2013 conference - AAANZ | The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand

AAANZ 2013 Conference

Inter-discipline

Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, RMIT Design Hub

Melbourne, December 7-9, 2013

Image Credit Bianca Hester A world fully accessible by no living being’, 2011 A three-part project including an architectural construction at Federation Square, a broadsheet distributed freely (2000 copies), and a series of propositions performed over a two-week period in November 2011. Image detail: cinder block wall, Saturday November 19th, 2011 Photo: Bianca Hester

The 2013 AAANZ annual conference took place in Melbourne, December 7-9. It was hosted by the University of Melbourne (VCA and Art History), National Gallery of Victoria and RMIT. It included sessions on the history of art and other visual arts disciplines, art theory, and practice-based research in art, design and architecture.

The conference focused on the theme of interdisciplinarity and explored the past, present, future of art, including its practices, threats and histories. Are we, as some have argued, all working in the intersections of disciplines, being ‘interdisciplinary’? Or do we have sharply defined conditions of disciplinary practices? The conference theme aims to encourage critical perspectives that challenge the term ‘inter-disciplinary’. What does it mean to work between, under, through and without discipline?

‘Inter-discipline’ brought together a broad set of practitioners, independent scholars, interdisciplinary artists, curators, museum educators, students and higher degree researchers across the fields of Architecture, Design, Art, Art History and Theory, Curatorship and Museum Studies, to address key issues of concern and to highlight points of intersection between disciplines.

You can download the 2013 Conference Booklet here Full program.

Conference Proceedings

The Inter-discipline: AAANZ Conference 2013 — Conference Proceedings have now been published.

Keynotes

David Joselit A Multitude of Images

A multitude denotes a plurality of people or things. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it signifies “the character, quality, or condition of being many.” The subject of this lecture will be the condition of being many with regard to images, for indeed it is possible to define modernism as a response to “a multitude of images.” The lecture will range from early 20th century montage to recent practices of aggregating readymades among contemporary artists.

David Joselit is a leading scholar and critic who has written about pivotal moments in modern art ranging from the Dada movement of the twentieth century to the emergence of globalisation and new media over the past decade. Professor Joselit is currently Carnegie Professor and Chair of the History of Art department at Yale University and an editor of OCTOBER. He also worked as a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston in the 1980s and regularly contributes to Artforum and Art in America. Professor Joselit also maintains a strong interest in gender, queer and feminist studies. His selected publications include: After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012); Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2007); Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (October Books; MIT Press, 1998); and American Art since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, 2003).

David Joselit was a Macgeorge Visiting Speaker supported by the Macgeorge Bequest. David’s visit was also supported by the Victorian College of the Arts Master Teacher program, the State Government through Arts Victoria.

Paul Wood ‘World Art History’ and ‘Contemporary Art’: two strangers seeking an introduction

The relationship between art history and art practice is mobile and unresolved. While the province of the former lay securely in the past their distinction was evident. The more art history encroaches on the present, the less that is the case. Furthermore, not only is the remit of history changing, its changes are now irreversibly affected by geography. As we are constantly reminded, the present is an epoch of globalisation. The discourse of ‘world art history’ is spoken in the academy, which remains, albeit to a diminishing extent, distinct from the market. The discourse of ‘contemporary art’, while increasingly heard in academe, is inseparable from the market. Both are products of globalisation. This paper looks at dominant formulations of both discourses, and speculates about their actual and possible relationships.

Paul Wood is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Open University, England. He is coeditor, with Charles Harrison and Jason Gaiger, of the three-volume Art in Theory, an anthology of changing ideas about art from the founding of the Academy to the end of the twentieth century (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992-2003). He is the author of Conceptual Art (Tate Publications, London, 2002) and Western Art and the Wider World (Oxford, Wiley Blackwell, 2013). His main involvement has been in the history of the modern movement. His principal research interests lie in the theory of modernism and the avant-garde, and in revolutionary art and realism. More recently, he has worked on contemporary questions of globalisation and the relation of the western canon to non-western art. He is currently working on issues around the ‘Benin bronzes’ and is involved in a joint project with the Open University and the British Museum on Ancient Egyptian art.

Paul Wood’s keynote was supported by the Victorian College of the Arts Master Teacher program, the State Government through Arts Victoria.

Sarah Wilson Deleuze and interdisciplinarity: from Capitalism and Schizophrenia to the Centre Georges Pompidou

Deleuze was innately interdisciplinary. The Deleuze industry explodes with guides, interpretations, preposterous concepts — ‘Dr Who’s body without organs’—never rooting his thought, writing and action in the Paris of his times; a Paris after 1968, schizophrenic in terms of the death agonies of Communism, Maoism and a proliferation of neo-marxisms coexisting with rampant capitalism and an increasingly sophisticated ‘culture industry’… a Paris exploding with new liberties yet encircled with old institutions: overcrowded universities and prisons in the age of Concorde and the Pill, the apothesis of experimental cinema… Via his passions Artaud, Bacon, Klossowski to Richard Lindner or Gérard Fromanger, to Jean-Jacques Lebel or Ipousteguy, and finally to the citadel of interdisciplinarity, the Pompidou Centre itself… we trace the unknown Deleuze who lectured on ‘Musical Time’ for IRCAM with Pierre Boulez and was finally commemorated on the tenth anniversary of his death with a special Pompidou Centre album in 2005.

Sarah Wilson is Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She currently holds a Chair of Excellence at the Centre for the Cultural History of Contemporary Societies at the University of Versailles, Saint Quentin. Her project ‘Globalisation before globalisation: avant-gardes, academies, revolutions’ intends to rewrite a history of modernism and postmodernism to 1989– as demonstrated in her recent Paris-London conference ‘Network Beaux-Arts, going global.’ Picasso / Marx will be published by Liverpool University Press in 2013 following The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (Yale, 2010), She was principal curator of Paris , Capital of the Arts, 1900-1968 (Royal Academy London, Guggenheim Bilbao, 2002-3) and Pierre Klossowski Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2006, touring to Cologne and Paris. Sarah Wilson was appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres awarded by the French government for services to French culture in 1997.

Sara Wilson’s keynote was supported by AICA International Association of Art Critics, Australia and the Ian Potter Foundation.

2013 Masterclasses

Two masterclasses for graduate students were held at the 2013 conference.

Paul Wood | Workshop: Conceptual Art and Conceptualism

The legacy of Conceptual art is both pervasive and yet contested. It has been called the hinge between the past and the present. For some it effectively initiates contemporary art. For others that is to exhibit a misunderstanding of what Conceptual art stood for. From yet another point of view it symbolises all that is wrong with the art of our time. This workshop is going to consider different views of Conceptual art, both historically in relation to modernism, but also in relation to the diverse forms of contemporary art often called ‘Conceptualism’.

Readings: Paul Wood, Conceptual Art, Tate Publishing, London, 2002, pp. 6 – 15, 74-76. Download PDF Wood_Conceptual_Art; Stephen, A. (2013). Some more questions. Interview with Mel Ramsden by Ann Stephen. 1969: The Black Box of Conceptual Art. Sydney University Art Museum. pp. 79-87. Download PDF Wood_Interview_Reading; Global Conceptualism. Points of Origin 1950s-1980s (exhibition catalogue, Queens Museum of Art, New York 1999); Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009, Part 4: Countercurrents: South/North.

David Joselit Masterclass | Art in the Age of Big Data, c. 2013

Information has always been political, but with the rise of Big Data in intelligence operations, activists like Edward Snowden and groups like Wikileaks have made it clear that political sovereignty now means control over vast reserves of data—an asset that companies like Walmart and Google have long understood. Since the late 1960s, with the advent of conceptual art as truly global style, art has also allied itself to information. Under these new conditions we must ask ourselves, “What is art in the age of Big Data”?

2013 PhD Prize and Book Prizes

See the AAANZ Prizes page for more information on 2013 prize winners: https://aaanz.info/prizes/2013-prizes/

2013 Sponsors

The 2013 AAANZ Conference, Inter-discipline is proudly supported by the National Gallery of Victoria, The Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), Faculty of Arts – University of Melbourne, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), the Macgeorge Bequest, AICA International Association of Art Critics – Australia, and the RMIT Design Hub.

We thank our sponsors for their support of this conference.

AAANZ 2013 logo design by Sophie Rankin.