Dialogue and Dilemmas in
Contemporary Visual Art

FORUM 1

Monday 4 August 2008, 6pm for 6.30pm

HOW GOOD IS CONTEMPORARY ART?
Ethics and aesthetics in art

Rex Butler
Bill Henson: The Letter Returns

The great psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once wrote: “The sender receives his own letter back from the receiver in an inverted form”. We might say the same of the invitation the photographer Bill Henson sent out to the recent exhibition of his that caused such controversy. But what Lacan reminds us is that, more than this controversy being the secret desire of Henson or whoever sent the invitation, it also speaks the secret truth of Henson’s photographs. In other words, those who complain about his photographs are not at all on the opposite side from Henson but in fact share many of the same assumptions as him. What is it that Henson and such child protection advocates as Hettie Johnson have in common? And how might this allow us to formulate our objections both to Henson’s photographs and to the usual criticisms of them?

Marco Marcon
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Fragmentary notes on quality and contemporaneity

My presentation focuses on the ethical implications of recent artistic practices that aim at intervening in everyday social relations.

Tony Nathan
Ethics in practice – unapplied principles and subjective viewpoints, a practitioner’s point of view

A discussion from the viewpoint of a contemporary artist.  A brief examination of some  controversial artworks  and application of personal standards. How to be comfortable with double standards  and other useful tips.

Jenepher Duncan
Signs of the Times

Looks at recent controversies around art, censorship and populist politics.  A short discussion of the issues and arguments around the representation of the child nude in art and whether freedom of expression is an artistic right in the pursuit of aesthetic experience or a delusional ideal, encouraging exploitation or exhibitionism.

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FORUM 2                            

Monday 11 August 2008, 6pm for 6.30pm

ABORIGINAL ART – IT’S A WHITE THING?
(Richard Bell’s theorem http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/great/art/bell.html) Cultural perspectives on contemporary Aboriginal Art

Ian McLean
Re-Bell: Aboriginal art - it's a red thing

Richard Bell's paper - Bell's theorem: Aboriginal art it's a white thing! - has been greeted like a futurist manifesto, like a bomb thrown into the complacent crowd of art lovers enjoying their glass of wine at the opening of an Aboriginal art exhibition. There has been much applause and shaking of heads. Some might think my paper is like the police rushing in to restore order, others might think it a counter punch. There is only one way to find out.

Susan Lowish
Beyond the Colour Line

A generation, at least, of Indigenous artists have emerged since Richard Bell rose to prominence in the 1990s. Have the issues changed? If so, what are the new challenges faced by this younger generation? To some, it may appear as though Indigenous art is center stage in almost every arena, and opportunities have opened up that just three decades ago seemed unimaginable. However, is it really possible to speak that positively of the future for Australian Indigenous Art?  

Richard Bell
Bring it on! (The Revolution)

Art it’s a white thing - Richard Bell’s theorem http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/great/art/bell.html)
Western Art is the product of Western Europeans and their colonial offspring. It imposes and perpetuates superiority over art produced in other parts of the World. For example, the African Masks copied by Picasso. Westerners drooled at Picasso's originality - to copy the African artists while simultaneously ignoring the genius of the Africans.

Any new "art movement" is, after the requisite hoopla and hype, named and given an ISM, that is duly attached to the end of a noun, e.g.. "Modernism". This "nounism" doesn't transfer to non-Western art. Words like primitive, ethnographic, provincialist or folk-art suffice. Below the ISMs are "Schools". A noun followed by School. For example, the Heidelberg School.

Aboriginal Art is considered a "movement" and as yet has not graduated to ISM status by being "named. I shall do so now. I name Aboriginal Art HIEROWISM. It is the modern hieroglyphics. Also, there is always controversy (lotsa rows) so I think it's appropriate. So. How is it that an unqualified Black can't name an Art Movement?

Prior to the 20th Century, art produced by Westerners from former colonies was not considered to be up to the standard of art produced by resident Europeans. The North Americans demanded, and begrudgingly attained, parity with their European cousins. In fact the axis of power has actually shifted away from Paris to New York and their artists are at the forefront of Western Art today. Not so their Antipodean counterparts who struggle with what has been called The Provincialism Problem (Terry Smith in his 1974 article of the same name). This has produced a cultural cringe of massive proportions that requires artists from provincial outposts to be able to merely aspire to mediocrity.

Provincialism permeates most levels of Australian society. Consequently, it weighs heavily on the industry catering for the art of Aboriginal Australians and renders most of those involved in that industry unworthy of the roles they have given themselves. It is unwise to market Aboriginal Art from the Western Art aesthetic and attach an Aboriginal Spirituality (an exploitative tactic that suggests that the purchaser can buy some). Perhaps it would be wiser to market this form of art from a purely Western construct. Demand that it be seen for what it is - as being among the World's best examples of Abstract Expressionism. Ditch the pretence of spirituality that consigns the art to ethnography and its attendant "glass ceiling". Ditch the cultural cringe and insert the art at the level of the best in western art avoiding the provincialism trap.

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FORUM 3                             

Monday 18 August 2008, 6pm for 6.30pm

RE-PUBLIC ART?
The next public art

Julian Goddard
Un-Public Art

This short paper looks at the failure of public art in Western Australia its ability to articulate art practice. It argues that the state system of patronage compromises any critical or speculative art practice through its management and control of the production of art in public spaces constructed around a skewed idea of what is 'the public'. The paper will also suggest alternatives and examples of others of doing public art. 

Amy Barrett-Lennard
From Spectacle to Experience

An investigation of new forms of engagement with public art works and projects and how the lines between producer and consumer are beginning to blur.
Audiences today are enjoying a far more experiential and participatory relationship with their public art, even if it is not always the planned or desired outcome.

Djon Mundine
Memory, Memorials, and Visibility

Art doesn't exist on it's own; it comes from a person and society, their  history and the times of its creation, but neither should it be mere illustration for political statement. And the art of Aboriginal Australia hovers between, enumeration of our Indigenous history in the names, numbers and activities of our forbears who created us and created a space for us to develop the art expression exhibited; space which allows us to talk. It also powerfully evokes universal emotions of anyone's life and history lived on the
immumerable terrains of Aboriginal Australia. This history exists in the 'great Australian silence' on the 'secret river of blood' of the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner in his 1968
Boyer Lecture, 'After the Dreaming'. The art is to acknowledge an Aboriginal existence not only of the current artists as persons in their own right, but to give comfort and recognisze past pain, sorrow, longing and loss, and leaving a trace of them in the hearts of others. The artist's central attribute is to make the art 'sing' in a positive winning stroke, rather than merely as a resigned memorial. In the late 1980s I initiated the Aboriginal Memorial project to be realised in 1988 as a statement of the true meaning of the nation's celebration of 200 years of colonisation [still ongoing]. Now 20 years later what is effect [affect] on the Australian consciousness; can it influence change or merely remain a silent witness to history.

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FORUM 4                            

Monday 25 August 2008, 6pm for 6.30pm

TOO MUCH ART?
The loss of ideas in art? Difference and excess in art?

Robert Cook
Everywhere only rhymes with nowhere

Drawing from writers as diverse as Helene Cixous, Allan Kaprow, Robert K. Cooper, Scott Schuman, Foucault, Adorno, Brad Warner, Nicholson Baker and Tom McCarthy, this presentation will discuss art’s ethereal-and-economic multiplication and psycho-libidinal dispersal into the citizenhood after the ‘end of the art’.  The presenter will cogently argue: 1) that the perceived contemporary Surplus of Art is actually a sign of its positive function as a free-floating platform for (and prelude to) engaging with the sub-arts of music, painting, literature, cinema, sport, situation comedy, self-help and home renovations; and 2) that the four figures of the Sartorial Dandy, Athletic Dandy, Designer Dandy and Psychological Dandy are the most precise, observable lived structures of this field’s current neo-avant-gardist advancement into the air we breathe and the language we speak and the things we make and the thoughts we feel and the beliefs we believe.   

      
Kate McMillan
No free lunch – the moral and ethical implications of making art

This paper will examine the abundance of meaningless art and the moral and ethical dilemmas that artists should, but often don’t, grapple with. The paper will pay hommage to the late Noel Sheridan’s seminal paper ‘why be an artist’.

Marcus Canning
Too much ain’t enough love to satisfy me.

Big, gratuitous, excessive art.  Dig it. Art with love handles. Fat Art. Can't get enough of it. The dumber the better. Dumbo dumb. Ideas are for academics and they're a species on the brink of extinction baby, so let's make hay whilst the sun still shines!  Bring It On !!!  ; )

Daniel Palmer
The Importance Of Doing Nothing (with thanks to O.W.)

According to Oscar Wilde, industriousness leads to stupidity. Has the professionalisation of the artist – in the context of biennales, the curatorial class and the art market boom – produced a dumbing down of art? Is there a loss of ideas? (Has anyone counted? Where have they gone?) Are we post-theory, or post-critical? This presentation explores the place of ideas in contemporary art and the role – potential and actual – played by art criticism in their multiplication. Is everyone a critic now?