Gathering collecting: art and the ethics of 'care at a distance'

Catalogue essay 2 in a catalogue of an exhibition held at SASA Gallery, Adelaide, 8 May-1 June 2007. He addresses the notion of what it is to collect and how art objects survive the transposition associated with collecting.

Testimony, memory, and art at the Jewish Holocaust museum, Melbourne, Australia

Taking its cue from Charlotte Delbo’s powerful writing about the Holocaust in which she highlights the role of sense memories, this chapter begins with the proposition that sense memories – as distinct from narrative or vicarious forms of memory – are a particularly effective vehicle for the communication of past trauma in the present. The paper explores the potential value of this proposition for the display of objects in a Holocaust museum which are given meaning by the voices of the survivor community and their focus on the importance of testimony. The chapter undertakse an analysis of how the sense memories of survivors animate specific objects on display, exploring the ways in which these objects help the Museum to create a bridge between the survivor community and the wider general public (Auerhahn and Laub, 1990). I argue that built into that process there is a requirement that audiences listen in a manner that makes them a witness to past traumas. This listening process, I want to argue, offers not only an opportunity for healing on the part of survivors but also, following Simon (2005), the exchange of a ‘terrible gift’. That gift, I will suggest, places the visitor as a witness to past traumas and builds an ethical request that they should actively work against future genocides. Central to that possibility, I want to argue, is the way in which the process of witnessing a sense memory is an affective experience for the viewer leading to the potential production of empathy.

Matching objects across the textured-smooth continuum

The problem of 3D object recognition is of immense practical importance, with the last decade witnessing a number of breakthroughs in the state of the art. Most of the previous work has focused on the matching of textured objects using local appearance descriptors extracted around salient image points. The recently proposed bag of boundaries method was the first to address directly the problem of matching smooth objects using boundary features. However, no previous work has attempted to achieve a holistic treatment of the problem by jointly using textural and shape features which is what we describe herein. Due to the complementarity of the two modalities, we fuse the corresponding matching scores and learn their relative weighting in a data specific manner by optimizing discriminative performance on synthetically distorted data. For the textural description of an object we adopt a representation in the form of a histogram of SIFT based visual words. Similarly the apparent shape of an object is represented by a histogram of discretized features capturing local shape. On a large public database of a diverse set of objects, the proposed method is shown to outperform significantly both purely textural and purely shape based approaches for matching across viewpoint variation.

Op-Objects

The work relates to Australian history in that it reconfigures the found objects - furniture, paintings and narratives - to move implicate the viewer in unexpected ways.