School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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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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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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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)
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ItemThe Discursive Field: Home is Where the Heart Is(National Gallery of Victoria, 2002)
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ItemRobert Smithson's Ghost in 1920s Hamburg: Reading Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas as a Non-Site(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2002)
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ItemGroup soul(Taylor & Francis, 2004-11)This essay is a reflection on collective ownership in a collaborative work of art, noting the contemporary relevance of traditional Aboriginal understandings of intellectual and spiritual copyright. The subject matter of this essay is the intersection of Western Desert painting and a 1980s post studio artist collaboration, underneath which I’m overtly asserting Western Desert painting’s importance to a global audience, even though critics and curators find Western Desert painting difficult to place in the context of contemporary art. They acknowledge its importance, but are constricted by categorizations based on the assumption that nationality and ethnicity equals narrative. The last twenty years or so demonstrates, though, the failure, not the necessity, of the idea of nationalisms and, equally, the dark dangers lurking behind the valorization of ethnicity and religion. By this I mean that the regional narrative doesn’t really explain very much, except to Sotheby’s or Christies’ clients, although models that show the virtual Balkanization and overlapping dispersal and globalization of different types of art and audiences certainly seem to, at the same time as anthropological frameworks are being displaced in the study of Aboriginal art. The reasons for this history lesson will become clear: the stakes are high with regard to artists and visuality.