Looking Back 2017: Australia, Frieze, 2017 (original) (raw)
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Chapter 22 Visual Arts in Australian culture
It Wasn’t Me, I Won’t Do It Again, 2022
An illustrated memoir by Victor Gordon, a socially-engaged South African-born Australian artist. His art practice incorporates strongly-held social views and personal concerns peppered - with humour. Prolifically illustrated throughout with over 260 images addressing an extensive range of social issues. www.victorgordon.com
The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand 2011 Annual conference focused on a single overarching theme: Contact. ‘Contact’ evokes encounters between cultures, peoples and objects and the issues and outcomes they spark. Papers were presented on topics or issues related to this theme. They included papers on encounters between one culture and another, between viewer and art work or between one artist or art work and another. Keynotes Okwui Enwezor Intense Proximity: Concerning the Disappearance of Distance The idea of Contact adopted as the theme of this conference is a timely one. Contact presupposes an encounter, as well as suggesting the possibilities that such an encounter could provoke. In the second decade of the 21st century, contact is on trial. It has become part of the programme of a rising politics of negation, a xenophilic construct manifesting a rabid form of anti-difference. The troubled history of contact is well known. And its appearance in modern and contemporary art is known as well. In this lecture, I propose to use an upcoming exhibition to address the complicated issues that are part of the legacy of contact. The exhibition in question—Intense Proximity—which opens next year at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, is partly grounded in an examination of the lingering forms of ethnographic poetics that has shaped the world of contact. One of the project’s central curatorial features is the critical legacy of French ethnography in the first half of the 20th century, a discourse directly based on contact. The phenomenon of ethnographic poetics to which Intense Proximity refers could be understood as part of the great heritage of modernity, a model of global relations in which the precise measure between the near and far was blurred. Intense Proximity is in turn a form of curatorial speculation on the continuous fascination between ethnographic poetics and contemporary art, a probing into the metastasizing politics of anti-difference. Okwui Enwezor is a curator, writer, and scholar. He has recently been appointed Director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. He is the founding publisher and editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. He has held positions at the International Center of Photography, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Art Institute. He has held visiting professorships in Art History at the University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Umea, Sweden. In 2011 he will deliver the Alain Leroy Locke Lectures at Harvard University and, in 2012, he will serve as Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Okwui Enwezor’s visit is made possible with a grant from Creative New Zealand. TE PAPA (Thursday evening keynote venue) I Professor Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby When Contact is a Bullett: Manet’s (Painterly) Execution In this paper, Grigsby addresses the persistent blindness of extant interpretations of Manet’s Execution of Maximilian of 1867, a painting long appreciated as a condemnation of Napoleon III’s intervention in Mexico. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby was born in the Panama Canal Zone. She is Professor of the History of Art at U.C. Berkeley and author of Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (Yale University Press, 2002) and Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal (Periscope Publishing, 2011). With Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson, she recently co-edited a special issue of Representations entitled New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual (Winter 2011). Her essay for that issue, “Negative-Positive Truths,” concerns Sojourner Truth’s cartes-de-visite and introduces ideas from a book in progress called Shadows and Substance. Her talk “When Contact is a Bullet: Manet’s (Painterly) Execution” stems from another book project entitled Creole Looking: Portraying France’s Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century that examines France’s relationship to the Caribbean and Americas Conference Convenors David Maskill, Victoria University of Wellington Sarah Caylor, Victoria University of Wellington
The revenge of genres. Contemporary Australian Art.
G Le Roux, 2007
The curatorial rationale seeks to subvert the notion of ‘genre’ as definition of a general idea; class of beings, or objects that share commonalities. The exhibition will reveal the discourses used by artists from the Pacific region, to resist; struggle; play; control or distinguish themselves from these categories. ‘The Revenge of Genres’ exhibition will explore the multiple identities of Australia: religious, artistic and philosophical. Selected artworks include those that relate to different human ontology’s and their representations, and works that encourage discussion about the dichotomies between nature, culture and the construction of reality. Landscape will be a key connector throughout this exhibition, and audiences will be presented with imagery that celebrates dreams and forgotten myths. A large component of the exhibition will be devoted to new media including video and sound, and the remainder of works include a cross-section of contemporary painting, sculpture and installation. Each exhibition will be accompanied by lectures, performances and videos by the selected artists, as well as workshops that aim to both stimulate the debate regarding the definition of international contemporary art and cultural practice.
'We have survived': South-east Australian Aboriginal art exhibitions since 1988
reCollections, 2010
This paper focuses on several Aboriginal art exhibitions held since 1988 and includes a broad discussion of participating artists and their artworks. Taking this broad approach, rather than discussing individual artworks, illustrates the interconnectivity of art and culture and the importance of applying an integrated worldview to the exhibition process. Aboriginal-determined art exhibitions are part of an ongoing 'culture-making', where art, history and culture are made and remade as new ways of experiencing Aboriginality.[1] They have influenced a paradigm shift beyond the confining Western categories applied to Aboriginal people and their art styles, forcing a rethinking of the categories of fine art and high culture.[2] https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol\_5\_no\_1/papers/we\_have\_survived
No Boundaries: Australian Aboriginal Contemporary Abstract Painting
2015
The rise of the Aboriginal Australian art movement in the early 1970s ushered in an artistic revolution. But like any important revolution, it did not stop there. As the twenty-first century approached, Aboriginal artists across the continent began transforming their traditional iconographies into more abstract styles of art making. Speaking across cultures, without sacrificing their distinctive identities, they found new ways to express the power of the ancestral narratives of the Dreaming. Drawn from the collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl, No Boundaries features the work of nine trailblazing artists who were at the forefront of this movement: Paddy Bedford, Jananggoo Butcher Cherel, Prince of Wales (Midpul), Tommy Mitchell, Ngarra, Billy Joongoora Thomas, Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, and Tjumpo Tjapanangka. Each one was a respected senior Lawman, knowledgeable in every aspect of Aboriginal ceremonial traditions. Inspired by these ancient cultural practices, they forged one of the most dynamic painting movements of recent times. By exploring the cross-cultural potential of abstract painting, they drew attention to the entangled networks that define the contemporary experience, reminding us that contemporary art comes from every corner of the globe. The art and life of each artist is given in-depth analysis by leading art historians, curators, critics, and anthropologists. The essays shed light on the rich and complex histories behind the artworks, placing them in the context of traditional Indigenous culture, the environment, colonial experience, and the global contemporary art world. In doing so, they reveal nine artists working at the vanguard of contemporary art practice. Includes new essays by Henry F. Skerritt, John Carty, Edwina Circuitt, William L. Fox, Stephen Gilchrist, Jens Hoffmann, Darren Jorgensen, Emily McDaniel, Ian McLean, Fred Myers, Una Rey, Quentin Sprague, and Luke Scholes.