Confronting consensus : the art and politics of Christopher Howlett

The article discusses the art career and works of Brisbane artist Christopher Howlett. Howlett has engaged with a number of political issues in a range of media. Issues include the artist as 'labourer', art in the age of tabloid media, art and celebrity culture in media such as performance, installation, sound works, and digital frameworks.

"What is contemporary art? A review of two books by Terry Smith'

What is contemporary art and what are the key components of contemporary culture? This review demonstrates where Terry Smith provides important answers to this question. The books thus help to improve understanding of how art has changed in recent decades and how a global culture now shapes its parameters. This review does not however concur that Smith provides a convincing case for a complete cultural paradigm transformation.

Worldly feelings made material : cosmopolitan aesthetics, affect and recent relational art

The openness and compassion implicit in the social transaction of recent philosophies of cosmopolitanism is reflected in the aims of the body of interpersonal, process-driven artworks commonly referred to as relational art. In attempting to bring art into life, specifically as a point of intervention in the lives of its spectators, the affective power required to realize the communal and participatory aims of many of these artworks is central. Relational art practices invite the individualising distinctiveness of the spectator yet ultimately seek the collective affect of the artwork’s formulated community. Like cosmopolitanism, this is a felt community where the obligatory affective investment is imagined as open and empathic built on mutual exchange and generosity. They suggest that it doesn’t matter so much what we feel about art but what and how we feel through art. The artworld’s public spheres have become increasingly affective worlds, where the artwork’s coerced and managed human relations are conceived as interstices for a more open exchange with art and each other. With reference to Sydney Biennale’s recent All My Relations exhibition, this paper will interrogate how worldly feelings are made material by the requisite emotional and aesthetic labour of feeling for and with others in relational art.

Activism, art and social practice : a case study using Jacques Ranciere’s framework for analysis

The question can no longer just be whether “art and social practice” or creative forms of activism are part of larger neo liberal agenda nor if they are potentially radical in their conception, delivery or consumption. The question also becomes: what are the effects of social practice art and design for the artists, institutions, and the publics they elicit in public and private spaces; that is, how can we consider such artworks differently? I argue the dilution of social practices’ potentially radical interventions into cultural processes and their absorption into larger neo liberal agendas limits how, as Jacques Rancière might argue, they can intervene in the “distribution of the sensible.” I will use a case study example from The Center for Tactical Magic, an artist group from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Art and science as creative catalysts

Science, Art and Science Art collaborations are generally presented and understood in terms of their products. We argue that the process of Science art can be a significant, even principal benefit of these collaborations, even though it may be largely invisible to anyone other than the collaborators. Hosting the Centenary of Canberra Science Art Commission at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has shown us that while Science and Art pursue orthogonal dimensions of creativity and innovation, collaborators can combine these directions to access new areas of imagination and ideas.

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.

Cosmopolitan tendencies in recent intersubjective art

This thesis uses cultural studies approaches to ask in what ways can intersubjective art act on the disparities brought about by late capitalism through the auspices of cosmopolitanism? How do the same processes that oppress others allow the artist to be mobile and self-reflexive while accruing and deploying a broad range of knowledges and competencies? The answer is paradoxical: those oppressed by the processes of late capitalism become the focus, theme, and content of the intersubjective artwork while the artists benefit from a system they seek to problematise and critique. Three case study chapters highlight these complex and disconcerting politics.

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.

Shooting from the Wild Zone : A Study of the Chicana Art Photographers Laura Aguilar, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, Delilah Montoya, and Kathy Vargas

The dissertation analyzes and elaborates upon the changing map of U.S. ethno-racial formation from the vantage point of North American Studies, multi-disciplinary cultural studies, and the criticism of visual culture. The focus is on four contemporary Mexican American (Chicana) women photographers, whose art production is discussed, on the one hand, in the context of the Euro-American history of photographic genres and, on the other hand, in the context of so-called decolonizing cultural and academic discourses produced by Mexican Americans themselves. The manuscript consists of two parts. Part I outlines the theoretical and methodological domain of the study, positioning it in the interstices of American studies, European postmodern criticism, postcolonial feminist theory, and the theories of visual culture, particularly of art photography. In addition, the main issues and paradigms of Chicano Studies (Mexican American ethnic studies) are introduced. Part II consists of seven essays, each of which discusses rather independently a particular photographic work or a series of photographs, formulating and defending arguments about their meaning, position in the history of photographic genres, and their cultural and socio-political significance. The study closes with a discussion about ethno-racial identity formation and the role of Chicana photography therein - in embodying and reproducing new subjectivities, alternative categories of knowledge, and open ended historical narratives. It is argued that, symbolically, the "Wild Zone" of gendered and race-specific knowledge becomes associated with the body of the mother, a recurrent image in Chicana art works under discussion. Embedded in this image, the construction of an alternative notion of a family thus articulates the parameters of a matrifocal ethno-racial community unified by the proliferation of differences rather than by conformities typical of nationalistic ideologies. While focusing on art photography, the study as a whole simultaneously constructs, from a European vantage point, a "thick" description of Mexican American history, identities, communities, cultural practices, and self-representations about which very little is known in Finland.

Critical reckonings : Global art and art history after the West and Eurocentrism

Review of Paul Wood (2013), Western Art and the Wider World. Wiley-Blackwell : Chichester, United Kingdom.

Baudelaire, Daumier and the Art of Memory

This article reassesses the importance of the Baudelaire's criticism of the art of Daumier in relation to his theorization of memory. It argues that more than Guys, Daumier may represent for the poet the quintessential 'peintre de la vie moderne'.

L'art public : les nouveaux modes d'expression artistique et le processus d'intégration en milieu urbain

L’art public se présente sous divers modes d’expression artistique dans l’espace public. Qu’il soit permanent, temporaire ou éphémère, qu’il soit singulier, interactif ou participatif, qu’il soit traditionnel ou numérique, l’œuvre intégrée ou insérée dans ce contexte tente d’interpeller le public. Cette recherche examine l’évolution des modes d’expression artistique dans l’espace public, dans l’espoir de trouver une définition de l’art public. L’étude de cas de la Ville de Montréal est la base de cette recherche pour examiner les nombreuses manifestations de l’art dans l’espace public et ses périmètres. Dans une perspective conceptuelle et transdisciplinaire, sous lesquels nous considérons les approches artistiques, paysagères et politiques dans l’analyse du sujet, nous nous intéressons aux frontières des modes d’expression artistique et les moyens de les représenter. En somme, nous souhaitons saisir ce que l’on considère comme l’art public dans l’aménagement urbain montréalais et générer des connaissances plus générales. Notre revue de littérature et les observations faites sur le terrain révèlent de nouveaux enjeux qui influencent les pratiques artistiques et la perception que peut susciter une œuvre d’art public aujourd’hui. Nous examinons les facteurs qui les influencent à ce jour. En étudiant la question, nous constatons que la tâche de définir ce qui constitue l'art public est difficile, d'autant plus que les pratiques évoluent constamment. Souvent définie comme une fonction plus cosmétique qu’artistique et dans une logique d'équipement, l'art dans l'espace public joue un rôle passif et fait l'objet de débats et de critiques. Pour le public, l'art public est difficile à discerner bien que sa présence semble être appréciée. Nos résultats mettent en lumière la complexité des processus politiques, les attentes spécifiques, les règles et modalités oppressantes pour l'artiste, la difficulté à saisir les œuvres d'art et le manque de médiatisation pour sensibiliser le public. Avec la politique d'intégration, l’art dans les espaces publics résulte souvent d'une médiation conflictuelle dans un rapport de compromis et d’attentes contrastées afin que soit réalisée une œuvre. Les résultats permettent de penser que les processus de sélection sont souvent pervers et fermés aux initiatives artistiques. En outre, il serait nécessaire dans ce contexte que les artistes définissent mieux leur statut professionnel et leur pratique. Malgré des efforts du Bureau d'art public de Montréal, l'art public semble peu perçu sur son territoire. Par ailleurs, les nombreuses discussions avec le grand public portent à l'attention l'absence de médiatisation pour les arts publics sur le territoire de Montréal.