Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications

Permanent URI for this collection

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Infrastructures of Autonomy on the Professional Frontier: ‘Art and the Boycott of/as Art'

Butt, D ; O'Reilly, R (The Journal Press, 2017)

Rachel O’Reilly and Danny Butt discuss an artistic refusal (boycott) to provide meaning for the service of the extractive and incarceration industries who sponsored the Biennial of Sydney.
Colonial Hospitality: Rethinking Curatorial and Artistic Responsibility

BUTT, D ; Local Time, (Society for Artistic Research, 2016-05-06)

The recent enthusiasm for gestures of hospitality in contemporary art promises relief from the individualising forces of neoliberal capitalism and the professionalised hierarchies of the art world. Yet, Jacques Derrida describes the gesture of hospitality as paradoxically asserting a kind of sovereignty that underwrites the 'right to host', returning hospitality to the conditionality of the authorising institution. In settler-colonial territories, these institutionally underwritten gestures always sit uneasily atop indigenous sovereignties that have not been ceded, requiring the positive gestures of hospitality to remain open to their structuring fissures. This paper considers figurations of hospitality and responsibility in works by Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Raqs Media Collective in reading the art collective Local Time’s research-driven practice that seeks to reconcile indigenous self-determination and settler gestures of hospitality.