Postgraduate student presentations
The AAANZ 2019 conference committee invites postgraduate students to submit both session proposals and proposals for individual papers to be included in the main conference programme.
If there is no appropriate session, postgraduate students are still encouraged to submit a paper proposal as part of the Call for Papers. Open sessions may be convened for postgraduate students whose research sits outside the session themes. NB The Call for Papers has now closed.
AAANZ Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers Programme
A dedicated programme for postgraduates and early career researchers will be held on the afternoon of Tuesday 3 December. Starting with a lecture on art writing by Jennifer Blunden, it will be followed by masterclasses led by three of the keynote speakers: Geoffrey Batchen, Jill Burke and Maura Reilly. Full details of the content are below.
These will be run as Postgraduate Advance Training Seminars (PATS), with an opportunity for around five of the attendees to present a brief 5-minute overview of their research to their peers and receive feedback from the leader of the masterclass.
The masterclasses will be limited in size to encourage open discussion. They are an opportunity for postgraduates and early career researchers to meet, network, discuss their research, resources, challenges and share their learnings. Attendees are welcome to present both within this context, and the main conference. Pre-registration by 27 September 2019 is ESSENTIAL, download the expression of interest form AAANZ Masterclass EOI(word doc) and send to conf@aaanz.info.
PROGRAMME
Tuesday 3 December
9am Mihi Whakatau (Welcome) | Waipapa Marae, University of Auckland | All conference attendees welcome
10am Morning tea | Waipapa Marae, University of Auckland
Free time to visit Auckland Art Gallery, Gus Fisher Gallery and St Paul St Gallery.
1pm Jennifer Blunden, An art writer’s toolkit \ All conference attendees welcome
2.30pm Masterclasses (running concurrently)
These events are for Postgraduates and ECRs only, pre-registration by 27 September is ESSENTIAL
Geoffrey Batchen, Histories of the Negative
Jill Burke, Beauty Embodied: The Visual Arts and Cosmetic Culture in Renaissance Europe
Maura Reilly, Notes on Curatorial Activism
5pm Welcome drinks and exhibitions opening | St Paul St Gallery, AUT University | All conference attendees welcome
PhD Graduate exhibitions opening
Olivia Webb, Anthems of Belonging
Lance Pearce, I’ve pulled every blind and turned off all the lights but one, which I’ve named after you
Abstracts
ART WRITING LECTURE | Jennifer Blunden, An art writer’s toolkit
What makes good art writing? Why does so much art writing get such a bad rap? This session looks to recent research into language and meaning-making to explore these questions. We’ll look in particular at the qualities that distinguish art discourse from other kinds of writing, along the way drawing out some practical tools and strategies to help art writers create effective and welcoming texts for a range of contexts, audiences and purposes, both within the academy and beyond.
Jennifer Blunden works and researches in the museum and gallery sector, with a longstanding focus on communication, disciplinarity and accessibility. She has worked for many leading cultural institutions within Australia and internationally, in roles including as a writer, editor, content developer, strategist and language advisor. Her recently completed PhD, ‘The language with displayed art(efacts)’ won the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand’s PhD Prize for 2017. In 2014 she was awarded the inaugural Sylvan C Coleman & Pam Coleman Fellowship in Museum Education and Public Practice at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a ‘linguist in residence’ project that explored the role played by language in shaping visitor experience and learning. Jennifer is currently undertaking a research residency in the Art, Design and Museology Department at University College London, where she is carrying out an in-depth study of the discourse of art with a focus on issues of access and participation
MASTERCLASSES
Geoffrey Batchen, Histories of the Negative
How do you write a history for photography? Made in infinite numbers for a diverse array of purposes, photographs defy Art History’s preferred organising principles: originality, innovation, authorship, rarity, chronology, style, nationalism. But if you abandon those principles, what is left to motivate one’s historical narrative? By what means does one to decide what to include and what to leave out? These are questions my own work has been considering for some time. In this Masterclass, I will present my latest attempt to address them, a history of photography dedicated to the negative. Ignored or reviled by existing histories, the negative is nevertheless at the heart of photographic practice, even in the digital age. In the binary structure that allows photographs to come into being, the negative is this medium’s metaphoric other. A history of the negative is therefore also a history about othering, about history itself as a process of othering. Participants in the Masterclass will be presented with various ways that a history of the negative might be imagined and, through discussion, will be asked to reflect on the politics of their own history making.
Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of Art History at Victoria University of Wellington. He is an expert in the general theory and historiography of photography who has helped to pioneer the study of vernacular photography. Batchen has published extensively, in twenty-three languages to date, and has curated numerous exhibitions around the world, the most recent being Still Looking: Peter McLeavey and the Last Photograph (Adam Art Gallery, 2018) and Live from the Moon ({Suite}, 2019). He is the author of Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (MIT Press, 1997); Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (MIT Press, 2001); Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004); William Henry Fox Talbot (Phaidon, 2008); What of Shoes: Van Gogh and Art History (Seemann Henschel, 2009); Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (Izu Photo Museum, 2010); Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (Prestel, 2016); and Obraz a diseminace: Za novou historii pro fotografii (NAMU, 2016). A new collection of his essays, 更多的疯狂念头 [More Wild Ideas: History, Photography, Writing], appeared in Chinese in 2017. He has also edited Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (MIT Press, 2009) and co-edited Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (Reaction, 2012). His latest book is Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (Power Publications, 2018). In January 2020, Batchen will be taking up the Professorship of Art History at Oxford University in the UK.
Jill Burke, Beauty Embodied: The Visual Arts and Cosmetic Culture in Renaissance Europe
How did the concentration on women’s beauty in Renaissance visual culture affect the way women thought about themselves and their appearance? This class will investigate a new and burgeoning area of scholarship – that of cosmetics and body modification, and consider how women changed their faces, hair, and bodies in order to meet beauty ideals. The visual arts were crucial in laying out expectations for beauty, and as well shall see, these criteria tightened and became ever-more important during the period. As part of the class, we will look at renaissance cosmetics recipes and, if possible, try some reconstructions of these recipes ourselves. We will address the following questions: Why is beauty so important for renaissance women? How did conventions for beauty intersect with social distinctions of gender, class and race? Did images influence renaissance perceptions of ideal beauty? Do beauty ideals mean that women suppress their individuality?
Jill Burke is a leading international expert in Italian Renaissance Art. Her research and teaching focuses on the representation and understanding of the body in Italy and Europe from around 1400-1600 and she has published widely in this field. Her latest monograph, The Italian Renaissance Nude, was published with Yale University Press in 2018, and followed by an exhibition on the Renaissance Nude that Jill was involved in organising at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Royal Academy in London. Jill won the Philip Leverhulme prize for her “outstanding” contribution to art history, and has also held a fellowship at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti, Florence).
Previous to working on subjects relating to the body, Jill’s work has focused on topics relating to social identity and the visual arts. Her interest in periodization led to her edited book, Rethinking the High Renaissance (Routledge, 2012); her interest in patronage and identity was discussed in her first monograph which was based on extensive archival research – Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (2004). Perhaps her happiest research moment was stumbling across a previously unknown scribbled note on the back of a receipt from 1509 describing a robot lion made by Leonardo da Vinci. The subsequent article “Meaning and Crisis in the Early Sixteenth Century” was published in Oxford Art Journal (2006).
Maura Reilly, Notes on Curatorial Activism
“Curatorial Activism” is a term I coined to designate the practice of organizing art exhibitions with the principle aim of ensuring that certain constituencies of artists are no longer ghettoized or excluded from the master narratives of art. It is a practice that commits itself to counter-hegemonic initiatives that give voice to those who have been historically silenced or omitted altogether—and, as such, focuses almost exclusively on work produced by women, artists of color, non-Euro-Americans, and/or queer artists. The thesis of my book Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (2018) takes as its operative assumption that the art system—its history, institutions, market, press, and so forth—is an hegemony that privileges white male creativity to the exclusion of all Other artists. It also insists that this white Western male viewpoint, which has been unconsciously accepted as the prevailing viewpoint, may––and does––prove to be inadequate not merely on moral and ethical grounds, or because it is elitist, but on purely intellectual ones. This Masterclass will discuss the current issues at stake, as well as look at the work of contemporary “curatorial activists” addressing sexism, racism, western-centrism, white privilege and lesbo/homophobia, including Okwui Enwezor, Jonathan Katz, Camille Morineau, Paweł Leszkowicz, Juan Vicente Aliaga, Connie Butler, Catherine de Zegher, and others.
Maura Reilly is an arts writer and curatorial activist. She is the founder and director of Curatorial Activism Consulting – an art consultancy firm in NYC committed to addressing sexism and racism in the art world. Previously, Reilly served as Executive Director of the National Academy of Design (in New York), Chair and Professor of Art Theory at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia), and has held Senior Curator positions at the American Federation of Arts and Location One, both in New York City. As Founding Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, she launched the first exhibition and public programming space in the USA devoted exclusively to feminist art, where she organized multiple exhibitions, including the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party and the blockbuster Global Feminisms (co-curated with Linda Nochlin).
Reilly has authored and edited many books and articles on contemporary art, including most recently Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (Thames & Hudson, 2018) and Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader (Thames & Hudson, 2015). Other major publications include monographs on artists Ghada Amer, Nayland Blake, and Richard Bell. Reilly is a founding member of The Feminist Art Project (TFAP) — an organization dedicated to fighting discrimination against women in the art world. She is also a founder, along with Helena Reckitt and Lara Perry of fCU (Feminist Curators United), a network of curators and scholars committed to feminist curatorial practice. Reilly is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including ArtTable’s Future Women Leadership Award and a President’s Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art, and, in 2015, was voted one of the 50 most influential people in the art world, by both Blouin Art Info and Art & Auction. Dr. Reilly holds a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. For more information, please visit www.maurareilly.com.
EXHIBITONS OPENING AT ST PAUL ST GALLERY, AUT
Olivia Webb, Anthems of Belonging
Anthems of Belonging explores aspects of contemporary New Zealand culture and identity through song. Over 18-months, five different New Zealand families worked with Olivia Webb to compose new national anthems which sing of their contemporary lives. This multichannel video and sound artwork, filmed in each family home, presents a musical family portrait; a dynamic and polyphonic composition about feelings of place and belonging in Aotearoa.
Olivia Webb (b.1988) is an artist, musician and vocalist of Dutch-Pākehā descent, based in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland). Her art practice utilises performance, participation, video, sound and music to give voice to silent experiences and traditions that pulse through our daily lives. Olivia’s recent work explores how we listen, with exhibitions creating opportunities for audiences to develop new listening skills through workshops and group activities. Olivia has performed and exhibited internationally as an artist and vocalist, and has studied Early music and 17th – 19th Century ensemble singing in New Zealand, France and England. She is currently completing practice-led PhD in Art at AUT University.
Lance Pearce, I’ve pulled every blind and turned off all the lights but one, which I’ve named after you.
Lance Pearce’s work takes the shaping of language as a point of departure for ways of expressing thoughts and ideas beyond direct communication, exhibiting the ways in which thoughts and ideas may be expressed beyond semantic clarity by presenting storied objects.
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