School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemEmpire(Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002)Meridian’s importance lies not in the affirmation of the vitality of artists’ careers, nor in the demolition of the ‘next wave’ syndrome, nor even in the revelation of cross-generational continuity through a major exhibition of senior artists in a museum program usually dedicated to the new. Rather, it consists of the opportunity to test absence: that of emerging, not established, contemporary artists. If the present moment (the one represented by emerging artists) is on this occasion not on the museum’s walls, then it stalks the exhibition as its always-present doppelganger, like a transparent overlay. What do I mean? As I’ve noted before, the drive to rethink art is not the property of any one period, even one as productively unstable as the present. As we look at older artists’ work, we are able to see if younger artists are bound by genetic coding to return to conservative certainties, or if the productivist revolution of the early 1970s was a trajectory and a true sea change.
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ItemDoppelgangers and the third force: the artistic collaborations of Gilbert & George and Marina Abramovic/Ulay( 2000)Gilbert & George’s and Marina Abramovic/Ulay’s actions of the 1970s were collaborations that blurred and doubled the “normal” figure of the artist as an individual body. This type of collaboration had the properties of a third identity, but did the new identity resemble a third hand, a doppelganger (an apparition associated with death, sometimes experienced historically as a shadow or as the double of a living person), or a phantom extension of the artists’ joint will, rather like a phantom limb? The nature of this modified artist is important, for it represents a strategy to convince the audience of new understandings of artistic identity. In this regard, these 1970s actions now seem absolutely prescient with respect to art in the late 1990s, in which so many artists absented themselves from the position of either author or maker. The believability of Gilbert & George’s action, The Singing Sculpture (1969-73), was linked to their manipulation of absorption and theatricality, the qualities Michael Fried theorized in his influential study of Denis Diderot’s bourgeois milieu in eighteenth-century Paris. Gilbert & George were emphasizing a physical and mental discontinuity between artists and their beholders. The idea of art that encodes personal absence and misplaced identity, of going away and leaving markers or traces of that departure, is far from new and has at least one clear artistic precedent from a much earlier period - the Enlightenment. It had been theorized, for example, in a completely different context, that of Denis Diderot’s 1767 essays on the landscape painter Claude-Joseph Vernet. In his celebrated “Salon” of 1767, Diderot imagined himself stepping into and taking country walks in Verner’s landscapes. To recapitulate Fried’s elaborations of Diderot’s theories, this imagining was prompted by Diderot’s proposal that the spectator of a painting must be free and active, not just a passive consumer, and conversely that the painting itself should seem to be an impassive object in nature and not appear to be asking to be looked at. Diderot was arguing for two ideas: The beholder has an active place and role in the work of art, and the work of art can be a place in which the artist or the viewer could “go for a walk” and mentally move around within the picture-space. The resulting artistic preference for the painter’s self-effacement and depersonalization represented a departure from previous Rococo ideas of theatrical self-presentation and the spectator’s appreciation of such theatricality. Mental travel was part of the process of dissociation in a special case of absorption - the pastoral - in which the disembodied spectator became a visually active phantom participant in the work itself.
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ItemThe ice-age(Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2007)Lee Bul’s Mon grand récit: because everything … 2005 is a table-top miniature world. One of a pair of major sculptures sharing the same title and mapping the same mysterious topography, the Govett-Brewster’s Mon grand récit: because everything’s alter ego, Mon grand récit: weep into stones… 2005 was shown at the Basel Art Fair in 2005. The two works are very similar, though the Govett-Brewster version is slightly larger and is dominated by a glossy, sprawling, white base resembling a vast glacier, whereas the same forms in Weep into stones… are suspended in space, like a huge train-set on scaffolding. Both works are composed of images of the wreckage of modern history’s mass utopias, of the twentieth century visions of crazy perfection that were shared by capitalism, fascism and communism. These visions have now disintegrated. First, this essay looks at Mon grand récit: because everything… as a work of art that represents the duration of modern history and its entropic end. It does this by translating duration into metonymic images, into images that represent the twentieth century’s failed utopias by architectural models of never-completed modernist monuments in construction: a hanging, bent wood freeway hovering above a snowy abyss; a mountainous central tower encrusted with miniature crystal models; a tiny scale model of Vladimir Tatlin’s never-constructed Monument to the Third International 1920 perched on a glacial waste. Second, the essay shows that because Lee Bul presents modern history as both personal and shared, the instructional diorama represents her quite strategic and very conscious argument against contemporary art criticism’s hermeneutics of nationality, in favour of a determinedly global perspective.
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ItemRobert Smithson’s ghost in 1920s Hamburg: reading Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas as a non-site( 2002)While we can discern an archival turn in contemporary art—of works such as Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig (1999) and of exhibitions such as “Deep Storage” (1998)—the aim of this paper is not merely to identify iconologist Aby Warburg as prefiguring that turn, but to read Warburg’s last work in relation to Earth artist Robert Smithson’s non-sites as a means of opening up discussion on the function of art as archive, and archive as art. The work with which we primarily concern ourselves is Warburg’s final unfinished work, Mnemosyne Atlas (1927-29)—started the same year as the more famous, equally incomplete collection of quoted texts by Walter Benjamin, his Arcades Project (1927-1940). Warburg has always been regarded as a canonical but maverick figure: he was a founder of iconology (the study of the historical development of iconographic symbols) and the key figure in the revival of the study of Antique art (late in his life, through the agency of the Warburg Institute, located first in Hamburg and later in London). Robert Smithson was arguably the key conceptualist artist in the transition between modernist and postmodernist art; he was also a prolific and influential writer on contemporary art. Both arrived at theorisations of art as archive and of memory storage by art just at the point that the life of each was tragically cut short.
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ItemWe are all animal now(Sherman Galleries, 2007)
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ItemBernard Smith, cold warrior( 2005)Bernard Smith’s canonical book, Australian Painting 1788–1960, was shaped by the Cold War, and this forced the emerging discipline of Australian art history onto a trajectory that would not be shaken for another two decades. More than art history determined Smith’s innovations. This paper proceeds from that obvious but easily overlooked point, that Smith and his book were deeply conditioned by the intellectual climate of Cold War Australia. The appearance of Smith’s book and, henceforth, Australian art history’s concerns with postcoloniality and anxiety about nationality derive from this. Smith’s particular Cold War shaped Australian art history ever since.
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ItemBroken Screen: Doug Aitken’s Electric Earth and the inner workings of a single moment( 2007)An earlier and different version of this essay appeared as: Green, C. (2007). “Broken Screen,” Broadsheet (Adelaide), vol. 36, no. 1 (January 2007), 52-55.Over time from the 1960s, audience tolerance for disrupted narration has increased in proportion to the penetration of new media’s database and digital effect paradigms into cinematic representation: the concept of neo-baroque cinema and the idea of the Cinema Effect have been formulated in response to this. Trying to “understand” broken narratives—the world of Lev Manovich’s database aesthetic—through character motivation, residually insisting on naive cinematic realism, has always seemed excessively willful. This essay is going to explore the workings of broken narratives through the concept of a cinematic experience of suspension, which is specific to a panoramic, environmental installation and a quasi-documentary film genre, and which is very different to the identifications of classical narrative cinema.
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ItemThe atlas effect: constraint, freedom and the circulation of images(Melbourne University Press, 2009)
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Item2006: Contemporary Commonwealth( 2006)
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ItemVoiceless( 2007)