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Extended conversation pieces

Extended Conversation Pieces brings together conversations about art, and conversation as art. The exhibition features collaborative works by six Brisbane emerging artists, Catherine or Kate (Catherine Sagin and Kate Woodcroft), Scott Ferguson (Erika Scott and Brooke Ferguson) and Courtney Coombs and Caitlin Franzmann. These artists engage with ideas of contemporary feminism through processes of dialogue and exchange; exploring subjectivity, humour and intimacy in performance and installation works. Extended Conversation Pieces showcases the distinctive approach to contemporary practice at Boxcopy, an artist run initiative focused on supporting and commissioning new experimental works by Australian artists, and engaging with collaborative processes and practices.

This is not the work

For the exhibition THIS IS NOT THE WORK, feminist artist-run-initiative LEVEL continue their investigation of alternative curatorial methods.

Surveying a selection of community-engaged artist projects from different locations around the world, this exhibition followed the pathways of women-centred social networks in order to initiate further collaboration and conversation. The projects documented in this exhibition are examples of artists working with women and community in challenging and unpredictable ways, demonstrating feminist sensibilities and a commitment to non-hierarchical and collective structures. As in the past, LEVEL uses the gallery as a conceptual base-camp or frontline rather than a just site of display.

Exhibitions as sub-brands: an exploratory study

The purpose of this paper is to explore the adoption of major exhibitions, often called blockbusters, as a sub-branding strategy for art museums. Focusing the experience around one location but drawing on a wide data set for comparative purposes, the authors examine the blockbuster phenomenon as exhibition packages sourced from international institutions, based on an artist or collection of quality and significance. The authors answer the questions: what drives an art museum to adopt an exhibition sub-brand strategy that sees exhibitions become blockbusters? What are the characteristics of the blockbuster sub-brand?

X is not the same as X

X is not the same as X is an installation that disturbs consumer identity and power relations. In the gallery at Melbourne Central the installation enacts a folding of the outside into the inside, and vice versa. Bishop & Reis entrap the viewer in a 2/3 size room – a slightly distorted replica of a space through which the viewer has recently passed. Inside this shaky interior, behind our own reflection, the viewer devolves into something else, an everyman who in The West Wing is presented as both one and many Santa. To warp a well-known phrase: the white hair follicles of the long beard marks a deterritorialisation of the fur, mouth and snout of the animal.

Marking time: duration as subject (Tony Woods)

Tony Woods: Archive, edited by Andrew Gaynor and published locally in 2013, records the durability of the artist’s primary painting practice as will as his filmmkaing, a painting practice in which he has accrued a level of prestige over many years and changes of circumstance.

Lynsey Martin: A case study in 1970s Australian experimental animation

Lynsey Martin’s short experimental Animations remain largely unknown internationally. His graphic 16mm films Approximately Water (4 minutes 1972), Whitewash (1973, 4 minutes), Interview (25 minutes 1973) and Leading Ladies (1975 5 minutes) are analysed for their technique and cultural position, artifacts of a productive if marginalized period of artist made films. These graphic films stand as critical works at the heart experimental filmmaking in Australia and speak through their design and production method to current trends in digital media. Martin’s work includes the use of collage and its erasure, the grain of the photographic image and handpainting and drawing imagery directly on the film surface. Martin deals with the graphic and material elements of the filmstrip, the nature of filmic movement and the nature of photography in public space. For martin his films deal with films deal abstraction and illusionism, elements of chance, the deconstruction of film language, the diary film and process as content. These films stand as historic aesthetic traces of an immediate hands-on approach to image making that came into crisis in Australia through the disappearance of technical education in the 1980s when Martin taught graphic design in technical schools.

No photography please

Rather than represent the world merely by photographic means, handmade moving-image artists seek to create new ways of seeing by staging a variety of interventions into the material makeup of celluloid. Handmade artists tattoo film’s skin not only with scratches and paint, but also with blood, dirt, paper, candy, sand, nail polish remover, and seawater. Seeking media not normally found in a filmmaker or artist’s studio, they mine their own bodies and backyards for things to make into moving images.

This program highlights rarely-seen works of artisanal film production from the Coop’s collection. Some of the works are wonderfully constructive, building up the visual surface of the film by combining found footage with painterly abstraction. Others are destructive, subjecting film to a variety of elemental and material stresses. Taken together, these films not only exhibit the diversity of handmade practices and concerns, they also provide a framework for rethinking how cinema can be made through its unmaking.

In other words, handmade cinema—in concept, material, and execution—is counter-cinema.

Reading

This is a part of a series dealing with the nature of reading

My life by a thread

The myth of Ariadne explored

Spatial design 3.0

Spatial Design 3.0 forms a new dialogue between the artist and design artefacts, lens-based practice and the entanglements of contemporary critical theory. The artist was invited to exhibit at the Peninsula Art Gallery in Plymouth, UK at the Envelop Exhibition as part of the UK Festival of Design 2015. The artwork involves wire, photography, printing, mark making, typography and patterns negotiated and frozen within spatial arrangements. These elements are manipulated as a means to engage the traditional tools and instruments of art and design methodology in contemporary practice. The work was published and internationally distributed in the accompanying catalogue.

The new wilderness: A practice-led model for arts based enquiry

The New Wilderness is a practice-led, multidisciplinary arts project first piloted by artists, writers, teachers and academics from Geelong, Deakin University and Courthouse ARTS Centre in 2013. In a series of workshops run by artists, and working to specific themes, the project provided a platform for participants to explore and respond creatively to change in the community; it culminated in a large-scale installation at Courthouse ARTS Centre’s main gallery. Our paper positions the project as a able to cut across convention, empowering young artists to respond to ‘big questions’ of relevance to the changing material, spatial and social relations within their communities. In questioning and seeking to transform communities into sustainable media, economic, environmental and social ecologies, this emergent model begins with a localised focus, which is designed to travel across time and place, and pedagogical frameworks. The paper positions Geelong as a community under radical transformation in its economic foundations and demographics. As artists and academics living and working in the region we see it as an experimental ground for investigations into a series of provocations that mirror the shape of the paper we intend to give. The provocations, as outlined in the workshops, might also be envisaged as new relations to:Object – From consumable to unusable to play. In revisiting the first iteration of The New wilderness in 2013 we discuss the ‘superfictional’ (Hill, 2000) enquiry that participants were asked to engage with. Its premise described Geelong as an abandoned, post-apocalyptic site. Participants were asked to imagine themselves as a group of future explorers and excavate objects from the city’s old tip. In unearthing their choices and re-presenting the objects in the gallery the participant was prompted to analyse site, situation, object and process as phenomena for ‘being’ or ‘telling stories’, providing insights into wider realms of cultural experience (Ellis, Adams and Bochner, 2010). Parallel to this ‘autoethnographic’ reflection our paper uses the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of consumer and material culture. He traces the subject’s relation to objects from use-value, to exchange-value and in the era of extreme capitalism, to pure exhibition-value. He searches for ways that the objects produced in our material culture can be ‘profaned’ (Agamben, 2007). Space – From the material to the spatial to the situation. We are interested in how objects and the practices they elicit can be ‘profaned’ by their situation (Agamben, 2007; Wark, 2103). To profane, according to Agamben, is to open up the possibility that the object loses its exhibition-value to ‘a special form of negligence’ (Agamben). He uses the example of the child’s ability to insinuate any object into a new logic of play (Agamben). Like the objects excavated for The New Wilderness they could be from a variety of spheres – business, household, industry, health etc… The child, like the artist, reconstitutes, reorders and assembles new relations between things. In reflecting on the first New Wilderness project the paper correlates the creative response of the participant (student, child, artist) with the occupier. The Occupy Movement, which took up residence in many of the world’s cities’ financial districts in 2011, used a number of strategies commensurate with both Agamben’s notion of profanation and McKenzie Wark’s reading of the Situationist International’s use of détournement - as a strategy that releases objects and subjects back into the field of play (Wark, 2013). The field was taken by the occupy movement to be the space in which they occupied – capitalism, its logic and its practices, were, for a short time, redundant in the occupied field. The New Wilderness conceptualises the city as a localised field, from which its discarded objects can be ‘profaned’ or, repurposed, to reflect on shared histories, responsibilities, pedagogies and future action. Subject: self/other– As much as we propose New Wilderness to be a pedagogical initiative we see it as personal, critical and political. In the themed workshops, designed to elicit personal responses to the object and the site, which culminated in a multi-disciplinary installation, performance and/or text based work, participants were encouraged to think critically, and importantly, collectively. Through the four workshops run in the first iteration of the project participants were asked to re-consider their material value-systems, much as the occupy movement was trying to do, and like the occupiers, participants were empowered to be agents of change. Our paper reflects on the practical outcomes and the conceptual, political and pedagogical strategies embedded in The New Wilderness project. The paper affords us the additional opportunity to imagine a life for it in other geographical, socio-economic and educational situations. Merinda Kelly and Cameron Bishop, 2013Bio: Merinda Kelly is a sculptor and installation artist, educator and PhD student at Deakin University. Her research interests include Visual Culture, Practice Led Research, the Ontology of Art, and Autoethnography. Her most recent work includes the Pop Archaeology' and the Globo-Touro Projects.Bio: Dr Cameron Bishop is an artist and academic working in Visual Arts at Deakin University. He exhibits regularly and has written a number of journal articles and book chapters. His research has focused on the philosophical and postcolonial dimensions of space and subjectivity and more recently has evolved into an active interest in strategic interventions into space and practice.

Communicating history A-historically

A paper delivered in tandem with the short film Threshold (Dirk De Bruyn, 20 minutes, 2014), which documents the history and childhood remembrances of the Geelong Waterfront using photographic material gleaned from the Geelong Heritage Centre, the Victorian State Library, the National Film and Sound Archive and Auckland War Memorial Museum alongside Google Maps.

TWEI 2.0 (Type will ease itself 2.0)

TWEI 2.0 (Type will ease itself 2.0) is a newly developed artefact of inquiry that engages the reproductions of memory, meaning and experience. The work offers a new typographic mark-making proposal salvaged from ordinary articles common to routines of the everyday – street and road signage, maps, and GPS coordinates. Our experience of these articles offer familiar patterns of recognition and sites for meaning making. We keep hold of and remember the traces of colour, marks and symbols as a means to retain our experiences of places and sites of meaning. In this work TWEI 2.0 positions a cartographic reproduction of digital histories, which have been repurposed from landscapes in Kuwait and Oman. The digital based work will be projected in a large format so to be physically realized on an architectural scale representative of large maps in the gallery environment. This scenario offers a vision that is as inescapable as the signage from which it comments on and offers a consideration of the gallery wall as both a boundary for experience and the production of a site of meaning. The work in this space physically presents an installation that seeks to be at both overwhelming and intimate. Here the artist pursues direct engagement with the audience as a practice of social meaning and partnership providing a direct correlation to our familiarities with common physical signage and sign posting of our streets, corners and roads. In achieving this TWEI 2.0 proposes to highlight the fragility of meaning and the brittleness of memories.