AIAH Art History Research Grant Recipients 2020

INSTITUTIONAL

Andrea Bubenik, ‘Living Pictures: The Renaissance Artist-Scientist’, (University of Queensland)

About the project 

The monograph will be the first to compare and contrast the receptions of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528).  While both Leonardo and Dürer have been subject to intensive scrutiny by scholars, little comparative work has been done to establish their impact on the descriptive sciences, especially the emergent fields of botany, ecology and zoology. While Leonardo enjoys far greater renown today, it was in fact Dürer who historically exerted greater influence, not only during the early modern period, but arguably well into the nineteenth century. Exploring these receptions and the emergent ‘Renaissance Artist-Scientist’ archetype helps to elucidate both intersections and divergences of art and science during and subsequent to the early modern period.

Project update

The grant assisted me to complete the research for the project including finalising the chapters, sourcing images, and obtaining copyright permissions. The book is currently under consideration with Amsterdam University Press.

Emily Eastgate Brink, ‘Modelling Disease: Visualising Illness in Australia’ (University Western Australia)

About the project 

This project examines the visual legacy and cultural significance of pathological research in Australia. Looking specifically to the foundational collection of anatomical wax models deployed by the University of Melbourne’s Medical School in the later nineteenth century, this study will investigate how disease in Australia was first visualised, studied, and understood.

Project update

COVID-19 significantly impacted the early stages of this research project. As Melbourne was in lock-down for over a year, I was unable to complete the initial phase of material research at the Harrry Brookes Allen Museum that I had outlined in my original proposal. Despite this setback, I held frequent Zoom meetings with the curators of the collection and developed a strategy for researching the collection remotely. One of the consequences of the COVID lockdown was the institutional push to digitise the objects at the HBA Museum. As the digitisation of the Baretta and Tramond waxes had been a key component of my original project, I revisited the aims of my proposal and revised my project in light of these changing circumstances. My remote research affirmed that, though digital images were a very useful tool, virtual information about the materiality of these objects was still lacking. As a result, I decided to work with the HBA’s former curator, Nina Sellars, to produce multi-dimensional Arctec scans of a selection of objects. These scans will produce three-dimensional renderings of the objects, including meta-data (such as labels, fingerprints, etc.), which will then be digitally animated by a collaborator in Mexico.

In November of 2022, I was able to see, touch, and examine the objects I had encountered virtually for two years. This experience was invaluable and has confirmed the importance of material encounters between researchers and objects. I am currently incorporating my research on the HBA’s Baretta and Tramond waxes into a series of articles and a book project about alternative anatomies. Additionally, Nina Sellars and I will be exhibiting our wax animation in London later this year.

Ann Stephen, ‘Collected Writings of Ian Burn’, (University of Sydney)

About the project 

To support the publication of the writings of Ian Burn, who was Asia-Pacific’s most important and least well-known conceptual artist. I am currently editing a new volume of his writings accompanied by a critical introduction and contextualizing commentary on selected texts. It will highlight how early Conceptual art opened up all sorts of exchanges and collaborations that are now critically important in contemporary art. As a key voice in early Conceptual art, Burn’s writing offers profound insights and access to aesthetic debates and challenges.

INDEPENDENT

Iva Glisic, ‘Emergency Art in the Western Balkans’

About the project 

This project will provide a new and comprehensive account of the contemporary political art that engages with the legacy of ethnonationalist violence in the Western Balkans. It will focus primarily on how war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s have been interpreted in contemporary artistic production in this region. While attempts to examine and openly discuss these crimes have largely been hamstrung by the rise of populist politics in successor states, the domain of art has emerged as a critical platform for articulating resistance and opposition. By examining how innovative creative practices have been used to disrupt the official silence on war crimes and provoke public debate on the legacy of ethnonationalism and its bigoted rhetoric, the project will provide a new reference point for the study of post-socialist political culture in 21st-century Europe. This investigation will also contribute to the debate on the role of visual arts in promoting international relations, human rights and transitional justice, which has to date failed to systematically incorporate the Western Balkan experience.

Project update

The activities carried out with the support of the research grant included the identification and collation of primary sources. In 2021 these activities were conducted by overseas research assistants. With the resumption of international travel in 2022, I was able to undertake a six-week research trip to Belgrade to complete this archival work. The funding was used to cover the expenses of engaging research assistants, Canberra-Belgrade return flights, fees associated with access to research libraries, and the copying of archival materials. In early 2021, Belgrade-based researcher conducted a scoping study of primary sources relevant to the project. My initial analysis of archival materials revealed important connections between Western Balkan materials and artistic production in other post-socialist societies. In late 2021, Moscow-based researcher was engaged to collect materials that could provide insight into patterns of artistic exchange within a broader post-socialist context. While the initial funding request included provision for a Belgrade-based research assistant, work on the project necessitated an adjustment to engage a research assistant in Moscow, and for me to undertake in-situ research as principal researcher. In order to identify and collect primary sources that will serve as the basis of two proposed journal articles, the project had to be adjusted to account for challenges associated with COVID-19, including the availability of research assistants, travel restrictions, and unpredictable access to institutions.

Ruth Pullin, ‘Eugene von Guérard and Aboriginal Australia’

About the project 

This project has sought to scrutinize the visual and written records of Eugene von Guérard’s engagements with the people of the Kulin nation and Gunditjmara, Djab Wurrung and GunaiKurnai peoples in mid-nineteenth century colonial Victoria. Paintings, drawings, sketchbook notes, an important cache of unpublished and newly translated correspondence, newspaper articles, personal memorabilia and the artist’s thoroughly documented collection of Aboriginal cultural material have been interrogated in the context of his Humboldtian mindset, his relationships with pioneering ethnographers and anthropologists, contemporary exhibitions and the impacts of governmental policies – or the lack of them. His closely observed and detailed records of Melbourne’s urban frontier, life on and around the pastoral properties he visited and the landscape he travelled through make his works a valuable repository of historical facts which can now, in David Hansen’s words, be offered back to Aboriginal Australia. Perhaps the most powerful of these legacies is knowledge of Gunditjmara man, Johnny Dawson’s artistic practice. Von Guérard was deeply impressed by the work of his fellow artist and the only known works by the artist are those that he preserved.

Project update

COVID-19 lockdowns in Melbourne meant that research trips were delayed or not possible and the use of libraries was limited. This resulted in the delay of the research and completion of the project. Cultural consultation trips were to GLaWAC, Kalimna West: GunaiKurnai Elder and GLaWAC RAP manager, Russell Mullett; Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-Operative AGM, Ballarat; preliminary meeting with Gunditjmara elders, Warrnambool; research trip NLA and NGA, Canberra. Liaison with Professor Bruno David and Professor Lynette Russell, Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University. Translation, with Tom Darragh of von Guérard correspondence held by the Berlin Ethnographic Museum from old German.

Publication outcomes:

1. “Eugene von Guérard on GunaiKurnai Country 1860–1861: Reading the story of fire in his landscapes” for GLaWAC Report and publication in Jessie Buettel et.al, Fires in the GunaiKurnai Landscape, East Gippsland (SE Australia): Characteristics, Cultural Practices and Impacts on Cultural Heritage Places and Artefacts. Archaeopress, Oxford
2. Essay for the exhibition catalogue: ‘65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art’, Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, 2023
3. Essay for Australian Studies Journal, ed. Stefanie Affeldt, Heidelberg University, October 2023
4. An article for the Australian Historical Studies journal, which is with referees
5. An article for the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, CSIRO

Adelina Modesti, ‘Elisabetta Sirani – monograph under contract with Lund Humphries’

About the project 

Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665) was an innovative and influential artist of the Bolognese School, especially on the women artists of the city. Bologna in fact was the only Italian city to have a large school of professional women artists (68), active predominantly from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Much has been written on Sirani since her early death at age 27. Modern scholarship on the artist begins in the 1950s, with a second wave during the feminist years of 1970s, and she has since had a resurgence of scholarly interest with a number of articles and essays, 2 monographs (2004, 2014) and 4 exhibitions in the past 30 years. The book, for the new Lund Humphries series Illuminating Women Artists, draws from these academic studies to present an overview for a generalist audience, taking into particular account the latest studies published since my 2014 monograph on the artist. It is based on extensive archival documentation and primary sources − her biography and eulogy, inventories and sale catalogues, work diary, trial testimony, literary texts − and analyses the life, work, critical fortune and legacy of this successful Bolognese artist in the context of the post-tridentine society that both inhibited and supported her.

Project update

The research grant was used to pay the costs of image copyright fees, initially for 60 illustrations. An additional seven illustrations were included as the manuscript was being written, and further images were requested by the peer reviewers, which required added copyright expenditure for another ten images. This in turn added to the costs of the book’s production which meant that part of the grant was used to pay for the publisher’s production expenses for these extra illustrations. The grant also enabled the purchase of 20 copies of the published book to be sent as complimentary copies to museums and image rights granting bodies, as requested in their licensing agreement.

‘Elisabetta Sirani’ is currently in production and will be released in June 2023, through both Lund Humphries, London, and Getty Publications, Los Angeles. Read more about the publication here

EMERGING

Louise Box, ‘Re-assembled and re-interpreted: digitally reconnecting a dispersed eighteenth-century print collection in Melbourne and New York’, (University of Melbourne)

About the project

When tracing the intertwined histories of printmakers, dealers, and print collectors, researchers often focus on the acclaimed collections of the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET). Less well-known Australasian collections are often overlooked. This project demonstrates how nine albums of prints at the University of Melbourne, assembled by English collector Elizabeth Seymour Percy, 1st Duchess of Northumberland (1716-1776), are internationally significant to the history of print collecting in the eighteenth century. The Duchess’s extensive print collection was dispersed at auction in the 1950s, and some of her prints are now housed at the MET (New York) and the University of Melbourne. This project extends PhD research to reconnect the University’s intact print albums and the Duchess’s surviving collecting records with her dis-bound prints now in the MET. This is the first in-depth analysis of the Duchess’s prints at the MET and has revealed previously unrecorded histories of the Duchess’s prints now in New York. Prints from the University of Melbourne and the MET have been analysed side-by-side to connect both collections, to expand knowledge about the development of a print collection by an eighteenth-century female collector, and to follow the subsequent dispersal of the collection through the twentieth-century art market. The research is being prepared for publication in peer-reviewed publications.

Project update

This grant enabled me to extend previous research and to undertake new analyses of archival material and digitised collection objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Research findings from this project have been incorporated into teaching for art curatorship students at the University of Melbourne and a paper based on this research grant project, titled, ‘Fugitive assemblages: Re-interpreting an 18thC English print collection in New York’, was presented at the 2022 AAANZ conference. Two articles for publication are currently being prepared with the support of local and international partners.

Giles Fielke, ‘Michael Lee: Turnaround’, (University of Melbourne)

About the project

Ten films related to the artist-filmmaker and animator Michael Lee (who was born in Townsville, QLD in 1949) can be found in the Non-Theatrical Lending Collection (NTLC) of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. Relatively unknown today, and with little secondary writing about his work, Lee is nevertheless described today as a ‘major filmmaker’ by contemporary film critic Jake Wilson. (1) Lee’s films – for he has since made others – capture something of the broader climate of the period between 1969 and 1989, when Lee was living and working as an artist-filmmaker in Narrm/Melbourne. Most importantly, a trilogy of films -The Mystical Rose (1976), Turnaround (1983), and A Contemplation of the Cross (1989) – mark his response to the moment when art-making in Melbourne was going through a period of significant transformation (like so much other “Western” art was at the time). Similarly to the way it is recently described by Thomas Crow, Lee’s work can be characterised by not only his ‘abstinence’ from, but reaction to the secularising principles of modernist avant-gardism. Lee’s experimentalism preferred an investigation of and ‘overt acknowledgment of the inseperability of the Western art tradition from its founding in Christian observance’. (2) In a way, this is the very “turnaround” featured in the central film of Lee’s trilogy (he describes it as a metanoia) and it becomes increasingly pronounced in his work: moving from geometric abstraction and the cut-up techniques that
revelled in aleatoric composition, into a convergence with the ultimate symbol of Christianity, the cross.

(1) Jake Wilson, “The Masoulis vision of independence.” RealTime, 63 (Oct.-Nov. 2004):19.
The screening was a part of the 2004 Melbourne Underground Film Festival, a notoriously reactionary film festival which started in response to MIFF in 1999.
(2) Thomas Crow, No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art. Sydney: Power Publications, 14

Project update

Research and fieldwork into Michael Lee’s 1970s and 1980s films require archive visits to the Cultural Centre of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, Watch This Space in Alice Springs, AIATSIS and the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra. As well, visits with the artist will continue in suburban Melbourne, along with institutional work at State Library Victoria and Experimenta (Colllingwood Yards). Ongoing is the documentation of oral history with the artists involved in his work, as well as with his collaborators – the Cantrills, Jonas Balsaitis, Bruce Pollard from Pinecotheca Gallery in Richmond, for example. A chapter on Lee’s work, including my interview with him, will appear in my proposed study of artist-filmmakers in Australia.

Georgina Walker, ‘The rapid construction of privately founded and funded art museums and foundations in South Korea’, (University of Melbourne)

About the project

This project aims to investigate the rapid construction of privately founded and funded art museums and foundations in South Korea. The shortage of public art museums and municipal museums has prompted South Korea to look to Japan’s more established reputation of collecting and preserving art collections, and systematically managing cultural policy within the public and private museum sectors. Since the formation of the Sixth Republic in 1987, and through active government support of the corporate and private museum sectors, we have witnessed a boom in art museums, foundations and exhibition and artist-run spaces: it is estimated that 45 private museums have been established in South Korea with around 13 located in Seoul. Considering the newly established public museum sector, are private individuals and large corporations in South Korea taking charge of the art museum sector?

Project update

The outcome of this project is intended to lead into the publication of Walker’s forthcoming monograph entitled, ‘The Rise of the Contemporary Private Art Museum: China, Japan, South Korea and the Arabian Peninsula’ that offers the first in-depth survey of an unprecedented period of private museum building. In January 2023 travel was undertaken to Seoul in South Korea although it was delayed due to international travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The field trip included visits to private and public art museums, commercial art galleries, exhibition spaces and the opportunity to conduct expert interviews. This research will shed new light on private collectors and large corporation-led museums and their role in the promotion of art and culture alongside their counterparts in the public museum sector.

Kate Warren, ‘Histories of Arts Coverage in the Australian Popular Media’, (Australian National University)

About the project

My research project constructs a popular historiography of art and art history in Australia. Focusing on key case studies of popular media forms – including radio, magazines and television – the project will chart how the visual arts and art history have been communicated and presented to broad Australian publics. By documenting and analysing the presentation of art across Australian popular media and press, my research aims to produce an expanded understanding of popular perceptions and reception of art in Australia. I will be using the AIAH/AAANZ research grant to help fund access to key archives, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Archive and the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA). These archives have extensive holdings of audio-visual materials and archival documentation of Australian media histories, and this grant will support me to undertake essential scoping research in these collections.

Project update

Funds from the grant were used to support access to essential research materials for my project, primarily in the archives of significant national cultural and media institutions. In particular, the grant enabled me to engage thoroughly with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Archives in Sydney. I was not able to visit the archives physically due to COVID-19 restrictions, but ABC Archives staff helped me undertake a significant amount of research remotely. I also engaged ABC researchers with a scoping research brief, from which they identified large amounts of materials related to their archival holdings of arts television shows and programming. This gave me access to hundreds of hours of television and radio show programs from the ABC’s history, spanning a breadth of arts coverage from the 1950s to today.

The grant also supported me to engage with and access materials in other important national cultural institutions, including the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) and the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), both of which hold important items and records that relate to the histories of arts broadcasting and coverage in Australia. The following research outputs were also supported by this grant:

• A significant article published in the December 2021 issue of the international Journal of Art Historiography, titled “Tracing cultural values through popular art historiographies: Australian popular magazines and the visual arts”, available here
• A recently published article in the Journal of Australian Studies titled “Art in the Barbershop: Visual Arts, Audiences and Australasian Post”, available here