Congratulations to the 2022 AIAH Art History Research Grant Recipients. There were four recipients chosen from sixteen submissions.
2022 AIAH Art History Grant Recipients
$20,000 ($5,000 per grant) sponsored by the Australian Institute of Art History
Judges Louise Box, Melanie Cooper and Susan Lowish
Wes Hill
Institutional recipient from Southern Cross University
Jeff Gibson: Public Pictures
About the project ‘Jeff Gibson: Public Pictures,’ involves art history research and publishing, producing the first ever monograph on the Australian artist Jeff Gibson, to be published (confirmed) in 2023 by Perimeter Editions, Melbourne, and Griffith University, Brisbane). As sole editor of the book, the project will expand upon my 2022 exhibition, ‘Countertypes,’ at Griffith University Art Museum, co-curated with Angela Goddard. As the first survey of his forty-year career, the exhibition made a case for Gibson as one of Australia’s leading, yet overlooked, exponents of post-Pictures art. The research and publication project extends this focus, seeking funds to commission four art history researchers to contribute to the publication, and to pay for costs associated with the digital formatting and scanning of Gibson’s analogue archival material.
Gibson was born in Brisbane in 1958 and is well known in Australia as an editor and critic, having worked for the era-defining art magazine Art & Text from 1988 to 1998, before moving to New York to become managing editor of Artforum, where he still works today. Prior to ‘Countertypes,’ Gibson’s historical relevance as an artist and art writer was identified in the 2017 exhibition ‘Every Brilliant Eye: Australian Art of the 1990s’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, which included several of his works and, via discursive labels, registered the impact of his criticism on our collective understanding of that decade. The 2023 publication, ‘Jeff Gibson: Public Pictures,’ will elaborate on both ‘Countertypes’ and ‘Every Brilliant Eye,’ providing a detailed investigation of Gibson’s output—from his early punk collages to his embrace of digital media—and, with fresh eyes, surveying Australian art-historical debates concerning appropriation, ‘avant-grunge,’ postproduction art and the legacies of postmodern image-making.
Gibson is the only Australian artist to have been included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial, curated by Michelle Grabner in 2014. Despite such outstanding international achievements, scholarly knowledge of his work as an artist remains inadequate. ‘Jeff Gibson: Public Pictures’ seeks to change this. As editor of the publication I will write foundational chapters that will contextualise Gibson’s various bodies of works since the late 1970s, as lenses through which the journey from Pictures to Postproduction art can be understood, and in relation to the shifting terrain of postmodern art and discourse in Australia. In addition to these foundational chapters, four art-historical essays will be commissioned to support Gibson’s legacy. These will examine: 1. Gibson’s use of public posters in the 1980s and ‘90s; 2. Gibson’s deployment of social media apps such as Instagram; 3. The role of criticism and theory on Gibson’s practice; and 4. Gibson’s approach to collage across analogue and digital works. The project requires funds to commission the four Australian art researchers and to reproduce important archival material, some of which has never before been publicly seen. The key rationale behind the project is to broaden appreciation and understanding of Gibson’s significant bodies of work, which have arguably been overshadowed by his prominent editorial roles over the last three decades.
Katrina Grant
Institutional recipient from Australian National University
Reconstructing lost landscapes: evaluating the use of 3D and VR for studying landscape and garden history in early modern Italy
About the project The planned research put forward for this grant is part of a broader project looking at the relationship between landscape, nature, engineering and design in early modern Italy. It is based upon the proposition that from the late sixteenth century onwards in Europe technology and science played a key role in reshaping both the physical state of the landscape and, to paraphrase W. J. T. Mitchell, the ‘imagined’ experience of landscape that was present in people’s encounters with place (Mitchell, 2002 see full references below in Lit Review). On the cusp of the enlightenment the natural landscape became a focus for expressions of power, progress, social hierarchy, morality, and duty. This research seeks to redirect discussion away from traditional narratives about the rise of landscape painting and the individual artist’s experience of the nature, toward a new account of the role played by technology and art together in reframing human relationships with the natural world.
While the rise of the genre of landscape painting in this period is relatively well documented, other forms of visual culture – designed landscapes, festivals, and theatrical spectacles – have not been considered on an equal footing. Yet, physical landscapes like gardens and theatre cover a spectrum of landscape representation from intended objectivity through to deliberate generation of fantasy. Landscapes, gardens and festivals set within them are still not widely understood beyond specialist studies, despite their significance to the culture and politics of the time, largely because of the significant challenges in trying to reconstruct lost spaces and temporary events. The proposed project for which funding is sought will use 3D modelling and VR environments to reconstruct lost spaces. It builds on my recent monograph Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture (AUP, 2022) and a proof of concept project completed in 2021 ( K. Grant and A. Leelasorn, ‘3D in the Time of Covid: Reconstructing a Real World Location Based on Limited Digital, Resources’, Living Digital Heritage Conference 2021) that reconstructed the Boboli theatre based on just photographs and plans. This 2021 project demonstrated that the proposed method and software (Maya and Unreal Engine) could result in a high quality reconstruction, which allows the viewer to have the experience of ‘physically’ moving around a space and helped us to understand the layout, scale and use of the space.
Funding is sought to further develop this project to create a series of 3D reconstructions of historic landscapes in Rome, Florence and Turin that, unlike the Boboli Gardens, no longer exist but are well documented in prints and documents. The focus of the budget is to pay for a research assistant with expertise in high-level modelling and VR development that will mean that the reconstructions can be properly developed, published as high-quality non-traditional research outputs, and, made available as a shared resource for other researchers. The research will also contribute to a book project on ‘Engineering the landscape’ and planned articles on digital research methods for art history.
As well as the above publications this research will contribute new digital methods and examples of NTROs for art history based on the use of digital tools. These will benefit the growing community of digital art history researchers and cultural institutions working on place-based visual culture and ensure that computer-based spatial models and visualisations they develop align with the intellectual and technical rigour of art history as a discipline. This project will address the challenge of using a practice-led methodology that will combine traditional art historical approaches of archival research and visual analysis with the use of new digital tools for 3D modelling and the creation of VR environments. It will also critically engage with how art historians might approach the use of what I call ‘speculative reconstruction’. Reconstructing these spaces relies on using evidence that is not only fragmentary, but, also requires a level of critical interpretation. Although the descriptions, and the prints in particular, provide a valuable record of these ephemeral spaces and events, they are not impartial. This project proposes to develop a methodology that allows me to take advantage of the digital tools for reconstruction whilst managing the inevitable speculative and subjective nature of such virtual reconstructions. This project will use digital tools to visualise and reconstruct these events in a way that will open up discussions on the limitations of surviving visual evidence, which will help to deepen our understanding of the original events.
Matthieu Gallois
Independent recipient
The Aboriginal Flag
About the project The proposed book is based on Dr Mathieu Gallois’ 2017 PhD research and represents the first full-length study of the Aboriginal Flag. In 2018, the thesis was awarded the Power Publications Dissertation Prize for Indigenous Art Research. The book is to be published by University of Western Australia Publishing (please see attached letter of confirmation).
The structure and narrative arch of the proposed book is based on two bold claims: the flag is a work of art, and it has changed Australian society. The flag as activist art, canvassed over the first four chapters, provides deep insight into Indigenous ontology and the important, but poorly understood role culture plays in post-colonisation, Indigenous activism.
The argument that the flag has changed Australian society is outlined over the ensuing four chapters. This discussion includes the central events of Australian race relations since 1971 (when the flag was designed): the Tent Embassy, the 1988 Bicentenary Protests, the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Mabo, WIK and The Apology. Across these events, the Aboriginal Flag transcended its familiar Indigenous themes and agendas: black pride, land rights, sovereignty (to name just a few) to act more broadly as a catalyst for change in attitudes towards multiculturalism in mainstream Australian society. The latter, as argued in the book, is the Aboriginal Flag’s greatest legacy.
The controversies surrounding the Aboriginal Flag and it copyright ownership, resulting in the 2020 Select Committee on the Aboriginal Flag, and the sale of the flag’s rights to the Commonwealth in 2022, represent significant new histories and developments that post-date the completion of the thesis.
Funding from the AIAH Art History Research grant will enable Dr Gallois to engage key representatives of the Indigenous community to collaborate in the book’s publication. Ghillar, Michael Anderson (of tent embassy fame) has kindly agreed to write the book’s Introduction. ABC journalist Daniel Browning has agreed to act as Indigenous researcher for the publication. Funding from the AIAH Art History Research grant will pay Anderson and Browning for their contributions to the book.
Anita Gowers
Emerging recipient from Australian National University
The display of art in Van Dieman’s land: colonial frames and frame makers
About the project My research project constructs a history of the display of works of art in 19th century Australia. Focusing on the key case study of picture frames, this project will examine the recently rehoused archival materials relating to framers and frame-making held at the Queen Victorian Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG), Launceston. By documenting and analysing these materials I aim to expand and enhance understanding of the display of early Australian paintings, drawings and prints, their frames, their frame makers and how artists wanted their work presented.
Recently QVMAG has brought together, for the first time, its vast array of frame materials and written archives. In the early 1990s QVMAG was at the forefront of research on the display of Australian artworks. Therese Mulford, then a curatorial assistant at QVMAG, curated the first ever exhibition of Australian picture frames in 1991, and compiled a ground-breaking directory of Tasmanian frame makers. The large volume of materials collated by Ms Mulford between 1985 and 1992 includes original boxwood moulds, frames, an extensive frame database (on 3½ inch floppy disks), and a photographic archive, as well as boxes of correspondence from galleries, private collectors and relatives of frame makers. The AIAH research grant would support access to and analysis of this exceptional archive for the first time by an academic researcher.
QVMAG strongly supports this project, and is willing to provide access both to the archival materials and additional access, under curatorial supervision, to the frames it holds in storage. Visits will be scheduled over an eight-month period, to ensure the research is compatible with QVMAG staff workloads. This grant would fund my travel and accommodation from Hobart, where I am based; these extensive archives and frames must be examined at first hand/on site, as none of the material is digitised. In consultation with QVMAG curators, selected frame materials will be prioritised for documentation and digitisation.
In 2022 I undertook a six-week summer scholarship at the National Library of Australia examining nineteenth century Australia frames held in the Rex Nan Kivell collection. This research uncovered exciting new insights into the frames and the display of art in 19th century Australia which will directly feed into my examination and analysis of QVMAG’s remarkable frame archive. In October 2022 I will be tracing the histories of early Australian frame makers in archives and libraries in Britain, and I was recently awarded a Plomley Foundation grant to undertake scoping work on QVMAG’s frame archive as an important first step for this project. As the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery has also agreed to provide access to its frames, the outputs from this project will be far more significant; TMAG’s co-operation demonstrates the confidence of cultural institutions in this research. This project is viable as I live in Hobart and have the flexibility to access collections around changing institutional workloads and, being geographically close, take advantage of serendipitous invitations to storage areas at short notice when they arise.
My PhD research argues that the frame is an important cultural artefact, in which is embedded a wealth of contextual information about the artwork it contains. Accessing archives and objects in cultural collections was not possible during COVID-19, and examining these frame archives is an exceptional opportunity to examine, understand and record the display of art in 19th century Australia.