Birthdays and anniversaries are a theme of this year’s Victorian State Report. On the 24th May 2011, the National Gallery of Victoria celebrated its150th year, with late night parties, lavish dinners, and an entertaining cabaret. The celebration continues throughout the year with new spaces for art, commissioned works and the fabulous Felton Bequest Gift exhibition, ‘Living Water’, showcasing 107 paintings by 94 Indigenous contemporary artists from Far Western Desert.
A star feature of the NGV’s 150th anniversary year is the exhibition, ‘Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed’, guest curated by Dr Ruth Pullin. Current Director, Dr Gerard Vaughan, said: “This fascinating exhibition takes a fresh look at the remarkable contribution Australia’s most distinguished landscape artist made to Melbourne’s developing arts culture in his role as the inaugural Curator and Master of the School of Painting at the NGV. In 2011 we also celebrate the anniversary of 200 years of von Guérard’s birth date”. In honour of this anniversary, the Victorian College of Arts hosted a symposium about the history of the Gallery School, which started in 1867 under von Guérard’s leadership. As we know, the Gallery School is the founding institution of the VCA, which formed in 1972 under Lenton Parr.
Another important birthday is being celebrated across town. For 25 years Centre for Contemporary Photography has been Melbourne’s premier venue for the exhibition of contemporary photo-based art, providing a platform for emerging and established artists. The have consistently presented high quality exhibitions, publications, professional workshops and an annual series of free public lectures. This year their line up has included Dr Alison Nordström, who was in Australia as a guest of Bendigo Art Gallery for the exhibition ‘American Dreams: 20th Century Photography from George Eastman House’ and Victor Burgin, who was in Melbourne to participate in the ARC-funded free-entry symposium ‘Digital Light: Technique, Technology, Creation’ at the University of Melbourne on 18–19 March 2011.
News from Monash
The Faculty of Art & Design has a new Dean – Professor Shane Murray – who was the Foundation Professor of Architecture at Monash before taking up this position. One of the first things the new Dean did was to streamline the Faculty into three departments. This means that theory and history are now embedded in the studio disciplines with the art historians/theorists in the Department of Fine Arts. From there we run a Theory Program for both the Faculty of Art & Design and the Faculty of Arts, continuing the major in Visual Culture.
Publications, events and grants at Monash:
Melissa Miles won a large ARC Discovery in 2010 focused on the History of Australian Photography; Anne Marsh’s book Look: Contemporary Australian Photography since 1980 was launched in December 2010 (website to be launched in August 2011).
Melissa Miles, Daniel Palmer, Anne Marsh, Mark Davison and the Centre for Contemporary Photography are running a public seminar at the CCP on October 1st this year as part of the ARC Linkage project ‘Photography as a Crime’. The CCP will be curating an exhibition around this theme at the same time. An anthology is forthcoming. Melissa Miles and Daniel Palmer both received awards from the DVC Research to enable their research.
Melissa Miles has organised an international photography symposium on ‘National Histories of Photography’ with Geoffrey Batchen (Victoria University, Wellington), Tanya Sheehan (Rutgers University) and Elizabeth Gertsakis, so be hosted by the Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University on 4th August 2011.
Luke Morgan is editing the proceedings of IMPACT7: Intersections and Counterpoints, an international, multi-disciplinary printmaking conference to be hosted by the Faculty of Art & Design in September of this year. Luke also has two chapters on the design and meaning of early modern landscape in the important new six volume work edited by John Dixon Hunt and Michael Leslie, A Cultural History of Gardens being published by Berg in September this year. (Thank you, Anne Marsh, for supplying the news from Monash).
News from La Trobe
After the shock demise of the original Art History Department at La Trobe, Art History was relocated as a Program with the History Department. In a vote of confidence for the future of Art History at La Trobe, Art History has recently been reinstated as a major, actively supported by La Trobe University Museum of Art and the Art History Alumni. Dr Adrian Jones OAM and Dr Lisa Beaven from the La Trobe University School of Historical and European Studies History/Art History Program have convened a conference, ‘The 14th Australasian David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, to be held at the State Library of Victoria and National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, Monday 4th – Thursday 7th July 2011. ‘The David Nichol Smith seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies’ is a long-running quadrennial conference that has spawned many influential publications. Inaugurated and supported by the National Library of Australia, the Nichol Smith is the major Australasian showcase for inter-disciplinary professional and academic discussion on eighteenth-century studies, in history, literature, art history, and musicology, studies of material culture and anthropology and archaeology. The conference embraces every aspect of life, politics and culture during the ‘Long Eighteenth Century’, circa 1688 to 1815. International and national art history speakers include Douglas Fordham (University of Virginia), Chloe Chard (London), Gerard Vaughan (Director, NGV), Mark Ledbury (incoming Power Professor, University of Sydney) and Karin Wolfe (British School at Rome). For the full program see here.
Lisa Beaven of the Art History Program, La Trobe University, has published An Ardent Patron: Cardinal Camillo Massimo and his Antiquarian and Artistic Circle (London: Paul Holberton, 2011). The book is glowingly reviewed by Xavier Salomon, Curator of Italian Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in the latest issue of Storia dell’Arte (in Italian!).
Adelina Modesti, ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Art History Program at La Trobe, has the English translation of her 2004 book in Italian on Elisabetta Sirani, a 17th century painter who established Europe’s first design academy specifically for women, forthcoming with Brepols. Richard Haese, who remains actively involved in the Art History Program at La Trobe, is publishing his long-awaited monograph on sixties radical artist Mike Brown with Miegunyah Press later this year.
Caroline Jordan has received a United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney grant to travel to the University of Austin, Texas and Columbia University, New York, to further her research on the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s program of modernising and internationalising the visual arts sector in Australia in the mid twentieth century. (Thank you, Caroline Jordan, for supplying the news from La Trobe).
News from the University of Melbourne
The Art History Program at the University of Melbourne has recently relocated from the Elisabeth Murdoch Building to the 3rd floor of the John Medley, along with Australian Indigenous Studies, Screen Studies and Arts and Cultural Management. The move took place in the middle of semester and was expertly handed by the current Head of Program, Dr Christopher Marshall. Professor Jaynie Anderson, Herald Chair of Fine Arts and President of the International Committee for the History of Art from 2008 to 2012, is in the corner office once inhabited by Professor Joseph Burke. She is celebrating the recent successful launch of a special issue of the Journal of Art Historiography dedicated to Australian Art Historiography that she guest edited. Available online. We are also looking forward to the publication of the Cambridge Companion to Australian Art, also edited by Jaynie Anderson, due out later this year. Here. In December 2010, Dr Felicity Harley-McGowan was appointed as the Gerry Higgins Lecturer in Medieval Art History at the University of Melbourne. She is also a Research Fellow in the Trinity College Theological School, University of Melbourne. On completing her PhD in the department of Classics at the University of Adelaide (Australia), Felicity was awarded post-doctoral fellowships at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and subsequently The British School at Rome. She is a welcome addition to the Art History Program. A new monograph by Dr Anthony White, Lucio Fontana: Between Avant-Garde and Kitsch is forthcoming from MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Associate Professor and Reader in Contemporary International and Australian Art, Charles Green, is working on several projects resulting from his recent ARC successes.
Art History’s postgraduate community at the University of Melbourne has been particularly active in establishing and maintaining several reading groups, including Modern and Contemporary Art and Australian Aboriginal Art. Fellow of the Art History Department, Dr Helen McDonald, has won a fellowship to the ANU to work on art and climate change. Congratulations Helen.
Around Town
MELBOURNE ART NETWORK
With Katrina Grant at the helm, the Melbourne Art Network (MAN) has quickly established itself as an invaluable art history newsletter offering email, Facebook and Twitter updates on scholarly art happenings in Melbourne: lectures, conferences, exhibitions, jobs etc. It is also a lively forum for critical commentary and reviews from wherever our contributors may be around the world. New members and contributors are always welcome. Best of all, it is free to subscribe. A wonderful source of news and information for everything art historical!
Susan Lowish