World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
CIHA’S ROLES IN THE MAKING OF ART HISTORY AROUND THE GLOBE
Jaynie Anderson, University of Melbourne (Lead Speaker)
Since its foundation at Vienna in 1873 CIHA or the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art has defined
itself as the only true global organization in the history of art, one that creates permanent links
between art historians of all countries. For most of the twentieth century the art historical globe was
conceived of as European until the conferences organized by Irving Lavin (Washington) and Thomas
Gaeghtgens (Berlin), which both attempted a global art history on an unprecedented scale. With the
Melbourne congress in 2008, Crossing Cultures. Conflict, Migration and Convergence (published in
2009), some 700 art historians participated from 50 countries,and some 220 art historians from 25
countries published their presentations. The global mix and the difference in methodologies
encouraged other countries to contribute to art historical debate. After Melbourne CIHA has held
colloquia in Akita, Beijing, Florence, Johannesburg, Maribor, Nuremberg, and Rio de Janeiro. In my
presentation I will present the last four years’ activities and look to the future of art history. At
Nuremberg in 2012 I am chairing a session with Thomas Gaeghtgens on ‘CIHA as the object of art
history’, where we ask for presentations on the past, present and future of art history, and who
validates what is art history.
Biography:
Professor Jaynie Anderson graduated in History and Fine Arts from the University of Melbourne,
and proceeded to a doctorate at Bryn Mawr College, where her thesis was on Giorgione. In 1970 she
became the first woman Rhodes Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she remained until 1991
teaching art history. In 1997 she was appointed Herald Chair of Fine Arts and Head of the School of
Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology, in charge of creating a newly formed school in the
Arts Faculty of the University of Melbourne. She remains committed to the pursuit of excellence in
Renaissance scholarship. Jaynie hosted the 32nd international conference of art historians (CIHA) on
the subject of Crossing Cultures, Conflict, Migration and Convergence, at the University of
Melbourne, 13-18 January 2008. She has received grants from the British Academy (1981-82), the
Leverhulme Trust (1993-4), and the Australian Research Council (1999-2003). She has been a visiting
Scholar at the John Paul Getty Museum (1986), at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts,
National Gallery, Washington (1991), at the Harvard Centre for Renaissance Studies, I Tatti, Florence
(2001, and 2003) and at the Institut national de l'histoire de l'art, Paris (2003). Jaynie has been
elected President of the International Committee for the History of Art from 2008 to 2012.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
ATMOSPHERIC AFFECTS: THINKING ECOLOGICALLY ABOUT ART
Jill Bennett, National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA) at UNSW (Lead Speaker)
This paper is grounded in the belief that ecological thinking constitutes a new paradigm---one that
extends and deepens the recent fascination with connectivity in the arts (as manifested in the
development of interactive media arts, in concepts like relational aesthetics or dialogical aesthetics
and in the prevalence of thematics of reciprocal engagement).
Ecological thinking by its nature addresses the material connections between things and the dynamics
of objects in time and space. Thinking ecologically about art (as opposed to simply representing
ecologies) means rethinking the materiality of art objects and the way in which those objects occupy
and are encountered in space. It means thinking about space (environment) in constitutive terms as
something that materially affects experience and perception. This in turn has profound implications
for the way in which we understand exhibition space and its relationship to the world beyond.
In these terms, my paper will examine the relationship of air to contemporary art and aesthetics and
will argue for immersion as a mode of ecological inquiry.
Biography:
Professor Jill Bennett is Professor of Visual Culture and Director of the National Institute for
Experimental Arts (NIEA) at UNSW, where she is also Associate Dean Research, College of Fine Arts
(COFA) and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art & Politics (CCAP). Her books include
Empathic Vision; Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (Stanford University Press, 2005), Practical
Aesthetics: Events, Affect and Art After 9/11 (IB.Tauris, in press), T-Visionarium: A User’s Guide
(UNSW Press/Hatje Cantz 2008), Fantasmi: Dennis Del Favero, 1996-2003 (UNSW Press/Sprengel
Museum, 2004) and with R. Kennedy ed., World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time,
(Palgrave/Macmillan 2003).
She has curated a number of exhibitions associated with her research, including most
recently, REAL emergency (with Anna Munster), Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, 2009
and Prepossession (with F. Fenner and L. Kelly), Ivan Dougherty Gallery and Golden Thread Gallery,
Belfast, 2005. She is currently completing ARC funded research on current events in art and is
working with the City of Sydney and Object on a series of sustainable public art projects.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
CROSSING BORDERS: PERFORMANCE, ART, ACTIVISM AND THE WORLD
Thomas J. Berghuis, University of Sydney
Art history often finds itself in a predicament when it comes to confronting the advent, growth and
unremitting position of performance art in the overall development of contemporary art, in the world.
Performance art can be considered an active agent and a perpetual driving force behind the historical
avant-garde art. Performance art can also become the residue and sediment of past actions and
events, as when it is collected and installed in exhibitions, placed on display as timeless artefacts.
These records of 'the performance art past' have contributed to discussions of performance
documentation, re-enactment, re-appropriation, and re-mediation.
Then, there is the level at which performance art transforms into popular representations of
conceptual photography, or where performance art becomes part of staged events at exhibitions,
festivals, and at art fairs – often aimed at providing a form of entertainment and drawing on
experiences of the public spectacle.
Informing these realms lies the unremitting development and extensions of performance art practices
across the globe that continues to offer momentous examples of the deepening relations between
performance art, activism, and ‘world-making’ – by generating important new means of examining
connectivities and potential differences between notions of art-making and community-making.
This paper proposes to examine the development of performance art festivals across the world during
the past 20 years, with a focus on the rise of new international performance art festivals in Asia, since
the start of the 1990s. It seeks to provide an analysis of the way performance art festivals can offer
important examples of new means of connectivity in art, as well as in relation to culture and society.
The paper will examine how these performance art festivals – many of which have been developed in
direct contact with the public domain – are crossing borders in terms of developing complex relations
between international performance art communities with local communities in societies across Asia.
Biography:
Dr Thomas J. Berghuis is a lecturer in Asian Art at the Department of Art History & Film Studies at
the University of Sydney. From March to June 2011 Berghuis was a Visiting Fellow with the
Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. Berghuis completed his PhD in
Art History & Theory at the University of Sydney (Australia) in 2006, following an MA in Sinology at
Leiden University in 1999. During the past 10 years he has traveled extensively to China, Indonesia,
Malaysia and Singapore for his research, and from 2003 to 2004 he was a visiting scholar at the
Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. His book, Performance Art in China was published in 2006
with Timezone 8 in Hong Kong. Berghuis is currently working as a co-editor on a book marking the
10 year anniversary of the Jakarta-based artists’ collective ruangrupa, titled Siasat: Expanding the
Space and the Public, featuring 38 writers from across Asia, Australia, and the Middle East.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
ASSERTING THEIR PRESENCE: ABORIGINAL ARTISTS ENGAGING WITH THE BUILT AND NATURAL
ENVIRONMENTS OF THE ILLAWARRA (NSW)
Vincent Bicego, University of Wollongong
How have Aboriginal artists engaged with the built and natural environments of South Coast NSW? How
has this brought awareness to the general public of Aboriginal culture and the issues of concern to
Aboriginal peoples? (Focus area: Illawarra and neighbouring localities.) These are the questions I seek to
answer in my doctorial thesis (still in progress) and I will address key points of the research in this paper.
Over the last two decades, a number of public artworks have emerged in both the Illawarra’s urban centres
and relatively undeveloped areas. In the main, they are murals and sculptures that have been co-authored
or produced solely by local Aboriginal people. Irrespective of the issues specific to each work, their
positioning in the landscape necessarily reasserts an Aboriginal presence that has been largely dismissed
for two hundred years, and inherently introduces participants and onlookers to a discourse sometimes
rarely engaged with outside universities, governments, galleries and museums. As such, some of these
works have been conscious acts of public education and reconciliation. Numerous murals produced by
Kevin Butler, for example, grace the walls of preschools and primary schools throughout the Illawarra.
They remain many of the students’ first real exposure to Aboriginal culture, and are indicative of the
now accepted necessity of incorporating Aboriginal perspectives into the NSW school curriculum.
Other projects that have included Aboriginal artists, such as a number of works at Wollongong’s
popular family destination, Belmore Basin, finally acknowledge the place of Aboriginal people in
Wollongong’s multicultural community, and contribute to a corrective history of the region. Of great
importance are those public works that intersect with environmental concerns. Artist sisters, Lorraine
Brown and Narelle Thomas, have been at the forefront of the protection and rejuvenation of
Coomaditchie Lagoon, previously at risk from Wollongong’s suburban sprawl and steel industries.
Contemporary totem poles, pictorial walkways, and murals, invite visitors to this now healthy reserve.
Similarly, when Boolarng Nangamai recently worked with Land Care to regenerate the bushland
around Kiama’s landmark ‘little blowhole’, the artists created a special mural to mark the occasion.
Such works reinforce the health of Country as a prime concern of Aboriginal identity and culture, and
the importance of Aboriginal people’s agency in helping shape our physical and cultural environments.
Biography:
Vincent Bicego: PhD candidate (University of Wollongong, Faculty of Creative Arts).DEGREE:
Bachelor of Creative Arts (Honours), 2008. University of Wollongong. Thesis title: ‘An Aboriginal
Garden: Tradition and Innovation on the Southeast Coast’. CONFERENCE PAPER: A Koori Garden,
‘Selling Yarns 2: Innovation for Sustainability’, Australian National University / National Museum of
Australia, March 2009.LECTURES: ‘Post’ colonial? Aboriginal culture on the world stage, and the
denial of Aboriginal rights back home. University of Wollongong, Sept 2010. Aboriginal art of
southeast Australia: rediscovering traditions. University of Wollongong, April 2009.TUTOR: Theory
in practice: Australian Art, Media & Design in the Global Context (2009); Ideas in Practice:
Perspectives on Modernism (2010); Introduction to Indigenous Art and Visual Culture (2010);
Representation and Space in the Post Colonial World (2010). Faculty of Creative Arts, University of
Wollongong
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
CONFOUNDING LIGHT: SUBVERSION AND TRANSNATIONAL SYMPATHY
Merlinda Bobis, University of Wollongong and Filipino-Australian writer, performer and academic
Light is far reaching in Bobis’s novel The Solemn Lantern Maker. It exposes the Philippine’s history of
colonisation, and ripples into contemporary politics and daily life impacted by globalisation. 9/11 and
the discourse on terrorism, third world poverty and child prostitution, McDonald and Pizza Hut,
transnational labour, and mobile phones intersect in local-global hostility and sympathy, co-optation
and subversion.
This paper will trace the trajectory of light in the novel, its reflections/refractions on a local life under
siege by local-global politics and economics, and colonial history. Light and life are commodified—but
can this commodification transpose into ‘alternative illuminations’? Is it possible to conceive a new
discourse of resistance? Can one imagine a narrative paradigm of transnational sympathy that is safe
from co-optation? Should globalised postcolonial modes of resistance not also be decolonised and reimagined in an innovated space that is locally made? In this paper, novelist Bobis will examine the
notion of ‘a subversive transnational sympathy’, which is the premise of her novel: “Inside the can, a lit
candle, its light streaming through. It is the heart of the tree, a flickering innovation of a heart.”
Biography:
Dr Merlinda Bobis, a Filipino-Australian writer, performer and academic, has published novels,
short fiction, poetry, and drama. She has received the Prix Italia for Radio Fiction, the Australian
Writers’ Guild Award, the Steele Rudd Award for the Best Published Collection of Australian Short
Stories, the Philippine National Book Award, and the Philippine Balagtas Award, a lifetime award
for her fiction and poetry in English, Pilipino and Bikol. Her first novel Banana Heart Summer was
short-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Her plays have been
performed/produced, mostly as her one-woman show, in Australia, Philippines, US, Spain, France,
China, Thailand, and the Slovak Republic. She is senior lecturer in creative writing at the University
of Wollongong, Australia, and poetry and fiction editor of the online journal Postcolonial Text.
Currently she is researching the ‘transnational imaginary’ and strategies for ‘localising the global’ in
cultural production. Author’s website: http://merlindabobis.com.au
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
WORLDS APART, WORLDS UNITED
Zoja Bojic, Australian National University
This paper examines a phenomenon in the writing about art history. It is concerned with the legacy of
Greek art in Roman art practices. It is based on an analysis of the writings by two writers from
antiquity whose relatively substantial texts on art and art history survived to this day.
Vitruvius and Pliny the Elder wrote extensively about their contemporary art practices as well as those
through history until their times. Vitruvius wrote his ten books On Architecture in late 1st c. BC; Pliny
wrote his Natural History in the 1st c AD. Vitruvius comes across as a person versed in practical work,
not writing; Pliny is considered one of the first encyclopaedists and an intellectual of his time. The two
writers belong to two different worlds, yet their writings demonstrate a strong similarity in that what
they each considered ‘foreign’ art practices and in what they considered Roman art practices. This
paper examines the relationship between the worlds of Vitruvius and Pliny the Elder, as well as the
relationship, as described by these two writers, between Roman art practices of the times and the
history of Greek art. In doing so, it contributes to our better understanding of these two
interconnected art practices as well as some origins of later Euro-centric art.
Biography:
Dr Zoja Bojic is an Australian scholar who is currently lecturing in art history at ANU. Her books
include Stanislaus Rapotec, a Barbarogenius in Australian Art, and Imaginary Landscapes, the Art
of Danila Vassilieff (both published in 2007), a book on Australian art scene published in Serbian
(2004) and the book of translation from Latin into Serbian, Vitruvius, De Architectura (2009) with
her essay, selection of images, commentaries and apparatus. Her book on Pliny the Elder’s writings
about the arts, with her selection of Pliny’s texts, her translation from Latin into Serbian, her essay,
selection of images, commentaries and apparatus, is scheduled for publication in 2011.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
WAR ART AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, University of Melbourne
In conflicts since Vietnam, Western artists and photographers have expanded existing definitions of
war documentation and war art. It is widely assumed that they shaped perceptions of conflicts. The
paper argues for the emergence of a very different development of war images in the present, and
asks if these might assist Australian citizens as much to understand the contemporary as to
understand their own images of war. Recent war art commissions contribute to the understanding of
the nation’s participation in conflict, even though the artists were alternately subject to delusions of
cultural importance or haunted by a sense of their irrelevance, afraid that culture is little more than a
fancy mode of luxury retailing. It is clear to us, however, that recent contemporary art’s approaches to
the particularity and contingency of images of conflict rather than stories about it—to visual history—
is a crucial resource if Australian society is to understand how culture and politics are entwined as the
contemporary.
Biography:
Dr Lyndell Brown and Dr Charles Green have worked in collaboration since 1989. They have held
more than 30 solo exhibitions, most recently including: Framing Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan, Ian
Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne (2008); War 2007, Nature Morte Gallery, New
Delhi (2008); and have been included in several national and international curated group
exhibitions including Tranquility, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, and M.Y. Art Prospects, New
York, (2005), with Rose Farrell & George Parkin; Photographica Australis, ARCO Madrid, National
Gallery of Thailand, National Gallery of Singapore, 2003-2004, and Tales of the Unexpected,
National Gallery of Australia, 2002.
Brown and Green are represented in major national and international collections including
National Gallery of Australia; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Art Gallery of South Australia;
National Gallery of Victoria; Art Gallery of West Australia; University of Melbourne Vizard
Foundation; University of Sydney; University of Western Sydney; King’s School; Trinity College;
McClelland Regional Gallery and several other regional galleries and curated corporate collections
in Australia, United States, Spain, Germany, India, Japan and Canada.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
CONNECTING THROUGH COMPUTER ART
Kathryn Brown, Tilburg University in the Netherlands
This paper examines the theme of ‘world-making’ in contemporary art by analyzing the aesthetic
properties and social effects of interactive computer artworks that invite individuals from around the
world to participate in the creation of objects and displays. I focus on the large-scale public light
installations of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and the webbased computer art of Ken Goldberg.
Lozano-Hemmer has produced a number of public artworks, described by the artist as ‘relational
architecture’, in which individuals control the projection of searchlights or animations by sending
messages over the internet, or via cell phones and iPads. Vectorial Elevation (1999, Mexico City),
Amodal Suspension (2003, Yamaguchi), and Solar Equation (2010, Melbourne) operate on the principle
that individuals who are not necessarily present at the site of the work’s display can, nevertheless, be
involved in the control and appearance of the work. The web-based work, Telegarden (1995-2004) by
US artist, Ken Goldberg, operated in a similar way: individuals logged on to a website in order to
control the functioning of machinery that monitored, watered, and tended a remote, but living
garden. With over 10,000 participants (and 100,000 viewers), the work prompted co-operation,
communication, and, on occasion, rivalry between strangers.
These interactive pieces exploit the potential of new media as a means of staging ‘human connectivity’
by implicating individuals in the realization of an artwork and drawing people together for the
purposes of collaborating on a single project. They broaden the definition of ‘interactivity’ as it applies
to computer art forms by prompting exchanges not just between individuals and computers, but
between people. Liberating viewers from the physical and cultural specificity of traditional spaces for
art viewing, these uses of digital technology create new arenas for the participation in, and enjoyment
of, visual art. I examine the aesthetic consequences of this development by analyzing the actual locus
of these artworks, questioning the concept of ‘site specificity’, and considering what it means to
‘experience’ an artwork from whose actual display a participant may remain physically distant.
Biography:
Dr Kathryn Brown is Assistant Professor of Art History at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She
holds a D.Phil from the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of London. Her research
areas include nineteenth-century French painting, twentieth-century modernism (with particular
focus on the livres d’artiste of Henri Matisse), and contemporary art. Her book, Women Readers in
French Painting 1870-1886, is forthcoming with Ashgate Publishing. She is currently editing a
collection of essays on the art book tradition in twentieth-century Europe (also forthcoming with
Ashgate). Her most recent articles (2010) have appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism and American Art. Recent conference presentations include papers delivered at the
College Art Association (New York, 2011) and the Association of Art Historians (University of
Warwick, 2011). She has organized an international conference on aesthetics entitled Towards a
Contemporary Aesthetic Education to be held at Tilburg University in October 2011.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
MEANWHILE, IN ANOTHER PART OF THE WORLD…
Charlotte Bydler, Johannes Gutenberg-University
…I deny the existence of one single time, in which all times are linked as in a chain. [...] I deny, in an
elevated number of instances, the successive; I deny, in an elevated number of instances, the
contemporary as well. (JL Borges, ‘A New Refutation of Time’, 1944/46, Labyrinths, 1970, pp 257-58.
Is it at all possible to identify a shared problem in ‘Global Art’, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, or indeed ‘art
history’? Any material at hand resolutely situates both inquiry and researcher. In the following,
cosmopolitanism will be unfixed from ancient genealogies, and used to describe modes of conviviality
in different art worlds on equal footing with ‘le tout-monde’ (Glissant) and heeding Pollock,
Breckenridge and Bhabha’s call to keep ‘cosmopolis’ an open and porous concept. This is no peaceful
state, but people who negotiate their living in aesthetics – sometimes parallel, sometimes together –
without constitution or laws. Communication is central. But connectivity feeds both flash mobs and
democratic revolutions. The problems of co-presence in judgments on historical time is not only
ubiquitous in cultural history – it is its basic matter. We perceive events in relation to other events:
euphoric, anticipated or feared, simultaneous, enduring, long since past, traumatic, unknown, sudden,
frustrating, etcetera. And the mere smell of yesterday’s new technology and debates in whatever is at
hand is enough to drive a wedge between its undeniable presence and its claims to be part of the
present. I want to investigate the time/s inhabited by two roughly coeval events that thematised
contemporaneity. The first is Plateau of Thought, a portion of Harald Szeemann’s dAPERTutto at the
2001 Venice Biennale, Plateau of Humankind. The second event is Wired Ruins, a collection of projects
on the internet publication CTheory’s multimedia site, curated by Timothy Murray and launched in
2002.Szeemann’s coy bricolage of events taken out of human aesthetic history will be set against
Wired Ruins’s threatening subtitles, ‘digital terror’ and ‘ethnic paranoia’, that signal a shocked
realization that the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 spawned a new cosmos for humanity to
inhabit. Images themselves mark time, and lend themselves as supports for production of claims to
anciennéité. (Didi-Huberman) These events reveal diverging senses of time as simultaneity or
contemporaneity, and as history – without necessarily causing conflict. But were they lived as part of
the same time, as equally relevant to any one aesthetic community or art world?
Biography:
Dr Charlotte Bydler: 2010-11: Guest Professor, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Johannes GutenbergUniversität, Mainz, Germany. PUBLICATIONS: The global, the cosmopolitan, and other Internet art
worlds (earlier HSFR-project), Södertörn Studies in Art History, No 2 (ms 2011);‘Global
contemporary?’, Globalization and Contemporary Art, Jonathan Harris (ed.), Blackwell (2011);‘The
Global Art World, Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art’ (2004), pp. 378-405; Elena
Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal & Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on LargeScale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, Bergen Kunsthall & Hatje Cantz Verlag
(2010);‘Forhandlinger om det samtidige – Anders Sunnas kunstnerskap’, pp. 9-14, Ottar. Tromsø
Universitetsmuseet (282/2010); ‘Performativitet och relevans’ (Performativity and Relevance), in
Birgitta Åkerström et al. (eds.), Det åskådliga och det bottenlösa. Tankar kring konst och
humaniora, Festschrift for Professor Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf, Stockholm University (2010);
‘A Local Global Art History’, Is Art History Global?, James Elkins (ed.), Routledge (2007).
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
BEYOND THE SELF: CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITURE FROM ASIA
Christine Clark, National Portrait Gallery
This paper explores the representation of the self in current South and Southeast Asian visual art
practice, through the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Beyond the Self: Contemporary Portraiture
from Asia. The use and manipulation of the artist’s own image has become noticeably prevalent in
contemporary art across the Asian region, with many artists exploring and re-exploring their selfpersonae through altering their own image. For these artists, their contemporary worlds involve
increased global awareness and mobility and altered economic and technological possibilities. These
very factors have provided artists with renewed impetus for the investigation of older contentions,
namely the objectivised, material body and an immaterial inner subjectivity. Artists have focused
attention on their individual and/or collective positioning within historical or cultural constructs,
frequently examining existing tropes of representation, endorsed nationalist mantras and ideas, the
use of culturally-specific objects to personify one's identity or beliefs. Yet, many of these artists’
practices are not only defined and confined by national boundaries. The fluidity of references at local,
national and international levels and, in some instances, identification across current borders speaks
eloquently of contemporary being, including location, and self representation. Many of the artists in
the exhibition are notable mid-career and senior artists – Agus Suwage and FX Harsono (Indonesia),
Vivan Sundaram and Atul Bhalla (India) and Navin Rawanchaikul (Thailand) – as it is these generations
particularly whose concerns and inquiries focus on the self image. Beyond the Self explores the
transgressive and transformative possibility of portraiture and tracks some evolving influences in
contemporary self portraiture in Asia through the works of artists from Indonesia and India as well as
Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.
Biography:
Christine Clark has been in the museum sector for the past twenty years, where she has worked as
a curator, writer and exhibition manger. Her academic qualifications include a Masters of Business
Administration (dissertations in Asian-Australian cultural relations and cultural policy) and a
Bachelor (art history). She was extensively involved in the first three Asia-Pacific Triennial projects.
Christine has predominately curated and managed exhibitions focusing on the Asian-Pacific region
and Asian Australian visual art practice. This has included curating the Museum of Brisbane’s
Echoes of Home: Memory and mobility in recent Austral-Asian art (2005 – 2008) a major exhibition
which toured to 8 capital and regional centres across Australia and managing and conducting Arts
Management Workshops in Indonesia. She is currently Exhibitions Manager at the National
Portrait Gallery and is the curator of Beyond the Self: Contemporary Portraiture from Asia¸ a major
NPG travelling exhibition.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
THE WORLDING OF THE ASIAN MODERN
John Clark, University of Sydney (Lead Speaker)
This paper reconsiders the historical depth and global range for art works and practices we may call
‘The Asian Modern’. These had their inception in the early to mid-19th century but were much more
than counter-appropriations under the constraints of colonialism or neo-colonialism. All of the modern
Asian art discourses arose in conditions where there were both internal or endogenous forces at play
with external or exogenous demands and provision of models. It is important now in post-colonial
times to reconsider more carefully the various ways of conceiving the distinction between exogenous
and endogenous art discourses even under such constraints since the resulting works have become
the originary works for long-term and in most cases almost wholly endogenous genealogies of the
modern. Whether artists moved or stayed at home, the notional stability and motility of modern Asian
artists & art works seems to be a grounding feature of their existence, one sometimes occluded by
later nationalist ideologies. But these were emplaced in a set of relations between domestic and
overseas art centres which it is no longer feasible to see as merely those of colonial or later neocolonial following and transfer. Indeed the nature of art centres was so various and changed so
completely between say the Paris of the 1880s to 1910s and the New York of the 1960s to 1990s that
the changing nature, rise, and varying functions of exogenous art centres and of endogeneity in the art
discourses we now associate with particular Asian nations must be examined.As material the paper
will deploy results from the first three years of my ARC-funded research.
Biography:
Professor John Clark, CIHA, FAHA, is Professor of Asian Art History and ARC Professorial Fellow at
the University of Sydney. Among his recent books is Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art of the
1980s and 1990s, Sydney: Power Publications, 2010 and Modernities of Chinese Art, Leiden: Brill,
2010. He is author of the chapter ‘The Southeast Asian Modern’ in the anthology Modern and
Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, forthcoming from the University of Hawai’i Press, and is a
member of the international advisory board for the new journal World Art.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
DIGITAL WORLDMAKING: NEW MEDIA IN ARNHEM LAND
Jennifer Deger, New York University and National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW
This presentation explores digital media as a vital force for social connection and creative practice in a
‘remote’ Aboriginal community in Arnhem Land. Christmas Birrimbirr (Christmas Spirit) is a multiscreen installation project directed by Paul Wunungmurra aimed at both Yolngu and non-local
audiences. Its performative aesthetics show Christmas as a Yolngu ritual concerned with making the
dead co-present with the living. Innovative in both form and content, this work provides a glimpse of
the ways that new media can enable Yolngu to creatively revitalize and re-envision ties to kin and
country, while generating new trajectories of intercultural encounter and connection. Produced in the
context of heightened local anxiety about cultural loss and future forms of belonging, conceptualized
within broader questions regarding the nature of digital knowledge and technologically-mediated
sociality, this collaborative project is informed by community based agendas, indigenous aesthetic
practices, and ceremonial forms incorporated from elsewhere. Using tinsel, lights and Christmas tunes
to build an affectively charged viewing experience, this work claims new possibilities for Yolngu
cultural production and practice-based digital scholarship.
Biography:
Dr Jennifer Deger is an ethnographer and founding member of Miyarrka Media, a collective of
indigenous and non-indigenous artists and filmmakers based in the community
of Gapuwiyak,NT, formed to enable Yolngu to working creatively with new media technologies at a
community level. She is a Research Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at New
York University and a Visiting Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, University of
New South Wales.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS A GLOBALISING AGE, BUT WAS THE ARTIST AUGUSTUS
EARLE A GLOBALIST?
Mary Eagle
The British artist Augustus Earle (1793-1838) lived and worked in the period after sea exploration had
succeeded in mapping the main outlines of the world. From the British point of view, maritime travel
expanded after the Napoleonic wars, with a global pattern of shipping dictated by trade and
colonisation. European interests, modern science, and missionary work informed the Western
interpretation of the world. The claim for Earle having been a globalising artist of his time rests on the
fact that he travelled widely for the twenty years of his working life, visiting Ireland and France, the
Mediterranean, Northern Africa, North America, South America, the South Atlantic, Australia, New
Zealand, the Pacific and China Seas, South East Asia and India. Given the scientific tendency of much
travel art at the time, it is notable that he participated only minimally in scientific work. Through his
brother, he learned the art of hydrographic and topographic illustration but practiced this scientific
skill only occasionally. Likewise, he produced remarkably few illustrations of natural history (there may
be collections as yet untraced). One of his few declared ambitions was to participate in expeditions of
exploration, but his applications met with little success, and when he joined the Beagle, illness obliged
him to resign before the expedition had completed a quarter of its work. Of the other main avenues
open to a travelling artist, Earle engaged only occasionally and half-heartedly in commercial illustration
(he was distressed when his work was tweaked for use as advertisement) and was disenchanted by
what he saw as the hypocrisy of missionaries and officials. Rather than working along the scientific and
commercial lines of his time, and in paid employment, Earle followed a much older tourist tradition of
distinguishing places and peoples through costumes, customs, and scenic features. Earle’s mature
characterisations are his main contribution as artist and, potentially, as globalist. His point of view was
globalising insofar as he candidly described a reputation a place or people had acquired outside the
immediate context. Equally, Earle was wide ranging in almost the opposite sense in that his
interpretation disregarded racial and national divides, and can seem empathetic to the points of view
of the person and people who are players in the scene. In a period increasingly given to moral oneupmanship, his stance was that we all have responsibility for the good and the bad behaviour of
humankind. It wasn’t only an attitude of ‘let he that is without sin among us, let him cast the first
stone’. Earle puts viewers of his pictures in the picture, therefore we are presumed to participate in
various scenes of life around the world. If ‘globalising’ refers to the dominant direction of travel art in
his time, Earle’s engagement was small. Alternatively, he was a globalist if the term is applicable to an
approach which, without taking people entirely on their own terms, affirms that we too participate in
the same kinds of behaviour.
Biography:
Dr Mary Eagle is an art historian and curator and author of a number of books on Australian Art
including Peter Purves Smith: A Painter in Peace and War (2001).
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AN ART MUSEUM IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Tony Ellwood, Director, Queensland Art Gallery (Lead Speaker)
Biography:
Tony Ellwood is the Director of the Queensland Art Gallery; this is a two campus facility which
includes the Gallery of Modern Art, which opened in December 2006. Prior to taking up this
position in June 2007, he was Deputy Director – International Art, at the National Gallery of
Victoria for seven years. He was Director, Bendigo Art Gallery, from 1996 – 1999 and also worked
as a Curator at the National Gallery of Victoria from 1993 – 1996, specialising in major
international curatorial projects. He has also been an Aboriginal Art Coordinator, working at
Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, Kununurra, from 1991 – 1992. He has been on numerous state and
Commonwealth boards, this has included the Visions of Australia Committee, Museums Australia
National Board, and Victorian College of the Arts (Board and Academic committee) and was on the
selection committee for the 2005 and 2009 Venice Biennales. He has written and edited numerous
publications and articles. Currently Tony is on the Japan-Australia Foundation Board and will
undertake the role of nominator for the next Hiroshima Art Prize, organised by Hiroshima City
Museum of Contemporary Art and Foundation.
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THE PHILIPPINE POLYTROPE: INTIMATING THE WORLD IN PIECES
Patrick Flores, Professor of Art Studies and Curator of the Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines
(Keynote Speaker)
Biography:
Professor Patrick Flores is the keynote speaker for this conference. He is Professor of Art History, Theory,
and Criticism at the University of the Philippines at Diliman, and is the Curator of the University of the
Philippines Vargas Museum and Adjunct Curator of the National Art Galleries of the Philippines and
Singapore. A recognized scholar in the fields of Philippine and Asian art, Flores has organized several
national and international platforms, including Luz: Traces of Depiction at the National Museum of the
Philippines (2006), and Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art at the Japan Foundation Asia
Center (2000-2003). In 2008, he was a curator for the Position Papers series at the Gwangju Biennale.
Flores is the author of numerous articles and several books concerning Philippine art. Among his
publications are: Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (Quezon City/Manila, 1998),
Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum, (Manila, 2008) and Past Peripheral:
Curation in Southeast Asia, (Singapore, 2008). (biography from Global Art and the Museum
http://globalartmuseum.de/site/person/141)
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WHEN ART MIGRATES: BIENNALES AND ITINERANCY
Anthony Gardner, The Courtauld Institute of Art (Lead Speaker)
This paper examines the re-emergence of ‘itinerant biennales’ – that is, biennales that shift location
each time they are held – in Europe since the early 1990s. In particular, I will focus on two specific
exhibitions: the Emergency Biennale, in which an exhibition of art was sent by suitcase to Grozny at
the height of the Chechen wars, so as to show artistic support for local residents (the ‘biennale’ also
travelled elsewhere in Europe and subsequently to North America as well); and the European biennale
of art, Manifesta, that has taken particular instances of European politics as its focal point every two
years (including East-West relations in Ljubljana in 2000, Turkish-Greek disputes in Cyprus in 2006, and
Europe-Africa tensions in 2010). Does the itinerancy of these biennales reinforce or problematise the
usual presumption that contemporary art, and especially large-scale exhibitions of art like biennales,
are mere handmaidens to neoliberal globalisation? Is migration a trope or a politics in these
exhibitions? And have these exhibitions exploited local politics of migration, war and underdevelopment, or presented an important politicisation of art amid globalisation?
Biography:
Dr Anthony Gardner is the Andrew W Mellon Foundation / Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellow at
the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK, for 2010-2011 and, from 2011, an ARC Postdoctoral
Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research examines the histories of art and
exhibition since 1970 in Europe and Australasia, with particular focus on postsocialism, biennales
and the “global turn” in art. Recent publications include essays in Third Text, The Australian and
New Zealand Journal of Art, Postcolonial Studies and The Cambridge Companion to Australian Art
(ed. Jaynie Anderson, Cambridge UP, 2011). In 2009, he was an International Fellow through the
Global Art and the Museum project, organised by Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter
Weibel, at the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; and in 2011 a Visiting Fellow at the New Europe College,
Bucharest, Romania. Among his current research projects are a monograph on Postsocialist Art’s
Critiques of Democracy, another on the history of biennales since 1970 (co-written with Charles
Green, University of Melbourne), as well as an edited anthology on The South Project. He lives and
works between London and Melbourne.
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CONNECTING A GLOBALISED WORLD; MAKING GLOBALIZATION CONTEMPORARY THROUGH ART
AND BIENNALES
Charles Green, University of Melbourne
This paper will explore the history, display and transformation of the contemporary through one of the
most significant phenomena in contemporary global culture: landmark international survey shows or,
as they are also known, “mega-exhibitions”. It draws on jointly-written research towards a
forthcoming book on mega-exhibitions by Charles Green and Anthony Gardner. Biennales and
triennales have drawn local practitioners into ostensibly globalised networks of art world attention
and financial support, publicising regions or cities previously deemed “peripheral” to the metropolitan
centres of London and New York. Where this paper differs from the general demonisation of megaexhibitions is in our contention that ‘biennialisation’ has not merely reflected the recent phase of
globalization and geopolitical change, but has offered profound, critical insights into art’s nexus with
globalised commerce and political interests, both after 1989 and, surprisingly, long before it, offering
new and profound methods of human connectivity and instances of cultural exchange. The paper
focuses on a time—the late 1970s—when regional artists were working in a cultural geography of
destabilized but still crushingly hegemonic center/periphery relationships, and on a particular megaexhibition—the 1979 Biennale of Sydney—that offered a confused and contradictory place for local
art. For Australian artists, that biennale brought welcome news in the form of recent, major works by
international artists, but it also brought an infuriating exclusion from their circles, for the number of
local artists was a small percentage of the exhibitors and the visitors were often carefully chaperoned
or had set themselves over-optimistically tight schedules, oblivious to the twenty hours flight time
from Europe or New York. The issue of artists and audiences for Biennales in regional centres went
further than artists’ concerns about exclusion and lack of representation to the deeper question of
whether something other than a token link between local and international art is possible. The 1979
Biennale of Sydney’s problems were to be replicated in the short-lived Johannesburg Biennale during
the mid-1990s, and both Sydney and Johannesburg struggled with the issue of local relevance and the
question of who is a biennale for and who is connected to what, in the creation of a global
contemporary.
Biography:
Dr Charles Green is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art in the School of Culture and
Communication at the University of Melbourne. Author of Peripheral Vision (1996) and The Third Hand
(2001), he is currently working with Anthony Gardner on a forthcoming book that will be a history of
biennales, assisted by an ARC grant. He is also an artist, working since 1989 in collaboration with Lyndell
Brown. In 2007, they were Australia’s Official War Artists, deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and are
currently working on a follow-up project with Jon Cattapan, also with the assistance of an ARC grant.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
MAKING PLACE: THE QUESTION OF TIME AND SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY PUBLIC ART PRACTICE IN
MANILA AND THE REGIONS
Tessa Maria Guazon, University of the Philippines-Diliman
Contemporary public art projects in Manila and regions outside the capital illustrate interesting shifts
in scope. They encompass state sponsored programs and corporate commissions, as well as projects
that combine state support, non-government organizations and the participation of artist collectives.
The engagements that transpire are rarely examined and assessed, with focus inordinately object
based and little attention given to process, site and the often overlooked element of time. My essay
presents as examples public art projects organized and realized by artists engaging communities.
These include those by Alma Quinto both in central Manila (Urban Plan/Duyan) and in Mindanao,
Kawayan de Guia’s Ax (is) Tent project for the recent Philippine art festival celebration in Baguio, its
counterpart exhibition Transient Studio, and Mark Salvatus’s collaborative projects with prison
inmates in Quezon province for Secret Garden. Spanning the last five years (2007 to 2011) these
endeavors were founded on collaboration, engagement with communities in varying degrees, and are
more or less reliant on ties with state agencies. These artist’s projects will be examined through the
rubrics of time and space, as they are highly informed by locale and the shared qualities of transience
and ‘the fleeting’. The ‘worlds’ these projects attempt to weave will be graphed against the larger
sphere of contemporary art making in the Philippines. Interrogating place making as a manner of
constructing worlds, the paper examines art’s crafting of the human condition. The essay is part of a
larger endeavor to extend understandings of the nature and changing breadth of ‘public art’ in specific
local contexts, its proposed aims and the possibilities they offer for communities grappling with
challenges wrought by globalizing’s rapid, if not bewildering tempo..
Biography:
Tessa Maria Guazon is Assistant Professor of Art Studies at the University of the PhilippinesDiliman She has published essays on topics of urban issues and public art, cities and cinema, and
artistic interventions of the urban condition. These have appeared in the journals Philippine
Humanities Review, Agham Tao, Pananaw and proceedings for conferences on cities held in
Lisbon and Liverpool. A forthcoming journal essay and book chapter examines public art practice
in Manila. Research interests include public art practice, curation and contemporary art and
artistic mediations of the urban Her art critical reviews on exhibitions and film have appeared in
Humanities Diliman and Asian Art News. She is currently at work on a university-funded research
grant on contemporary commissions for public art in Manila.
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HERE IN BYZANTIUM: IMITATING REALITY IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC
Anthea Gunn
This paper argues that the work of the Imitation Realists, a short-lived collective of artists in 1960s
Sydney, can be seen to foreground the engagement with cosmopolitanism and globalisation in
contemporary art. The work of these artists - Mike Brown, Ross Crothall and Colin Lanceley - during
the 1960s offers an alternative view to traditional Australian art history and its charting of the
relationship between Australian art and the art centres of the Northern Hemisphere.
These artists constantly sought to embed their work within the local, with a deliberate focus on the
Pacific region and a conscious refusal of the traditional gaze toward Europe. They drew on indigenous
cultures, their immediate urban surrounds and contemporary popular culture as a part of a strategy to
make art constructed out of the material environment that surrounded them and that reflected the
entirety of their world. They asserted that their perspective on the world was just as valid as that of
the traditional Western cultural centres and was not limited to the strangeness of the antipodean
landscape.
Their use of assemblage enabled the artists to break through the impasse they perceived in
contemporary art. Their work was one instance of a widespread interest in the 'primitive' and
assemblage shared by artists in Europe and the United States at the time. The Imitation Realists used
assemblage to actively engage with the modern world as they saw it from their specific context,
seeking both to shape and represent it.
Biography:
Dr Anthea Gunn was awarded a PhD in Art History by the Australian National University in 2010.
She has worked as an assistant curator at the National Museum of Australia since 2008. Her article
‘A-changin' times: the art of Martin Sharp in the 1960s’ was published by the Journal of Australian
Studies in June 2010.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
OTHER WORLDS: ON MUSIC, PAROCHIALITY AND BREAKING OUT
Huw Hallam, King’s College London
Like the notoriously uneven spread of globalization’s social and economic effects, its impact on the
various arts shows marked differences. Music, in particular, has witnessed profound convulsions
through globalization and this paper will examine how transformations of its production,
dissemination and consumption compare to those of the visual arts, exploring their ramifications for
the theme of ‘world-making’. Major technological developments over the course of the last three
decades, including the internet and efficient digital audio data compression technologies, have
furnished new social practices of music sharing and consumption that have proved major challenges to
music copyright legislation and the music industry’s functioning. Increasingly, high profile musicians,
including the German post-industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten (my example here), have sought
to engage these developments to bypass the music industry’s traditional mediating functions and
establish more direct relationships with their audiences. This nascent but still uncertain shift raises the
prospect of an unprecedented decentralization of music’s world economy, away from the EuroAmerican centres of concentrated capital and their function as transnational, cultural door-keepers.
However, attunement to music’s peculiar sense-making logic suggests that the increased potential of
global connectivity offered by recent media developments and the (possible) etiolation of the music
industry's centres of power may nevertheless fall short of provoking a situation of musical ‘worldmaking’. A fundamental distinction exists between immersive, auditory resonance and structures of
visuality and representation. Whereas the visual arts generally favour a relation of difference that
indicates a field of reality beyond the observer, music tends to generate pockets of empathic
homogeneity, parochial worlds cut loose from the world around them. The final section of this paper
will explore certain strategies to expose and break through these worlds, focussing on the tropes of
'citation' and 'collapse' in Einstürzende Neubauten's work and its critical positioning in relation to art
world institutionalism.
Biography:
Huw Hallam is currently a PhD candidate in musicology at King’s College London. He has written
articles interrogating the politics of ‘world art’ historiography, as well as art and music criticism. His
current project is a theoretical examination of music’s political dimensions.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
TRACING CONFLICT ZONES: A SURVEY OF RECENT AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL OFFICIAL
COMMISSIONS
Warwick Heywood, Australian War Memorial
Since 2007 the Australian War Memorial has commissioned five artists to travel to conflict zones
around the world and record Australian Defence Force operations. This paper will argue that the
commissioned works represent conflict zones as radically asymmetrical, dispersed and evolving
environments where various coalitions of nation-states campaign against non-state entities; and
advanced military systems, international businesses and digital imaging technologies are rapidly
installed into, or on top of, established cultures, geographies and identities. The works focus on the
Australian soldier within these complex environments but also explore the way resources, cultures,
histories, bodies, territories, and identities are contested and/or remade through the conflicts. The
presentation will survey the following commissions:




In 2007 collaborative artists Lyndell Brown and Charles Green travelled to the Middle East and
Afghanistan. Their paintings and photographic work focuses on imported military bases and the
way landscapes are reconfigured by these amorphous international spaces.
Shaun Gladwell toured Afghanistan in 2009, and his video work examines the training and
rituals of Australian soldiers and their relationship to global war zones.
Jon Cattapan’s paintings and prints represent Australian solders involved in peace enforcement
operations in East Timor. Exploring night vision technologies and digital communications his
work evokes an abstract “battlespace”, which advanced military organisations project over
operational environments. He toured East Timor in 2008.
eX de Medici travelled to the Solomon Islands in 2009. Her watercolours represent different
armies that make up peace enforcement operations in the region as well as weapons and other
machines. Her work catalogues the various historical and contemporary global pressures that
reshape the cultures and environment of the Solomon Islands.
Biography:
Warwick Heywood is an art curator at the Australian War Memorial. He is the curator of the
Memorial exhibitions, Framing Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan - Lyndell Brown and Charles Green,
and the recently completed Double Field: Shaun Gladwell – Afghanistan.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
KEEPING AN EYE ON THE HAINTS
Pat Hoffie, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University (Lead Speaker)
“That yard’s a mighty long place for little girls to cross at night,’ Jem teased. ‘Ain’t you scared of haints?’ We
laughed. ‘Haints, Hot Steam, incantations, secret signs, that old thing,’ Jem said, ‘Angel bright, life-in-death; get
off the road, don’t suck my breath.’ (To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, 1960,Chapter 28, p. 280)
All notions of ‘worlds’ depend on definitions of boundaries; so in this sense I guess all worlds could be
described as more or less like the big yards of the imagination. Yet there are other worlds that
transcribe what seem to be those more familiar worlds. They operate within boundaries that are
invisible; mutating, steaming up to take on temporary forms and relationships, then dissolving again to
reveal that what was previously familiar has been transformed into new apparitions and visions. These
worlds within worlds can play a lot of mischief with what we might think is real. They are the worlds of
myths, superstitions, opinions, attitudes, inflections; the moving worlds of interpretation that change
with the times and that cloud and shroud and open up to reveal the familiar again in changed ways
One of the roles of art has been to keep a keen eye on those changes in forms and relationships; to
trace the invisible edges of apparitions so that we can trace our path through the newly reconstituted
familiar in ways that open up possibilities. Harper Lee’s novel is set amidst the racial and class tensions
and hypocrisies of a small town. When I first read it as an adolescent living in Brisbane, lots of it
seemed oddly familiar. And so that novel, among others, shaped part of the boundaries of my own
little world that I packed up to take with me when I first began my own journeys beyond that ‘mighty
long’ yard of home. This paper will trace some of the ways visual art helped me try to make sense of
those places – those worlds - as they kept mutating, transfiguring and transforming before my very
eyes, and looks at the way fear can constrict the possibility of living in - or constructing - other worlds.
Biography:
Professor Pat Hoffie is a visual artist who has worked extensively in the Asia-Pacific region for the
past three decades. During this time, her series titled Fully Exploited Labour has explored a number
of themes including the way visual culture is valued, issues concerning social justice and human
rights, and cross-cultural mistranslations. She works in a range of media and her work has been
included in a number of public collections and survey exhibitions of contemporary Australian art in
Australia and overseas. Her curatorial projects have involved international collaborations with
artists from the Asia-Pacific region and include a number of research projects including (with
Caroline Turner) Art and Human Rights, QPACifika, The Peel Island Artists’ Residencies, and Planet
Ueno (Tokyo/Brisbane). Other recent collaborative projects focus on aspects of local history; these
include BABELprojekt at the 2010/11 Woodford Folk Festival, WindWells: channelling + divining at
the State Library of Queensland Gallery in 2010, and Troop drill at Queensland’s Fort Lytton in
November 2009. A monograph on her work, Fully Exploited Labour (ed. Sally Butler), was published
by the University of Queensland Art Gallery in 2008.She is a regular contributor to journals,
magazines and newspapers and is currently a Professor and Director of the research focus group
SECAP (Sustainable Environment through Culture, Asia Pacific) at Queensland College of Art. She
currently holds the UNESCO Orbicom Chair in Communications at Griffith University.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
GRASSROOTS CONNECTIONS IN JAPAN-AUSTRALIA CULTURAL RELATIONS IN THE 1980S: GRYPHON
GALLERY AND THE MELBOURNE ART SCENE
Allison Holland, Monash University
In the late 1970s the Australian artist Stelarc, then residing in Japan, proposed to Ken Scarlett, Director
of Gryphon Galleries, Melbourne an idea for an exhibition that eventuated in Yo in: Ideas from Japan
made in Australia (1981). A large-scale project of twenty-seven Japanese artists across seven sites, this
exhibition was a significant initiative in affirming ties between the art milieus of Japan and Australia.
With budgetary constraints to consider the project minimised the cost of freight and insurance by
engaging teams of Melbourne-based art students to recreate many of the works in situ. Using local
materials the teams, headed by lecturers from Melbourne’s key art colleges, worked from sketches
and photographs supplied by the represented artists. The project offered local artists unique
opportunities to engage with the immersive installation and experimental practices of an emerging
generation Japanese artists, as well as the established members of Mono-ha and Koto-ha collectives.
As a result of this event an influential yet informal collective emerged, which included artists John
Davis, Peter Callas and Goji Hamada.
The reverberations of Yo in were two-fold: Continuum 1983 and Continuum 1985. Both exhibitions
were curated by Emiko Namikawa and presented works across the media of video, installation and
performance. Continuum 1983 toured twenty-seven Australian artists to several commercial galleries
in Tokyo. While the subsequent exhibition in Australia, Continuum 1985, hosted thirty-three Japanese
artists across nine venues. This paper will consider the benefits and shortcomings of these ambitious
bi-cultural projects within the current arts infrastructure and the motivations of the key players, both
curators and artists. More importantly, it will focus on the innovative use of technology and
performance, by select artists, in the evolution of hybrid art practices.
Biography:
Dr Allison Holland is currently an Adjunct lecturer at Monash University. Allison has previously
worked at the National Gallery of Victoria and State Library of Victoria as a curator.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
THE GLOBALIZATION OF INDONESIAN ART
Sue Ingham, University of NSW
Indonesian artists entered the international art world in the 1990s through overseas residencies and
international survey exhibitions or biennales. Biennales have been the clearest example of
globalization in the visual arts for, although some of the first Euro – American exhibitions had long
traditions, it was during the 1990s they increased exponentially in number and appeared across the
world and in Asia. This coincided with a time when opportunities inside Indonesia to exhibit
experimental and socio/political art were extremely limited. Indonesia was emerging from a repressive
dictatorship that was culturally conservative while the exploding art market was primarily interested in
commercially viable work that was decorative and non contentious. The biennale circuit was an
appealing outlet for alternative art and those few Indonesian artists and one curator who could
navigate the requirements and the predominantly western paradigms of the international exhibition
circuit were repeatedly selected to show or work with them. They came to represent Indonesian art
internationally, yet biennales are imperfect vehicles to represent a culture in its entirety. Biennales
have a particular focus and limitations and much of Indonesian culture was not experienced through
them.
Unlike many discussions concerning the impact of globalization on Asian modern and contemporary
art, this paper will consider the relationship between Indonesian art in the 1990s and its global
exposure from the inside out, beginning with the conditions inside Indonesia at the time. The history
of Indonesian art has elements in common with other post colonial Asian countries such as Malaysia,
but there are significant variations in response to local issues and as a result generalizations about all
Southeast Asian art can be misleading.
Biography:
Dr Susan Ingham is a writer and researcher in contemporary Indonesian art after a career teaching
the history and theory of art in Department of Technical and Further Education schools of Fine
Arts. She received her PhD in 2008 from the University of New South Wales and her thesis entitled,
‘Powerlines: Alternative art and infrastructure in Indonesia in the 1990s’, is being re written for
publication. She has published articles in a number of art magazines including Asian Art News,
TAASA Review, Contemporary Arts&Culture Broadsheet and C Arts and in catalogues for the Gang
Festival, Asian Traffic, Gallery 4A and Contemporaneity: Contemporary Art of Indonesia, Museum
of Contemporary Art, Shanghai.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
IMPERIAL AND LOCAL: ART AND THE ERASURE OF BORDERS IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH
WORLD
Alison Inglis, University of Melbourne
This paper looks to the historical precedent of ‘old empires’ by examining a nineteenth-century
example of art that crosses and simultaneously erases national borders by achieving significance at
both a local and global level. The focus of the paper is the imperial monument in the nineteenthcentury British World; and while the term ‘imperial monument’ can encompass a variety of sculptural
projects, in this case will confine itself to those statues of imperial dignitaries that were reproduced in
a number of localities across the British Empire. Two case studies with relevance to Australia will be
investigated: the bronze memorial statue of Sir John Franklin by Matthew Noble that was erected in
London and Hobart respectively during the 1860s; and the bronze monument to General Gordon by
Hamo Thornycroft, which was erected in London and Melbourne in the 1880s. The historical
circumstances of the four commissions will be investigated to determine why the colonial
commissioning bodies chose to erect reproductions of monuments currently under construction in
Imperial London; as well as the extent to which the ‘colonial’ versions were made to differ from the
metropolitan templates (with respect to inscriptions, iconographic details, etc). The reception of the
monuments in London and Australia will also be analysed to determine the contemporary rhetoric in
which these works were located as well as shed light on the shifting dynamic that existed between
such notions as ‘foreign’ and ‘local’; ‘imperial’ and ‘national’; and ‘metropolitan’ and ‘provincial’’.
Finally, the paper will determine the extent to which the idea of Empire transformed colonial
perceptions of art, so that art was increasingly valued for its role in facilitating the ‘domain of human
connectivity’ across the English-speaking world; a view that would be gradually undermined postFederation by the cultural divide associated with ascendant nationalism.
Biography:
Dr Alison Inglis is an Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Melbourne. She has coordinated the Master of Art Curatorship program since 1995. Her primary research area is
nineteenth-century British art but she has a strong interest in colonial art in Australia and British
Imperial art networks. She is particularly engaged by the role of art museums in Australian society,
an interest that has been strengthened by her involvement as a Board Member with a number of
Victoria’s art institutions including Heide Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of
Victoria (of which she is an Emeritus Trustee). She has completed a doctoral thesis on the work of
the English artist, Sir Edward Poynter and has co-curated several exhibitions including one with
Ann Galbally on the foundation collections of Melbourne’s Public Library and National Gallery in
the 1850s and 1860s (1992). Her contributions to Australian art have focused on imperial
perspectives, exhibitions, collecting and patronage, and include: a chapter entitled ‘Empires of Art’
in the Routledge ‘Victorian World’ series (in press – 2012); a chapter entitled ‘Imperial perspectives
on art in nineteenth-century Australia’ in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Australia Art
(in press - 2011); articles on ‘Aestheticism and Empire: the Grosvenor Gallery Intercolonial Art
Exhibition’ (2008); ‘The allure of Albion: collecting British Art in Adelaide’ (2005); ‘”Desirable
Things”: The Private Collection of Alfred Felton’, with John Poynter (2004).
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
THE INDONESIAN ART SCENE TODAY
Mella Jaarsma, Artist and Co-founder, Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (Lead Speaker)
In the Indonesian art scene today, everything lies in the hands of private initiators: that is, private
artists, galleries, curators, supporters, and collectors. They are newly defining the nature and pace of
art developments and discourses.
With the lack of an established national art infrastructure that supports art institutions and
contemporary art museums, it seems the most important point of reference at the moment for
assessing art in Indonesia is in terms of market trends. Nowadays, many Indonesian artists ‘go
international’ to art fairs instead of participating in art biennales and non-profit art projects.
Observation of the latest developments in Indonesia reveals that young artists are following art
market tendencies, producing artworks mainly for group shows with themes imposed by
‘independent’ curators hired by commercial galleries. They produce works upon invitation to
participate in an exhibition, according to the curator’s theme. Consequently, what happens is that
most artists, although very skillful, do not develop a body of works following their own vision and
concepts. This is a different approach to art practice when compared with the previous generation of
artists who concentrated on specific issues with political and social concerns, based on research and
experimentation, and shaped their artistic profiles relatively independently. This earlier generation of
artists has been succeeded by a new generation of artists that want to have fun with art and make
artworks as part of their daily activities while communicating through facebook, making music, and
designing merchandise products, for instance. Are young artists growing up after dictatorial eras in
Asia only engaged in safe play, non-critical and consumer art?
Biography:
Mella Jaarsma, was born in Emmeloord, the Netherlands in 1960 and studied visual art at
'Minerva' Academy, Groningen (1978 - 1984), after which she left the Netherlands to study at the
IKJ (Art Institute of Jakarta, 1984), Jakarta and at ISI ( Indonesia Institute of the Arts, 1985 - 1986),
Yogyakarta and stayed ever since in Indonesia. Her work has been presented widely in exhibitions
in Indonesia as well as in international art events at the Singapore Art Museum, Queensland Art
Gallery – Brisbane, Center of Academic Resources, Chulalongkorn University - Bangkok, KIASMA Helsinki, Yokohama Triennale, Museum of Contemporary Art – Taipei, Katonah Museum - New
York, The Royal Academy of Arts - London, etc. Her work is in major public collections such as the
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, the Singapore Art Museum, and others. She gives
workshops and lectures in Indonesia as well as abroad. In 1988, together with her partner Nindityo
Adipurnomo she founded the Cemeti Art Gallery in Yogyakarta, which since 1999 has changed into
Cemeti Art House; organizing exhibitions, projects and residencies. Since 1995 she also has been
active as a board member at the Cemeti Art Foundation –Yogyakarta, recently changed into the
Indonesia Visual Art Archive (IVAA) and since 2010 she is a board member of the Yogyakarta
Biennale Foundation. Together with Nindityo Adipurnomo she received the John D. Rockefeller 3rd
Award, New York, USA (2006) and the Academic Art Award #2, Jogya Gallery / Indonesia Institute
of The Arts, Yogyakarta (2008).
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
REVALUING OCEANIC THINGS AS WORLD ART: A PERSPECTIVE ON MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY
Margaret Jolly, Australian National University
Musée du Quai Branly has generated passionate debates, even before its opening, engaging scholars,
museum professionals, politicians, journalists, and publics in France as well as broader global
audiences. Here I reflect on how a curatorial celebration of ‘les arts premiers’ and the ostensible desire
to dislodge a colonial Eurocentrism in an embrace of ‘world art’ can paradoxically reinscribe European
genealogies which emphasise the value of Oceanic arts as inspiration for European artists and as
valuable commodities for collection with little deep or critical scrutiny of their Indigenous meanings
and values. Making a world through art requires not just the rhetoric of ‘cultures conversing’ but
developed dialogues with Indigenous creators and curators.
Biography:
Professor Margaret Jolly is Professor in Gender and Cultural Studies and Pacific Studies in the
School of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific. She is an historical
anthropologist who has written extensively on gender in the Pacific, on exploratory voyages and
travel writing, missions and contemporary Christianity, maternity and sexuality, cinema and art.
Research interests: Gender and sexuality in the Pacific and Asia; ethnography of the Pacific,
especially Vanuatu; anthropology and colonial history; politics of tradition; indigeneity, diaspora
and citizenship; feminist theory; photography and cinema; museums and material culture in
Oceania.:
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
BETWEEN UTOPIA AND REAL WORLDS: INDONESIA’S NEW MEDIA ART AVANT-GARDE
Edwin Jurriëns, University of NSW
This presentation will focus on the ways in which two Indonesian new media art initiatives, Common
Room from Bandung (West Java) and The House of Natural Fiber (HONF) from Yogyakarta (Central
Java), envisage some of the key aspects of Indonesia’s democratic future. Since the fall of Suharto’s
totalitarian New Order regime in 1998, Indonesia has made important democratic progress,
particularly in terms of freedoms of press and expression. At the same time, the country has
tremendous challenges ahead, such as creating conducive environments for ecological sustainability
and local economic development. Indonesian visual artists make important contributions to generating
discourse about and seeking practical solutions to some of these problems, especially through their
creative explorations of an impressive array of new media, technologies and scientific fields; ranging
from video and mobile phones to robotics and microbiology. On the one hand, these artists attempt to
find ideas and alternatives by engaging with the imaginary, the unknown and the utopian. On the
other hand, they derive inspiration and gain a sense of urgency from their close collaboration with
local communities as well as international counterparts. It is this unique engagement with the tensions
and opportunities that arise from combinations of the artistic and the technological, the abstract and
the practical, and the global and the local, that position new media art communities such as Common
Room and HONF at the vanguard of Indonesia’s creative and social development. As this presentation
will demonstrate, Common Room is predominantly concerned with the urban and ecological
development of Bandung and surroundings, while HONF deals mainly with the future of education,
health care and rural development in the Yogyakarta area.
Biography:
Dr Edwin Jurriëns is a lecturer in Indonesian Studies and Southeast Asian Social Inquiry at The
University of New South Wales in Canberra. He obtained MA and PhD degrees in Literature and
Indonesian Studies from Leiden University, the Netherlands. He also studied at the Indonesian
Institute of Arts (ISI) in Yogyakarta. His current research interests are new media art, community
media, television culture and media literacy in Indonesia. He is author of From Monologue to
Dialogue: Radio and Reform in Indonesia (KITLV Press, 2009) and Cultural Travel and Migrancy: The
Artistic Representation of Globalization in the Electronic Media of West Java (KITLV Press, 2004).
He also co-edited Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters (Rodopi, 2007), a
book about expressions of cosmopolitanism and patriotism in Asian media and art. His articles
about new media art include:
 ‘ “No false echoes” ; Polyphony in colonial and post-colonial times’ (2008) International Institute
for Asian Studies Newsletter 48 <http://www.iias.nl/files/IIAS_NL48_21.pdf>.
 ‘Indonesian video art; Discourse, display and development’ (2009) Review of Indonesian and
Malaysian Affairs (RIMA) 43(2): 165-189.
 ‘Motion and distortion; The media in the art of Jompet and Tintin’ (2009) Indonesia and the
Malay World 37(109): 277-297.
 ‘Video spa; Krisna Murti’s treatment of the senses’ (2010) Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde (BKI) 166(1): 1-24.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
THE WORLD IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIA: INDIGENOUS ART AND GLOBALIZATION
Ian McLean, University of Western Australia
Recent notions of world art history and globalization are yet to be adequately theorized. This will only
happen after the consideration of specific examples in which art production has responded to global
networks of power, be they technological, political, religious, aesthetic or whatever. This paper will
begin such a project from the perspective of the world in Central Australia. It will sketch a history of
the world in two key moments of aesthetic production in Central Australia – the impact of the world
religion of Christianity in the art of Albert Namatjira and the impact of the artworld on Papunya Tula –
with the aim of outlining points that need to be accounted for in a theory of globalization and world
art history.
Biography:
Professor Ian McLean is currently Professor in the History of Australian Art at the University of
Western Australia, and in October 2011 will take up an appointment as Research Professor in
Australian art at the University of Wollongong. He has written extensively on Australian art. He is
on the advisory boards of the journals Third Text and World Art. His most recent book, How
Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art: Writings on Aboriginal Contemporary Art
(2011), chronicles the critical reception of Aboriginal art since the early 1980s.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
OLD COLONIES: NEW LUXURIES: EASTON PEARSON AND THE PROBLEM OF CONTEMPORARY
FASHION
Peter McNeil, University of Technology Sydney
In 1989, Brisbane-based fashion designers Pam Easton and Lydia Pearson began to create from an
Australian provincial city their range of garments that were deliberately nostalgic and feminine, with
an air of knowing retrospection generated through an engagement with historical and ethnographic
sources. At first they were not widely known and their market was completely local. Within ten years
their female clothing-line, manufactured in Brisbane, made of textiles garnered from Italy, France,
Vietnam and India, was retailing in Browns, London; Neiman Marcus, USA; and Alta Moda, Kuwait. An
engagement with ethnographic sources by contemporary designers is not uncommon, sometimes
amounting to a type of scavenging activity, perhaps Baudelairian ‘rag-picking’ to be more poetic and
polite. In going to the ‘source’ of ethnic textiles and re-commissioning in India fabrics that had not
been produced in some cases for decades, their practice raises questions about authenticity,
intervention and revival. How have they engaged with colonial women’s imagery from their base in a
post-colonial city? Is it this sense of a diasporic imaginary that has made the Easton Pearson label so
successful overseas? In what ways do they highlight a position for their imaginary female subject
featured in their designs, press releases and fashion parades, a consumer who is post-colonial and
knowing at the same time? Can such complex ideas as the identity of the inter-war white imperial
woman who is simultaneously both the colonizer and the colonized be conveyed through a garment or
a collection in which a straightforward didactic capacity can never be ensured? What happens when
such semiotically-laden garments are worn today by the (privileged) ‘other, such as the Gulf woman
engaging with up to date western-generated fashions? If these same garments are desired by nonwestern elites such as the women of the Gulf States, then how does this change our understandings of
global luxuries and their continuing relationship to orientalisms in fashion?
Biography:
Professor Peter McNeil is Professor of Design History at University of Technology Sydney and
concurrent Professor of Fashion Studies at Stockholm University. Trained as an art and design
historian, his research crosses disciplines, chronologies and geographies from the early-modern
(c1500-1800) to the late-20th century. He is currently a Principal Investigator within a major
EU/HERA-funded project, 'Fashioning the Early Modern c1500-1800' and in Australia leads the
'Surry Hills Project', a study of clothing workers, entrepreneurs and consumers, c1890-1980.
McNeil’s co-edited Shoes (2006, with Giorgio Riello) has been translated into Italian and will soon
be issued in paper. Other recently completed projects include The Men’s Fashion Reader; Fashion
in Fiction; Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources (4 volumes, Berg) and The Fashion History Reader
(Routledge, with G.Riello). McNeil’s latest projects include ‘Back in Fashion: A Global History of
Fashion in the Second Millenium’ (with G. Riello). McNeil is past President of the Art Historian’s
Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ); member of the Editorial Board of Journal of
Design History (OUP); Board and Book Reviews Editor, Fashion Theory (Berg); committee, Journal
of Aesthetics and Culture.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
META NARRATIVES OF CONTEMPORARY ART BY WOMEN
Kate MacNeill, University of Melbourne
This paper analyses four recent large scale international exhibitions of art by women held in the years
2007 to 2009. These exhibitions provide an opportunity to consider the nature of the contemporary
feminist art project and the curatorial framing of contemporary art practices by women. One of the
first exhibitions at the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, Global Feminisms:
New Directions in Contemporary Art (2007) consisted of 98 works produced by 80 women artists since
1990. WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los
Angeles, traced the influence of the 1960s and 1970s women’s art movements predominantly, but not
exclusively, in the United States with work from 120 artists connected to over twenty different
countries. The Pompidou Centre’s elles@centrepompidou (2009) contained of over 500 works drawn
from the museum’s own collection by more than 200 women artists. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2007) at the
Bilbao Fine Arts Museum sought to highlight the conflicted nature of women’s images in art: as sexual
object and as agents of change. It comprised 69 works by 38 artists and 3 artist’s collectives.
Adopting a type of meta-analysis this paper treats each exhibition as a survey of women’s art practices
and seeks out correlation and disjuncture between the exhibitions. It does this through interrogation
of the catalogue essays, identification of themes in the exhibitions and an analysis of the artists and
works chosen for inclusion. The aim of the research is to both reflect upon modes of representation of
art by women and to speculate as to what these exhibitions can tell us about the nature of global art
practices more generally.
Biography:
Dr Kate MacNeill is a senior lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication, University of
Melbourne. Her PhD, Art that Matters (2007), examined identity as performativity in Australian
contemporary art. Recent publications have considered indigenous/non-indigenous collaborative
practices in Third Text, the Bill Henson controversy in Media International Australia and
contemporary dance as a creative industry in the International Journal of Cultural Policy. Research
for this paper was undertaken in 2010 when Dr MacNeill was a visiting scholar at the Beatrice Bain
Research Group, UC Berkeley, California.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
TRANSNATIONAL ASSEMBLAGES: WORLD-MAKING ON THE EDGE OF ART AND COMMUNITY
Francis Maravillas, University of Technology Sydney
The recent turn to the dynamics of relationality and interconnection in contemporary art theory has
coincided with a heightened awareness of the complexities of context and the limitations of identity
and community as organising tropes of art and exhibition practice. Since its launch in 2010, the Edge of
Elsewhere exhibition series (2010-12) organized by Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4a Centre for
Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney, has sought to redefine and expand the boundaries of exhibitionary
and artistic practice through complex forms of collaboration and engagement with the diverse local
communities from Asia and the Pacific in the outer western suburbs of Sydney.
In this paper, I examine the ways in which Edge of Elsewhere may be understood as aligning itself with
a post-identity politics that emphasizes relations and connections and the emergence of fluid,
contingent communities that are not anchored in either a bounded territory or a coherent identity. In
particular, I explore how this shift from identity to relationality – along with the positing of community
as a dynamic process and unstable formation – necessitates new ways of thinking about art and
community. Significantly, I argue that Edge of Elsewhere evokes an alternate conception of community
and relationality in art, one that moves beyond closed and convivial circuits of interaction towards a
transnational aesthetic assemblage that foregrounds the complex, and at times fraught, ligatures of
meaning and interconnection between diverse, transversal locales.
Biography:
Dr Francis Maravillas is Associate Researcher at the Transforming Cultures Research Centre at the
University of Technology, Sydney, where he also lectures in cultural studies. His current research
interests include contemporary art and visual culture in Asia and Australia, curatorial practice and
international exhibitions and art in urban spaces. His work on Asian art in Australia appears in
various journals and exhibition catalogues as well as recent edited collections including Crossing
cultures: conflict, migration and convergence (2009), Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belongings and
Close Encounters (2007) and In the Eye of the Beholder Reception and Audience for Modern Asian
Art (2006). He was previously a board member of the 4a Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in
Sydney (2004-2007).
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
SPACED – ART OUT OF PLACE
Marco Marcon, IASKA
This paper addresses some of the broader critical, theoretical and curatorial issues arising from the
development of spaced: art out of place, IASKA’s new international art event.
Founded in 1998, IASKA ran for over ten years an international program of context-responsive art
projects in and around the small town of Kellerberrin, 210 kilometres east of Perth. The recently
launched spaced greatly expands the scope of IASKA’s program while maintaining its original core aims
and philosophy.
Spaced features visual arts and new media projects created through a process that combines in-depth
engagement with local social and environmental contexts and a global dialogue facilitated by webbased technology. The event focuses on current modes of socially engaged and participatory art, with
special emphasis on hybrid practices that operate at the crossroads of visual art, digital art,
architecture and design.
Spaced is structured around a global/local network linking local communities throughout Western
Australia as well as several overseas locations. This structure is intended to facilitate an examination of
the connections linking the immediacy of our local here-and-now to a global context shaped by
transnational social, cultural, environmental and economic forces.
Underpinning spaced’s curatorial concept is a reflection on the recent debate on notions of
participation, collaboration and social engagement in art. The paper discusses these currently topical
themes in the context of a broader analysis of the idea of community in aesthetic theory. In order to
explore these issues the paper touches on the works of theorists, critics and curators such as Jacques
Ranciere, Grant Kester, Nicholas Bourriaud, Claire Bishop, Miwon Kwon, Maria Lind and Peter Weibel.
Biography:
Marco Marcon was born in Italy and moved to Australia in late 1984. In Italy, he co-founded and
directed Murales, one of Rome’s most innovative live music venues of the late 70s, and worked as
a writer-producer of cultural programmes for the Italian Broadcasting Corporation. In Australia he
worked as editor of the art journal Praxis M and lecturer in art theory and cultural studies at
several universities. In 1998 he co-founded IASKA, of which he is the CEO/Artistic Director. Marco
Marcon curated several exhibitions, collaborated with artists on public art projects and published
over 110 articles, essays and reviews in various journals, magazines, catalogues and books.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
ENVIRONMENTAL CRITIQUE AND SLAVERY IN 19TH CENTURY BRAZIL
Claudia Mattos, Campinas State University
The present paper will discuss, through the analysis of both landscape painting and literature, the
relations established in the beginning of the 19th century in Brazil between the destruction of the
native forests of the country, alteration in climate, and slavery. In 1823, José Bonifácio de Andrada e
Silva, an important politician at the time, pronounced a speech against slavery in front of the National
Assembly, in which he explicitly associated the practice of destruction of the Brazilian forests and
climate changes related to it, with slavery. His main argument was that the abolition of slavery would
be an important movement towards the preservation of the nation’s natural patrimony. Bonifácio’s
environmental concerns were related to Alexander von Humboldt’s ideas on climate, expressed in his
book on the Americas. These ideas were very influential among a circle of intellectuals and artists,
active in mid-nineteenth century Brazil, such as the painters Félix-Émile Taunay (who was also director
of the Art Academy at the time) and Manoel Araújo Porto Alegre, and writers such as Gonçalves Dias
and Bernardo Guimarães. They were all politically active around 1840-1860, and transformed their
works into vehicles for the diffusion of preservationist and abolitionist discusses.
Biography:
Professor Claudia Mattos is Professor for the History of Art at the Campinas State University
(Unicamp) – São Paulo, Brazil, since 2002. PhD at the Kunsthistorisches Institute der Freie
Universität in Berlin (from 1992 to 1996). Pos-Doc at the Courtauld Institute in London (20002001). Publishes on Brazilian 19th and 20th Century Art, and European 18th Century Art. At the
moment she is one of the four leading researchers of the project: “Plus Ultra: cultural transfer
between Europe and Latin-America”, which is financed by the São Paulo State Research
Foundation (Fapesp). Present research interest: The representation of the conflict between nature
and civilization in Brazilian painting of the 19th century (in a post-colonial perspective). Published
books: Goethe e Hackert: Sobre a Pintura de Paisagem (Ateliê Editorial, 2008), Lasar Segall.
Expressionismo e Judaísmo (Perspectiva, 2000), O Brado do Ipiranga (EDUSP, 1999), Entre Quadros
e Esculturas. Wesley Duke Lee e os fundadores da Escola Brasil: (Discurso Editorial, 1997), Lasar
Segall (EDUSP, 1996).
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
CROSSING TIME AND SPACE: MAX BECKMANN, LEON GOLUB, NANCY SPERO AND GEORGE GITTOES
Joanna Mendelssohn, University of NSW
It could be argued that current conflicts are elaborate reconfigurations of those of the past. During
World War I Max Beckmann’s work as a medical orderly gave him access to the intensity and futility of
trauma, so he turned to metaphor, using unlikely visual images to show the absurd horror of a world
at war with itself. A generation later, his uncomfortable, tough but engrossing work spoke to dissident
Americans, including the Chicago born artists Leon Golub and Nancy Spero. Using different techniques,
but a similar sensibility, this husband and wife partnership, used allegory and metaphor to make art
with a message. Largely because of their political passion, neither Golub nor Spero have been fully
acknowledged in their own country. However, in 2010 the Pompidou Centre held a major Nancy Spero
retrospective, and later this year the Prado will exhibit Golub’s work. In 1987 conflicts led by the USA
led them to befriend the Australian artist, George Gittoes, whose early film, The Bullets of the Poets,
dealt with the poetry of Women guerrilla fighters in Nicaragua. Gittoes’ mature painting style was
significantly and demonstrably influenced by Golub. Gittoes was with Golub and Spero in New York in
early 2003 when they saw the protests at the forthcoming US invasion of Iraq. He subsequently
returned to documentary film making with a technique that combines the visual urgency of MTV with
elements of burlesque fiction as he places himself as a ‘holy fool’ in the midst of madness.
There are additional personal connections between these artists across generations. Beckmann’s
widow lived for many years in the same apartment block as Spero and Golub, and befriended them.
Gittoes is also a friend of Beckmann’s granddaughter, Mayen Beckmann, who has supported his
European career.
This paper argues that as well as the visual and personal connections that cross both generations and
continents, what these artists have in common is a sense of being outside any artistic establishment,
while at the same time being committed to using sometimes elaborate visual imagery to critique the
events of their time.
Biography:
Associate Professor Joanna Mendelssohn is an Associate Professor at the College of Fine Arts,
University of New South Wales and coordinator of the Master of Art Administration. She has
written studies of Australian artists Sydney Long, Lionel Lindsay, Norman Lindsay and the Lindsay
family, George Gittoes, Richard and Pat Larter. She is currently investigating connections between
Max Beckmann, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero and George Gittoes.
She is one of the instigators of the digital research project, http://www.daao.org.au. Her award
winning art criticism has been published in the Bulletin, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian,
and The Independent Monthly. She has also written extensively for Australian arts publications
including Artlink, Art and Australia and Art Monthly.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
GLOBAL CONFLICT AND ART
Charles Merewether, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts
(Lead Speaker)
Biography:
Dr Charles Merewether is an art historian, writer and curator who has worked in Australia, Asia,
Europe and the Americas. He is currently Director Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE
College of the Arts, Singapore.
Previously he was Deputy Director of the Cultural District (Saadiyat Island) in Abu Dhabi and was
Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Hong Kong International Art Fair. He was the Artistic Director
and Curator of the Biennale of Sydney 2006. He has taught at the University of Sydney, Universidad
Autonoma (Barcelona), the Ibero-Americana (Mexico City), and University of Southern California and
had been recipient of various Fellowships. From 1994 to 2004 he was Collections Curator at the Getty
Research Center in LA. He has published widely on modernism and contemporary art. His most
recent publications include ‘Under Construction: Ai Weiwei’ (2008), and ‘Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art:
Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970′ (2007) and forthcoming co-editor
(with John Potts) of ‘After the Event’ by Manchester University Press. Charles Merewether is
currently Director of the ICA in Singapore, and he is Honorary Director of Momentum:Sydney.
( http://www.lasalle.edu.sg/index.php/galleries)
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
THE PRECARIOUS ECOLOGIES OF COSMOPOLITANISM
Marsha Meskimmon , Loughborough University (Lead Speaker)
Biography:
Professor Marsha Meskimmon is the School of Art Director at Loughborough University. She
research centres on the work of women artists and expanded theoretical and critical perspectives
on ethics, aesthetics and subjectivity in contemporary art. She has explored these ideas in a
number of different publications, from The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self Portraiture in the
Twentieth Century (1996) and We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of
German Modernism (1999) to Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (2003), which
argued for the significance of women's cultural agency and the work that art does in materialising
difference. Shifting from object to process, and refusing to define 'women's art' as an a-historical
category of objects, it is possible to articulate the contingency of 'women' making 'art' in varied,
yet particular, situations, and to evaluate the mediating dynamics of nation, culture, 'race', sex, age
and class in each instance.
Marsha’s most recent book, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (2010), explores
the dynamics of ‘belonging’ - of being ‘at home’ - in contemporary transnational art in and through
four rich tropes: foundation, threshold, passage and landing.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
RITUALS AS EXHIBITIONS: WORLD-MAKING THROUGH YOLNGU ART
Howard Morphy, Australian National University (Lead Speaker)
Biography:
Professor Howard Morphy (BSc, MPhil London, PhD ANU, FASSA, FAAH, CIHA) is Professor of
Anthropology and Director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian
National University. Prior to returning to the Australian National University in 1997, he held the
chair in Anthropology at University College London. Before that he spent ten years as a curator at
the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. He is an anthropologist of art and visual anthropologist having coedited two of the main source books in the respective fields The Anthropology of Art: a Reader
(2006, Blackwell's, with Morgan Perkins) and Rethinking Visual Anthropology (1997, Yale University
Press, with Marcus Banks). He has written extensively on Australian Aboriginal art with a
monograph of Yolngu Art, Ancestral Connections (Chicago 1991), a general survey Aboriginal Art
(Phaidon, 1998) and most recently Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (Berg, 2007).
He has also produced a pioneering multimedia biography The Art of Narritjin Maymuru with Pip
Deveson and Katie Hayne (ANU EPress 2005). He has conducted extensive fieldwork with the
Yolngu people of Northern Australia, and collaborated on many films with Ian Dunlop of Film
Australia and has curated many exhibitions including Yingapungapu at the National Museum of
Australia.
With Frances Morphy he helped prepare the Blue Mud Bay Native Title Claim which as a result of
the 2008 High Court judgement recognised Indigenous ownership of the waters over the intertidal
zone under the Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act. His involvement in e-research and in the
development of museum exhibitions reflects his determination to make humanities research as
accessible as possible to wider publics and to close the distance between the research process and
research outcomes. In 2008 he was one of the organising committee of the major CIHA conference
in Melbourne Crossing Cultures: conflict, migration, convergence.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
BREAKOUT: THE EMERGENCE OF AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS ART AS ‘WORLD ART’
Bernice Murphy
This paper will explore perspectives on some disciplinary contests for interpretative ascendancy in the
collecting and exhibiting of Australian Indigenous art, focused on the last decades of the twentieth
century historically and leading to a contemporary vantage-point on recent years. It was in the postWar period that distinct disciplinary tensions arose between the vantage-points of ‘art’ and
‘anthropology’, when the historical collections formed by anthropologists and other scientists in
natural history museums were confronted – and in many respects challenged – by the rise of art
collections and an increasing momentum of exhibitions of Indigenous art in Australia’s art museums
nationally. There has been considerable writing and exposition of the critique by anthropologists of
the approaches taken by art museums in collecting and exhibiting Indigenous art in the later twentieth
century, but little analytical writing on the part of art curators that seeks to set out the different
critical vantage-point of the art museum. The paper will touch upon the remoulding of the art museum
itself in the later twentieth century, through the transformational currents of contemporary art’s
emergence as an instantly ‘worlded’ domain of art’s evolving history, and the dynamic role of
Indigenous art itself in these changes.
Biography:
Bernice Murphy has worked in the art museums field nationally and internationally since the
1970s. In the 1980s she established the Australian Perspecta survey exhibitions (Art Gallery of New
South Wales, Sydney), to provide a dialogue in alternate years with the Biennale of Sydney.
Curating the first two exhibitions personally, she showed 147 artists over a 2-year period, including
Aboriginal art as contemporary art and introducing Indigenous curatorship for the first time (a
component by Djon Mundine in the 1983 Perspecta). She worked collaboratively over 15 years on
the evolution of Sydney University’s Power Gallery into the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA),
Sydney, leaving her final post as Director in 1998. The MCA now has three major collections of
Aboriginal art, commissioned or negotiated by the author, with Indigenous art today the most
concentrated component of the MCA’s collections. Bernice Murphy currently chairs the Ethics
Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and is National Director, Museums
Australia. Awards: Australia Council's Visual Arts Emeritus Medal 1999; Doctor of Letters
(Hon.causa) University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004; ICOM Australia’s International Relations
Award, 2009.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
IS AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY GLOBAL?
Daniel Palmer, Monash University
The introduction of non-Western and other marginalised histories into the dominant narrative of
photography mirrors the ‘global turn’ in art history. This pluralising of photography’s histories brings
into view a far wider range of photographic practice, one in which the production of images and their
meanings and uses are both locally grounded and implicated in the array of national and international
interchanges that inform them. At the same time, approaches to understanding photography are
potentially limited by a continued reliance on national frameworks. This paper considers Australian
photography, whose local accents are typically discussed in terms of Australia’s colonial history,
distinctive landscapes, Indigenous practice and multiculturalism. I argue that while the question of
difference must continue to be asked, to understand contemporary Australian photography requires
an account of the differential impact of globalisation on national practice – particularly as the medium
has been so fundamentally reconfigured for the computer. If part of photography’s success as a global
medium is based upon a photograph’s openness to multiple recontextualisations, the digital era bring
this more plainly into view. As the historical epoch of the printed page gives way to that of the monitor
screen, the photograph has become a repurposable visual content open to multiple visualisations. This
globalisation of photography – which can only accelerate and become more elaborate – has major
implications for how we understand the representation of place and the circumstances of a
photograph’s creation, and thus the boundaries of photography’s identity. Our task is to begin to
discern and describe this changed world of photography, and what it means for photographic art.
Biography:
Dr Daniel Palmer is a Senior Lecturer in the Theory Department of the Faculty of Art & Design at
Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). He was formerly a Curator at the Centre for
Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. His publications include Twelve Australian Photo Artists
(2009), co-authored with Blair French, and Photogenic: Essays/Photography/CCP 2000–2004
(2005). His writings on photography and contemporary art have appeared in scholarly journals
such as Photographies, Reading Room, Philosophy of Photography, Angelaki and Transformations.
As an art critic, he has written extensively for journals such as Art & Australia, Photofile,
Broadsheet and frieze. His current research is focused around the status of photography in digital
culture, as part of an ARC funded project with Sean Cubitt and Les Walkling titled ‘Genealogies of
Digital Light’, and he is also working in collaboration with David Bate on a project around
photography and globalisation.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
DID YOU COME HERE TO FIND HISTORY?
Nursa Qureshi, Artist represented National Portrait Gallery exhibition Beyond the Self: Contemporary
Portraiture from Asia
What is this work really about?
‘Did you come here to find history?’ is fairly recent work, a departure in terms of technique. This work
was shown at Venice Biennale in 2009. On one level, it was created in response to the history in
general and on another level, the particular history of Venice. I also wanted to explore the relationship
of the artist to art history.It also addresses the ever interesting area of identity-politics.
Biography:
Nusra Latif Qureshi is an artist who was born in Pakistan in 1973 where she trained in the art of
Mughal miniature painting. She lectured at the National School of Art in Lahore from 1995 to 1999,
migrating to Australia in 2001 for postgraduate study in Melbourne where she now lives.
Recent Solo Exhibitions 2009: The Invisible Gun, Chawkandi Art Gallery, Karachi. 2007 Familiar
Memories, Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne, A Garden of Fruit Trees, Anant Art Gallery,
New Delhi 2005 Acts of Compliance, Studio Glass Gallery, London, Intentions of Memory, Joshua
McClelland Print Room, Melbourne 2004 Exotic Bodies, Counihan Gallery In Brunswick, Melbourne,
The Way I Remember Them, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, U.S.A.
Selected Group Exhibitions 2011: Gallery 4A, Sydney, - Zentrum Fuer Kunst und Medientechnologie,
Karlsruhe, Germany.
2010 Cross Art Projects, Sydney, Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, USA 2009 ‘East West Divan:
Contemporary Art from Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan’, The 53rd Venice Biennale, Italy. Green
Cardamom, London 2008 Perth Institute of Modern Art, Perth, Doris McCarthy Gallery, University
of Toronto, Canada 2007 UTS Gallery, Sydney 2006 The 5th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art
Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, The Drawing Center, New York, Manchester Art Gallery and Asia House
in London, UK, Karkhana: Collaborative Painting from Pakistan’s Avant-garde, San Francisco Asian
Art Museum, U.S.A. 2005 Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle, Australia, The Aldrich Contemporary
Art Museum, Ridgefield, USA, Sherman Galleries, Sydney 2004 Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
SEEDING [MIND] FIELDS WITH NATIVE THINKINGS
Lisa Reihana, Contemporary Artist + Tohunga a Toi, Unitec School Design and Vis Arts. (Lead Speaker)
Climb onboard my inbound musings, this whistle-stop tour takes you on a journey examining twenty+
years of art making practice and life living influences, variously described as a Young Gun, New
Zealand’s Tracey Moffatt, and a Patupaiarehe [Maori fairy-folk] hear what makes this daughter of the
Nga Puhi tribe tick, urban and urbane, playful yet serious; sexy and eclectic, this body of work has
traversed animation to installation, new media, photography and all manner of furry/feathery things.
Underpinning projects such as Native Portraits, Wog Features, Hypergirls and Digital Marae is a
personal politic that honours Women, Maori and Indigenous cultures.
Biography:
Lisa Reihana, born in 1964, is a mid-career artist of Nga Puhi descent. Her practice is wide-ranging,
and includes sculpture, installation and time-based media works, performance, costume and body
adornment and photography. Reihana's works communicate complex ideas about indigenous
identity and bicultural living, and are drawn from Mäori mythology and contemporary culture and
is widely acknowledged as a ‘Mäori international'. Reihana reinterprets oral histories and
customary lore making them accessible through her contemporary presentation.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
GLOBAL OBJECTS: CONTENTIONS AND ENTANGLEMENTS
Giorgio Riello, University of Warwick
For those seeking to chart a global history, artefacts might seem a last resort. Most functional items
were never intended to communicate explicitly, and extracting information from them can be difficult.
They rarely survive in accurate samples; the material culture of the elite is vastly over-represented in
the world’s museums. And with some exceptions (like archaeological remains, architecture, and
tombstones), they are decontexualized. Reconstructing the original place and time of their making and
use is often a matter of guesswork. For historians, the interpretation of an object is dependent upon a
prior understanding gained from documents, images, and other sources of information. Yet, we are
increasingly presented with exhibitions, museum re-displays and successful radio programmes (in the
UK Neil McGregor’s BBC The World in 100 Objects) that suggest that artefacts are indeed suitable to be
conveyors of global stories. There is a disjuncture between objects used as the pretext to talk about
global events, concepts and stories and their methodological use in the study and writing of historical
narratives. This paper adopts an object-based methodology starting with three rather dissimilar
objects, namely a seventeenth-century Japanese suit of armour (given as a gift to the King of England),
a nineteenth-century Indian building (built as an expression of Imperial architecture), and a recent
soccer ball used for the 2010 World Cup (created as an object that had to be respectful of all nations in
the world). Each of these objects presents one way that an artefact can fit into (and sometimes
challenge) a narrative of global history: objects that demonstrate cultural encounters (connections);
objects that synthesize global difference within themselves (hybridity); and objects that imagine the
global (globalism). This paper is an attempt to reflect on the complex relationship between artefacts
and the historical concepts that are mobilised to explain world history.
Biography:
Dr Giorgio Riello is currently Associate Professor in Global History and Culture at the University of
Warwick, UK (since 2007). He was previously Research Officer at the London School of Economics
(2004-06) and Tutor in Design History at the Royal College of Art/ Victoria and Albert Museum
(2003-04). Since 2010 he has been the Director of the Pasold Research Fund for the History of
Textiles, Dress and Fashion. He holds a degree (Laurea) in Business Economics from the University
of Venice, Ca’ Foscari (1998; 1st class degree). His Laurea thesis won the Special prize of the Bank of
Venice in 1998. He completed his PhD in History at University College London in 2002. During his
doctorate studies, he was the recipient of several major awards including the Fellowship of the
Luigi Einaudi Foundation in 18th-Century Studies (2000) and the Pollard Prize of the Institute of
Historical Research (2001). More recently he has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2010),
the Newcomen Business Prize of America (2009), and the Senior Braudel Fellowship (2011). He is
currently a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and will be a Visiting Fellow at the Australian
National University Humanities Research Centre in July-September 2011. His fields of expertise are
located within the long chronologies and geographical spaces covered by Global History. His
particular interests are directed towards issues of ‘material life and economic development’ and
the relationship between consumption and production. His current research focuses on changes in
consumer demand and their impact on the spheres of production and material culture, with
specific reference to textiles and clothing.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/people/staff_index/griello/
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
TOLERANCE: THE WORLD OF YANG FUDONG
Claire Roberts, Australian National University
Yang Fudong (b. 1971) is one of the most interesting contemporary Chinese artists working in the area
of photography, video and film. His immersive multi-screen installations have been exhibited in
Biennales and Triennales in China and around the world. Born in a small village north-east of Beijing,
he studied oil painting at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and now lives and works in Shanghai.
He is part of a generation of Chinese artists who have developed a high international profile while
continuing to live and work primarily in China.
Yang’s abstract works, often focusing on the activities of a collective of young people (intellectuals),
explore moods and sensibilities, thoughts and feelings. They are questing and questioning, empty and
illusory, using visual and sensory means to give form to things that have no form. While Chinese
natural, regional and urban landscapes form the backdrop of his works, narrative disjunction and an
emphasis on emotion, cause viewers to lose their bearings in time and space, transcending the need
for specific cultural knowledge. Yang Fudong has described himself as not belonging to any particular
place, and of working in an expansive international arena, yet living in a world that is actually very
small. He has also spoken of the increasing importance of the concept of tolerance (kuanrong) in his
thinking - tolerance in relation to people, art and life. The presentation explores the artistic practice of
Yang Fudong in the context of tolerance, humanity and Chinese concepts of ‘world’.
Biography:
Dr Claire Roberts is a historian of Chinese art and a curator. She is a Research Fellow at the ANU
College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University. She was a Co-ordinate
Research Scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University 2011, Research Fellow at
the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University 2009-2010 and Senior Curator of
Asian arts at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney 1988-2010. Claire studied at the Beijing Foreign
Languages Institute 1978-79 and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing 1979-81. She
has a Master of Arts from the University of Melbourne. Her PhD, undertaken at ANU, focused on
the work of modern Chinese brush-and-ink painter Huang Binhong (1865-1955). Claire has
published widely on Asian art and curated numerous exhibitions. Her most recent publications are
Friendship in Art: Fou Lei and Huang Binhong (2010), Other Histories: Guan Wei’s Fable for a
Contemporary World (2008) and The Great Wall of China (2006). Her forthcoming book is titled
Photography and China.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
ART IN THE WAKE OF VIOLENCE: THE WORK OF NALINI MALANI
Macushla Robinson, Art Gallery of NSW
The contemporary Indian artist Nalini Malani confronts histories of violence in post-partition India.
Through a close reading of her video works, I explore her response to historical instances of violence. I
argue that her representations of brutality work to connect the artist with others, breaking down
corporeal boundaries to find a space of bodily empathy for victims. In so doing, she seeks to shape
what Veena Das has called ‘… a world in which one can dwell again, in full awareness of a life that has
to be lived in loss’.
Through drawing, animation and sound installation, her works reference historical violence such as the
1949 partition of India and Pakistan, coupled with recent atrocities such as the riots in Gujarat in 2002
(Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of Pain 2005), or the aggravated destruction of Islamic
cultural heritage (Cities of Desire 1992).
Her video installation titled Mother India: transactions in the construction of pain was made in
response to Veena Das’ essay Language and the body: transactions in the construction of pain, which
examines how widespread sexual violence against women at the time of partition was incorporated
into a political narrative that reinforced the allegorical notion of the nation-state as a paternal figure.
Das’ essay asserts the need to ‘re-enter this scene of devastation to ask how one should inhabit such a
world that has been made strange through the desolating experience of violence and loss.’ Malani’s
works take up this project, both representing and critiquing the political narratives that have
constructed the world that she inhabits. By imaging this history and connecting it to present violence
Malani’s empathic and corporeal explorations of the body in pain open cultural wounds, unsettling the
gendered and nationalist narratives formed in the wake of violence.
Biography:
Macushla Robinson is an emerging theorist, practicing artist (trained in printmaking) and
Curatorial Assistant at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She recently completed her Honours
year in Theories of Art Practice at the University of Sydney, for which she received the University
Medal. Her research is in the field of contemporary art, focusing upon the philosophical
implications of material practices, such as the handwritten word and transcription in art. Her
methods are trans-disciplinary: her theoretical enquiries begin with material encounters and
processes, privileging process and materiality.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
WHEN INDIA AND CHINA ENGAGE: A CURATORIAL ADVENTURE
Chaitanya Sambrani, Australian National University
This paper addresses my curatorial project Place. Time. Play: Contemporary Art from India and China,
which was shown in Shanghai from October to December 2010. Marking the first occasion for
intellectual and creative engagement across the art and academic cultures of these two countries, the
exhibition was part of a larger and continuing project titled West Heavens initiated by Chinese curator,
academic and entrepreneur Chang Tsong-Zung.
The exhibition Place. Time. Play included nine artists and one collective from India, and five artists
from China. Working in a situation where there were no substantial precedents for engagement
between artist communities from these countries, and, in the absence of major infrastructural
support, most decisions and arrangements had to be made “on the run” as it were. There were no
familiar conventions that could be relied upon. The artists were encouraged to use each other’s
countries as a laboratory in which to test new ideas for cross-cultural engagement. In the year leading
up to the exhibition, all of the participants travelled through each other’s countries, visiting major
museums, art schools and historical sites, and making friendships unclouded by official policies
characterised by mutual distrust. Several of the Indian artists subsequently returned to China to
conduct further research, and/or to produce their work for the exhibition.
Place. Time. Play extended an invitation to artists to engage with “other” possibilities of geographical
location (place), historical position (time) and finally, creative intervention (play). Deliberately
eschewing potentially essentialist or national attributions in the title, we asked artists to engage in
what might be seen as universal, yet locally situated, extensions of their current practice. Linguistic
barriers notwithstanding, the project marks a significant engagement with a different vision of “global”
or “international” art, one that is premised on encountering that which is at once deeply intimate and
incontrovertibly foreign.
Biography:
Dr Chaitanya Sambrani is an art historian and curator with special interests in modern and
contemporary art in Asia. He has an MA (Fine) in Art Criticism from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.
University, Baroda, and a Ph.D. in Art History and Curatorship from the Australian National
University. His work has been featured in major publications, exhibitions and conferences in
Australia, India, China, Korea, Singapore, and the USA. His recent curatorial projects include
Place.Time.Play: India-China Contemporary Art (Shanghai, October-December 2010) and Edge of
Desire: Recent Art In India (Perth, New York, Mexico City, Monterrey, Berkeley, New Delhi, Mumbai
2004-07).
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
DISPLACED CONNECTIONS: METHODS OF COLLABORATION AND CROSS-CULTURAL ENGAGEMENT
ON PUBLIC SCREENS
Kristen Sharp, RMIT University
This paper will focus on the process and practice of collaboration used in an international art project,
‘Spatial Dialogues: Public Art and Climate Change’. ‘Spatial Dialogues’ is a three-year Australian
Research Council Linkage project employing models of engagement between artists, academic
researchers, private corporations and the public. The project is situated in three geographic locations:
Melbourne, Shanghai and Tokyo. It involves site-specific screen-based artwork and social networking
systems. The multiple layers of interaction available in this project establish a complex platform of
collaboration. This paper will explore methods of documenting and analysing the ‘behind the scenes’
modes of engagement in Spatial Dialogues in order to draw attention drawn to the challenges and
opportunities created by collaboration in a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary context.
Biography:
Dr Kristen Sharp is the Coordinator of Art History and Theory in the School of Art at RMIT
University. Her research is focused on contemporary art, globalisation and urbanisation. Her PhD,
‘Superflat Worlds: a topography of Takashi Murakami and the cultures of Superflat art’, examined
the contemporary Japanese artist Takashi Murakami as an example of a contemporary art practice
that is strategically located within the processes of contemporary globalisation. Kristen has
recently co-edited a book on public art for McCulloch & McCulloch and has published research
papers in Access: Critical Perspectives on Communication, Cultural and Policy Studies. She is
currently part of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project researching new international
models of screen-based public art.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
CONTEMPORARY ART: WORLD CURRENTS
Terry Smith, University of Pittsburgh (Lead Speaker)
At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, art seems markedly different from
what it was during the modern era: it is now—above all, and before it is anything else—contemporary.
What kind of change is this: illusory or actual, singular or multiple? Why did it happen? How deep does
it go? Has it, yet, a history? I argue that a worldwide shift from modern to contemporary was
prefigured in some late modern art during the 1950s, that it took definitive shape in the 1980s, and
that it continues to unfold through the present, thus shaping art’s imaginable futures. While having
some shared characteristics, this shift occurred in different and distinctive ways in each cultural region,
and in each art-producing locality within these regions. Cultural patterns with quite distinct
temporalities co-exist, develop separately or together, connect then part ways. Precisely in its grasp of
this experiential complexity, contemporary art is—perhaps for the first time in history—truly an art of
the world. It comes from the whole world, and frequently tries to imagine the world as a differentiated
yet inevitably connected whole. This is the definition of diversity: it is the key characteristic of
contemporary art, as it is of contemporary life, in the world today. My forthcoming book,
Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King and Thames & Hudson; Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2011), traces these changes as they happened, and as they continue to play
out. In this lecture I will outline the theoretical and art historical hypotheses underlying my recent
work.
Biography:
Professor Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and
Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and
Distinguished Visiting Professor, National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, UNSW.
He is the 2010 winner of the Mather Award for art criticism (College Art Association USA), and recipient
of the 2010 Australia Council Visual Arts Award. During 2001-2002 he was a Getty Scholar at the Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles, and in 2007-8 the GlaxoSmithKlein Senior Fellow at the National
Humanities Research Centre, Raleigh-Durham. From 1994-2001 he was Power Professor of
Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University
of Sydney. He was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of Union Media
Services (Sydney). His books include Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America
(University of Chicago Press, 1993; inaugural Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Book Prize 2009);
Transformations in Australian Art, volume 1, The Nineteenth Century: Landscape, Colony and Nation,
volume 2, The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); The
Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and What is Contemporary Art?
(University of Chicago Press, 2009). He is editor of many others including In Visible Touch: Modernism
and Masculinity (Power Publications and the University of Chicago Press, 1997), First People, Second
Chance: The Humanities and Aboriginal Australia (Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1999),
Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era (Power Publications and the University of
Chicago Press, 2001), with Paul Patton, Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars
(Power Publications, 2001, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005), Contemporary Art + Philanthropy (UNSW
Press, 2007), and Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity (with
Nancy Condee and Okwui Enwezor, Duke University Press, 2008). Contemporary Art: World Currents
(Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011).A foundation Board member of the MCA, he is
currently a Board member of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
‘THE FRONTIER’ SPEAKS BACK: AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS WORKING IN PARIS AND LONDON
Catherine Speck, University of Adelaide
Australian artists living and working in Paris and London in the Belle Epoque and modern eras had
deep engagement with cosmopolitan culture and international modernism. They experienced the
liberation of putting aside issues of nation, and of working in large, alienating but culturally challenging
multi-nation environs in the pre and post war years. This paper will explore how artists in France
including Rupert Bunny and Hilda Rix connected with, articulated and negotiated cosmopolitan
tendencies in their work, while those in London like Roy de Maistre and Eric Wilson, all too often illdescribed in the Empire of language of being as ‘at home’, also had a similar and deep engagement
with cosmopolitan culture. This off- shore practice constitutes another and very rich side of Australian
art.
Biography:
Dr Catherine Speck is the author of Painting Ghosts: Australian Women Artists in Wartime
(Craftsman House /Thames and Hudson 2004) and Heysen to Heysen (National Library of Australia
forthcoming 2011) exploring the father-daughter relationship between two of Australia’s eminent
artists, Hans Heysen and his daughter Nora, and numerous articles and catalogue essays probing
expatriate artists and cosmopolitanism, the representation of war, war memorials and the memory
of war, gender and war, gender and modern Australian art, and contemporary art. Current
research also includes the exhibitionary complex. She is an Associate Professor and Reader in Art
History at the University of Adelaide and coordinates postgraduate programs in Art History and
Curatorial and Museum Studies at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the University of Adelaide.
She is on the Editorial Board of Design and Art of Australia Online www.daao.org.au and a member
of the Adelaide Critics Circle.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
UNINVITED GUESTS: ARTISTS CONFRONTING THE THRESHOLD OF SOCIABILITY IN URBAN
AMSTERDAM
Zara Stanhope, Australian National University
In 2004 artist Jeanne van Heeswijk organised Het Blauwe Huis (‘The Blue House’) to be situated
amongst the construction of IJburg, a new commuter suburb reclaimed from the IJmeer lake in
Amsterdam. The Blue House was an autonomous four-year long participatory art project for
researching ‘the unplanned’ – a site for artistic production focused on a neighbourhood in which
community services were still years away. As members, artists, architects and academics undertook
residencies in the house for the purpose of investigating the character of this new urbanism and ‘what
did not yet exist’. The Blue House supported selected projects proposed by local residents that filled
immediate needs, as well as those initiated by members addressing diverse phenomena in that
environment
In this paper I argue that beyond drawing attention to the social engineering of public and private life
within urbanism, The Blue House was effective in opening a discursive space in the public sphere at a
local level that led to subtle transnational resonances. However, as well as successes, there were also
failures to participate or sustain projects, partly due to the demographic control of the city, reinforcing
Zygmunt Bauman’s vision of the disintegration of collective agency within globalisation. The Blue
House did not fulfil either a utopian model for relational aesthetics nor a service provider in the style
of NGOs. While precluding the formation of a local micro-community or a counter public that could
foreshadow an impetus toward communicative action, The Blue House did offer intersubjective
potential that I argue facilitated a discursive experience at the level of the individual. As a case of art
that crossed social boundaries in investigating the bureaucratic control of urban existence, I suggest
the value of The Blue House lay in the totality of its successes and failures to intervene in state and
market forces. It stimulated a reflexive and social praxis that enabled the individual to act within a
temporary creative milieu, and thereby enhance the possibility of active citizenship.
Biography:
Zara Stanhope is a curator and PhD candidate at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her
professional positions have included Deputy Director and Senior Curator at Heide Museum of
Modern Art, Melbourne (2002−08); inaugural Director of the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University
of Wellington, New Zealand (1999-2002), and Assistant Director, Monash University Gallery (1993–
1999). Recent curated exhibitions comprise: Objects to Live By, The Art of John Meade (touring
Australia 2009–2011); The world in painting (touring Asia and Australia 2007–09) and Perfect for
every occasion: photography today (Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2007). She co-edited the books
Les Kossatz, The Art of Existence (2008) and The Cbus Collection (2009), and regularly contributes to
exhibition catalogues and art publications. She is Chair of un Projects, the publisher of un
Magazine, a Board member of the National Exhibition Touring Service (NETS) Victoria, an advisor to
the RMIT University School of Art Galleries Board and a Mentor in the National Association of the
Visual Arts (NAVA) Curator Initiative. Current research interests include social art and the public
sphere, artist-run initiatives and curatorial practice for the twenty-first century.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
CONNECTING WORLDS
Dr Caroline Turner and Dr Michelle Antoinette, Australian National University
Biographies:
Dr Caroline Turner is a Senior Research Fellow in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts,
Australian National University. Prior to joining the ANU in 2000 she was Deputy Director of the
Queensland Art Gallery and organised and curated many international exhibitions, including from
the Louvre, the Shanghai Museum, and the Idemitsu Museum as well as co-curating Matisse in
1995 with works from 50 collections worldwide. She was co-founder and Project Director for nearly
ten years in the 1990s for the Asia-Pacific Triennials (1993, 1996, 1999) at the Queensland Art
Gallery, scholarly editor of the three major catalogues for the first three Triennials and convener of
the three international conferences. Her edited book Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of
Asia and the Pacific, 1993 was the first survey treatment in English on this subject and she has also
published a more recent survey Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific,
2005. She has written extensively on contemporary Asian art and museums as well as lecturing on
this subject internationally and has also served on the Australian Government’s Australia-China
Council, Australia-Indonesia Institute and the Australia Abroad Council.
Dr Michelle Antoinette is an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Cultural Inquiry, Research
School of Humanities and the Arts at The Australian National University. She is a researcher of
modern and contemporary Asian art and has been a lecturer on contemporary Asian and Pacific art
and museums at the ANU. From 2010, Michelle is undertaking research together with Dr Caroline
Turner on the emergence of new cultural networks in Asia underlining shifts in the development of
Asian art and museums in the twenty-first century. Michelle's previous research has focused on the
contemporary art histories of Southeast Asia and her publications include "The Art of Race:
Rethinking Malaysian Identity Through the Art of Wong Hoy Cheong" (2009), "Contending with
Present Pasts: on developing Southeast Asian art histories" (2009), "Intimate Pasts Resurrected and
Released: Sex, death, and faith in the art of Josè Legaspi" (2008), and "Deterritorializing Aesthetics:
International art and its new cosmopolitanisms, from an Indonesian Perspective" (2007). Her
forthcoming book Images that Quiver (Rodopi) explores the emergence and representation of
contemporary Southeast Asian art on the international stage in the 1990s.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
MAKING WORLDS: ART, ETHICS AND MATERIALITY
Jen Webb, University of Canberra and Lorraine Webb, Ucol Wanganui, NZ
‘The world’ seems, often, to be more a proposition than a place, more a theory than a thing-in-itself.
The fluidity of its meanings means that the dominant discourse tends to focus on the conceptual, the
economic and the political, rather than on lived experience, phenomenological encounters, or the
multiple ways of being in what each person might consider ‘the world’. How we might access the
plural experience of the world is a point of considerable scholarly debate as philosopher Nelson
Goodman notes, writing that ‘universes of worlds as well as worlds themselves may be built in many
ways’ (1978: 5). We start from Goodman’s constructivist premise, and focus on art as a domain for the
making of worlds. Art is perhaps under-determined compared with linguistic and political mediums,
but it may have equally profound effects on how lived worlds emerge and are understood. In this
paper we take up the twin concepts of plurality and practice to explore how art might enable an
exploration of connectivities and differences, and how it might form a venue for the making of worlds
that are not fully in accord with contemporary logics and ‘truths’. We do this through a discussion of a
recent exhibition that was framed around the theme of ‘making worlds’, and mounted in a small
regional city in New Zealand, Whanganui. It included the work of 7 artists whose common point of
connection is that town – one of the oldest colonial towns in New Zealand, and a fountainhead for
indigenous rights protests within Aotearoa. The artists’ connection with this luminal town, and their
separate experiences and identifications, serve to highlight the ways in which visual art can afford the
place to situate oneself: whether a geographical or an ontological place. From such places they can
produce and present their works to unmake and remake the known, authorised world – to allow new
conceptual frameworks and, possibly, new grounds for human connectivity. Artists: Kura Te Waru
Rewiri, Kate Lepper, Faith McManus, Lily Laita, Lorraine Webb, Chaco Kato, Helen Manning
Biographies:
Professor Jen Webb is Professor of creative practice at the University of Canberra, and Dean of the
Faculty of Arts and Design. Jen holds a PhD in cultural theory, focusing on the field of creative
production, and a DCA in creative writing. She has published widely in poetry, short fiction, and
scholarly works: her most recent book is Understanding Representation (Sage, 2009).She is
currently completing a co-authored book on the work of Michel Foucault, a co-authored book on
embodiment, and a textbook on research for creative writing. Jen is co-editor of the Sage book
series, ‘Understanding Contemporary Culture’, and of Axon: Creative Explorations, a new online
journal (UC). Her current research investigates representations of critical global events, and the
use of research in and through creative practice to generate new knowledge.
Lorraine Webb is Head of Painting at Whanganui UCOL's Quay School of the Arts in New Zealand.
Her work is in public collections in New Zealand and private collections in Australia, New Zealand
and France. She has a DFA (Honours) Printmaking from the University of Canterbury, and a MFA by
research Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She has been a finalist in the 32nd
Alice Art Prize, the Biennial Adams New Zealand Portrait Competition, the Trust Waikato
Contemporary Art Award, the Anthony Harper Art Awards, the New Zealand Painting and
Printmaking Award. Winner of the Zinni Douglas Merit Award 2009 Walker and Hall Art Award, and
has won the Cranleigh Barton Drawing Award, been the recipient of the William Hodges Fellowship
and artist in residence at CAMAC, France.
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POST WAR RECOVERY AND COSMOPOLITANISM IN VISUAL CULTURES: ITALY 1943 – 1964
Anthony White (& Mark Nicholls), University of Melbourne
This paper investigates the links between post-conflict recovery and cosmopolitanism in the visual
arts, using Italy as a case study. After WWII Italy was a devastated and divided country. In this paper
we argue that prominent in the nation’s recovery was the role played by cultural cosmopolitanism in
art and cinema. Cities such as Rome, Venice, Milan and Turin housed important Italian avant-garde
artists such as Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri, and neo-realist filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti
and Roberto Rossellini. However these cities also attracted avant-garde artists from Northern Europe,
Latin America, the USA and Oceania including Asger Jorn [Denmark], Roberto Matta [Chile], Wilfredo
Lam [Cuba], Robert Rauschenberg [USA] and Yvonne Audette [Australia], prominent filmmakers as
diverse as David Lean [UK], Ingrid Bergman [Sweden], Orson Welles and William Wyler [USA] and Jean
Luc Godard [France] as well as important institutions such as the French and American Academies,
foreign news desks, the major Hollywood studies, and travelling exhibitions from a variety of different
destinations around the world. The artworks and films produced in these centres were often the
outcome of collaborations and dialogues between artists and filmmakers from around the globe. As a
result, Rome, Milan, Venice and Turin, with their vibrant, international cultural communities, became
cosmopolitan centres of cultural activity which gave rise to fractured and multiple but highly
productive artistic communities. The artists and filmmakers who came together in Italy in the two
decades following WWII embodied a dynamic, trans-national creative energy which had a lasting effect
not only on contemporary international art and entertainment cultures, but also, as we argue, on the
extraordinary post-war political and economic recovery of Italy.
Biographies:
Dr Anthony White is Senior Lecturer in Art History at The University of Melbourne. His book Lucio
Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch (2011) will be published by MIT Press. Since 2005 he has
published several articles on Italian modern art in The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art,
Grey Room, October, and Reading Room. From 2000 - 2002 he was Curator of International
Painting and Sculpture at the National Gallery of Australia where he curated several major
exhibitions of American art.
Dr Mark Nicholls (not attending)
Mark Nicholls is Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne where he has
taught film and television since 1993. He is author of Scorsese’s Men: Melancholia and the Mob
(2004), recently published articles on Martin Scorsese, Luchino Visconti, Shakespeare in film and
film and the Cold War, and the forthcoming book Jeremy Irons and the Prince of Perversion. He is
active as a film critic and as a theatre writer, director and producer.
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CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBALISATION
Xu Hong: Senior Research Fellow, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (Lead Speaker)
The Historical Context of Chinese Contemporary Art
From Japan to Europe – the channels via which Chinese artists have come to understand Western
modern art
- the perplexity of ‘choosing’ and ‘being chosen’
Debate over the ‘jump’ model of social transformation and that of ‘discarding the old and mapping the
new’
The context of reality, and ideals
The Nature and Characteristics of Chinese Contemporary Art
The World and ‘World-making’ and the ideological trend of Chinese cultural nationalism”: to ‘adopt’ or
‘create’
A new mix: leaving ‘Realism’ behind
Chinese cultural signs in artworks and the artist’s Chinese cultural status
Chinese artists’ image of the West
The compulsion of humanity: progress amid contradiction.
Biography:
Xu Hong is an artist, writer and curator and currently Senior Research Fellow of National Art
Museum of China in Beijing. Educated at Shanghai Normal University and the Central Academy of
Fine Arts in Beijing she was previously Associate Researcher of Shanghai Art Museum. She has been
the curator and key organiser of many exhibitions including Passing Through the Horizon--Contemporary Chinese Art Exhibition San Diego in 2010; Turner From The Tate Collection Beijing
2009; Speak·Describe cross-strait contemporary art 2009; After Impressionist Arts Musée D’Orsay
collection Beijing 2008; Silk Road Painting USA 2007; Prado Museum Collection Exhibition From
Tiziano to Goya Beijing 2007;National Art Museum of China Peasant·Peasant exhibition 2006;
Prism---Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition Vienna 2005; National Art Museum of China Open Era
invitational exhibition 2003;The first and second Shanghai Biennale 1996 and 1998;Century--Female Art Exhibition Beijing 1997.
Her research and writing has concentrated on Chinese modern and contemporary art theory and
criticism. Among her recent publications are:
Echo of Thinking,2010, coauthored, Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House
The Complete Works of WU Guanzhong,2007, coauthored, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House
Chinese Female Art in the Nineties of 20th Century,2005, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House
‘Foreign Collection of National Art Museum: Situation and Strategy’ ,article, 2004
‘Social Progress and Female Arts: Chinese Female Artists in the Early 20th Century’,article,2003
Thinking on Female Art,2003,Jiangsu People’s Publishing House
A Study of ZHAN Jianjun,2001, Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House
A Study of PAN Tianshou,1997,China Academy of Art Publishing House
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
THE THRILL OF THE COLOURED LINE; PAINTINGS, STRING AND OTHER THINGS
Diana Young, University of Queensland
In this paper I consider colour as line and colour as plane and the role of each in Western Desert
sociality. The materiality of contemporary life for Aboriginal people in central Australia is composed
with the help of multiple things yet art making is often analysed as an isolated activity and the role of
the materiality of consumer goods neglected. Here I explore the connection between consumption
practices, in particular of ‘stringy things’ and art making that employs ‘the thrill of the line’. I use
archival material from the Ernabella Mission records and fieldwork at Ernabella in the far north west of
South Australia. Practices with consumer goods influence art marking across many media creating a
way of being in the world that enables Anangu (Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people) to imagine
an alternative modernity.
Biography:
Dr Diana Young is Director of the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum and lectures in
Anthropology in the School of Social Science. Her research interests include colour, material
culture and consumption practices. Since 1996 she has worked with Anangu Pitjantjatjara
Yankunytjatjara on a number of collaborative projects.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
ART MUSEUMS IN SHANGHAI
Lansheng Zhang, Australian National University
This paper will discuss the art museums in Shanghai and the role they played in art in the 1980s in
China – a period of reconnection to the contemporary art world outside China. Art museums in
Shanghai were instrumental in connecting local art communities to the international art scene and in
sharing knowledge of international art discourses through their exhibition programs, despite the
constraints of the political system in China. Key international exhibitions in the 1980s showed
important influences from the West. Artists responded with enthusiasm. The process of reconnecting
to the international art world through the efforts of art museums, individual artists, art institutions
and educators in Shanghai in 1980s made important contributions to the development of
contemporary art t in China. This process and the leadership of art museums became one of the major
driving force from inside that led Chinese contemporary art onto the international stage as a recent
phenomenon in the art world today.
Biography:
Lansheng Zhang Lansheng Zhang is an artist and curator and a PhD candidate at the Australian
National University. He has a long association and interest in art museums in China. His current
research work includes an investigation into the role art museums have played in the development
of the contemporary art in China. He was the Adjunct Professor with the RMIT University School of
Art in Melbourne from 2006 to 2008, and now is the associate professor and convener of the Arts
Management Program in the Eastern China Normal University School of Art, Shanghai.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
CONFERENCE CONVENERS:
Dr Michelle Antoinette is an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Cultural Inquiry, Research
School of Humanities and the Arts at The Australian National University. She is a researcher of modern
and contemporary Asian art and has been a lecturer on contemporary Asian and Pacific art and
museums at the ANU. From 2010, Michelle is undertaking research together with Dr Caroline Turner
on the emergence of new cultural networks in Asia underlining shifts in the development of Asian art
and museums in the twenty-first century. Michelle's previous research has focused on the
contemporary art histories of Southeast Asia and her publications include "The Art of Race: Rethinking
Malaysian Identity Through the Art of Wong Hoy Cheong" (2009), "Contending with Present Pasts: on
developing Southeast Asian art histories" (2009), "Intimate Pasts Resurrected and Released: Sex,
death, and faith in the art of Josè Legaspi" (2008), and "Deterritorializing Aesthetics: International art
and its new cosmopolitanisms, from an Indonesian Perspective" (2007). Her forthcoming book Images
that Quiver (Rodopi) explores the emergence and representation of contemporary Southeast Asian art
on the international stage in the 1990s.
Zara Stanhope is a curator and PhD candidate at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her
professional positions have included Deputy Director and Senior Curator at Heide Museum of Modern
Art, Melbourne (2002−08); inaugural Director of the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of
Wellington, New Zealand (1999-2002), and Assistant Director, Monash University Gallery (1993–1999).
Recent curated exhibitions comprise: Objects to Live By, The Art of John Meade (touring Australia
2009–2011); The world in painting (touring Asia and Australia 2007–09) and Perfect for every occasion:
photography today (Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2007). She co-edited the books Les Kossatz, The
Art of Existence (2008) and The Cbus Collection (2009), and regularly contributes to exhibition
catalogues and art publications. She is Chair of un Projects, the publisher of un Magazine, a Board
member of the National Exhibition Touring Service (NETS) Victoria, an advisor to the RMIT University
School of Art Galleries Board and a Mentor in the National Association of the Visual Arts (NAVA)
Curator Initiative. Current research interests include social art and the public sphere, artist-run
initiatives and curatorial practice for the twenty-first century.
Jackie Menzies is a graduate of the University of Sydney and has been responsible for the
development of the Asian collections at the Art Gallery of New South Wales since her appointment in
1980. She has been responsible for many publications relating to the collections, and overseen two
expansions of the Asian galleries (one in 1990; then most recently the upstairs Asian ‘pavilion’ in
2003). The 352 page book 'The Asian Collections' (2003), edited by her, was awarded 'Best Book of the
Year' 2003 by the Power Institute and the Association of Art Historians of Australia and New Zealand.
Ms Menzies has been the recipient of many grants, including two Australian Research Council (ARC)
Linkage grants: one with the University of Sydney, another with the University of Western Sydney, and
an AMCAI (Art Museum Collections Accessibility Initiative) grant from the Ian Potter Foundation (20012003) to research audience development. Ms Menzies has curated/organised many exhibitions – large
and small - and edited/ contributed to many catalogues. Selected major Asian exhibitions include
'Imperial China' (1992), 'Sacred Images of Sri Lanka'(1994), 'INDIA: Dancing to the Flute' (1997),
'MODERN BOY, MODERN GIRL, Modernity in Japanese Art 1910-1935' (1998), 'BUDDHA, Radiant
Awakening' (2001), and ‘GODDESS, Divine Energy’ (2006). The catalogue for GODDESS was awarded
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) 2007 prize for best large catalogue with
citation (in part) ‘…this catalogue, and the exhibition that accompanied it, are outstanding examples of
global scholarly endeavour of the highest international standard’. She has been a Director of VisAsia
(the Australian Institute of Asian Art and Culture) since 2000, and was President of The Asian Arts
Society of Australia (TAASA) 1993-2000 (Vice-President 1991-93). She was a recipient of a Centenary
Medal of the Commonwealth of Australia in 2003, and in 2008 was awarded a Medal of the Order of
Australia for ‘the study, preservation and promotion of Asian art in Australia.’
Dr Caroline Turner is a Senior Research Fellow in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts and
the School of Cultural Inquiry, Australian National University. She was Deputy Director of the
Humanities Research Centre from 2000-2006. Prior to taking up this appointment in January 2000 she
spent 20 years as a senior art museum professional. At the HRC she organised numerous conferences
and was editor of the HRC/CCR Journal Humanities Research 2000-2008. As Deputy Director of the
Queensland Art Gallery from 1982-1999 she played a key role in developing the Gallery’s international
programmes and organised and curated many international exhibitions, including Matisse (with Roger
Benjamin) with works from 50 collections worldwide, which toured Australia in 1995. In the mid-1980s
Turner also began working in the area of contemporary Asian and Pacific art. She was co-founder and
Project Director for nearly ten years for the Asia-Pacific Triennial exhibitions in 1993, 1996 and 1999.
Turner was the scholarly editor of the three major catalogues in the 1990s and the book Tradition and
Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, University of Queensland Press, 1993 and has
written extensively on contemporary Asian art as well as lecturing on this subject internationally. Her
book of essays Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, Pandanus Press 2005
is a survey of the dramatic developments in Asian and Pacific contemporary art in the last decade. Her
research has included an ARC grant ‘The Limits of Tolerance’ exploring the links between art and
human rights. The Australian Government appointed her to the Australia-China Council in the 1980s
and the Australia-Indonesia Institute in the 1990's.She was made a Member of the Order of Australia
(AM) in 2009 for contributions to the visual arts and to the establishment and fostering of cultural
relationships in the Asia-Pacific region.
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World and World-Making in Art conference Abstracts and Biographies
CONFERENCE CHAIRS:
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