art association of
australia & new zealand

The highlight this year was the opening of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in January. MONA is the largest private museum in Australia and showcases the collection of David Walsh who owns the Moorilla vineyard in Berriedale, Tasmania. It contains an impressive selection of contemporary art works including a major installation by Anselm Kiefer as well as works by internationally renowned artists such as Wim Delvoye, Marina Abramovic, Jenny Holzer, Jannis Kounellis, AES+F and many prominent contemporary Australian artists including Fiona Hall, Callum Morton and Ah Xian. Brigita Ozolins, who lectures in Art Theory at the Tasmanian School of Art also has a major work in the collection, the installation Kryptos. Sidney Nolan’s Snake is another highlight of the collection. In addition, there are many antiquities from ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, pre-Columbian etc.

The other main arts event was Ten Days on the Island in late March/early April which featured art exhibitions including Reconstructing the Animal curated by Dr Yvette Watt

(Associate lecturer in Fine Art at the Tasmanian School of Art); Volcano Lover by Lucy Bleach (Associate lecturer in Fine Art, Tasmanian School of Art) and River Effects: the Waterways of Tasmania curated by Malcolm Bywaters (School of Visual and Performing Arts, Launceston) and Professor Noel Frankham (Head of the Tasmanian School of Art) . Associate Professor David Stephenson (Tasmanian School of Art) had a major exhibition in the Julie Saul Gallery, New York Light Cities: Tokyo, Melbourne, San Francisco, Las Vegas while Milan Milojevic (Head of Printmaking, Tasmanian School of Art) had work selected for the exhibition Personal Space: Contemporary Chinese and Australian Prints exhibited in Sydney then touring China. Dr. Llewellyn Negrin (Head of Art and Design Theory, Tasmanian School of Art) had an article ‘The Self as image: a critical appraisal of postmodern theories of fashion’ re-published in The Fashion History Reader ed. by Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (New York & London: Routledge). This article has also been translated into Chinese and is to be published in the journal Art and Design Research.

Llewellyn Negrin

The 2010 AAANZ National Conference, which ran from 1-3 December, was hosted by the University of Adelaide, the Art Gallery of South Australia and UniSA around the theme of Tradition and Transformation. Professor James McWha, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Adelaide, launched the conference, and the three keynote speakers were Professor Evelyn Welch, Deputy Vice Chancellor Research at Queen Mary College, University of London; Professor John Paoletti of Wesleyan College, USA, and Dr Philip Jones of the South Australian Museum. 170 papers were delivered in 23 streams ranging from Renaissance art to Indigenous and new media art, and AGSA Director and Curators also spoke in the Gallery around works on display or in the collection. A postgraduate training day was incorporated into the conference along with pre-conference tours to Adelaide’s leading art and design centres and museums, the latter funded by Arts SA. Feedback from attendees praised the institutional cooperation underpinning the conference.

The postgraduate program in Art History at the University of Adelaide and the Art Gallery of South Australia are now teaching interactive courses online including virtual classes in the Art Gallery. The four online courses taught around the Art Gallery’s collection are Japanese Art, Australian Art, European Art since the Renaissance and Australian Indigenous Art. For more details visit www.arthistory.adelaide.edu.au

Catherine Speck

As the result of a faculty reorganization at Queensland University of Technology, the School of Design will join the Creative Industries faculty. Visual Arts will revert once again to a stand-alone discipline. In other news from QUT, Mark Pennings has conducted a series of very successful seminars at GOMA to coincide with the exhibition, C21st.

A new research grouping, Urban Modernities, has commenced at QUT combining design, social theory and arts research. A former version of this research group will soon publish its first research project, “Sweat: The Subtropical Imaginary.”

At the University of Queensland Professor Anne Marsh, Director, Art Theory Program and Associate Dean Research, Monash University, will deliver the 2011 Daphne Mayo Lecture on Wednesday 24 August.

A number of new appointments have been made at Queensland College of Art Griffith University. Dr Maura Reilly has been appointed as the first Professor of Art Theory. Maura has held senior administrative museum positions in New York City, and from 2003 to 2008, as founding curator of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, she co- curated (with Linda Nochlin) the critically acclaimed ‘Global Feminisms’. Dr Anne Kirker has been appointed Adjunct Associate Professor at QCA. Anne has worked in leading public art galleries in New Zealand and Australia. She is a writer and exhibition curator and an expert on Australian and International prints, drawings and photographs. Professor Tony Fry has also been appointed to head QCA’s Master of Design Futures. Tony’s long-term engagement in Design history and theory is well known to the academic community. He is currently also engaged in international projects with communities in East Timor.

The QCA has opened a Postgraduate Gallery in the central suburb of Wooloongabba. The POP gallery is designed for exhibiting and examining Postgraduate students from QCA and also provides a space for collaborations between students and other artists associated with QCA.The IMA in association with QCA Gold Coast is alsoopening a Pop-Up Space at Circle on Cavill, Surfers Paradise. IMA Surfers will present four shows over four months, starting with Damiano Bertoli’s Continuous Moment: Anxiety Villa.

Rosemary Hawker

Professor Hilary Radner has joined the Department to develop the Visual Culture major, which has recently moved from the Department of Media, Film and Communication to the Department of History & Art History. She has published two monographs, and five co-edited volumes as well as numerous articles and book chapters on topics ranging from film melodrama, through makeup, fashion photography and women’s magazines to, more recently, topics about New Zealand cinema and culture, and the history of French cinema. Her 2011 books include Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture (Routledge) as author and New Zealand Cinema: Interpreting the Past (Intellect/U. of Chicago) as co-editor.

Mark Stocker continues as Programme Co-ordinator in Art History and Theory. He has recently had articles accepted by the British Numismatic Journal and the Sculpture Journal, and one of his essays will appear in The Art of Transculturation, edited by Julie Codell (Ashgate, due 2012). He recently visited the UK, where he exposed an alleged art crime to startled students and staff at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, and he also reviewed ‘Modern British Sculpture’ for the Burlington Magazine. He intends to step down as editor of the Journal of New Zealand Art History following the publication of the current volume (32), which will be the tenth under his editorship.

Erika Wolf recently published an essay on Shigeyuki Kihara in “Pacific Arts.” Her essays and translations appeared in the accompanying publication for “A Hard, Merciless Light. The Worker-Photography Movement, 1926-1939″ (on view at the Reina Sofia, Madrid, until August). She is publishing a book on the Soviet poster artist Viktor Koretsky that will appear in conjunction with an exhibition at the University of Chicago later this year. She is also editing a catalogue and collection of source documents in conjunction with an exhibition of the Soviet painter Aleksandr Deineka at the Fundacion March, Madrid that opens in November.

Dr Judith Collard has received a UORG grant to research the topic ‘Matthew Paris as a Natural Philosopher’. This is part of a larger project on Matthew Paris and his Books. She has published the following articles in Interpreting Francis and Clare of Assisi: from the middle ages to the present, edited by Constant Mews and Claire Renkin, and Journal of Medieval History. She was one of the coordinators of the 2011 ANZAMEMS conference at Otago University in February, that attracted scholars from Poland, Britain, Ireland, Canada and the USA, as well as from Australia and New Zealand.

David Maskill

While the University of Canterbury has had a shaky start to the year, we are extremely proud to announce the launch of Issue No. 3 of Oculus: Postgraduate Journal for Visual Arts Research. Oculus showcases the exceptional quality of postgraduate research throughout New Zealand and Australia and is now peer-reviewed by an outstanding international board of scholars. We’re also looking forward to an end-of-year exhibition on the Campus Gallery, jointly organised by the students of the Postgraduate Diploma in Art Curatorship, Honours Art History and Design students. Lost: an exhibition of destroyed and stolen artworks and its accompanying catalogue promises to be the occasion for the Christchurch community to reflect on how destroyed artworks keep living in the public’s, artists’ and art historians’ minds through reproductions and literary descriptions and how they sometime become mythical objects enriched by the imagination of artists and scholars alike.

Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu has been closed to visitors since 22 February 2011 when an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale struck New Zealand’s second largest city. It was the second major earthquake to strike and came just over six months after the first in September 2010. For ten days in September, our sturdy building was used as the Civil Defence hub from which the initial stages of the disaster management and recovery were planned. And, at that time, we thought this was long enough! However, from February we needed to deal with the reality of the present and once more become the hub of various operations.

Miraculously, it seems now, the NGV touring exhibition of Ron Mueck’s sculpture opened in the Gallery in October 2010 and closed in January 2011. We were thrilled with the 135,000 visitors who saw this exhibition, which became the largest pay-to-view art show ever held in Christchurch.

During both earthquakes and subsequently, our Gallery has stood as an expression of recovery and renewal in this city, and it’s a role we’d like to reinforce into the future. The building has proved itself to be made of strong stuff, with climate control in collection areas continuing seamlessly and damage to works of art minimal. Of course, one major consequence of the seismic activity has been the cancellation of key elements in the exhibitions and public programmes – and, at this stage, it is still unclear when we’ll be able to open again.

David Maskill

Since the last regional report, Victoria University of Wellington has appointed Geoffrey Batchen to the newly established Professorship in Art History. Geoffrey is widely known as one of the world’s leading scholars in the critical history of photography.

The Art History Programme at Victoria University of Wellington looks forward to welcoming colleagues from throughout Australia and New Zealand to this year’s annual conference which is scheduled for 7-9 December 2011. The theme of the conference is ‘CONTACT’ and the call for papers is now open. Details of conference strands, paper proposal forms and registration can be found on the AAANZ website.

David Maskill

As Head of Department for Art History at the University of Auckland since 2010, Caroline Vercoe has found new ways to foster postgraduate study, and a very successful postgraduate conference was held in November 2010. There has been a substantial rise in postgraduate numbers this year, many students attracted by the new Honours course on Art Curating and Writing run in collaboration with the Auckland Art Gallery, and coordinated by Ian Wedde.

The Department was pleased to welcome Greg Minissale to the staff at the beginning of 2010, and he has already made his presence felt with courses in contemporary art and theory, including a popular undergraduate course, Framing the Viewer. With his doctoral research on Indian art he is particularly well qualified to contribute to the new course on Global Art Histories that he and Caroline Vercoe will present in Semester 2 this year. Greg is currently working on a book for Cambridge University Press, The Psychology of Contemporary Art.

Len Bell’s book Marti Friedlander (Auckland University Press, 2009) was a finalist for the New Zealand Post National Book Awards in 2010 and has already been reprinted.

Iain Buchanan’s long-awaited book on the Habsburg tapestries is currently in press, and anticipated to appear this year. Following on the publication of her edited book on Henrietta Maria, Erin Griffey is currently developing a data base of works in the Stuart collections which is attracting international support. Robin Woodward has produced two monographs published by White Space – Steve Woodward Sculptor and Mary McIntyre Painter – in 2009 and 2010 respectively. Seven years’ research for Elizabeth Rankin, with printmaker Philippa Hobbs, culminated in a book and exhibition on the black artist Peter Clarke, Listening to Distant Thunder, in Johannesburg in May, which will travel to the South African National Gallery. In another collaboration, this time with past PhD student Kriselle Baker, Elizabeth co-edited a book on recent photographs by Fiona Pardington, launched at her Govett- Brewster Gallery exhibition in New Plymouth in June 2011.

Members of staff have also presented papers at many different events – AAANZ of course, but also such conferences as the British Art Association (Glasgow); CAA (Chicago); CIHA symposium (Johannesburg); Contained Memory (Wellington); International Deleuze Studies (Amsterdam); Renaissance Society of America (Montreal); Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (Arizona); National Portrait Gallery (Canberra); and Iain Buchanan was invited to contribute to the Mercury and Herse Tapestry Symposium at the Prado.

There is a strong sense of anticipation in Auckland as we count down to the opening of the refurbished Auckland Art Gallery on 3 September, just before the start of the Rugby World Cup – undoubtedly no coincidence, though it is hard to imagine too many rugby aficionados planning to spend a lot of time in art galleries. For the Auckland Triennial, 2010, Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon, curated by Natasha Beckman, the gallery co-opted a number of sites across the city. But generally Auckland art lovers have had to make do with the somewhat truncated scale of the New Gallery venue, which has not daunted members of the gallery staff who have mounted several interesting exhibitions, currently Local Revolutionaries, 1965-1986, and Goldie and Lindauer: Approaching Portraiture. Mary Kisler has put this time to particularly good use, bringing out her book Angels and Aristocrats, a lavish volume on historical paintings in New Zealand collections. Other exhibitions involving Auckland University staff at the Gus Fisher Gallery are Len Bell’s very successful Marti Friedlander, and Elizabeth Rankin’s Collateral: Printmaking as Social Commentary (with Christchurch artists Michael Reed and Sandra Thomson, American Daniel Heyman, and South African Diane Victor): sales from her catalogue for Collateral are being donated to Gap Finder – an initiative to support Christchurch artists to create performances and installations at sites made vacant by the earthquake, in a city shorn of many of its arts venues.

David Maskill

Forthcoming – Tony Bond is currently away but please forward news to him.

Anthea Callen has joined the School of Art, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU, as Professor of Art (Practice-led Research). Her expertise is in visual culture and the gender politics of visual representation spanning the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, notably in France and Britain. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century artists’ materials and techniques and she has written key texts such as Techniques of the Impressionists and The Art of Impressionism.

A fully online Graduate Diploma and a Masters in Art History and Curatorship have been introduced at the ANU. The online delivery has been coordinated by Dr Zoja Bojic and replicates the on campus program. Other innovations in the course offerings at ANU include a new Asian Art major which will be available from 2012. The major was developed by Dr Charlotte Galloway and draws together the offerings on Asian art from various Colleges at the ANU.

Many of the ACT art historians have been working overseas. Professor Sasha Grishin is on sabbatical for most of 2011 and as part of the ‘Australian Season’ at the British Museum he delivered a talk on contemporary Australian printmaking. Charlotte Galloway was on leave in 2010 and was living in London, where she was an academic visitor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and worked as a consultant for the British Museum. Elisabeth Findlay was an Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford during the Michaelmas term, where she researched the portraits of Joseph Banks.

A series of conferences will be held in Canberra over the following months, including:

Public Interactions: Dialogues on Art and Public Space

20-23 July 2011

School of Art, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU

Website

This international symposium will be held in Canberra and International and local artists, architects, designers and public intellectuals will converge to explore the role of art in the public spaces of the contemporary community. This symposium will engage with what it might mean to locate art within public spaces. It will address ephemeral projects and guerrilla activities in the interstices of inhabited spaces alongside commissioned public works and official commemorative precincts.

World and World-Making in Art: Connectivities and Differences

11-13 August 2011

Humanities Research Centre, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU

Website

This international conference coincides with the Humanities Research Centre’s theme for 2011 on ‘The World and World-Making in the Humanities and the Arts’. The conference will explore a number of key issues in art discourses today and also address a central concern of the HRC’s theme in invoking the idea of world-making beyond cultural divides and instead, speaking ‘to a domain of human connectivity’. It will explore the significance of connectivities and differences in the field of art: its practices, histories, institutions, inclusions and exclusions, ethical concerns and theoretical and methodological approaches under the overarching theme of ‘The World and World-Making’. Much of the focus of the conference will inevitably be on contemporary transformations resulting in part from globalization and geopolitical changes in our world, including migrations and transnational movements of people and art as well as new means of human connectivity and cultural exchange, and historical dimensions of the theme of ‘The World and World-Making in Art’.

The conference will complement an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery on contemporary Asian portraits (Beyond the Self: Contemporary Portraiture from Asia) and the panel on ‘art and conflict’ will be jointly hosted with the Australian War Memorial.

ACUADS Annual Conference 2011 – Creativity: brain-mind-body

21 – 23 September 2011

School of Art, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU Research School of the Humanities and the Arts, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU Faculty of Art and Design, University of Canberra

Website

The Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) coordinates theme- based annual conferences (with rotating locations throughout Australia) as part of its professional development responsibility. The 2011 conference is a 3-day program built around the broader theme of creativity. The conference invites speakers to discuss creativity in practice-led research in Schools of Art and Design and academics and practitioners working with ideas involving visualisation, materiality, tradition, technology and hybridity.

The Challenge of the Object
Die Herausforderung des Objekts

33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art
July 15th to 20th, 2012

From July 15 to 20, 2012 the Germanisches Nationalmuseum is hosting the 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art in Nuremberg and invites art historians from all over the world to attend and discuss “The Challenge of the Object”. The object and how it is perceived in art history is a question that is currently very highly charged, the result of increasing globalization and digitalization. Art and cultural historians from all over the world, from a vast cross-section of disciplines and fields of professional interest are called upon to discuss together the role and the theory of the object in art history. The topics are divided into 21 sections with up to 20 talks each. The sections should enable a comparison to be made between the different viewpoints and methods. For that reason they are categorized according to how their questions on the object in art history are formulated. This should allow talks on different genres, epochs and countries to be brought together.

The congress will be rounded off with an extensive supporting program with excursions, for example to Documenta in Kassel, and a wide-ranging program for young academics. At the same time the Germanisches Nationalmuseum will be presenting the important special exhibition on “The Early Dürer”.

The Call for Papers ends on April 30, 2011. From November 2011, registration for participation without a presentation is also possible.

Detailed descriptions of the individual sections as well as information on the congress and the Call for Papers can be found here