School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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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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ItemTranquillity (with Lyndell Brown, Rose Farrell, and George Parkin)(Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2005)
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ItemNew Order, Old Paradigms and Dangerous Spirits(Artspace Visual Arts Centre, 2002)
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ItemStelarc and the Alternate Architecture of the Artistic Body(National Gallery of Victoria, 2002)
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ItemInto the 1990s: The Decay of Postmodernism(National Gallery of Victoria, 2002)