landscape The discussion generated by the that suggest a history of human and industrial presentations will be facilitated / moderated in presence, overgrowth and abandonment. the second half of the session. Operating outside of the binaries of utopia/ The participants may decide to pursue the dystopia, these works hover in an interstitial round table discussion in some form or other space, where construction and collapse after the conference but this is not obligatory. are frozen in time. Using meticulously cut 64 fragments of paper stock originating from the art field and also playfully struggles with exhibition announcements via the incoming the conundrum of how artworks contribute mail and mass-produced paint swatches to the environmental problems they are from hardware stores, I build compositions attempting to elucidate. using bright, flat and metallic color through a system of planar frontality, overlapping Jenny was an all day panellist for the artist density with blankness. Although the day at the 100th CAA Conference, Los works are abstract, they make reference to Angeles in February and recently received pavements, barbed wire and open space, a DAAD scholarship. She is the Australian pushing against the physical boundaries of representative for the Arts and Sciences the paper support. Emerging from the legacy for Sustainability in Social Transformation of L.A. Abstract Classicism, Robert Smithson, Summer School, a member of the SCA the New Topographics photographers, Graduate School Gallery Committee and is and the history of post- war housing the Cultural Coordinator for Blue Mountains developments, new forms are created that City Council. envision space as alive, transparent, and inclusive, and as sites for social reflection given the current global economic crisis. JANET BURCHILL Lisa Blas is an artist from Los Angeles, working in painting, photography and Under the rubric of Toxicity framed as installation. Her work excavates artifacts of Neoplatonic Radiation, The Creation from political and social histories as a means of Nothingness and Matter in Reverse Gear – a interpreting contemporary experience in the representation of the series – Light from Light globalized landscape. Solar Dome, 2010: Inland Empire – Solar Neon, 2008, and On The Beach, 2006. Janet Burchill is an artist. JENNY BROWN Tied, Mayday 2006 engages with some of the JONATHAN CAMERON issues relating to the impacts of rising tides on the low-lying Pacific Islands. It was an event ‘Vamp: [High Tea Edition]’ is an exploration held on the Indigenous owned fishing vessel into popular culture’s obsession with the the Tribal Warrior that culminated in a funerary charming and alluring vampire character. It is performance at Farm Cove where frozen a cookbook featuring a series of captivating saltwater sculptures were melted into the ocean. images of high tea recipes; which upon The installation housed in the boat included further examination of the accompanying video monitors screening personal responses texts reveal blood as a key ingredient in each to a proposed future of cultural disconnection, recipe. The seductive qualities of the images memory loss and large-scale displacement. function in a similar way to that of the vampire Questions raised focussed on where character in popular culture; engaging the responsibilities sit and what actions can be viewer in such a way that various abject taken in relation to the eco-system devastation qualities inherent within the vampire figure are brought about by global warming, as well as ultimately accepted. Australia’s refugee policies that compound This project is reconsidered through the term problems by contributing a different type of ‘toxicity.’ The purpose of the cookbook was toxicity for powerless Islander populations. to raise questions concerning the vampires The work employs some strategies that assist necessity to consume blood (along with a it to sit outside the hegemonic processes of instinctual craving for human blood: a threat 65 together < > apart to human life) - something that viewers of the JULIA FE ATHERSTONE genre should find repulsive. The work draws light to the irony concerning the vampire Where the crows: toxic implications of the character as being at once repulsive yet yellow colour cast desirable. The yellow painted walls, of my 3-projector Jonathan Cameron’s recent work is motivated video and sound installation Where the by popular cultures’ present fascination Crows exhibited in Brave New Worlds 2012, with vampire fiction and explores notions of implicates yellow as a poisonous colour: the abject and desire. Cameron is currently yellow toxic paint; sulphur-based pesticides; completing his MFA at Massey University, uranium yellow cake; India’s toxicity labels Wellington, New Zealand. and Nazi Germany’s yellow badge of shame. Yellow also represents the sun; mono frequency sodium light; and Ancient Egypt’s MERILYN FAIRSKYE Sun God, with predators like crows and a 25-year famine with stories of parents eating I undertook two field trips to Chernobyl their children. in 2009–2010 and made creative work, including photographs, art installations and a Yellow unsettles the viewer, amplifies unease, feature film, that reflects on an iconic site that desolation and d e a t h… by symbolising continues to generate public anxiety. toxicity of pesticides and racism, and suggesting Earth is too hot, if we keep Fieldwork II (Chernobyl) is a single-channel burning coal, warming our atmosphere, silent video projection that takes you into a releasing carbon dioxide and acidifying bleak, winter landscape, littered with deserted oceans. Our future world will be a yellow villages engulfed by trees. A long row of desert inhabited by scavenging crows and too ghostly, abandoned houses stands on snow- hot for humans. covered ground. Further along other houses are buried under a thick layer of clay. You Photographer for the book Don Dunstan’s learn only from the title where this place is. Australia. Sydney Morning Herald’s first female photographer after World War 2. In A fast, handheld tracking shot, made with a 2007 she completed her Masters of Art and is small low-resolution camera from a moving currently an MFA research student at COFA. car was slowed down with software to a fraction of its recorded speed. Time is stretched to the point where the image, on the verge of disintegration, is almost stilled. ALEXANDER JAMES The image blots and coagulates in clumps of sticky shapes that spasm and shudder in and A toxic weather history out of recognition. The way we speak can change the environment. Through a manufactured Merilyn Fairskye is an artist whose current dialogue humankind injects an air that is toxic research engages with the impact of mega and has the ability to create climate. Through technologies on people and the environment. photography and video, my research attempts She is co-convenor of Toxicity, a collaborative to provide a portrait of the anthropocene, creative arts research group. a new geological age where humanity is the agent of weather. John Ruskin spoke of climate change in terms of blasphemy, war and the Nineteenth century “storm cloud”. In this presentation I will discuss themes 66 in weather history and how they relate to a the Princes Highway south of Sydney at contemporary toxicity. Waterfall and Heathcote. The billboards show two men looking at a painting by Eugene von Guérard, View to lake Illawarra and the distant EDUARDO KAIRUZ mountains of Kiama (1860). The men are Dharawal elder, Roy Kennedy Flanked by powerful institutional buildings, and Nyoongar man, Kelton Pell. The painting the Torre Confinanzas stands out in the is located at the Wollongong City Gallery. The middle of Caracas’ economic centre. The photographs were taken in that gallery. predominance of the imposing tower is determined by the following conditions: firstly, At the together/apart ‘Toxic Blooms’ session, the 45 story-high structure is the second in the 5 minutes available I will explore the highest skyscraper in the capital of oil-rich role of context, coincidence and chance Venezuela. Secondly, it is one of the largest in the process of making, as well as the squatted buildings in the world, housing more relationship between viewer and these than 600 families in apparent precarious artworks. conditions. An uncompleted emblem of Derek Kreckler has been exhibiting since economic power, the 1990s saw the tower 1977 working across performance, video, seized by Venezuela’s financial watchdog to sound and photography, examining the become a symbol of crisis, abandonment and transformation of modes of historical avant- decay. But recently–thanks to its spontaneous gardism into the present. His is particularly occupation–it has become a symbol of interested in the engagement between social justice after decades of exclusion hybridity and modernism. Derek Kreckler is a and exploitation. Superstructure investigates doctoral candidate (thesis submitted), UOW: toxicity as it manifests in architecture and Ontological Fragments: artworks beyond their the city. But instead of comparing the materiality (2012). phenomenon of Torre Confinanzas with disease, it focuses on the ambiguous effects that emerge when a virulent agent invades a decaying body. PROFESSOR ANNE NOBLE Eduardo Kairuz is an artist based in Piss Poles, Antarctica, 2008 Melbourne. He holds an MFA from the Sydney In 2008 I spent six weeks in Antarctica as College of the Arts and is currently a Lecturer a US National Science Foundation Fellow to at the Architecture Department of Monash undertake two photographic projects. The University. first, Whiteout, is an investigation of Antarctic light and space. The second, At the End of the Earth reflects on human presence, and DEREK KRECKLER the infrastructure that supports science, exploration and adventure in Antarctica. Appropriated Circumstance is a series of Both bodies of work are the outcome works that can be exhibited in different of my search for an aesthetic that more formats and contexts. The current works in appropriately addresses the fragility of the ice the series and the ones referred to as part of and our contemporary rather than historical together/apart are titled: Roy takes a breather relationship to place. after showing Kelton the best fishing spots #1 and #2 (2012). In my presentation I will focus on three images from the series, Piss Poles, Antarctica, This work consists of two large format Aurina #1 – #6, 2008 and examine how billboards (12600 X 3800 mm) located on the conflicted operations of beauty and 67 together < > apart toxicity might posit a contemporary sublime Through the lens of my camera a different experience of the Antarctic landscape. view appears – childhood huts, scenes from anxious old-world stories of lost and Anne Noble is Professor of Fine Arts at enchanted children, ancient Maori sites Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand. covered in a blanket of pines, the cleared Her work engages with issues related to the land of early New Zealand photographs, imagination and memory of place through the and neat forestry rows like a new wave of medium of photography. monocultural colonisation. There is something here for us to understand, DR CATHY TUATO’O ROSS if we stop the movement and look in the manner of archaeologists who can read the Head in the clouds/head in the sand decline of civilizations in common cooking pot shards found in the rubbish dumps of old Samuel Johnson described optimism as sites. the triumph of hope over experience. This project describes determined optimism, Ellie (Ellen) Smith works photographically not as a position of triumph, but as a more and exhibits through out New Zealand. She perilously negotiated balance between coordinates community based art projects and hopefulness and hopelessness. Hope and publications (The Heads Proposal) and works optimism are associated with attitude more part time as tutor/lecturer in photography. than with action. However, given the current issues facing the planet, attempting to colour experience with a golden glow could be considered a negative rather than a positive JOSEPHINE STARRS approach or state of mind. This series of images, (being an extension of a recent Waterways body of work titled The Optimist’s House, Sydney Harbour! Gorgeous blue water, originally exhibited at Photospace, Wellington glittering city skyline, exclusive “dress circle” late–2011) explores wilful blindness, denial, suburbs, lovely fresh ocean air. and the desire to cover up unpleasantness so that a rosy outlook can be preserved and day- However commercial fishing has been dreaming can continue undisturbed. banned in Sydney harbour because the marine life is considered toxic. Recreational Dr Cathy Tuato’o Ross lives on the edge of the fishing is extensive, but fish caught on the Whangarei Harbour with her young family. She Western side of the Harbour Bridge should makes photographs and drawings, and works not be eaten as they contain high levels of as an independent researcher and art-writer. dioxins and other carcinogens. Waterways is a video and sound installation offering ideas for solutions to these problems while at the ELLEN SMITH same time revealing the underbelly of Sydney Harbour through a mash-up of the popular Clearing 1990’s TV show Water Rats. In New Zealand the pine tree is seen as an Josephine Starrs is an artist and researcher imported pest (it grows like a weed) or a quick whose long term collaboration with Leon return cash crop (plantations cover any spare Cmielewski (UWS) has produced a variety or difficult land). The unchecked spread of of screen-based installations. Waterways pine forests has been viral, yet it is ignored showed in Urbanition at San Francisco Arts and invisible to us – there is nothing here Commission Gallery and Carriageworks worth looking at. Sydney in 2011. 68 integral in producing propaganda posters and PANEL artworks for the revolutionary forces. During this period no less than ten artists’ collectives SENSING THE were launched in the major cities of Java. Aside from their political activities these COLLECTIVE IN collectives consolidated technical expertise and materials and nurtured philosophical CONTEMPORARY ART and artistic discourse. Whilst maintaining the AND AESTHETICS IN value of artistic collaboration such discourse championed the individual artist as integral ASIA to the proper functioning of community. This paper will examine the individual and collective relationship of Indonesian artists CONVENORS organisations as brought to the fore through DR THOMAS BERGHUIS an analysis of group portraits painted by and University of Sydney of the collectives. The paper asks in looking at the imagery of these organisations, what DR DAVID TEH do we understand about the relationship National University of Singapore of individual and collective agency and the historical context of their formations? Throughout history there has been talk of the disappearance of art, if not the dispersal Matt Cox is a PhD candidate in Asian Art of art after ‘the end of art’ and ‘the end of History with the Department of Art History art history’. Yet, practices and experiences & Film Studies and the Power Institute, of art in have never seized to exist. Nor do University of Sydney and Study Room these practices and experiences of art seize Coordinator at the Art Gallery of New South to transpire our senses of cultural belonging Wales. He is completing his PhD dissertation and our shared experiences of culture in on the development of portraiture in 20th relation to our world. This panel explores Century Indonesia. common senses of contemporary art to ‘come through the collective’, and transposes the ‘genius’ of the individual artist and ‘aesthetic KEDAR VISHNAWATHAN contemplation’ on the individual artwork in favor of thinking through the collective The collectivisation and appropriation of of art and aesthetics across cultures and the peasantry in Indian independence: two communities in our region, and our world. opposing strategies This paper examines two inter-related, MATT COX and opposing, methods of the peasantry’s appropriation within Indian modernism related to the socio-political processes of the A letter from the studio; artists collectives in Indian Independence movement. Articulating revolutionary Indonesia 1945–1949 how the peasantry’s life-worlds became a On 17 August 1945 President Sukarno central discourse of Indian modernism. How declared Indonesia’s Independence. In the Indian National Congress romantically 1949, after four years of bloody conflict, appropriated the peasantry into the creation of the Netherlands acknowledged Indonesia’s a dominant visual discourse at Shantiniketan autonomy. Although marred by violence by Nandalal Bose (1882–1966), and Ram the four-year period proved to be one of Kinkar Vaij (1906–1980). The collective vital activity for Javanese artists who were pan-national cultural appropriation of the 69 together < > apart peasantry was a nationalist manoeuvre culture, and which shapes the horizon of both going deep into non-Raj contaminated individual and collective practice to this day. components of the Indian cultural-system, moving away from Raj’s cultural-system. Dr David Teh is an Assistant Professor at the Chittaprasad Bhattacharya (1915–1978) National University of Singapore. His research was, during the 1940s, connected with the focuses on contemporary art in Southeast Communist Party of India (CPI), becoming an Asia, with specific attention to art in Thailand. activist disseminating agitation propaganda His essays have appeared in Third Text, in diverse media. Depicting the peasantry Afterall and Aan Journal (Bangkok). using social realist discourses. Consequently creating another discourse in opposition to the dominant Indian National Congress CLARE VE AL discourses. Chittaprasad did not believe in the peasantry’s appropriation, but rather Collective ruptures: documenting the celebration of their life-worlds. precarious nature of Thai politics through Kedar Vishwanathan is a PhD candidate in image networks, 2010–present Asian Art History with the Department of Art In 2010, the military crackdown on United History & Film Studies and the Power Institute, Front for Democracy protestors in Bangkok University of Sydney. His thesis examines appeared as the inevitable result of the Indian Modernism from 1890 to 1960 and polarization of Thai politics. Significantly, is due to be submitted in the second half of the Thai government’s largely unsuccessful 2012. attempts at reparation via the control of image networks represented an attempt to propagate a vision of the modernist fetish DR DAVID TEH of the nation as collective. Drawing upon Stimson and Sholette’s contention that Baramee: the ethics of withdrawal in Thai collective structures should be periodised contemporary art (Stimson and Sholette, 2004), this paper In its heyday, the mantle of the avant- proposes that this rupture was coexistent garde artist brought with it a number of with the development of informal collectives roles: shaman, melancholic, enfant terrible, utilizing social networks of image exchange provocateur, the ‘bad guest’ at the dinner such as Youtube, Facebook and street graffiti. party of high culture. In Thailand, however, In a context where official control over image those leading artistic transformation have networks is longstanding in both artistic rarely conformed to these archetypes. Their and non-artistic realms, the significance of distinction consists not in a rejection of, but this development will be examined in light a negotiation with, institutional structures, of Latour’s ‘Actor –Network Theory’ (Latour, in the art of compromise, not of resistance. 2005), which specifies how collectives Despite the general demise of the avant-garde exist as precarious series of temporary as heroic paradigm, the value once attributed relationships, expanding within and beyond to aesthetic innovation has in Thailand been national and artistic limitations. reinscribed within the person of the artist, Clare Veal is a PhD candidate in Asian Art as a kind of aura that I characterize with the History with the Department of Art History Thai word baramee (‘charisma’). Far from & Film Studies and the Power Institute, finding heroic individualist or agonistic outlets, University of Sydney. Her PhD thesis focuses baramee is cultivated through intellectual on the links between photography and retirement, an ethics of withdrawal with the formation of Thai identity in the period deep roots in Siamese political and spiritual 1950–2011. 70 century. Clarice Zander, who organised the PANEL 1933 Exhibition of Contemporary British Art, assembled the show primarily for Australian STRUCTURING WAYS artists. Basil Burdett, the curator of the 1939 Herald exhibition, similarly viewed his key OF SEEING audience as practising artists, with the main purpose of the exhibition being that of re- CONVENORS invigorating Australian painting. This paper will DR CATHERINE DE LORENZO consider the cultural and economic factors University of New South Wales which led to a radical change in this emphasis in the last fifty years. ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR Steven Miller is Head of the Art Gallery of New JOANNA MENDEL SSOHN South Wales Research Library and Archive. University of New South Wales He has worked in both public and commercial galleries since the late 1980s. ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR CATHERINE SPECK University of Adelaide IAN COOK E ERIC RIDDLER Eight American Artists (1958): from Seattle to Art Gallery of New South Wales New Zealand This session examines the various influences, Eight American Artists was the first exhibition ranging from different funding models to of original examples of modern American shifts in art historical thinking, that shaped art to be displayed in New Zealand. The the development of curatorial and exhibition exhibition was arranged by the Seattle Art practices in Australia from the mid -twentieth Museum and was toured to the Auckland century. It will encompass the context and Art Gallery and the National Art Gallery in rationales for specific curatorial interventions, Wellington in 1958 by the United States the broader evolution of exhibition and display Information Service as part of a wider circuit practices in the profession, and the reciprocal of the Pacific, which also included Australia. impacts of art exhibitions on art history. This paper will examine the different meanings and agendas behind the exhibition, situating it within the broader discourse on the STEVEN MILLER use of modern art as a form of propaganda by the U.S. Government during the Cold The 1953 exhibition of French Painting Today War, as well as giving consideration to how and the question of focus audiences for it expressed local New Zealand aims and exhibitions agency. This paper will look at the 1953 exhibition The paper will also draw comparisons with of French Painting Today, arguably one of the subsequent display and reception of the the last shows to be organised primarily show in the state art galleries of Melbourne for practising artists. Hal Missingham, the and Sydney. Director of the Art Gallery of NSW at the time, wrote that the exhibition was held for I am currently a PhD candidate in art history ‘artists, students and the general public’— at the University of Auckland. My topic is the in that order. This reflected a traditional art-related interactions between New Zealand focus for exhibitions before the mid 20th and the United States from 1950–1980. 71 together < > apart ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR ERIC RIDDLER CATHERINE SPECK & DR CATHERINE DE LORENZO Birth of the Biennale This paper will trace the first two decades of Mountford and Tuckson: key protagonists in the Sydney Biennale, beginning in 1973 with exhibiting Aboriginal art its emergence from the Transfield Art Prize, The late 1970s and 80s are frequently culminating in the ‘Boundary Rider’ of 1992– credited as the decades when Aboriginal art 3. The idea of art prizes and scholarships came into its own. This paper examines the for contemporary art gathered strength in crucial lead-up decades of the late 1950s and the 1950s and 1960s, valuable for emerging the early 1960s via two significant exhibitions artists and the stakeholders’ collections. of Aboriginal and Tiwi Islander art. First under However, the idea of art as the object was examination is Mountford’s exhibition of being replaced, as the ideas behind art barks shown at AGSA as part of the inaugural and the environment in which the new art Adelaide Festival of Arts. Second is Tony was created became as important as, if not Tuckson’s touring exhibition of Aboriginal more important than, the finished object. barks and objects. Both exhibitions, shown in Meanwhile, attention was changing from the an art gallery not an ethnographic museum, Pacific focus of the early Biennale exhibitions invited an aesthetic reading of the objects. to a renewed European scene and, with it, a From a museological perspective it could post-modernist revision of twentieth century be argued that these exhibitions mark a art history. Questions of gender balance and shift from seeing Aboriginal art as solely regional participation emerged. Then came ethnological artifact to ‘art for art’s sake’. The the opportunity, thanks to a globalised art impact these exhibitions had on art history will scene, to explore the contemporary practice be probed, as will the influence of scholarship of formerly overlooked nations. by anthropologists on the uptake of Aboriginal Eric Riddler is Image Librarian and Researcher art within art curatorship and art history. at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, having A/Prof Catherine Speck coordinates previously worked with the College of Fine Arts postgraduate programs in Art History and and Design and Art Australia Online. Curatorial & Museum Studies at the Art Gallery of South Australia and University of Adelaide, and she is co-researcher of an ARC ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JOANNA project, Australian Art Exhibitions 1968-2009. MENDEL SSOHN Dr Catherine De Lorenzo is an art historian The rise and fall of the Australian Gallery with adjunct research positions in COFA, Directors’ Council 1975–1981 UNSW and Monash University. Her research currently examines Australian In 1975 the Visual Arts Board created art historiography, Australian-European funding to enable the previously annual photographic exchange, and cross-cultural meeting of gallery directors (the Australian and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Gallery Directors Conference) to become a national touring agency, the Australian Gallery Directors’ Council (AGDC). This body spearheaded the implementation of professional standards throughout the country and initiated scholarly exhibitions that uncovered Australia’s colonial past, as well as reconsidering the present. It was liquidated in 72 1981. Despite its short life it changed forever for art historians and museum curators? the terrain of exhibitions in Australia. Alison Inglis is an Associate Professor in The rise and fall of the AGDC, and the the Art History Program at the University of subsequent careers of those whose curatorial Melbourne. She has co-ordinated the Master visions were enabled by its existence, is both of Art Curatorship program since 1995. an example of the ephemeral nature of many She is currently working on the Australian of the structures that govern the arts and also Research Council funded project, Australian an indication that closure is not to be equated Art Exhibitions 1968–2009: a generation of with failure. The paper draws on archival cultural transformation. interviews with those most closely involved with the AGDC as well as extant archives. Joanna Mendelssohn leads the ARC funded DAVID RAINEY Australian Art Exhibitions 1968–2009: A Generation of Cultural Transformation. She Nolan’s Mrs Fraser: reconstruction and writes on Australian art, and is joint-Editor in deconstruction Chief of www.daao.org.au. Sidney Nolan’s painting Mrs Fraser is regarded as emblematic of his animosity towards Sunday Reed. It has inflamed viewers ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR for more than 60 years with Nolan conflating Mrs Fraser’s story with his own, seeing ALISON INGLIS himself as the betrayed convict Bracefell and Sunday as the betraying Eliza. Art historians as exhibition curators: the case of Completing the Picture: Women Nolan sent the Reeds photographs of some artists and the Heidelberg Era (1992) of his Fraser Island paintings. Hitherto unreported, they include an early larger This paper evaluates the 1992 exhibition version of Mrs Fraser, which reconstructed, entitled Completing the Picture: Women encourages deconstruction of the myth that artists and the Heidelberg Era, which was Nolan painted it to denigrate Sunday Reed. held at Heide Museum of Modern Art and subsequently toured to eight other venues The paper examines responses to the work in Australia. The exhibition examined the by critics, curators and by the artist himself. It work of 19 women artists associated with argues that these, like the various narratives the so-called Heidelberg School, and was characterising the reportage of the historical widely recognized at the time as ground- Eliza Fraser, have been preconditioned by breaking, acting as ‘a catalyst’ for further structured ways of seeing. This structuring of feminist reappraisals of Australian art history. commentary has encouraged viewers to see Completing the Picture was conceived the work itself, to see Eliza Fraser, and to see and written by two art historians, Victoria Sunday Reed, in preferred, often errant, ways. Hammond and Juliette Peers. This paper will investigate the wider significance of this David Rainey retired from Patent Attorney exhibition in terms of its context and impact. practice in 2006 and now pursues Australian How typical was this collaboration between avant-garde art/lit of WW2. In 2009 he art historians and art museums at this time? curated the Ern Malley exhibition at Heide. He How familiar were the two art historians maintains the aCOMMENT website. with exhibition theory and practice? Did an exhibition with art historians as curators differ from those produced by professional curators? How influential was this exhibition 73 together < > apart and envelope. Examples that come to mind PANEL are projects by Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (such as the proposal for the SURFACE AND DEEP Re-skin of the UTS Tower and the digital origami Emergency Shelter), Peta Carlin’s HISTORIES: CRITIQUES, Exhibition Urban Fabric: Greige, and the AND PRACTICES IN Urban Art Projects (UAP) collaboration with American artist Ned Kahn (Hassell ART, ARCHITECTURE, Architecture, Sydney and Brisbane Airport Corporation) for the art wall of the Brisbane AND DESIGN Domestic Terminal Carpark. The session invites critical commentary on CONVENOR ‘uses’, figurations, scales, and typologies of DR ANURADHA CHATTERJEE surface, and it encourages consideration of University of Tasmania case studies from across art, architectural, Surface in architecture has had a deeper and design writing and practice. a more pervasive presence in the practice and theory of the discipline than is commonly supposed. Orientations to the surface DR LAINI BURTON emerge, collapse, and reappear, sustaining it as a legitimate theoretical and artefactual Beyond the surface: the spatial dialectics entity, despite the disciplinary definition of of Pipilotti Rist’s Pour Your Body Out (7354 architecture as space, structure, and function. Cubic Meters) The persistence of surface is a commentary Pipilotti Rist’s 2008–2009 installation on the concomitance of the visual and the Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) built, especially as modernity casts into showcased an immersive environment that question the nature of the eye, vision, and the pursued an affective use of physical space. visible. In White Walls and Designer Dresses, The installation site—the Marron atrium in Mark Wigley notes: “Architecture is no longer MoMA, New York—engenders the maternal, simply a visual object with certain properties. domestic interior and implies notions of It is actually involved in the construction of containment and delimitation while reiterating the visual before it is placed within the visual. the ‘Otherness’ of woman. Critical responses Indeed, vision itself becomes an architectural to Rist’s installation employed a range of phenomenon” (1995). feminising metaphors which describe a Even though surface is defended for its ‘dialectic of division’; one that emphasises pervasiveness by Kurt Forster, it occupies the binary structures of interior/exterior, nature/ interstice or the space of the unconscious culture reflected in social hierarchies. in architectural discourse, from where it I argue Rist ruptures the naturalising function defends its legitimacy as architecturally of such metaphors by producing a work valuable, as opposed to merely visually where the boundary is reconfigured as pleasurable. Nevertheless, it is a key site for permeable and temporal. Further, I suggest interdisciplinary collaborations, which allows Rist’s installation offers an alternative practitioners and thinkers in art, heritage, experience to linear time and the rationality fashion, interior design and craft, industrial of Cartesian space; one that proposes new design, new materials and installation relationships between its form and content. technologies to think of surface as superficial and pervasive, symbol and space; meaningful This paper, then, will discuss Rist’s installation and functional; static and transitory, object as a work that embodies a spatial dialectic and 74 investigates how space is constituted through S TELLA NORTH the metaphoric body of woman. Dr Laini Burton is Lecturer, at the Queensland Sartorialised space: the surfacing of College of Art, Griffith University. Her research expansive bodies interests centre on body politics and gender The framing of the body by clothing is akin theory, and contemporary Australian art and to the framing of the potential-charged design practice. interior of a building by its manifest structure. Mapping the integument of corporeal surface and tectonic substance, garments become ANNA DALY a mimetic inter-address of body and space, effecting a corporealisation of place at the The lost dimensions of industrial space: scale of what is worn. To wear and to inhabit wallpaper as surface and surface as are thus not so far removed; both stage the structure in the late-eighteenth and application of the body’s immediacy to its nineteenth century interior experientially intimated objects, and vice versa. Surfaces corporeal and spatial are For Henri Lefebvre, the produced space of brought into continuity via clothing’s interface modernity has replaced the social space of – an interface both emphatic, as is the sewing pre-industrialisation. This is partly attributable sense of the word, and communicative, as is to what he terms the “disembodiment” of the computing sense. To consider body and space where, epistemologically speaking, the space in continuity with one another is not body is severed from its natural relationship only to extend our understanding of both, but to space reconfiguring the body and space as to be located analytically as we are already ontologically distinct categories. located experientially; both spatialised and This paper illustrates Lefebvre’s argument sartorialised. through the emergence of wallpaper, a form Stella North is undertaking a doctoral thesis that, in its apparent devotion to the surface, in Gender and Cultural Studies entitled Word articulates the problematic surface/structure Made Cloth: Rebodying Fashion’s Materiality. distinction used to characterise rational She is the author of ‘The Surfacing of the Self: space. As such, wallpaper also demonstrates The Clothing-Ego’ in the forthcoming Palgrave the degree to which produced space was collection Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis. susceptible to “...instability, disparity and substitutions.” The phenomenon of faire tapisserie, in which DR FLAVIA MARCELLO women could seemingly disappear into walls serves as just one example of this. Here, Scratching the surface: technical and the significance of the surface to categories symbolic practices of contemporary ‘green’ of being challenges the concept of its architecture superficiality and reveals that the separation Throughout history the architectural surface between subject and object underwriting the has been used to represent, narrativise and surface/structure distinction is one vulnerable naturalise religious, political and economic to distortion. power. This paper approaches architecture Anna Daly is researching Enlightenment as an assemblage of relations and flows conceptualisations of space for a PhD that cutting across the autonomy of a disciplinary also considers the conventions of genre field, surrounding and producing buildings and framing that underwrite art historical as objects expressing socio-cultural order definitions of illusionism. and acting as economic agents. It uses 75 together < > apart contemporary ‘Green’ architecture to pose architects’ collages and photomontages key questions in relation to the ideology and generated architectural proposals and their language of ‘sustainable’ architecture: How representations. For Raggatt, collage was does architecture reconcile questions of given significant attention in a catalogue of surface with the form, style and content of procedures (Raggatt 1993) and employed in ‘sustainability’ and green-ness? Is ‘Green’ the design of buildings. architecture becoming more a style than a mode of practice? How can the desire for Dianne Peacock is a Melbourne based formal and stylistic innovation influence the architect and artist completing a PhD in move to sustainable practice? It discusses Architecture and Design by project at RMIT three recent Melbourne buildings whose University. An ongoing project collates technical and symbolic practices show a examples of architects’ collages. shift from content to form, from surfaces that achieve best-practice standards of sustainability to facades that act as signifiers KIRSTY VOLZ & in their own right. DAVID TOUSSAINT Dr Flavia Marcello is an architectural historian lecturer in design at Deakin University. Beneath the surface: the unsolved mysteries Her research is in fascist ideology in its of Jim Thompson and Florence Broadhurst artistic, architectural and urban expressions This paper investigates the parallels merged with sustainable design curriculum between the careers of Jim Thompson and development in academic and professional Florence Broadhurst and what lead them development settings. to design such noteworthy patterns for wall surfaces in the final act of their lives. Was it that the coloured surface provided a way DIANNE PEACOCK to camouflage and hide its subjects? As Fernand Léger wrote white walls create ‘… Architects’ collage and photomontage: an impalpability of air, of slick, brilliant new propositional work from Melbourne, 1980 and surfaces where nothing can be hidden any onwards longer….’ Then, for Broadhust and Thompson the patterned surface became a plane in Picasso and Braques’ experiments of 1912 which to bury past secrets. begin an account of the role of collage in modern art (Taylor 2004). By contrast, in Kirsty Volz and David Toussaint are a husband architecture we encounter only fragmentary and wife duo who share a passion for and incidental histories of the application architecture and South East Asian culture. and development of this medium despite the discipline’s extensive use of photomontage. This paper is part of a search for histories of architects’ photomontage and collage. Its MOLLY DUGGINS focus is on generative and propositional works, observing that for much of the 20th century, Colonial montage: consolidating an such work often occurred in contexts where Australian iconography in late nineteenth- architecture and contemporary art mixed. century graphic culture A local fragment of a history of architects’ Focusing on the late nineteenth-century collage and photomontage is found in the graphic output of John Sands Ltd., I will work of a number of Melbourne architects examine the employment of montage, a including Howard Raggatt and Ivan composite illustrative style featuring vignettes Rijavec. From the 1980s onwards, these of scenic landscapes and emblems of industry 76 integrated through frames incorporating to the scene of the crime, or the event, before Australian flora and fauna, as a strategic or alongside the authorities. illustrative style engaged in visually defining Australian identity in the years surrounding However, David Campany speaks of the Federation. While demonstrating the artistic propensity of the contemporary photographer and technological sophistication of the to turn up late to the event, arriving after colonies, Sands’ montage imagery drew upon the ‘action’ is over or after the crime has an intimate scrapbook aesthetic that sought been committed. One can see this shift as a to personally appeal to and implicate the response to the ‘decisive moment’, the key viewer in consolidating its constituent parts element of an earlier photographic cycle and to construct a pictorial narrative. In its ability one that remains iconic of a certain genre of to solidify rather than fracture, to smooth over photography. One can also see this lateness the cultural fissures of colonialism in order to as a reaction to the drama of journalism, as a re-envision the colonial past subsumed in an response to the horrific images of accidents emerging vision of an optimistic nationalist and world events that populate our lives, future, montage has particular agency as a or as part of a shift in emphasis from the decorative mode within late nineteenth-century author to the viewer. Under this relatively new Australian visual culture. photographic mode, a viewer populates what might appear initially as an empty image with Molly Duggins is a PhD candidate in art meaning, which is generated by the image history at the University of Sydney. Her thesis and by the viewer’s own experience. examines the aesthetic assemblage of nature in colonial Australian albums. This session will explore the shift in contemporary practice from photographing the event to recording its aftermath. It will examine how the photographic might relate to concepts of history and memory and how it can act as a marker of past events, people or places, or PANEL record traces of the aftermath of an event. THE AFTERMATH : PHOTOGR APHY, DE AN KEEP MEMORY AND HISTORY Remembering Hiroshima: photographs as cultural artifacts and memory sites CONVENORS DONNA WEST BRETT The photograph is both text and object. University of Sydney It is a mnemonic device, a trigger for the remembrance and memorialisation of events borne out of direct and indirect experience. ANN SHELTON Photographs are also memory sites (Nora Massey University 1989) that connect the past with the present. In the world of photojournalism, ‘keen In 1947, two years after the atomic bomb young photographers’ sometimes known as exploded over the Japanese city of Hiroshima ‘ambulance chasers’ monitor police radio: in killing tens of thousands of civilians, the doing so they follow in the footsteps of such author’s father served in Hiroshima as photo luminaries as Brassai or Weegee. They part of an Australian contingency of the are also attempting to secure the quintessential British Commonwealth Occupational Forces image, summing up a situation pictorially. (B.C.O.F.) deployed to assist in the rebuilding These photographers have endeavored to get of the city. 77 together < > apart The graphic photographs, which depict the Department of Politics and International the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Studies at the University of Cambridge. She Hiroshima, packaged as souvenirs for the holds a Masters of International Affairs at occupying troops have shaped Keep’s the ANU, a Masters in Art History and Visual memories of this catastrophic event. Culture at the University of Oxford and a Bachelor of Art Theory (Honours) at the Using the field of memory studies as a College of Fine Arts, UNSW. theoretical framework in which to interrogate Keep’s family photographs, this paper examines how these particular photographic artifacts have helped to shape the authors HELEN HUGHES understanding and memories of post-war Hiroshima. A phenomenology of aftermath: Gregor Schneider’s Weisse Folter 2007 Dean Keep’s research is concerned with exploring the nexus between emerging digital The contemporary German installation artist technologies and memory/remembrance. Gregor Schneider plumbs the notion of Other research areas include mobile media, ‘aftermath’ to explore the entangled fields of digital imaging and the production of hybrid memory, history and their representation. narrative forms. In this paper, I seek to explore the specific relationship between photographic image and architectural space as it relates to ELIZA GARNSEY the staging of aftermath by discussing Schneider’s 2007 exhibition Weisse Folter, The battle for hearts and minds: artistic made for K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- responses to terror Westfallen in Düsseldorf. Here, Schneider created a life-size reconstruction of Camp Armed with art International Relations is more 5, part of the US military detention camp at alert to ideas and less blinded by rhetoric. Guantanamo Bay, relying solely on digital Art and visual culture play a strategic role in photographs downloaded from the internet as the battle for hearts and minds. This paper blueprints. Each of the rooms was emptied examines the role of art as a soft power of human occupants, clinically clean, freshly resource used to transmit knowledge and painted, and largely divested of signifiers values across both individual and collective of geographic context. Yet what Schneider levels. Using the War on Terror as a case ultimately suggests in this work is that traces study, the paper examines how art and visual of an event can never be wholly expunged culture affected the War on Terror in two from site. Weisse Folter sought to present discernable ways. First, art was influential a phenomenologically charged, simulated in co-opting support for the War on Terror. experience of Camp 5 without deferring to the After 9/11 terrorism became highly optical iconic image-tropes — of kneeling, restrained, and images of ‘terror’ flooded the visual age. orange-clad prisoners — propagated by Secondly, art and visual culture have been international news media. In this way, the prominent in representing and co-opting rooms were like ‘empty photographs’ whose anti-war sentiment. Images of American meaning was determined by the viewer’s soldiers torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib physical experience of the space. prison became central to fostering anti-war sentiment. Helen Hughes is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Melbourne. She is In October 2012 Garnsey will commence co-founder and co-editor of Discipline, and doctoral research into the nexus between an editor of emaj — the Electronic Melbourne creative expression and post-conflict justice in Art Journal. 78 VERONICA TELLO understood. Given the contested relationship between photography and knowledge, the Distillations of Time: the politics of aftermath flow of understanding always moves both photography and Rosemary Laing’s to walk on ways between my images and a viewer; a sea of salt (2004) even when action or someone’s state or appearance is visually described, there’s no By the time Rosemary Laing arrived to certainty as to the meaning of what is seen document the Woomera detention centre in and no clear narrative reading. Photographed 2004 more than a year had passed since its in or within a kilometre of my home, Small closure. Many of the photographs in Laing’s Hours explores interior and exterior, public subsequent series, to walk on a sea of salt, and private spatial and other relationships, appear desolate, peopleless, baron: it is as operating in an uncanny and ambiguous if history is at a standstill. They focus on the register. traces of historical events as opposed to the Rebecca Shanahan is a Sydney-based artist. ‘decisive moment.’ They proffer ‘monumental’ In 2011 her work Neighbours screened at like images for commemorating contemporary the ACP Festival, Atlanta, USA and her joint history. They are, in turn, forms of ‘aftermath’ exhibition Homelands (with Damian Dillon) is photography. Many critics have argued at UTS Gallery in June–July 2012. that aftermath photography produces a sublime aesthetic which reifies and rarifies the historical referent, bringing the genre’s ethics into question. Yet, as this analysis of JONATHAN KAY to walk on a sea of salt will show, that which To the uttermost end: the photographic is at stake vis-à-vis aftermath photography amalgamation of history, imagination and is not necessarily bound to its distance from exploration in illusionary landscapes the historical event, but rather its particular production of (expanded) historical time. ‘When navigators set out from the Mediterranean world, and later from Europe, Veronica Tello is a PhD candidate at the looking for the fabled land, they were University of Melbourne. Her research is searching not just for the future but for the published in Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in past as well’ (Edmond, 2009, p. 211). Painting, Afterall, Tijdschrift Kunstlicht and Art Monthly Australia. At the beginning 18th century one third of the Earth remained a mystery to Europeans (Ferns et al., 2007). While the majority of the northern hemisphere had been geographically REBECCA SHANAHAN navigated, the Southern hemisphere remained largely uncharted by European explorers. Small hours and dead time However, the South Pacific did not remain a void, rather it became a theatre in to which My recent photographic and video work Small European imagination projected illusionary Hours references the cinematic technique landscapes such as the Antipodes, The Great of temps mort. In French ‘dead time’, temps Southern Land and Terra Australis Incognita. mort is the term used when filming occurs before or after characters move into frame or The purpose of this creative research paper is action takes place. Used by auteur directors to visualize illusionary landscapes of the South like Claire Denis, Yasujiro Ozu and famously Pacific into photographic experiences. These Michelangelo Antonioni, these moments of illusionary landscapes are the amalgamation temps mort often resemble small meditations of memory, history and imagination that on what can or cannot be seen, and by stems from this imaginative consciousness of implication what can or cannot be known or European exploration. 79 together < > apart Jonathan Kay is currently studying at Massey University towards a Master of Fine Arts. He PANEL has exhibited in a number of group exhibitions in both, public and private galleries in New THE DIALECTICAL Zealand and the United States of America. Website: www.jonathan-kay.com SPIRIT IN ART CONVENORS CHERIE PROSSER DR VICTORIA CARRUTHERS The University of Sydney Australian soldiers at Vignacourt JAIME T SAI The recent discovery of hundreds of glass The University of Sydney plate negatives of Australian, American and English troops stationed in Vignacourt during There is little doubt that the spirit of dialectics 1916 through to the end of the First World pervades, sometimes haunts, the thinking of War created a media story in Australia. The the 20th century. The influence of Hegel on the revival of the images of the ‘lost diggers’ seminal theory and philosophy of the ‘moderns’ has captured the imaginations of the public. like Darwin, Freud and Marx is undisputed. The public interest has been largely focused Furthermore, Kojève’s interpretive lectures around the personal stories, the family history on Hegel delivered throughout the 1930s in and personal commemoration. Paris to a devoted audience, which included This paper will explore how photographic Lacan, Bataille, Breton, Merleau-Ponty and and artistic documents can relate concepts Sartre, contributed to the dialectical spirit that of history and memory. With the distancing underlines structuralism, poststructuralism, of time, meaning can sometimes only be psychoanalytic theory and post colonial generated from the image and the viewer’s theory. Whether in support of, or opposition own experience. The development of the to the synthesising quality of the dialectic, all community portal by the Memorial is key 20th century theory is informed by its legacy, to ensuring that there is new space for the emerging in preoccupations with notions of self public to share their memories and to enable and Other, reconciliations of inner and outer connections to be made between the present realities and theories of the fluid, polysemic and the past. nature of human subjectivity. In this sense the dialectical spirit is evident in all aspects of Remember me: the lost diggers of Vignacourt cultural, aesthetic and social theory and creative curated by Dr Janda Gooding opens 2 practice that seeks to explore the often complex November 2012. relationships between opposing notions: Cherie Prosser is assistant curator of art at cultural assimilation/difference; the whole/the The Australian War Memorial. She curated fraction; dualism/polysemicism; heterogeneity/ Everyday addictions, AGSA 2005 and was homogeneity; fixed and fluid; and, of course assistant curator for the 2004 Adelaide together/apart. Biennale of Australian Art. Her MA was on the use of the neo-baroque aesthetics by contemporary photography and video artists. DR DARRYN ANSTED Blurred synthesis: Gerhard Richter and dialectics of the visible Gerhard Richter’s painting parallels the problematising of the Hegelian dialectic in 80 the second half of the twentieth century. it within the discourse that occurs around This paper establishes dialectical thought, notions of self and ‘other’ by comparing and via the legacy of Richter’s training in Socialist contrasting it to the work of several Australian Realism, as on ongoing element reworked indigenous artists, Danie Mellor, Richard Bell throughout his oeuvre. Whether encountered and Daniel Boyd all of whom exhibit hybridity in the ideological mandates of East German in their creative practice cultural policy or in the stylistic subversion of the West’s avant-gardism, Richter engages Nicola Dickson is a visual artist. The topic of the dialectic with a deconstructive practice her PhD, completed at the ANU in 2010 was that works both within and to resist its Wonderlust: The influence of natural history logic, deploying a dialectical approach as illustration and ornamentation on perceptions authentically as possible – not unlike Theodor of the exotic in Australia. Adorno’s negative dialectic. With a close visual analysis of several key paintings, and a clear explication of their ideological context, DR ROB HAYSOM this paper documents the preservation of dialectical tension throughout Richter’s Artist as shaman oeuvre, concluding that ultimately this refusal The artist and his double is prevalent amongst of synthesis must be understood as an those artists adopting a shaman persona ethical fracture in Hegelian systematisation: within their artistic practice. Works by Beuys a resistance to the reduction of difference and Ernst are paradigmatic of such activities. comparable to certain manoeuvres in the The Australian artist Kevin Mortensen thought of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel has applied the shaman role extensively Lévinas. throughout his artistic ouvre, particularly in his adoption of a bird-man persona in many of his Dr Darryn Ansted is Coordinator of Painting works. at Curtin University in Western Australia. An early-career artist-academic, his practice Drawing upon Danish and Australian involves painting as a social practice and aboriginal myths and legends, pre-history, publishing on contemporary art. and landscapes of Denmark and Australia, his work is permeated with the artist as storyteller. His pioneering performance work The Seagull Salesman at Pinacotheca in 1971 began DR NICOLA DICKSON a variety of projects conducted in various locations in galleries and outside settings, that In search of self include representing Australia at the 1980 How does a ‘settler’ Australian artist engage Venice Biennale, performing at the ICA London with notions of self and ‘other’? Who is self as well as performances in wetland and city and who ‘other’? Indeed how can such environments throughout Australia. an artist engage with representations of The role of shaman raises questions about the indigenous Australian people without being adoption of such a position, well foregrounded situated as the coloniser? How does one enter when examining Mortensen`s work. and culturally engage within the ‘Third space of enunciation’ described by Homi K. Bhabha I currently teach art history, theory and and ‘elude the politics of polarity and emerge painting, and co-ordinate the Honours as the others of our selves’? This paper charts program across our School. Recent my negotiation of these concerns within my research includes a monograph on Arnold painting practice which explores evolving Shore (Macmillan) and Kevin Mortensen notions of Australian identity. I will discuss the (forthcoming). painting methodology I employ and situate 81 together < > apart SUSAN HOLDEN aesthetic ideas and urban paradigms in architecture. The antinomy of the ‘space-time’ concept in modern architecture DR ADAM JASPER This paper proposes to revisit the disciplinary significance of the ‘space-time’ concept Slavoj Zizek’s less than nothing: Hegel and for modern architecture by considering its the shadow of dialectical materialism historical and conceptual relationship to the longuedurée of the spatial/temporal division ‘What we refer to as the continent of in the arts. The ‘space-time’ concept was “philosophy” can be considered as extending famously popularised by architectural historian as much as one wants into the past or into Sigfried Giedion in his highly influential 1941 the future, but there is a unique philosophical book Space, Time and Architecture: The moment in which philosophy appears “as Growth of a New Tradition, in which he used such” and which serves as a key—as the the ‘space-time’ concept as a synecdoche for only key—to reading the entire preceding the zeitgeist of modernity, and to describe the and following tradition as philosophy […] This historical prescience of modern architectural moment is the moment of German Idealism’ space. Giedion’s use of the concept invoked (Less than Nothing, 2012, p7) two competing historical lineages of ideas Like a latter-day Kojève, Zizek seeks to about spatial experience in architecture. On reassert the primacy of Hegel’s dialectic as the one hand, he drew from an avant-garde the definitive event in western philosophical conceptualisation of ‘space-time’ that focused thought. In unambiguous terms, he claims on the kinaesthetic aspect of spatial experience the primacy of the dialectic as not only ‘a as something that could unite the arts of breath-taking concentration in the intensity painting, sculpture and architecture. On the of thinking’, but as the pre-condition for other hand, he also drew on ideas developed in philosophy “as such”. Can such an ambitious the nineteenth century by a group of German re-inscription of Hegel into contemporary aesthetic theorists, which focused on the thought be sustained? What are the temporality of bodily extension as the thing implications of Zizek’s arguments for the that distinguished architecture from the other practice of art history? On the occasion of the arts. The spatial/temporal division in the arts, publication of Zizek’s thousand page magnum first articulated by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing opus on the dialectic, this paper will attempt in his essay Laocöon: An Essay on the Limits to provide a primer on this monumental of Painting and Poetry (1766), and reiterated work, and take some first tentative steps in in the twentieth century in the concept of assessing its implications. ‘medium specificity’ in modern art; provides a productive framework through which to Dr Adam Jasper is a lecturer at the University think through the antinomy of the ‘space-time’ of Technology Sydney. He is a contributing concept in modernism, and to more deeply editor to Cabinet Magazine, and a regular understand its significance as a fault-line in contributor to Frieze and Art and Australia. architecture’s disciplinary identity. Susan lectures in the History and Theory of Architecture and Architectural Design, and is CHARI LARSSON a member of the ATCH (Architecture, Theory, Didi-Huberman’s dialectics: the legacy of the Criticism, History) Research Centre. Her unhappy consciousness research interests include the history of post- war architecture; architecture’s relationship In an astonishing body of work spanning to the other arts; and the historiography of thirty years and over thirty books, Georges 82 Didi-Huberman’s art history reflects an of wonder, these objects are chimeric in their ongoing engagement with the anti-Hegelian combination of art, natural history, cabinetry spirit of contemporary French philosophy. and theatre. They manifest a dialectical spirit This paper will examine one aspect of the and like their Baroque forebears they offer anti-Hegelian impulse in Didi-Huberman’s the beholder a vicarious experience of the thought, specifically his proximity to Georges new world. Straddling the old world and the Bataille and Bataille’s preoccupation with the new, they are chimera produced by radical “unhappy consciousness” as an irreconcilable cultural, perceptual and technological shifts, rend in subjectivity. conditions that find uncanny parallel in the twenty first century post-colonial remediation Most accounts of Georges Bataille’s of the baroque. Hegelianism commence with Kojève’s Lisa Slade is Project Curator at the Art Gallery lectures in the 1930s. I will, however, retrieve of South Australia and a PhD candidate at an earlier moment in the French reception Monash University. of Hegel, Jean Wahl’s 1929 publication of Le malheur de la conscience. Wahlemphasised an internally divided and self-alienated model of subjectivity, unable to achieve synthesis in PANEL experience. Wahl’s “unhappy consciousness” exerted a profound influence on Bataille’s TOGETHER BUT APART thinking, who embraced the theme of an irrational, fragmented subject. In – EUROPEAN ART IN Didi-Huberman’s hands this becomes a powerful tool in his development of a PUBLIC AND PRIVATE non-Hegelian dialectics. COLLECTIONS IN Chari Larsson is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Queensland. She is writing AUSTRALIAN AND NEW her thesis on French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman. ZEALAND, 1840–1940 CONVENOR LISA SLADE S TEWART REED Postgraduate student, University of New Hybridity, the colonial imagination and the South Wales neo baroque Many art collections in Australasia were shaped by groups of people who were Recent theory has positioned aspects of both together but apart. The collectors, contemporary art and entertainment as neo- whether public or private, in Australia and baroque. This paper extends this dialectic New Zealand drew upon artists, exhibitions, arguing for the inherently baroque nature of advisors and dealers on the other side of the several colonial objects made in the colony world, while their selections were influenced of New South Wales in the early nineteenth by art historians, critics and writers who were century. Made for private entertainment often distant and frequently unaware of the and sensorial pleasure, these hybrid circumstances of these collections. The time constructions, including collectors’ chests lapse caused by contemporary technologies and multipurpose furniture pieces, reveal the also increased the sense of separation. neo-baroque excesses and exigencies of the colonial imagination. Like the seventeenth At the same time, from the 1840s onwards, century Baroque wunderschrank, or cabinets works of art were displayed for sale in the 83 together < > apart colonies and many collectors purchased them more conservative styles, yet were innovative without any real connection with the artist enough to situate him as one of the more or knowledge of their place in the artistic radical painter-printmakers of his generation. milieu at ‘home’. Some local sellers may have While detractors from his work would claim been art dealers, but were just as likely to be Brangwyn’s prints were an “offense” in owners of music shops or stationers such as Whistlerian terms, this paper will contend Wilkie & Webster’s Music Shop in Melbourne he was, in fact, an “inoffensive” rebel, and and John Sands in Sydney. Various criteria a significant figure within the Australasian were employed to assess the value of a work printmaking community. of art, such as the artist’s ability to exhibit in the Royal Academy in London or the Salon in Rebecca Edwards is a PhD candidate at the Paris; certainly these exhibitions were keenly University of Melbourne. She is the 2012 reported by the colonial press. Later collectors Gordon Darling Intern, Assistant Curator of were able to use publications such as the Art Australian Prints and Drawings at the National Journal and Studio to read analyses of artists Gallery of Australia. and their works while also taking account of the opinions of local commentators, whose role expanded as the nineteenth century SUZANNE FR ASER progressed. The nexus between the two groups— Scottish-British-Australian identity at the European sources of art and advice and National Gallery of Victoria, 1864 to 1945 colonial purchasers—changed as more Between 1864 and 1945, the National affluent Australasian collectors travelled to Gallery of Victoria acquired approximately acquire works while journeys by art gallery 30 works of Scottish painting, the majority staff and trustees increased around the early of which were selected for the gallery by 1900s. However the use of overseas advisors a series of London art advisors whose by public and private art collectors continued expertise was employed for the purpose of into the mid 20th century. establishing a public collection for Victoria worthy of its position within the Empire and, subsequently, Commonwealth. The cross REBECCA EDWARDS section of Scottish works included in the gallery’s purchasing campaign aligned with An inoffensive rebel – the black and white the current fashions in London, which were work of Frank Brangwyn shaped by the motivations of national identity Although the introduction of the etching and presiding political authority. As this revival in Australia and New Zealand was paper will demonstrate, in their selections stimulated by State Galleries and their and commissions of Scottish art from London purchases of artist’s prints in the late 1800s, during this period, the National Gallery of the development of the movement was driven Victoria represented an allegiance to the by antipodean artists in the early twentieth inseparability of the concepts of Scotland and century. Britain. This paper will provide a revisionist reading of this state of affairs. This paper will focus on the attraction of the etchings of Frank Brangwyn, aesthetically Suzanne Fraser is a PhD candidate at the and ideologically, to the close-knit network University of Melbourne; her research of etchers and collectors that existed in the focuses on the collection of Scottish art and early 1900s. To this group, Brangwyn was the cultivation of Scottish visual culture in an acceptable rebel. His prints were linked to Australia. 84 JENNIFER HARRIS men in London asking them to select works for the Gallery’s collection. They were an Private and public collections of Japanese artist and an insurance manager. They, and art in nineteenth century Australia and New their successors, could purchase without Zealand consultation with the Trustees. The collecting of Japanese art by nineteenth Although telegrams were available, most century Australians and New Zealanders was communication was by letter and it took an expression of their aspirations to be part at least three months to get a reply. These of the international community despite being affected the decisions about which works to geographically apart. acquire. Private collectors like Sir Samuel Way in The Trustees soon were expressing Adelaide or Sir Joseph Kinsey in Christchurch reservations about works acquired by the formed their collections through access to Selectors despite both being influenced by international dealers, travel, exhibitions and the same critics and writers. extensive personal libraries housing important The Trustees became frustrated and in 1902, publications on the subject of Japanese art. they informed London that the Selection Bequests and gifts from such private Committee was no longer necessary. collectors provided the catalyst for the However within two years another system of formation of Japanese art collections in Selectors was reintroduced. Australian and New Zealand public museums. This paper examines the impact of physical Some public museums, however, like the Art and temporal separation between these Gallery of Western Australia or the Art Gallery groups on the Gallery’s acquisitions. It of South Australia resourcefully and directly also examines local purchases of overseas pursued acquisitions by other means. artworks. This paper will examine the nature of Stewart’s interest in the British collection of objects collected by the early decades of the AGNSW started some time ago when he the twentieth century, their sources and the researched this collection when he worked for networks of dealers and experts providing the Gallery. He is now undertaking a research advice. Masters at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. Jennifer Harris is in the final-year of her PhD He also teaches at the University of Sydney’s dissertation which examines the formation Centre for Continuing Education. of Japanese art collections in Australia and New Zealand. As the Curatorial Research Assistant in Asian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, she was a contributor to the exhibition catalogue The Golden Journey: Japanese Art from Australian Collections. STEWART REED Art Gallery of NSW selection committees in London and Paris—1874 to 1930s Soon after their appointment in 1874, the Art Gallery of NSW’s Trustees wrote to two 85 together < > apart paucity of scholarly discourse regarding the PANEL relationship between these developments. WHY DON’T WE TALK Drawing upon the themes of both the AAANZ annual conference and the Sydney Biennale, MORE OFTEN?: POINTS we seek to address this scarcity by bringing together academics and artists from a OF CONVERGENCE disparate range of practices and backgrounds in order to discuss the manner in which art BETWEEN VISUAL AND and theatre spaces have both historically PERFORMING ARTS informed one another, as well as the ways in which the multifarious demands made SPACES upon contemporary spaces transgress these formally divisive parameters. CONVENORS DR MELISSA LAING ST PAUL St Gallery, AUT University DR MELISSA LAING Performing Assembly DR DAMIAN LENTINI University of Ballarat Assembly was a two-part project instigated by ST PAUL St in 2012. The first stage involved ‘In the wealth of writings on space and the design and creation of an environment politics, there appears to be a lack of critical that supported the activity of fearless speech literature on the means, relationships, and within the physical space of ST PAUL St underlying ideologies in the making and Gallery One. This was developed by a mixed representation of space.’ discipline group of artists, designers and (Céline Condorelli, Support Structures, Berlin: architects. The second stage of Assembly Sternberg Press, 2009, p.7). was the activation of its principles through This session examines the points of activities held within and supported by the convergence between the construction, space. ST PAUL St extended invitations to positioning and critique of contemporary groups, collectives and individuals to use theatrical and visual arts spaces. Both theatre the space of Assembly to participate in the and the visual arts have adopted similar exploration of fearless speech to address architectural devices and strategies to support specific issues of interest to them. This their activities ranging from the concurrent paper will look at how the support structures emergence of the white cube/black box, developed for Assembly operated as a to the mobilisation of found spaces and platform for the ensuing talks, performances, temporary pavilion environments. However screenings and social interventions. It will these practices are predominantly discussed examine how the structures and events in isolation to one another. performed and critiqued the relationships and ideologies of the university gallery as a Although both visual artists and theatre physical and intellectual space. practitioners have been attempting to break out of their respective hermetic ‘cubes’ and Dr Melissa Laing is a curator, artist and ‘boxes’ from the 1960s onwards – and despite theorist based in New Zealand. Her current the increasing manner in which performative projects include the Performance Ethics strategies and display scenarios have come Working Group, an initiative of the University to inform the presentation and framing of the Without Conditions; and a 2012–13 Henry visual arts and vice-versa – there has been a Moore Institute Research Fellowship to 86 undertake research into the archives of the CHRISTOPHER WENN Public Art Development Trust. The lurker at the threshold: makeshift space and found temporality in Liminal Theatre’s SUE GALLAGHER & MONIQUE The Drover’s Wife Untold REDMOND Melbourne-based Liminal Theatre perform The space of assembly a hallucinatory rendering of Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife (1892) in a studio space This paper will seek to challenge and (im) converted from a school classroom. This mobilise relations between curators, artists paper explores the work of director Robert and exhibition designers and their modes Draffin as an effort of completion,—the work of practice by supporting lines of enquiry of audience, performer, theatremakers and into the complexities of the production of designers striving to come forth in a fragile space in a gallery context. The circulation moment of illumination. The Drover’s Wife of ideas through the various modes of Untold inhabits multiple spaces—the white curatorial proposition, exhibition design and cube of gallery space; the blasted desert of participatory art practice was reconfigured Drysdale’s The Drover’s Wife (c. 1945); the in “Speakeasy”, a two-day event-based ‘Empty Space’; and the ‘makeshift’ space of project, which took place within the month- found-space or site-specific theatre. In its long Assembly project at ST PAUL St Gallery, construction of time—historical time through New Zealand. SPEAKEASY involved a group distorted narrative, performance time through of artists interested in exploring notions of the spatial work of sound, the action-time- ‘free expression’, either as individuals or as vision of digital projection—The Drover’s Wife part of a group or collaboration. Speakeasy Untold is a rendering of theatre/archaeology, included site and time-specific occurrences, reconstructing past, present and future which explored how visual artists and the through its witnessing. This shifting field of objects, encounters and performances we temporality places the making of performance engage in or with, can contribute to ‘free at a point where its truth—its integrity— expression’; with particular emphasis on how is constituted between the reality of its any conversation can encourage or foster an surroundings and the visions of its imagining. exchange or interchange with an observer, audience or passerby. Chris Wenn is a sound designer and theatre practitioner, currently pursuing an MA in Sue Gallagher is a spatial designer and the Theatre Performance at Monash University. Associate Head of School Academic and Chris’ research explores the use of sound Head of Postgraduate in the School of Art & as a mechanism for the intersubjectivity of Design at AUT University. participants within the performance event, and its role after the performance event as theatre/ Monique Redmond is the Visual Arts archaeological artefact. Programme Leader and Postgraduate Strand Leader in the School of Art & Design at AUT University. Her art practice is formed primarily through collaborative and installation DR DAMIAN LENTINI processes. Performing the pavilion The following paper seeks to develop a set of architectural and institutional topographies which inform the design and use of the pavilion within the visual and performing 87 together < > apart arts. Examining a range of permanent and of these actions, and describe the use of temporary structures, it aims to explore the performance intervention as itself a critical potential of the ‘pavilion paradigm’ within strategy, challenging the narrative integrity of contemporary arts discourse; demonstrating the museum. how such structures provide the ideal ontological framework for the occurrence Caroline Wallace is a PhD candidate from of ephemeral art ‘events’ (the exhibition, the University of Melbourne, approaching biennial, vernissage or performance). completion of her dissertation entitled: Highlighting the manner in which pavilions Framing the Artist: Activism and the Whitney can be understood as occupying both a Museum of American Art, 1966–1971. framing and framed position within the staging of contemporary art events, the paper will go on to further demonstrate how contemporary JESSICA L. HORTON manifestations of this elusive structural device perpetually blur the boundaries between Living pictures, moving pasts: Robert Houle’s architectural and sculptural considerations Paris/Ojibwa of ‘art space’; thereby reconfiguring one’s In 2006 during a residency at the Cité des awareness of roles of interior and exterior Arts in Paris, Robert Houle researched the spaces (‘on-stage’ and ‘off-stage’), collective history of Maungwudaus and his Ojibwa and individual modes of spectatorship, dance troupe, who travelled to Paris to dance along with theatrical and visual modes of art on the streets, perform in the court of King reception. Louis-Philippe, and act out tableaux vivants Dr Damian Lentini lectures on modern in George Catlin’s Indian portrait gallery at and contemporary art at the University of the Paris Salon of 1846. For the resulting Ballarat, as well as undertaking sessional work, Paris/Ojibwa (2010), Houle reclaimed tutoring in contemporary art at the University archival traces from this history to form a of Melbourne. His research examines the stage set modelled after the Paris Salon. history, design and function of contemporary Contemporary performers then brought the exhibition spaces; with a particular focus archive to life, dancing from the Canadian on the architecture of non-collecting or Cultural Center to the Louvre. This paper temporary sites. considers politico-aesthetic dimensions of Paris/Ojibwa as Houle reversed of the colonial logic of the tableau vivant—one based on the CAROLINE WALLACE transformation of three-dimensional subjects into two-dimensional objects—reminding his Messing up the museum: theatrical art- contemporary audience that Maungwudaus activism and his dance troupe never stayed still for long. Screaming, squirming and smearing the sanctified spaces of museums, art-activism Jessica L. Horton, Doctoral Candidate in in late 1960s New York moved beyond Visual and Cultural Studies, University of traditional protest measures of picketing and Rochester, is completing her dissertation, pamphlets. Activist organisations such as the Places to Stand: Native Art Beyond the Guerrilla Art Activist Group (GAAG) inserted Nation at the National Gallery of Art in their presence into the controlled space of Washington, D.C. Museums such as the Whitney, MoMA and the Met, introducing a theatrical and raucous combination of performance and protest. This paper will examine a select number 88 MEREDITH MORSE PANEL Expanded spaces: 9 Evenings: theatre & engineering and New York’s post-Cage art WORDS AND RELATIONS The event 9 Evenings: Theatre & BETWEEN ARTWORK Engineering, held at New York’s 69th Regimental Armory in 1966, presented AND AUDIENCE IN THE performances by Robert Rauschenberg and experimental composer John Cage, MUSEUM both well-known art-world figures, and included works by Happenings practitioners CONVENOR and artists formerly associated with the JOSEPHINE TOUMA Judson Dance Theater. These works used Art Gallery of New South Wales & the the event’s purpose-built proto-network of University of Sydney electronic technologies to capitalise upon the Armory’s cavernous space and unusual Words, written or spoken, are undoubtedly acoustics. the most common interface between the artwork and the audience in the museum. The 9 Evenings artists had to negotiate From labels to audio tours and lectures, words changes effected by the electronically- are ubiquitous, but is there also a place for enhanced environment to their more local silence? When should words cease and how conceptions of visual-art spaces and can we use them to induce the viewer’s own theatre spaces. As the literature on new- imagination, looking and understanding? As media performance suggests, 9 Evenings a public programmer, the oral and written was one of the earliest performance traditions of art history are an integral part events in American art that was thoroughly of my work, but I’d like also to investigate technologically mediated. Artists had methods of engagement that allow for silence to accommodate the tendency of its or non-verbal learning. The paper will look technologies to amplify and distort the at the place of non-verbal engagement in art effects of sounds and bodily movement. The museums, using three examples: drawing and result would be the production of new and performance (visually-oriented programs) and unanticipated forms of sound, space, and group discussion that incorporates extended the performer. periods of silent looking. Whilst traditionally Meredith Morse is completing an art history associated with children’s or school’s PhD at the University of Sydney. She programs, these methods have great potential published a chapter on Simone Forti’s 1960s for diverse adult audiences. work in VOICE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts Josephine Touma specialises in adult and Media (MIT Press, 2010). learning and engagement, particularly related to European art, at AGNSW. She is also completing her PhD on Antoine Watteau in the Department of Art History, University of Sydney. 89 together < > apart SHEONA WHITE In this paper, I will present a case study of the various interpretive approaches the Knowledge of art; knowledge of audiences new MCA has taken to engaging audiences with contemporary art and instigating Reading, writing and speaking; listening, conversations about the works on display. I discussion and scholarship are all integral will discuss the different ways that interpretive components of the experience of visual art. content has been devised across different This is not new and can be traced back as far platforms to open up the possibility of back as an art historian would like to go. How different viewpoints and interpretations and this discursive practice plays out in galleries will talk about what we’ve learned in the is subject to much debate between and process. within different gallery departments. Curators, designers and program producers often Heather Whitely Robertson is the Head understand these dynamics in different ways of Creative Learning at the Museum of depending on their perspective. A new and Contemporary Art Australia. Prior to this, she complex dimension of this discursive practice worked for the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate is now playing out by virtue of the possibilities Modern and the National Gallery of Victoria. afforded by mobile technologies and Internet interfaces. DR GAY MCDONALD & I am interested in exploring the use of new and old technologies and the social GARY SANGSTER engagement that adult audiences practice as part of their wider engagement with Finding a way through contemporary art exhibitions, collections and gallery programs. In this paper the authors seek to address Sheona White is the Head of Public Programs what they consider to be the crucial ‘role at the AGNSW. She was previously Senior that words play in audience engagement…’ Curator, Museum Education at the MCA, by thinking about interpretative strategies Sydney and Deputy Director & Senior Curator as an integral dimension of a museum’s at the Wollongong City Gallery vision or approach rather than as a separate element of any given exhibition. To develop this proposition, the paper uses two case studies: the Museum of Contemporary Art, HE ATHER WHITELY ROBERTSON Denver and the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart. We will argue that the vision of each Conversation starters institution decisively informs how museum The MCA has established a transformative professionals in each setting deploy words new space for audiences to engage with and which inflects the type of engagement contemporary art. Visitors to our new building viewers have with works of art. tell us that they are delighted, excited and Gay McDonald and Gary Sangster lecture in inspired by the revitalised Museum. This is the School of Art History and Art Education good news indeed – but what about their at UNSW and are members of in.site: experience of the art? Were they moved, Contemporary Curatorial and Education challenged or ambivalent to the art they Research at UNSW/COFA (in.site.unsw.edu.au). experienced? Did the interpretive words we provided unlock meaning, open up thinking and tempt our visitors to revisit the art again and again to continue to explore new meanings? 90 MICHELLE FR ACARO This paper will examine Slow Art at the National Gallery of Australia and present Slow art: the ultimate public program findings to support its value and assert it as ‘the ultimate public program’ for museums ‘Good gallery teaching … provides unrivalled and galleries. opportunities for people to see deeply and think together about works of art, yielding Michelle has worked as an educator in a shared understandings inaccessible to the range of cultural institutions including The individual viewer’ (Rika Burnham, Teaching in Australian War Memorial, Old Parliament the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience House, The National Film and Sound Archive, 2011:1) The National Portrait Gallery, the National Archives of Australia and the Nolan Gallery. Learning programs in museums and galleries She holds a Bachelor of Education from the are varied and diverse. They allow for a University of Canberra, a Bachelor of Arts in Art multilayered approach to the interpretation History and Curatorship from the ANU and has of artworks and provide insight into artist’s recently completed a Masters of Liberal Arts in practice. By providing access to collections Museums and Collections from the ANU. and exhibitions through multiple modes (e.g. talks and lectures, workshops, music, performance and film screenings) museums DR LIM CHYE HONG and galleries encourage a layering of interpretive ideas that offer an alternative to ReFusing language and multiculturalism in traditional modes of interpretation such as the gallery text labels and interpretive panels. Translating cultural differences and Embraced by over 90 art museums and sensitivities is not an easy act. Translating for galleries throughout the world, Slow Art the sake of translating is often a recipe for follows in the footsteps of the popular disaster. Lost in translation may be excused Slow Food movement, which began in the but careless misinformation as a result of late 1980s and has become increasing cultural arrogance is not acceptable. This popular worldwide. Aimed at encouraging a paper centres on managing resources and contemplative approach to art, the Slow Art programming within Art Institutions by movement encourages participants to pace addressing three concerns. The first explores their gallery experience and to look in-depth issues such as ‘to translate or not to translate’, at a work of art for at least 10 minutes rather ‘the reliance on translation agency’, and than the average of seventeen seconds. The ‘the intervention of a specialist’. The second National Gallery of Australia was keen to addresses strategies for engaging audience of embrace the concept and was proud to be Non-English Speaking Background (NESB) the first Australian art institution to officially through community language tour, education celebrate international Slow Art Day in April kit, digital media (iPod tour and iPad) 2010. and non-digital media (such as exhibition Rather than focusing on words, reading or catalogue, wall text and didactic panel). The talking, initially Slow Art relies on silence third investigates if the poetic intent of an art and quiet contemplation works of art. The work is ‘lost in translation’ in the feat to have program focuses on positive individual it all. observation followed by a shared experience. Dr Lim Chye Hong is a specialist in Chinese It encourages visitors to share their own Art. Prior to her move to Sydney, she has experience of works of art rather than utilising curated exhibitions and taught Art History information mediated through an educator. and Curatorial Studies in Singapore. In the 91 together < > apart recent past, she was visiting curator for the Wollongong City Gallery for Memories of Silk. Currently she is the coordinator of Asian OPEN PANELS Programs at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. ZOE ALDERTON University of Sydney ROBYN BANNON Framing Colin McCahon: sackcloth, nails and paper Metaphor – the use of imaginative language Colin McCahon is remembered for his outré in the interpretation of artworks religious statements on unmounted paper and Drawing on insights garnered through my unframed canvas. He was also committed to work as a Visual Art teacher and now tertiary the delivery of a Christian message of peace Visual Art Education lecturer I have found that and landscape appreciation. McCahon saw more able students are often well placed to frames as an impingement upon his prophetic use language in imaginative and speculative communication. In rejecting borders, he hoped ways. My doctoral research project, titled to embroil his audience in a dynamic, didactic ‘Metaphor – The use of Imaginative Language relationship with his paintings. He wished for in the Interpretation of Artworks’, focuses his imagery to expand past the gallery space on locating ways to extend the capacity of and into social behaviour. The paucity of his students to use language metaphorically unframed materials was a reflection of his to engage in the process of interpreting demotic statements, redolent with meaning. artworks—what artworks are about. This paper will demonstrate how the unclean footsteps he left on his images denoted a This presentation explores the role of spiritual journey; how the rough sackcloth he metaphor in art interpretation, and the employed was a sign of guilt and loss; and how imaginative and creative use of language to the pins that nailed his images to the gallery allow complex, subjective and negotiated wall sought to evoke the suffering of Christ. All meanings to be derived from the images in these messages culminate in his emphatic, artworks. I will discuss the role of metaphor prophetic call to change. as a tool, giving students skills to access an artwork directly, and how this will enhance a Zoe Alderton is a PhD candidate in the student’s capacity to be an active audience in Department of Studies in Religion, University the Art Museum setting. of Sydney. Her thesis concerns the schism between intended meaning and audience I am currently a Lecturer in the School of Art reception in the oeuvre of Colin McCahon. History and Art Education and working on a doctoral research project at COFA UNSW. I have taught Visual Arts in NSW Secondary DR LARISSA ALLEN Schools for 18 years. University of Auckland Architectural metaphor In Kant A pious and humble man, Kant claimed he desired for himself nothing more than a sufficiently comfortable hut. An ambitious thinker, he aspired to nothing less than to conjure up a splendid building of philosophy. The depiction of a philosophical project in architectural terms was not Kant’s invention; 92 for centuries before him, ideological systems ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR would be put into words, but visualized in REX BUTLER & bricks and mortar. DR A. D. S. DONALDSON The architectural metaphor in Kant University of Queensland & National Art follows the Aristotelian paradigm – the School architectural images, which Kant evokes while presenting his philosophical project, A History of unaustralian Art 1940–1960: the enliven his discourse and serve as cognitive choice between abstractions and mnemonic aids to the reader. However, the key to a better appreciation of Kant’s After a period in which it was the choice metaphorical language lies in Kant’s own between surrealism and abstraction that was theory of aesthetic ideas. We suggest that in the driver for Australian art, the period 1940 the context of the philosophical discourse, to 1960 saw Australian artists, both here and whenever a metaphorical simile is used, the abroad, having to choose between European mechanism of the Kantian aesthetic idea is and American forms of abstraction. This, at work. of course, is to offer a very different version of Australian art from the one that would I was born in Moscow, Russia. I have PhD in see the period culminating with the rise of Economics and for eight years was teaching the “Antipodeans” and the publication of Finance in New Zealand. Since 2006, I have Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting. In fact, been studying Art History at the University of 1960 would see the end of the “Australian” Auckland. moment, as evidenced by the fact that for the second edition of Australian Painting Smith would have to append a chapter on JOANNE BAITZ abstraction, which goes against the entire University of Western Australia teleology of the rest of the book. As usual with the nationalist histories, however, the Pathways back to Piero from 20th century date given to this reversal is too late. Already Australian art by 1940, abstraction was the decisive fact of Australian art. This paper seeks to The revival of interest in Piero della Francesca write the pre-history to the “Australianist” that occurred in Europe in the early 20th acknowledgement of abstraction in the Century was due in part to the Modernist 1970s, demonstrating that the history of interest in the use of geometric order, Australian art from 1940 to 1960 can only rationalised space, colour and light. Australian be explained through the competing forms of artists inherited this interest through their European and American abstraction. interpretation and interrogation of European Modernism. This paper looks at how the A.D.S. Donaldson teaches at the National Art works of Piero were referenced by Australian School, Sydney. His most recent project is artists in the 20th century. an exhibition on John Power at the University of Sydney Art Museum, co-curated with Ann Joanne Baitz is a PhD candidate at the Stephen. University of Western Australia under the supervision of Winthrop Professor Richard Rex Butler teaches in the School of English, Read. Her thesis title is: Art in Australian Media Studies and Art History. His most art: Anachronism in 20th Century Modernist recent book is the edited collection Jeremy Australian Art. She graduated from UWA with Gilbert-Rolfe: Art After Deconstruction (2011). a Bachelor of Art (Honours) in English in 2000. 93 together < > apart DR SALLY BUTLER KIM CLAYTON-GREENE University of Queensland University of Melbourne The case for blended concepts in James McNeill Whistler and the Australian intercultural interpretation of art: Frank etching movement Stella’s Working Space & aboriginal desert painting. James McNeill Whistler’s graphic influence in Australia has always been acknowledged What are the grounds for intercultural but never thoroughly interrogated or aesthetic appreciation of Aboriginal Desert documented. As a leader of the nineteenth- Painting that adhere to the tenets of century English and European etching revival, postcolonial politics but avoid aesthetic Whistler’s theories on etching were circulated nullification through cultural authentication? throughout the world. ‘James McNeill Whistler Eric Michaels says its impossible – the socio- and Australian Etching’ examines the impact political contexts are simply too complex; of Whistler’s printed work on the development Elizabeth Burns Coleman suggests an of the Australian painter-etcher movement in approach through the ontology of form – the late nineteenth century and the prolonged “comparing paintings as instances of types” influence of his etching style and theories within their own Aboriginal oeuvre. This paper up until the Australian etching boom in the considers a more straight-forward approach of 1920s and 1930s. This paper will explore ‘blended concepts’. the visual manifestation of Whistler’s style in the works of Australian print artists and ask I argue that sophisticated theoretical why Whistler’s etching enjoyed such popular categorisations for intercultural aesthetics longevity in Australia for so long into the regarding Desert Painting are premature twentieth century. and that critical discourse might advance by first attending to the basic building blocks Kim Clayton-Greene will shortly submit her of aesthetic value. I consider how parallel MA thesis in Art History at the University of concepts of fundamental aesthetic elements Melbourne. Her research focuses on the such as ‘pictorial space’ function as ‘blended legacy of James McNeill Whistler’s graphic concepts’ within intercultural discourse. work in Australia. Blended aesthetic concepts, like the ‘blended family’ and ‘blended learning’ models, are inevitable outcomes of the Deleuzian rhyzomatic conditions of contemporary ARETI DEVETZIDIS Flinders University of South Australia experience that perform ideogenesis. Frank Stella’s writings on pictorial space as ‘Working Entry of the crusaders into Constantinople Space’ provide a salient example. by Eugène Delacroix – Greek history art and Dr Sally Butler is Senior Lecturer in Art History culture, real and imagined, through the prism at the University of Queensland with particular of his art research interests in contemporary Australian Delacroix’s Entry of the Crusaders into Indigenous art, intercultural aesthetics and Constantinople 1840, which he regarded as photo-media art. his third massacre, was commissioned by Louis Phillipe for the Gallery of the Crusaders in the museum of the Palace of Versailles. It depicted a triumph for the French and a disaster for Byzantium. I will examine the meaning attached to the painting that he called his third massacre, the first being 94 Scenes From the Massacres at Chios: Greek elaborate the shifting art world conditions, Families awaiting Slavery or Death 1824 and conceptual frameworks and stylistic strategies the second being The Death of Sardanapalus that make feminist practice the relational 1826–27 based on a play by Byron. The nightmare it is today, whilst seeking strategic tensions of the times are mirrored in the common ground. We ask how can feminist visual language of the painting and the artists and writers gain analytic and political potentially subversive intentions of the artist. traction in the ‘events management’ new art It contains conflicting symbolism that refers, economy? in part, to the attachment of western Europe to a particular fantasy of Greek history and Kelly Doley is a performance artist and part of culture, while denying the actuality of the the Brown Council. historical Hellenic experience. Dr Catriona Moore Lectures at the University Currently I am a full-time Research Higher of Sydney and has written extensively on Degree Student at Flinders University of South feminism, women and the visual arts in Australia in the Department of Modern Greek Australia for many years. Studies. I am also a professional visual artist with twenty years experience as a practitioner. My ultimate aim is to imbue my visual art PRUE GIBSON practice with a deeper knowledge of the University of New South Wales Hellenic historic and cultural experience. Forces of love: the perception of magnetic fields in art KELLY DOLEY & This paper explores the magnetic fields between collaborative artists, and between DR CATRIONA MOORE the art work and the viewer. The perception of Artist & University of Sydney love, as an embodied experience, contributes to phenomenological consciousness of art. Are we there yet? The phenomenology of art detects strong Following international examples, recent relations between collaborative artists, which exhibitions of feminist and women artists’ the viewer is able to sense, via the magnetic work curate timely and topical ‘generation field or current of sensory imagination. choices.’ Inter-generational feminism can be melodramatic, like mother-daughter Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples, Silvana relationships. Mutual exasperation is usually and Gabriella Mangano are collaborative repressed, under the pressures of art- artists who represent and present relations world niceties. Forty years ago, feminism’s that, in turn, connect with the viewer. Their exploratory program of aesthetic politics natural and created fields of energy can be exploded the constraining formalist stylistic, considered types of unspoken language or conceptual and institutional conditions of late perceived connectivity. This paper will refer modernism. This non-prescriptive though to the work of Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Paul programmatic project makes little sense in Crowther and Alphonso Lingis. the formlessness of our current, endlessly networked ‘art relations’. There are relations of attachment/ detachment, reciprocity/repulsion between The paper presents a no-holds-barred, collaborating artists. This causes energized trans-generational speculation on feminist stimuli, bodily orientations...and even carnal aesthetics. Our collaborative script is presences. This paper explores embodied interview-based, representing the views of relations and conscious experiences as the feminist artists and writers of all ages. We most meaningful criteria for the aesthetic 95 together < > apart judgement of the success of an artwork. DR EDWARD HANFLING Prue Gibson is author of The Rapture School of Media Arts, Wintec of Death 2010. A PhD candidate (APA recipient) at SAM, UNSW, her creative work, Feminists and formalists part two Longing, is a novel and her dissertation, The At the Adelaide AAANZ conference two years Passions, investigates the aesthetics and ago, I presented some unresolved ideas phenomenology of love and art. under the title ‘Feminists and Formalists’, looking at the parallel emergence of modernist abstraction and the Women’s Art DR IAN GREIG Movement in New Zealand in the 1970s. The National Art School latter was in part a critique of the former. Many feminists believed that the formalist Quantum romanticism: the aesthetics of emphasis on aesthetic rather than social the sublime in David Bohm’s philosophy of or political values privileged the work of physics male artists. I hope to provide an account of aesthetic experience that connects these The post-Kantian trajectory of aesthetics rival groups. The emphasis on complexity of has colonised discussions of physics and meaning in contemporary art and art-writing cosmology. In particular, physicist David may hinder our appreciation of feminists and Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics formalists alike. Both depend on a certain posits a rapprochement of art and science toughness or leanness of form, either for its which is underpinned by a holistic world-view own sake, or for the sake of making a political based on his belief in the interconnectedness point. Is it possible that in accounting for our of all phenomena. experience of such works, we omit thoughts This paper argues that such tendencies are and feelings, impulses and desires, which lie driven by a romantic impulse rooted in a beyond the terms in which we usually discuss conception of the sublime that revives the ‘art’, or, indeed, beyond articulation? link between nature and aesthetics first Dr Edward Hanfling teaches in the School of established by Kant. As such, Bohm’s views Media Arts at Wintec, Hamilton. He writes art provide a framework in which to explore criticism for the journal Art New Zealand, and is a cluster of issues relating to the tradition editor of the Journal of New Zealand Art History. of the sublime and which may enable an understanding of the transcendent impulses that sometimes accompany discussions of quantum mechanics, a framework which sees DAVID HOMEWOOD physics intersecting with the ‘spiritual’ via the University of Melbourne aesthetic perception of the infinite in the finite. Dale Hickey’s 90 White Walls (1970) and Ian Greig is an artist and academic and currently chance in the photographic process teaches Art History and Theory and Research Methods at the National Art School, Sydney. Clearly modelled on a 1969 statement by internationally recognised Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler, Melbourne artist Robert Rooney would suggest in 1975, ‘The camera is a dumb recording device. It’s not the same as seeing. The camera often seems to organise the material itself. For both Huebler and Rooney, the “dumb” use of the camera served as a means to restrict the extent of 96 the artist’s conscious construction of the MELINDA JOHNSTON & pictorial content of an artwork. Through the LYDIA BAXENDELL predetermination of the parameters of a University of Canterbury, New Zealand compositional system that specified when and where to press the shutter-release Art matters – mending Christchurch button, undetermined indexical visual information could be recorded with a degree With two major earthquakes and thousands of anonymity. The artist remained outside of aftershocks under our belts, the landscape, the frame, his role in the execution of the culture and community of Christchurch has work reduced to mechanically operating changed dramatically. Canterbury artists and a mechanical device. The Conceptual galleries have been displaced, their buildings use of photography contributed to the unsafe or demolished. There is a longing to demise of the idea of “decisive moment” return to some sense of normality, but there photography: although related to the is also rising optimism. New cultural hubs are photographic tradition of reportage, it emerging and new relationships have been was fundamentally opposed to a model of forged. The University of Canterbury has photographic image production founded been one of several organisations central to on spontaneity, which is only permitted sustaining and developing an art community. to emerge from within the strictly defined Lydia Baxendell, University Art Collections limits of a predetermined system. Through Curator, and Dr Melinda Johnston, School of a detailed consideration of 90 White Walls Fine Arts Exhibitions Manager, will provide (1970), a pivotal early photoconceptualist two perspectives on the impact of the work by Rooney’s artist-colleague Dale Canterbury earthquakes. For both Baxendell Hickey, this paper will seek to understand and Johnston there has been a greater sense why a particular use of photography— of collaboration and collective spirit, with the characterised by serial repetition, artlessness, Canterbury arts community coming together and the organisation of the visual contents to help one another. within the frame through the employment of chance—became suddenly important Lydia Baxendell is the art collections curator to a number of Melbourne-based artists for University of Canterbury. She has spent working around 1970, all associated with the last decade working in curatorial roles the Pinacotheca gallery. This episode in the within dealer, public and institutional arts history of photography contributed to a broad environments. redefinition of the photographic medium that continues to exert a strong shaping force on Melinda Johnston completed her PhD in art contemporary photographic practices. history at University College London. She was the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts David Homewood is a Ph. D. candidate in exhibition manager from 2010 to April 2012. Art History at the University of Melbourne, researching the emergence of conceptualist art as a global phenomenon. In the non- academic context, his writing has appeared ELLY KENT in a range of publications, including Frieze, Australian National University Discipline and ArtAsiaPacific. input:output – exploring participatory practice from within This paper explores the theory, practice and ongoing outcomes of two projects in participatory art, narrated from two subjective perspectives: participant and artist. 97 together < > apart In Memory of a Name (2011, 4A Centre for to painting have been around for at least a Contemporary Asian Art) might be termed century. By example, this paper draws on the a ‘temporary invented community’ project. practice of Marcel Duchamp and deliberates Indonesian artist FX Harsono led a curatorium on his ‘post-abandonment’ continuation with of creative and academic practitioners, painting that subsequently raises a number of demonstrating an exploration of personal relevant questions for painting today. experience that grew into research about discrimination against Chinese Indonesians, Stephen Little lives in Sydney. He has returning to a subjective position in creating exhibited nationally and internationally. He is major artworks. currently the Subject Leader for Painting at the National Art School in Sydney. Re-employing Harsono’s methodology, the curatorium, with over a dozen cultural backgrounds, conducted ‘social research’ and DR DEBORAH MALOR developed new creative and theoretical works. University of Tasmania I trace what emerged from my research during this project. The last Edwardian expedition: photography This paper positions participatory art as a and empire narratives medium through which differing cultural An album in the Queen Victoria Museum perspectives can be explored. In this model, and Art Gallery (QVMAG), Launceston, methodology is a neutral construction, in holds a series of captioned photographs which artists and participants apply their own documenting an international expedition to experiences of culture and context, extracting view and record the 1910 solar eclipse from raw data from which emerges a creative Port Davey, in southwest Tasmania. The response. Input: output. album had been purchased for the collection Elly Kent is an artist, researcher and translator on the basis that its subject matter was a currently situated at the School of art in the recognised wilderness area, with ‘wilderness Australian National University. Her research photography’ being a collection theme at and practice investigates participatory QVMAG, however neither the photographer practice, particularly in Indonesia. nor the compiler of the album was known at the time of the purchase. To date, and beyond the basic task of identification, this DR STEPHEN LITTLE album has been only marginally touched National Art School by formal interpretation. Geoff Batchen in Each wild idea (2002) observed this is a A passage: expanded painting to painting situation common to albums, which ‘demand we add the physical intimacy of touch to the The terms ‘Painting’ and ‘expanded more distanced experience of looking’ – a painting’ posit painting as existing within two situation which continues today. This album modalities. The first is materially entrenched encompasses those two ideas of the album or with the traditions of the medium, and the archive: the institutional collection (looking) second, as an extension beyond those and the personal assembling of photo- ideological and material constraints. The objects (intimacy). In this paper, I call on second position is presented as ‘new’ – as other archive-based voices to destabilise the painting, but under markedly new terms of institutional context of the empire narrative, reference. This paper reasons that while the an inherently creative process in the use imperatives of our current cultural condition and re-use of the archive, and particularly may present the ‘expanded painting’ model as where the archive is comprised largely of a new development that similar approaches photographs. Interpretations of past records, 98 some of which were clearly understood GEORGINA MACNEIL and implicated in the original context of assembling the album but disconnected Authority & cathedralic imagery in Jay-Z and through time and place, have been made. Kanye West’s clip for N****s in Paris, 2012 Access to other archives such as the photographer’s plates has exposed something Kanye West’s clip for the track N****s in Paris of the editorial process of configuring the uses modern techniques such as almost album. In bringing together texts and images continuous strobe lighting, and kaleidoscopic external to the album, the broad dynamics of splitting and doubling of the image. The track the Edwardian class system exemplified in the itself is a sharp modern paean to the authority layout and functions of the expedition camp is and power within the music world enjoyed set against the closer, intimate narratives that by West and Jay-Z. However, the clip also inhabit this same contained group of images. features remarkably traditional methods of implying authority on the part of its singers. West produced the clip himself; assembled K YLA MACKENZIE from footage filmed during their 2011 joint University of Auckland tour for Watch the Throne. The distinctive architecture of Paris itself features heavily, in John Weeks’ figurative nude compositions: an particular the Western façade of Notre Dame. un-New Zealand preoccupation? In this paper I will show how West references cathedralic imagery, in order to confer John Weeks was a leading artist and teacher historical and religious authority on himself during the 1930s and 1940s in New Zealand. and Jay-Z. Viewed as part of the trajectory of During the 1920s he absorbed aspects of Jay-Z and West’s clips, a trend towards the modernist style and practice through his use of traditional and classical imagery may exposure to art and tuition in Edinburgh and be observed. Europe. In 1926 and 1928 he attended André Lhotes Cubist Academy in Paris. The legacy Georgina is a PhD candidate at the University of this experience, particularly in Weeks’ of Sydney. Her research focuses on the second series of Lhotian teachings, was a youthful John the Baptist in paintings of the Cubist-derived approach which prioritised Virgin and Child from Florence, ca. 1455- composition, colour and design. 1500. Classes at the Parisian studio also introduced a preoccupation which would sustain him many years later: the nude figure DR MARTIN PATRICK composition. Weeks’ subsequent use of Massey University Wellington this theme nodded at a classical as well as modernist tradition. This interest, along Art and how to live it: artists performing with the ‘foreign’ Cubist tendencies evident themselves (and others) in certain paintings, contrasted with an Performance-related art that exemplified assertive, emerging nationalist agenda among notions of testing limits while generating a younger New Zealand artists in the 1940s. high quotient of creative uncertainty was a Kyla Mackenzie is an Auckland Phd student hallmark of the 1970s. Artists who emerged researching the art of John Weeks, artist and later on in the wake of the postmodern, teacher [1886–1965]. She is also a free-lance sought to live out their works by straddling researcher/writer, as well as arts biographer both public and private realms, with [Grove Art Online]. increasing entanglement in late capitalist settings. The subjective constructed persona of the artist became an increasingly privileged 99 together < > apart aspect of creative practice. I seek to argue held in relation to the modern museum, and that the approaches of certain artists since microcosms representative of the building’s the 1990s have been linked by a notion of outward influence. the artwork as a well-documented event unfolding from personae derived from a Callum Reid is a PhD Candidate at the personalized and idiosyncratic amalgam of University of Melbourne. His thesis examines the artist’s autobiography, aesthetic, politics. the history of collection and display in the These artists privilege a burlesque of artistic Uffizi Gallery. authenticity, a quest to show that what is real, authentic, truthful, must be arrived at through patently absurd procedures, with the artist RIGEL SORZANO occupying several roles (and wearing several University of Auckland masks) simultaneously. The other C-Word Martin Patrick is an art critic and writer. A regular contributor to many international Despite the talk of hybrid works and blurring publications, his research specifically involves boundaries between art and craft, attempts critical writing on interdisciplinary practices to theorise craft on its own terms seem to and experimental uses of media in the visual have stepped up a notch in the last decade arts. or so. Strange. Perhaps this indicates that the Gesamtkunsthandwerk, or ‘total craft work’, proposed by last year’s Govett-Brewster CALLUM REID exhibition of the same name is still some University of Melbourne way off, after all. More significantly, however, those familiar terms ‘boundary’ and ‘hybrid’ Office space – interaction and display in the suggest a condition we’ve seen elsewhere: Uffizi’s early rooms one which struggles with an imposed modernity, attempting a journey from ‘abject The Uffizi Gallery in Florence remains one of other’ towards a post-colonial autonomy and the most important institutions in the history identity. This paper proposes the critical of art and exhibition. The early programs of framework of ‘craft as postcolonial other’, and collection and display employed by the gallery considers its potential to accommodate and would influence the manner in which many engage with issues specific to the theorising public and private museums have been built of craft in relation to contemporary art. and organised since. From its 16th century construction as a set of private rooms to its I have been researching and writing on 18th century renown as a destination for New Zealand art, craft and design since grand tourists, works of art and sculpture were 2004. I am currently working on research in introduced to the Uffizi from all over Europe. relation to hybridity and multiplicity of critical The way in which pieces were displayed frameworks. would reflect the relationships and interactions amongst the various key figures that had a say in structuring the gallery’s collections. K ATE WARREN Monash University This paper will examine these relationships and interactions and the manner in which Confronting relations of witnessing in the they began the Uffizi’s transformation from an work of Omer Fast inward-faced private space to an increasingly outward-faced public institution. I will examine The figure of the witness occupies a two of the major early rooms; the Vestibule privileged and prominent position in and Tribuna the closest spaces that the gallery contemporary culture, which Annette 100 Wieviorka has described as the ‘era of within this body of work: 1) The appropriation the witness’. Artist Omer Fast (Israel, b. of family photographs found on the corpses of 1972) develops his video installations from German soldiers. 2) The artist’s presentation interviews with people who have borne of himself as a German soldier in a number witness in various capacities, subsequently of the photomontages. My analysis relates to breaking down and re-imagining his subjects’ the conference theme “Together/Apart” by testimonies into new, often fictionalised considering the use of soldiers’ snapshots and speculative narratives. Using complex to graphically depict separation from family techniques of editing, re-enactment and (both at the front and in death), Zhitomirsky’s recreation, his works confront indexical empathetic representation of the German assumptions about testimony as a direct enemy via the use of his own visage, and the ‘translation’ of experience. artist’s own separation from his family during the wartime evacuation of Moscow. Having described his processes as somewhat ‘parasitic’ in nature, Fast acknowledges his Erika Wolf recently authored Koretsky: The creative reliance on the participation of other Soviet Photo Poster (2012) and co-edited the individuals. This paper argues that Fast’s catalogue Aleksandr Deineka: Avant-Garde for highly self-reflexive practice challenges the Proletariat (2011). She is writing a book dominant discourses around relational about Zhitomirsky’s political photomontages. and collaborative practices, in the process bringing into question the nature of bearing witness in contemporary culture and the roles and implications of those who solicit, appropriate and consume such acts of witnessing. Kate Warren is a postgraduate researcher in the Art Theory Program of the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University, and she was previously Assistant Curator at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. DR ERIKA WOLF University of Otago, New Zealand Imagining oneself as the enemy: Aleksandr Zhitomirsky’s photomontages for German soldiers in Front-Illustrierte Aleksandr Zhitomirsky established his reputation as a leading Soviet propaganda artist during World War 2 with political photomontages intended for German troops. Executed in the manner of John Heartfield, these photomontages were published in newspapers and leaflets that were dropped on German troops by airplane as part of the extensive propaganda “air war.” My presentation will interrogate two related motifs 101 2012 AAANZ Book & Catalogue PRIZES 6.30-7.30 JULY 13 AWARD NIGHT National Art School The AAANZ awards honour: s /RIGINALITY AND RIGOUR OF SCHOLARSHIP s #ONTRIBUTION TO KNOWLEDGE IN THE AREA IMPACT ON SCHOLARLY DEBATE IN THE FIELD s 3IGNIFICANCE OF THE TOPIC TO THE FIELD AND TO ADJACENT DISCIPLINES s 3IGNIFICANCE AND ORIGINALITY OF PICTURE RESEARCH s 1UALITY OF THE DESIGN PRODUCTION VALUES OF THE PUBLICATION s !BILITY TO CONVEY COMPLEX IDEAS TO WIDER AUDIENCES 1. Best Book ($500 supported by the Power Institute, The University of Sydney) 2. Best Anthology ($500 supported by the Power Institute, The University of Sydney) 3. Best Large Exhibition Catalogue ($500 supported by The University of Melbourne) 4. Best Small Exhibition Catalogue ($100 supported by The University of WA) 5. Best scholarly article in AAANZ Journal ($500 supported by Power Institute) New prizes for 2012 Originally a single ‘Book Prize’, there are now seven awards for AAANZ members publications over the last year. Two new prizes – honouring an Indigenous art writer and an artist-writer – have been added to the annual awards of the Art Association of Australia & New Zealand (AAANZ). 6. Best Indigenous essay/catalogue/book ($500 supported by Christchurch Art Museum) 7. Best artist essay/catalogue/book ($500 supported by Massey University) 102 junior_GU32704 CRICOS 00233E junior_GU32704 CRICOS Queensland College of Art Griffith University The Queensland College of Art (QCA), Griffith University offers masters and doctoral programs in studio research and related studies in visual arts, design, art theory and film. The QCA campus is located in Brisbane City’s cultural precinct that includes Australia’s largest contemporary art gallery, GOMA (home to the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art). A second QCA campus is near Surfers Paradise on Queensland’s Gold Coast. Email: [email protected] griffith.edu.au/qca Julie Fragar, Doctoral Student QCA. ‘Knocked off Her Feet (Get Up)’, oil on board, 60 x 40 cm, 2008.103 (detail), 2011. Appearing Act Appearing Brown Council, Council, Brown Research degrees in Art History and Theory at COFA Never Stand Still Master of Philosophy Master of Art Theory - modern and contemporary art Ph D - critical and cultural theory - media and new media theory - aesthetics - art and politics - intercultural art and theory - gender and the body - curatorial and museum studies For information about supervision visit For information about research degrees contact Dr Susan Best