Art and the anxious city: Public art, public interest and the public good

While public art is often considered a key hallmark of a creative city, artworks in the public realm also have the capacity to act as lightening rods for social anxiety at times of perceived crisis. This paper considers recent debates about government-sponsored public art projects in Queensland in light of three international case studies: Rodin’s Thinker in Paris, Tilted Arc in New York and Vault in Melbourne. It considers whether consensus positions on public art are possible or desirable in light of issues of spatial control, and proposes that well-negotiated anxieties about public art may be an indicator of creative vibrancy and dynamism that will assist in the future understanding of Queensland’s experiment with government-mandated public art.

Our true colours: A collage of four womens’ stories

The Our True Colours project brought together a group of four young women from refugee backgrounds to explore life narratives using visual arts and participatory video. The video is a celebration of their strengths and insights into the resettlement process. The Our True Colours storytelling project included an interactive art exhibition, a public screening event on International Women’s Day in 2014 and the creation of a website to permanently host the project: ourtruecolours.org

A different kind of studio: Reflecting on the open studio and the artist-teacher

For more than 15 years, QUT’s Visual Arts discipline has employed a teaching model known as the ‘open studio’ in their undergraduate BFA program. Distinct from the other models of studio degrees in Australia, the open studio approach emphasizes individual practice by focusing on experimentation, collaboration and cross-disciplinary activities. However, while this activity proves to be highly relevant to exploring and participating in the ‘post medium’ nature of much contemporary art, the open studio also presents a complex of affecting challenges to the artist-teacher. The open studio, it can be argued, produces a different type of student than traditional, discipline-specific art programs – but it also produces a different kind of artist-teacher. In this paper, the authors will provide a reflection on their own experiences as artists and studio lecturers involved with the two ‘bookends’ of the QUT studio program – first year and third year. Using these separate contexts as case studies, the authors will discuss the transformative qualities of the open studio as it is adapted to the particularities of each cohort and the curricular needs of each year level. In particular, the authors will explore the way the teaching experience has influenced and positively challenged their individual (and paradoxically) discipline-focussed, studio practices. It is generally accepted that the teaching of art needs to be continually reconceptualised in response to the changing conditions of contemporary art, culture and technology. This paper will articulate how the authors have worked at that reconceptualisation within both their teaching and studio practices and so practically demonstrate the complex dialogic processes inherent to the teaching of the visual arts studio.

Suspension points

This exhibition catalogue documents a collaborative art exhibition produced by QUT and Fordham University art students at the Ildiko Gallery in New York, December 6, 2014 to January 25, 2015. The exhibition theme related to the vagaries of communication over long distances, and the kind of creative works that could be generated via a range of media including email, Skype, message in a bottle, and Twitter.

Home is where the stuff is: Framing life-worlds in domestic space

This PhD playfully employs visual arts as a means through which to explore concepts of gender, normative behaviour, play, humour, collecting and an intimate and idiosyncratic relationship with domestic space. This PhD seeks to: represent certain complexities of individual experience through theoretical frameworks of Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu and selected visual artists; use my art to elucidate the humour that exists in the mundane; and illustrate the construction of particular life-worlds using auto-ethnography and visual documentation. This is represented in a 50,000 word exegesis (50%) and a practice comprising of eight artist books (50%).

Double blind: Supervising women as creative practice-led researchers

Many women creative practice-led researchers appear inhibited by a number of factors directly connected to their gender. This paper discusses these factors, including the culture of visual arts professional practice, the circumstances surrounding women postgraduate students, and unproductive self-theories about intelligence and creativity. A number of feminist strategies are discussed as potential interventions that may assist women creative practice-led researchers and their supervisors to reap more personal and professional rewards from their postgraduate research.

The ripple effect

The images from The Ripple Effect appear like they are advertising images but have a deeper social message. They are deliberately confronting, humorous, and thought provoking to create debate on true-life experiences of hospital treatments, recovery and support available in our community. The works in this exhibition carry the hopes and aspirations of a community that is bonded together by its collective experiences, and shares a vision of the resources needed for a productive and healthy recovery.

Art museums and the global tourist: Experience centres in experience-scapes

In the experience economy, the role of art museums has evolved so as to cater to global cultural tourists. These institutions were traditionally dedicated to didactic functions, and served cognoscenti with elite cultural tastes that were aligned with the avant-garde’s autonomous stance towards mass culture. In a post-avant-garde era however museums have focused on appealing to a broad clientele that often has little or no knowledge of historical or contemporary art. Many of these tourists want art to provide entertaining and novel experiences, rather than receiving pedagogical ‘training’. In response, art museums are turning into ‘experience venues’ and are being informed by ideas associated with new museology, as well as business approaches like Customer Experience Management. This has led to the provision of populist entertainment modes, such as blockbuster exhibitions, participatory art events, jazz nights, and wine tasting, and reveals that such museums recognize that today’s cultural tourist is part of an increasingly diverse and populous demographic, which shares many languages and value systems. As art museums have shifted attention to global tourists, they have come to play a greater role in gentrification projects and cultural precincts. The art museum now seems ideally suited to tourist-centric environments that offer a variety of immersive sensory experiences and combine museums (often designed by star-architects), international hotels, restaurants, high-end shopping zones, and other leisure forums. These include sites such as Port Maravilha urban waterfront development in Rio de Janiero, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, and the Chateau La Coste winery and hotel complex in Provence. It can be argued that in a global experience economy, art museums have become experience centres in experience-scapes. This paper will examine the nature of the tourist experience in relation to the new art museum, and the latter’s increasingly important role in attracting tourists to urban and regional cultural precincts.

Daubism: Copyright law and artistic works

An artistic controversy over a group of landscape painters called the Daubists provided impetus for copyright law reform in Australia in the early 1990's. In the first exhibition of Daubism in 1991 driller Jet Armstrong painted a crop circle over a painting of the Olgas by Charles Bannon - an artist, print-maker, and the father of the State Premier at the time, John Bannon. He called the resulting work, Crop Circles on a Bannon Landscape. Armstrong also inserted an inverted crucifix over a painting of the Flinders Ranges by Bannon, and renamed the work The Crop Circle Conspiracy Landscape. In response, Bannon took legal action against Armstrong in the Federal Court of Australia on the grounds of false attribution and defamation. He won an interlocutory injunction against Armstrong and the gallery, but then reached a settlement with the Daubists. An anonymous buyer purchased the work for $650 on the condition that it was returned to the painter. In his fight against the Daubists, Bannon received help and support from the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA). This professional group used the controversy to campaign for the reform of copyright law - in particular, the need for a moral rights regime. The artistic controversy over the Daubists was a catalyst for the introduction of the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 (Cth) in Australia. It offers an illuminating case study of the operation of copyright law in the visual arts.

‘A contributing life’: Living a contributing life as ‘a person’, ‘an artist’ and ‘an artist with a mental illness’

The Australian National Mental Health Commission, recently adopted a focus on ‘a contributing life’ to acknowledge the importance of full and meaningful participation in community life. This concept compels new conversations about the complex nature of every day and whole of life experiences for people with lived experience of mental illness. This article reflects on narratives by eight artists with lived experience of mental illness, in Australia to understand how opportunities are available through art for people with lived experience of mental illness to lead a contributing life. A twelve month study gained insight of how participants saw themselves, made meaning and sense of their experiences, and how each person asserted their choice to be an artist. This article shares a common premise held by the participants to choose a “way of life as ‘who I am’”. This declaration emphasised the relevance of living a contributing life as ‘a person’, ‘an artist’ and ‘an artist with a mental illness’. A number of conceptual issues are raised in light of the findings, not least how opportunities for participation are framed and available, or otherwise, to live a contributing life.

Not so not-for-profit

To address the sub-theme of the journal: Artistic Practices in a Time of Crisis, the author discusses the context of economic cuts and recent international crises on his PhD interactive and visual design research project undertaken in Australia. Identifying an apparent root-cause of current global crises, the author in reply, has structured a research plan and created a suite of new media, interactive, technology artworks, and installation art. Notions of Zen Buddhism, and stillness through meditation, are applied in the research and context of the artworks to support awareness of wellbeing, in response to the root-cause condition. The discussion will focus on the overarching question: how can one obtain value through the arts during current times of economic reduction conditioning?

Spotlight on animating spaces: Evaluation of Artslink Queensland's Animating Spaces 2013 & 2014

Animating Spaces 2013-14 Interim Report Artslink Queensland’s Animating Spaces initiative is a three-year statewide project (2013-2015) that aims to revitalise and celebrate non-traditional, significant, and unusual spaces within fifteen regional Queensland communities. After the completion of two years of Animating Spaces this is the first public interim report highlighting outcomes to date. A final evaluation report will be collated in early 2016 that will capture the Animating Spaces project in its entirety. Developed by Queensland University of Technology evaluation team, Professor Helen Klaebe and Dr. Elizabeth Ellison with the extraordinary assistance of Artslink Queensland staff, in particular Kerryanne Farrer.

Art museums and the global tourist: Experience centers in experiencescapes

Art museums are playing an important role is attracting cultural tourists to global cities and regions. Traditionally, art museums were primarily known for their didactic role. In a post-avant-garde era however museums are more focused on appealing to a broader clientele that want art to be novel and entertaining. Art museums have also come to play a greater role in gentrification projects and cultural precincts. This is because they are ideally suited for tourist-centric environments that offer a variety of immersive sensory experiences, and combine museums (often designed by star-architects), international hotels, restaurants, high-end shopping zones, and other leisure platforms. These "experiencescapes" include Port Maravilha urban waterfront development in Rio de Janiero, the Shanghai Bund, and the Broad project in Los Angeles. The Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart Australia is a boutique player in the global market for experiencescapes. It is smaller than many of its competitors and is situated in a remote part of the world, yet it has made an important contribution to Tasmania’s tourism industry.

Velum

Velum continues material experimentation with edible materials as explored within Formations: New Practices in Australian Architecture 2012. 1 The work employs the central theme of veiling as a ‘second skin’, an intermediary agent simultaneously engaging with Heideggerian themes of ‘nearness and revealing’ (1927, 1954). This second skin creates a liminality distorting everyday objects of popular culture and technological consumption. In doing so, the work puts forth multiple considerations, the figurative play upon consumption itself; the role of the strange and obscure to affect a deepening awareness of our accelerated consumption and experience; and more tangentially, questions surrounding imminent scenarios of hybridity between body and technology. Velum represents a recent focus of the authors’ creative practice, ‘Making Strange’ (Strange Making) published and presented elsewhere. Making Strange explores the sublime process, fundamental to both the final design outcome and the designing experience. The sublime process is seen as a leading, a physiological overpowering of self to a state of intense self-presence, often leading to self-transcendence or state of otherness. As such, the work engages with the body and materials, experimentally and in a trans-disciplinary manner to inform new material practice.

Closed Systems

Closed Systems was an exhibition of sculptural works held at MetroArts, Brisbane in the group exhibition 'Platform 2012' curated by Jan Manton. My contribution to the group show was a series of 13 bronze sculptures, produced using a lost-wax casting process. Each form was derived from a sapling that had been manipulated so that branches and roots were interconnected. The resulting 'looped' forms evoked notions on narcissism, self-absorption and introversion. The works were subsequently exhibited at the National Arts School in Sydney as part of the Kodak Minolta Art Prize (2013).