2018 AAANZ Conference is held in less than four weeks. There is still time to register: https://aaanz.info/register-for-the-2018-aaanz-conference/
The 2018 AAANZ Conference Committee are delighted to announce the keynote lectures Genevieve Grieves and Griselda Pollock will present at this years conference, held from 5-7 December at RMIT University, Melbourne.
First Peoples First: Decolonising/Indigenising the Arts and Culture Sector
Genevieve Grieves, Head of the First Peoples Department at Museums Victoria.
Throughout Australia, arts and cultural organisations and institutions are attempting to transform their practice and their spaces to acknowledge and redress the trauma and injustice central to the nation’s history and contemporary reality. There is a growing awareness of and movement away from colonising frameworks with the aim of decolonising and/or Indigenising the sector.
These transformations range from the development of Reconciliation Action Plans, inclusion of Indigenous content, recruitment of Indigenous staff to the creation of advisory bodies. There is a sense, among many, that the inclusion of First Peoples is a necessary step for the progressive organisation or institution. However, shifting focus in such a radical way can be a difficult process for spaces that have historically excluded our bodies and our expression of power. It is also difficult for these actions, however benign in intent, to move beyond mere acts of tokenism that create the impression of inclusive and progressive spaces without the necessary substance.
This paper explores this movement and the transformation of one entity, Museums Victoria, from a space that objectified and excluded Indigenous knowledge and bodies to an institution that aims to place First Peoples first. This shift of power within the Museum follows the success of the First Peoples exhibition (2013) that privileges and centres community voices and was created in partnership with communities, heralding a new era of collaboration, empowerment and self-determination.
The State of Art History, with Denmark in mind
Griselda Pollock, Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the transdisciplinary Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CENTRECATH) at the University of Leeds.
Art History, like the Arts and Humanities in general, is structurally challenged by neoliberal rationality of marketization and financialization (Wendy Brown) that is reshaping the academic, heritage, museal and commercial environment of the study of art and the support of its contemporary practice. It is also profoundly challenged to reform by historical demands for reconfiguration – decolonization and intersectionalization – addressed to all fields and practices of knowledge in the Arts and Humanities. Art History has, in addition, been challenged internally by those dissenting from, and seeking to difference if not displace, the canonical stories and methods established when Art History served as the spiritual and cultural mirror for the formations of the nation states in colonizing Europe. Hans Belting declared the ‘End of Art History’, the discipline being a protocol inadequate to ‘the contemporary’ in art while, grasping that nettle, Terry Smith declared we must formulate new methods to grasp what is ‘the contemporary’ before it destroys us. This drama in the tea-cup of a tiny, embattled discipline, working on the edges of what artist-writer Hito Steyerl reveals as the massive investment game in ‘duty-free art’, incites a mixture of shame (as to what purposes art and art history are being harnessed) and Benjaminian resolve to ‘think’ the dialectics of a knowingly tragic resistance. This lecture will explore in what terms can we defend and project the validity of the discipline’s self-named historical questioning and historical methodologies in the liquid modern present as culturally defined by Zygmunt Bauman and when the historical has become an embarrassment art history transforms into visual culture studies.
For more information about this year’s conference visit: https://aaanz.info/aaanz-home/conferences/2018-conference/
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