The upcoming lecture, The Double: Return and Reenactment, presented by U.S.-based curator James Meyer is the inaugural Monash University Margaret Plant Annual Lecture in Art History.
Tuesday 23 October 2018 @ 6.30pm
The Pavilion, Building H, Level 8
Monash University, Caulfield campus
900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East, VIC
In his talk, Meyer will draw from his forthcoming book, The Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture (University of Chicago Press) and discuss how movements of the “long Sixties” (1955-1979) – including antiwar, civil rights, and feminism – are represented in contemporary American art by artists such as Mary Kelly, John Malpede, Mark Tribe, and the collective BLW (Rosalinda Borcila, Sarah Lewison, and Julie Wyman).
James Meyer is curator of art (1945-1974) for the National Gallery of Art (Washington, U.S.A), and previously, Deputy and Curator of Art for the Dai Art Foundation (New York, U.S.A.). He is the author and editor of two definitive books on minimalism, Minimalism (Themes and Movements) (Phaidon Press, 2000) and Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (Yale University Press, 2004), has written important catalogue essays on numerous artists including Anne Truitt, Eva Hesse and Ellsworth Kelly, and is curator of upcoming shows on Mel Bochner and Barry Le Va.
Margaret Plant, for whom the new Annual Lecture in Art History series is named, is Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at Monash University. Her 1968 appointment as Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at RMIT was the first academic appointment of an art historian within an Australian art school. Around that time, Plant published her first book, Impressionists and Post Impressionists (Oxford University Press, 1966). She continues to write and publish to this day, including John Perceval (Lansdowne Editions, 1970), Paul Klee: Figures and Faces (Thames and Hudson, 1979), Painting Australia: A Child’s Guide to Australian Paintings (Craftsman House, 1995), and Venice: Fragile City, 1797-1997 (Yale University Press, 2002). Her most recent work, Love And Lament: An Essay On The Arts In Australia In The Twentieth Century (Thames and Hudson, 2017) features decade-by-decade essays that strive to cover “the entire spectrum of artistic mediums”.
Entry to Meyer’s talk is free and is open to the general public.
Image: Monash University Archives, News crews at student protest rally, photographer David Taft (1971)