Discipline No. 5

3
Editorial by Helen Hughes

5
Ponch Hawkes in Context: Documenting Collectivism by Maggie Finch

17
Intimacy with Strangers: Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s The Second Woman by Susan Best

21
Three Images of Environmental Crisis by Nicholas Croggon

27
Inventing Eric Michaels by Quentin Sprague

37
Horizon Lines: On Tom Nicholson’s Lines that could be scars by Tara McDowell

45
The National Picture: Greg Lehman interviewed by Helen Hughes and Paris Lettau

53
We Don’t Really Need This/BELL Invites by Richard Bell and Clothilde Bullen

69
An Indigenous Intervention: Richard Bell’s Salon des Refusés at the 2019 Venice Biennale by Ann Stephen

73
A Partial Account of EMBASSY 2019: Venice by Zoë De Luca

79
The Austere Aesthetic Vanishes: The Düsseldorf School of Photography and the Perfectly Constructed Image by Alexander Alberro

91
THE CUT by Aurelia Guo

93
Udo Sellbach: Seeing it, Still by Andrew McNamara and Wiebke Gronemeyer

103
‘A Mute and Inglorious End’: Foreign Sculpture Students in Munich, 1945–49, and the German Figurative Tradition by Jane Eckett

117
The UnAustralian Artworld by Rex Butler and A. D. S. Donaldson

129
Pure E vol. 1, 2019 by Hana Earles

133
The Naked Contract by George Egerton-Warburton

139
Shaping Young Minds: On Religion, Pedagogy, and the Art of Michael Stevenson by Anna Parlane

153
Affinity in the State of Emergence: Donna Haraway, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, and Alicia Frankovich by Pip Wallis

165
A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness by Kimberley Moulton, Yorta Yorta

192
Aniconism: Thomas Crow, No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art by Francis Plagne

Más allá del fin No. 3

1
Editorial by Carla Macchiavello and Camila Marambio

Appropriate Beginning

3
Juan Dávila interviewed by Carla Macchiavello and Camila Marambio

Reflexive Anthropology

7
For a Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla makes TV at Yuendumu by Eric Michaels

13
Noreshi Towai by Juan Downey

15
The Belly of the Beast: Eric Michaels and the Anthropology of Visual Communication by Jay Ruby

Deep Time

20
Verso l’infinito by Lucy Bleach

22
Archipelagic Wanderings in Trowunna by Denise Milstein

29
Images of the Invisible by Catalina Valdés

Haunting Film

31
An Archive for the Future, Seeing through Occupation by Macarena Gómez-Barris

37
Aperture, Apparition, Apparatus: An Incantation for Ghostly Machines by Tessa Laird

42
Is What We See “Normal”? by Carolina Saquel

Poetic Instauration

44
The Blow by Greg Lehman

44
‘Instauring’ Aboriginal Art by Stephen Muecke and Melinda Hinkson

49
Coda: Instauring Artful Anthropology by Lisa Stefanoff

Ethics of Place

49
The Subantarctic Imagination Versus the Southern Mindset by Joaquín Bascopé

53
Understanding Human Agency in Terms of Place: A Proposed Aboriginal Research Methodology by Mary Graham

57
Resisting Genocide by Hema’ny Molina

Funga

59
Searching for Slime Moulds in Northern Tasmania by Sarah Lloyd

68
A WhatsApp Conversation between Giuliana Furci and Nico Arze

70
Reimagining Fungi—A Foray in the Mycobiome by Alison Pouliot

Travellers

75
‘Helpless’ in Tierra del Fuego: Baldwin Spencer’s Last Journey by John Kean

81
Sur by Ursula K. Le Guin

84
Expedition, Exploitation, and Museum Collections by Bec Carland

Weaving Hands

85
ÆS JÁLA-KAWÉSQAR KUTEKÉ ČE = ‘My Ancestor and Me’ by Patricia Messier Loncuante

88
Retracing the History of Tasmanian Aboriginal Shell Necklaces by Lola Greeno

90
Vínculos tejidos entre sur–sur, Woven south–south links by Josefina de la Maza

Medium Specificity and Translation

90
Paratactic Notes on the Living Poetry of the Valparaíso School by María Berríos

95
The Sub Scene, Post-Cinema, and Global Media Flows by Tessa Dwyer and Ramon Lobato

99
Why This Happy Rage?: Tamil Pathways Across the South by Kevin Murray

Curriculum and Climate

101
Fishy Beginnings by Astrida Neimanis

104
Los Nudos Vuelven a la Mar: Coastal Curriculum and Intergenerational Embodied Learning by Sarita Gálvez

109
On Fishy Knowings and North/South Wanderings by Iris Duhn

Questioning Reflexivity

110
Oda a Ivette/Ode to Ivette by Camila Marambio

117
Brief Notes About Dust, Twirls, and Some Horses by Carla María Macchiavello

121
Ensayos Methodologies by Helen Hughes

P.S.

122
Utility, Uselessness, and Speculative Study: On Ensayos by Carlos Garrido Castellano

123
Useless by Christy Gast

Discipline, Más allá del fin has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body and Monash Art Design and Architecture, Monash University.

Fleetwood’s other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011). She is also co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration, and co-curator of Aperture’s touring exhibition of the same name. Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and programs on art and mass incarceration at the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture Foundation, Cleveland Public Library, Eastern State Penitentiary, MoMA PS1, Mural Arts Philadelphia, the Zimmerli Art Museum, and the Urban Justice Center. Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, ACLS, Whiting Foundation, the Art for Justice Fund, Denniston Hill Residency, Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the NEH.

*This lecture will be hosted via Zoom. You’ll receive a link to join on the morning of the event. Please ensure you have a good internet connection to give you the best experience for watching and participating.

Contemporary artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Sharon Hayes, deploy speech and language to address systemic inequities and silences. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s revival of Greek parrhesia and Banu Bargu’s concept of the ‘silent exception’, theories of embodied enunciation support the project’s contribution to a feminist political epistemology that redefines practices of democratic participation.

Jennifer González is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at University of California, Santa Cruz. She writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on critical race discourse, activist art, and technologies of embodiment.

She is the author of Subject to Display: Reframing Race In Contemporary Installation Art (MIT Press, 2008) and Pepón Osorio (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and served as chief editor for the volume Chicana and Chicano Art: A Critical Anthology, with Ondine Chavoya, Chon Noriega and Tere Romo, Duke University Press (2019). González has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has published articles in numerous scholarly and art publications such as Journal of Visual Culture, Frieze, Bomb, Diacritics, Archives of American Art Journal, Camera Obscura, Open Space and Art Journal. She has lectured extensively at universities and art museums nationally and internationally and teaches regularly at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York.

Discipline No. 5

3
Editorial by Helen Hughes

5
Ponch Hawkes in Context: Documenting Collectivism by Maggie Finch

17
Intimacy with Strangers: Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s The Second Woman by Susan Best

21
Three Images of Environmental Crisis by Nicholas Croggon

27
Inventing Eric Michaels by Quentin Sprague

37
Horizon Lines: On Tom Nicholson’s Lines that could be scars by Tara McDowell

45
The National Picture: Greg Lehman interviewed by Helen Hughes and Paris Lettau

53
We Don’t Really Need This/BELL Invites by Richard Bell and Clothilde Bullen

69
An Indigenous Intervention: Richard Bell’s Salon des Refusés at the 2019 Venice Biennale by Ann Stephen

73
A Partial Account of EMBASSY 2019: Venice by Zoë De Luca

79
The Austere Aesthetic Vanishes: The Düsseldorf School of Photography and the Perfectly Constructed Image by Alexander Alberro

91
THE CUT by Aurelia Guo

93
Udo Sellbach: Seeing it, Still by Andrew McNamara and Wiebke Gronemeyer

103
‘A Mute and Inglorious End’: Foreign Sculpture Students in Munich, 1945–49, and the German Figurative Tradition by Jane Eckett

117
The UnAustralian Artworld by Rex Butler and A. D. S. Donaldson

129
Pure E vol. 1, 2019 by Hana Earles

133
The Naked Contract by George Egerton-Warburton

139
Shaping Young Minds: On Religion, Pedagogy, and the Art of Michael Stevenson by Anna Parlane

153
Affinity in the State of Emergence: Donna Haraway, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, and Alicia Frankovich by Pip Wallis

165
A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness by Kimberley Moulton, Yorta Yorta

192
Aniconism: Thomas Crow, No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art by Francis Plagne

Más allá del fin No. 3

1
Editorial by Carla Macchiavello and Camila Marambio

Appropriate Beginning

3
Juan Dávila interviewed by Carla Macchiavello and Camila Marambio

Reflexive Anthropology

7
For a Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla makes TV at Yuendumu by Eric Michaels

13
Noreshi Towai by Juan Downey

15
The Belly of the Beast: Eric Michaels and the Anthropology of Visual Communication by Jay Ruby

Deep Time

20
Verso l’infinito by Lucy Bleach

22
Archipelagic Wanderings in Trowunna by Denise Milstein

29
Images of the Invisible by Catalina Valdés

Haunting Film

31
An Archive for the Future, Seeing through Occupation by Macarena Gómez-Barris

37
Aperture, Apparition, Apparatus: An Incantation for Ghostly Machines by Tessa Laird

42
Is What We See “Normal”? by Carolina Saquel

Poetic Instauration

44
The Blow by Greg Lehman

44
‘Instauring’ Aboriginal Art by Stephen Muecke and Melinda Hinkson

49
Coda: Instauring Artful Anthropology by Lisa Stefanoff

Ethics of Place

49
The Subantarctic Imagination Versus the Southern Mindset by Joaquín Bascopé

53
Understanding Human Agency in Terms of Place: A Proposed Aboriginal Research Methodology by Mary Graham

57
Resisting Genocide by Hema’ny Molina

Funga

59
Searching for Slime Moulds in Northern Tasmania by Sarah Lloyd

68
A WhatsApp Conversation between Giuliana Furci and Nico Arze

70
Reimagining Fungi—A Foray in the Mycobiome by Alison Pouliot

Travellers

75
‘Helpless’ in Tierra del Fuego: Baldwin Spencer’s Last Journey by John Kean

81
Sur by Ursula K. Le Guin

84
Expedition, Exploitation, and Museum Collections by Bec Carland

Weaving Hands

85
ÆS JÁLA-KAWÉSQAR KUTEKÉ ČE = ‘My Ancestor and Me’ by Patricia Messier Loncuante

88
Retracing the History of Tasmanian Aboriginal Shell Necklaces by Lola Greeno

90
Vínculos tejidos entre sur–sur, Woven south–south links by Josefina de la Maza

Medium Specificity and Translation

90
Paratactic Notes on the Living Poetry of the Valparaíso School by María Berríos

95
The Sub Scene, Post-Cinema, and Global Media Flows by Tessa Dwyer and Ramon Lobato

99
Why This Happy Rage?: Tamil Pathways Across the South by Kevin Murray

Curriculum and Climate

101
Fishy Beginnings by Astrida Neimanis

104
Los Nudos Vuelven a la Mar: Coastal Curriculum and Intergenerational Embodied Learning by Sarita Gálvez

109
On Fishy Knowings and North/South Wanderings by Iris Duhn

Questioning Reflexivity

110
Oda a Ivette/Ode to Ivette by Camila Marambio

117
Brief Notes About Dust, Twirls, and Some Horses by Carla María Macchiavello

121
Ensayos Methodologies by Helen Hughes

P.S.

122
Utility, Uselessness, and Speculative Study: On Ensayos by Carlos Garrido Castellano

123
Useless by Christy Gast

Discipline, Más allá del fin has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body and Monash Art Design and Architecture, Monash University.

1
Acknowledgement & Foreword

7
Ceri Hann by Clementine Edwards

10
The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art by Charles Green & Anthony Gardner

23
Steve McQueen’s Ghostly Survivals by Chari Larsson

37
Gossip and its Minor Discourses by Andrew Brooks & Astrid Lorange

53
Durable Expendables, Memes and Impossible Dreaming: Some Episodes in a History of Circulation by Chris McAuliffe

70
Curating Under Pressure in Settler Colonies by Léuli Māzyār Luna‘i Eshrāghi

91
Notes on the Presentation of ‘Curating Under Pressure in Settler Colonies’ by Léuli Eshrāghi’ by Sarah Werkmeister

94
Colophon

95
Contributors

Cover

Gordon Bennett

4
Editorial by Nicholas Croggon, David Homewood & Helen Hughes

6
Elizabeth Newman: Abstraction, Simulation, Obscuration by Francis Plagne

29
Critical Ambiguity: A Kantian Reading of Recent Work by Juan Davila by Helen Johnson

37
Trans-Pacific: Abstract Painting in Australia, New Zealand and America 1930–1960 by Rex Butler & A.D.S. Donaldson

49
Object Documentation by David Homewood & Bronté Lambert

62
The Dispute at the 19th Biennale of Sydney by Michael Ascroft

71
Illusion in Wendy Paramor’s Triad by Amelia Sully

80
Ambient Perspective and Endless Art by Nikos Papastergiadis & Amelia Barikin

92
Figures of the Machine: Richard Tuohy’s Halftone Films by Giles Fielke

106
Non-Resolution IRL by Danni Zuvela

112
Interview with Hito Steyerl by Amelia Groom

126
The Three Bodies of Angus Cerini by Jon Roffe

132
Encountering a Collection: Fiona Connor’s Wallworks by Kate Warren

146
What it’s Like to Dance Naked in the Museum and Other Thoughts: Stuart Ringholt’s Kraft (2014) by Liang Luscombe & Patrice Sharkey

158
Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity: Reflections on Method, Review of Reviews (Part 2) by Terry Smith

170
The Eternal Return of Irony: Gordon Bennett (1955–2014) by Ian McLean

183–116
Clothes by Centre for Style

187
Contributors

189
Image Credits

192
Colophon

Back Cover
John Citizen

Guest edited section by Ferdiansyah Thajib, KUNCI Cultural Studies Center (loose booklet in Bahasa and English)

Holopis Kuntul Baris: Karya Seni di Era Kolaborasi yang Tampak Mekanis / Holopis Kuntul Baris: The Work of Art in the Age of Manifestly Mechanical Collab­oration

3/7
Pengantar/Introduction by Ferdiansyah Thajib

11/27
Kerangka Kolektivitas/Terms of Collectivity by Simon Soon

41/53
Wok the Rock & Co.: Memahami Persahabatan dalam Dunia Seni Yogyakarta/Wok the Rock & Co.: Making Sense of Friendship in Yogyakarta’s Art Scene by Nuraini Juliastuti

65/75
Punkasila, Kerjasama dan Persahabatan/Punkasila, Cooperation and Friendship by Syafiatudina

85–88
Hestu A. Nugroho (Setu Legi)
(artist pages)

89
Kontributor/Contributors

90
Colophon

Cover

Nyapanyapa Yunupingu

Inside Covers
Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano
(artist pages)

2–3
Nick Selenitsch
(artist pages)

5
Introduction: Too Much, Not Enough by Nicholas Croggon and Helen Hughes

7
The Obscurity of the Present… by Jan Bryant

19–22
Justin Andrews
(artist pages)

23
Contemporary Art as Minimal Domination by Justin Clemens

19–22
Claire Lambe
(artist pages)

33
John Nixon: A Communist Artist by Rex Butler

41–44
Alicia Frankovich
(artist pages)

45
A Love for the Fallen: A Melancholic Relation to the Art of September 11, 2001 by Juliet Rogers

53–58
Patrick Pound
(artist pages)

59
White Lines: The Recent Work of Nyapanyapa Yunupingu by Quentin Sprague

53–58
Kate Smith
(artist pages)

73
Lend Me Your Ear: On Hany Armanious’s Fountain (2012) by Helen Johnson

77–80
Narelle Jubelin and Jacky Redgate
(artist pages)

81
Simryn Gill: Questions of Coherence, Knowledge and Information by Maggie Finch

95–103
The Mulka Project
(artist pages)

104
Still Searching: Time in the Work of Anastasia Klose by Anusha Kenny

113–116
Lauren Berkowitz
(artist pages)

117
A Love Story: A Constructed World, Speech and What Archive, The Telepathy Project by Lauren Bliss

125–128
Nathan Gray
(artist pages)

129
Geoff Newton: Fan Tribute History Parallel Bootleg Paintings (or: Career Paths are Not the Same as Songlines) by Lisa Radford

140–144
Harriet Morgan
(artist pages)

145
Notching Up the Imaginary: Film, Art and the Support-Surface by Adrian Martin

153–156
Rob McLeish
(artist pages)

157
Return to Disorder: Dale Hickey’s Passage from Conceptual Art to the Cup paintings (1972–73) by David Homewood

167–170
Dan Arps
(artist pages)

171
The Austrian Question: Ian Burn and Institutional Misrecognition by David Wlazlo

187–190
Zoë Croggon
(artist pages)

176
What is Not Music? An Interview with Mattin by Joel Stern and Andrew McLellan

191
Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity: Reflections on Method, Review of Reviews (Part 1) by Terry Smith

201–204
Brook Andrew
(artist pages)

205
Cosmopolitan Imaginings. Review: Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture by Huw Hallam

214
The Bomb and the Still Life: Strategies to Secure the Present Moment by S.T. Lore

242
Contributors

Back Cover
Alex Vivian
(artist page)

Guess edited section by Raimundas Malašauskas (loose insert)

Interview with Edith Scob by Raimundas Malašauskas, Valentina Desideri, Mark Geffriaud and Géraldine Longueville, designed by Joris Kritis and Julie Peeters

Cover
Matt Hinkley

1–6
A Constructed World
(artist pages)

8
Editorial: The Contemporary Artworld by Nicholas Croggon and Helen Hughes

10–12
Elizabeth Newman
(artist pages)

13
End of Love by Emanuele Coccia, translated by Connal Parsley

16–17
Sandra Selig
(artist pages)

18
Time Shrines: Melancholia and Mourning in the Work of Ash Keating by Amelia Barikin

25
Matt Hinkley and the Embedded Mark by Francis Plagne

35
Aestheticising Architecture / Architecturalising Aesthetics: Callum Morton and Bianca Hester by Helen Hughes

49–51
Kate Meakin
(artist pages)

52
Yukultji Napangati: Occupying Dreaming by Timothy Morton

59
A Moment An Immeasurable Whole (on Mira Gojak) by Helen Johnson

Guest edited section by Maria Fusco (insert)

Editorial: The Human Word is Midway Between the Muteness of Animals and the Silence of God by Maria Fusco
The Hand & The Creature by Nikolaus Gansterer and Moira Roth
Why Look at Animals? by John Berger
A Philosopher, A Cat, A Monkey and Nudity by Yve Lomax
Mnemonics for Bird Songs and Calls by John Bevis
The Hand, The Creatures & The Singing Garden by Nikolaus Gansterer and Moira Roth

97
RR / SK: Public Exhibition by David Homewood

106
Kimberley Dinosaur Tracks by Steve Salisbury

110
Unstable Realities in Omer Fast’s Five Thousand Feet Is The Best by Kate Warren

120
Price Tag by Adrian Martin

124–125
Rongsolo
(artist pages)

126
Recommended Reading: LIP Magazine (1976–1984) by Vivian Ziherl

137–140
Christopher LG Hill
(artist pages)

141
The Telling Moment Revisited: Vernon Ah Kee’s Tall Man by Tim Alves

146
All The News That’s Fit To Sing: Vernon Ah Kee’s Tall Man by Sarinah Masukor

150
Can There Be a History of Contemporary Art? (Terry Smith’s What is Contemporary Art?, 2009, Terry Smith’s Contemporary Art: World Currents, 2011) by Nikos Papastergiadis

156
Retromania and the Atemporality of Contemporary Pop (Simon Reynolds’s Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past, 2011) by James Parker

165–168
Paul Knight
(artist pages)

169
Watts’ Tale Of Endless Ore Chapter II — Escape and the Advice of Zola. by S.T. Lore

191
Contributors

Poster Insert
Janet Burchill

Cover
Damiano Bertoli

1–7
Stuart Ringholt
(artist pages)

8–13
Helen Johnson
(artist pages)

15
Editorial: Discipline and Publish by Nicholas Croggon and Helen Hughes

16
Contributors

17
Mira Gojak
(artist page)

18
Salon des Independents: John Nixon as Curator and Publisher in the 1980s by Francis Plagne

24
When Cracks Appear … Pat Foster and Jen Berean and Broken Windows by Fayen d’Evie

29
‘Are you Serial?’ On Marco Fusinato’s recent work by David Homewood

34
Christian Thompson and the Art of Indigeneity by Connal Parsley

38–39
Annie Wu
(artist pages)

40
Sympathies and Antagonisms: on Bianca Hester’s Please leave these windows open over night to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning by Liang Luscombe & Patrice Sharkey

45
Charlie Sofo
(artist page)

46
Deceive, Inveigle & Obfuscate: An Interview with Joaquin Segura by Thomas Jeppe

50
Review: Hotel Theory by Ash Kilmartin

54
Questionnaire: Yanni Florence on Pataphysics Magazine

58–59
Sriwhana Spong
(artist pages)

60–61
Jackson Slattery
(artist pages)

62–63
Matthew Griffin
(artist pages)

64
Stroking Rough Minutes into Smooth Hours: A Short History of the Music of Graham Lambkin by Nicholas Croggon

69–72
Joshua Petherick
(artist pages)

73
Editorial: Corridor by Vivian Ziherl

74
Flickering Hyperpresence: A Conversation with Wolfgang Muller and An Paenhuysen by Nine Yamamoto-Masson

78–87
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy
(artist pages)

88
An Interview with Ben Kinmont by Vivian Ziherl

92
Lean-to, Just so … by Rebecca Cleman

94
Proposition for a Banner March and Black Cube Hot Air Balloon: An Interview with Raafat Ishak and Tom Nicholson

100
Conservative Art Criticism? Matthew Collings on Contemporary Art by Michael Ashcroft

102
Review: Christoph Mencke, Daniel Loick, Isabelle Graw, The Power of Judgment: A Debate on Aesthetic Critique by Helen Johnson

104
Review: Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before by Sarinah Masukor

106
Watts’ Tale Of Endless Ore by S.T. Lore

108–109
Jessica McElhinney
(artist pages)

110–112
The Girft–Redaction and Decontamination by Slave Pianos

Fleetwood’s other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011). She is also co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration, and co-curator of Aperture’s touring exhibition of the same name. Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and programs on art and mass incarceration at the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture Foundation, Cleveland Public Library, Eastern State Penitentiary, MoMA PS1, Mural Arts Philadelphia, the Zimmerli Art Museum, and the Urban Justice Center. Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, ACLS, Whiting Foundation, the Art for Justice Fund, Denniston Hill Residency, Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the NEH.

*This lecture will be hosted via Zoom. You’ll receive a link to join on the morning of the event. Please ensure you have a good internet connection to give you the best experience for watching and participating.

Contemporary artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Sharon Hayes, deploy speech and language to address systemic inequities and silences. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s revival of Greek parrhesia and Banu Bargu’s concept of the ‘silent exception’, theories of embodied enunciation support the project’s contribution to a feminist political epistemology that redefines practices of democratic participation.

Jennifer González is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at University of California, Santa Cruz. She writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on critical race discourse, activist art, and technologies of embodiment.

She is the author of Subject to Display: Reframing Race In Contemporary Installation Art (MIT Press, 2008) and Pepón Osorio (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and served as chief editor for the volume Chicana and Chicano Art: A Critical Anthology, with Ondine Chavoya, Chon Noriega and Tere Romo, Duke University Press (2019). González has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has published articles in numerous scholarly and art publications such as Journal of Visual Culture, Frieze, Bomb, Diacritics, Archives of American Art Journal, Camera Obscura, Open Space and Art Journal. She has lectured extensively at universities and art museums nationally and internationally and teaches regularly at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York.

The lecture juxtaposes visual / aural art experiments of refugee and emigré memory that pose alternatives to the visual regimes of national security and humanitarianism that seek to capture “the migrant.”

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar whose work is concerned with the analysis of race, immigration, capitalism, and colonialism, she is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University Press, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), and the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke University Press, 1997) and New Questions, New Formations: Asian American Studies, a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 5:2 (Fall 1997). Before joining Yale, Lowe taught at the University of California, San Diego and Tufts University.

Jolene Rickard is one of the most important thinkers of this history. As an artist, her work has explored the way photography has operated as a technique of settler-colonialism, and as a key document of Indigenous survival. As a curator and visual historian, she has articulated the claims of global Indigenous art on the contemporary.

In this online talk, Rickard will introduce us to her concept of “Indigenous visual sovereignty”. Rickard will describe a mode of power that emerges not from European political philosophy, but from the long history of Hodinöhsö:ni ideas and practices. In the 19th and 20th centuries, this mode of sovereignty re-organised itself to engage with the settler-colonial infrastructures of treaties and borders—a struggle that Gayogo̱hó:nǫ (Cayuga) Chief Deskaheh (Levi General) and Rickard’s grandfather, Clinton Rickard, called “fighting for the line”.

Jolene Rickard is an artist, curator, and visual historian, specialising in issues of Indigeneity within a global context. She is a 2020 Fulbright Research Scholar at McMaster University, ON, CA, an Associate Professor in the departments of History of Art and Art, and the former Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program 2008-2020 (AIISP) at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Jolene is from the Tuscarora Nation (Turtle Clan), Hodinöhsö:ni Confederacy.

Since the 1980s, Professor Rickard has played a pivotal role alongside figures like G. Peter Jemison (Seneca) and Jaune Quick-to-see-Smith (Salish/Kootenai) opening radical new spaces for Indigenous art within the US settler art world. Her photographic and installation art has been included in landmark exhibitions, from “We the People” (Artists Space New York, 1987) to the current “Hearts of our People: Native Women Artists” (Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2020). Rickard has also curated numerous exhibitions of Indigenous art, and co-curated two of the four permanent exhibitions for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. She has published widely on Indigenous art and politics, her most recent article being “Unintentional Inclusion and Indigenous Art” (Art Practical, May 2020).

Jolene Rickard
On Indigenous Visual Sovereignty
Friday, 11th September 2020

Lisa Lowe
On Migration, Matter and Memory
Friday, 30th October 2020

Jennifer González
Fearless Speech: Performative Words in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Sharon Hayes
Friday, 5th March 2021

Nicole Fleetwood
Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Friday, 21st May 2021

Today, as we fret about the forces that underpin our screen-based lives, we are reminded once again that vision is not a timeless faculty, but a deeply historical and political construction. Images and artworks exist not simply as objects to be admired or interpreted, but as part of a vast visual infrastructure that governs our lives, shaping what we see, who we are, and what we can do. This infrastructure is what Meg McLagan and Yates McKee call the “image complex”.

In recent years and months, the image complex has become an increasingly intense site of contestation in the United States. At Standing Rock, and on Instagram, and on the streets of Minneapolis, governments, corporations, and citizens have battled to control images: their meaning and circulation, the technologies that produce them, and the types of experience they make possible.

Yet such struggles have long contoured life in the United States.

This online lecture series introduces four leading scholars whose work cracks open the history of the US image complex, and its imbrication with processes of capitalism, imperialism, racialisation, and militarism. Their research also illuminates the practices and visual regimes that have long resisted these processes, including by artists, incarcerated people, communities of colour, and Indigenous people.

The series will take place entirely online, with each presenter introducing us to recent research, focusing their discussion through a single, key image. The aim is not to create a new canon of images. Instead, the series will use our embeddedness in the image complex to workshop new ways of looking at images complexly, and thus suggest new avenues for image practice and research.

Jolene Rickard is Associate Professor, Department of The History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University.

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies, Yale University.

Jennifer González is Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Nicole Fleetwood is Professor of American Studies and Art History, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Posenenske’s work attempted to democratise art—in both how it was made and who had access to it. The best example of this is in her Vierkantrohre (Square Tubes) from 1967, some of which are on view at the United Workers Union. The components for this work were produced in unlimited numbers in industrial workshops near Frankfurt. Unlike most works of art, the Vierkantrohre were not editioned, remain unsigned by the artist, and were sold for the cost of their production. By insisting on this, Posenenske treated her practice quite unlike other works on the art market: instead of treating her work as rarified commodities, she chose to treat them like the mass produced consumer goods common to her time.

Posenenske’s use of simple construction materials—aluminium, cardboard—and the type of modular design typically associated with modern industrial design and manufacturing also point towards the post-war reconstruction of West Germany and its utopian embrace of consumerism (think of its icon: the VW Beetle). This supposed victory of capitalism would later be cheered as the “Economic Miracle”.

Winata will speak to how Posenenske’s art was responsive to the wider political atmosphere in post-war West Germany. Not only were the late 1960s a time marked by the aftermath of totalitarianism, but for Posenenske’s generation of workers, students and artists this was also a time filled with desires for socio-political change when the promises of their new society remained unfulfilled.

Amelia Winata in completing an art history PhD on Charlotte Posenenske at the University of Melbourne. She is an editor of Memo Review and Index.

Tuesday, 20th August 2019, 7:00pm
‘Spectral Film’
Artist Film Workshop
2 Kerr Street,
Fitzroy VIC 3065

‘Spectral Film’ presents a series of films by artist Carolina Saquel (including the web series DISTANCIA) and other mystery films, all of which are discussed in the joint issue. Screened by Artist Film Workshop, and introduced by Carla Macchiavello and Camila Marambio, editors of Más allá del fin Nº 3.

Wednesday, 21st August 2019, 1:00pm
Carla Macchiavello
Monash Art, Design and Architecture Artforum
G104, Monash University, Caulfield campus

Carla Macchiavello will introduce the work of the late Chilean video artist Juan Downey, followed by a screening of his 1977 film, The Abandoned Shabono (28 mins).

Wednesday, 21st August 2019,
6:00–7:30pm
‘Lost in Translation’
is a panel discussion with Camila Marambio, Rebecca Carland, and John Kean with video participation from the Yaghan Community on Navarino Island
Melbourne Museum
11 Nicholson Street,
Carlton VIC 3053

Co-presented with the Melbourne Museum, ‘Lost in Translation’ brings several contributing authors to Más allá del fin Nº 3. together to discuss the awakening of a forgotten collection from South America by reconnecting to its source community, the Yaghan. This is a project led by Camila Marambio and the curator of history of collections at Museum Victoria, Rebecca Carland.

Paid event, tickets can be bought online at:
https://museumsvictoria.com.au/
melbournemuseum/whats-on/lost-in-
translation/

Thursday, 22 August 2019
Mueller Hall, Melbourne Herbarium, Botanic Gardens
Birdwood Avenue
Melbourne VIC 3004

4:00pm
Sarah Lloyd
‘My Life in Slime’

Acellular slime moulds (myxomycetes) are amoebae, single-celled organisms that produce exquisitely beautiful spore-bearing ‘fruits’ visible to the naked eye. Slime moulds are usually studied by mycologists in academia who may undertake a relatively brief visit to a site where they gather organic material to culture in the laboratory. This talk describes a unique study of these unpredictable, ephemeral, miniscule organisms by a passionate naturalist with daily access to her study site: a tall wet eucalypt forest in central north Tasmania.

6:00pm
Carla Macchiavello
‘¡Ayayay! (From Eye to I to Ay!): Reflexive Translations and Video Bodies in Downey’s Videos and Beyond’

‘I wish to eroticise politics’, said Juan Downey in one of his notebooks when working on one of his best-known series of video works, Video Trans Americas (1973–79). Eroticism was here understood as a larger human project of survival, needing inter-species, human-machine collaborations. Feedback would meet eros, the thinking I/eye would meet the feeling body/¡ay!, looping desire, longing, bodies, memories … Downey’s works have been analysed as part of larger North American networks that created feedback loops between art and anthropology (as both were working with audiovisual technologies and reflexivity), art and television/agency of media, art and science. But the connections between politics and eroticism have been largely downplayed by scholars, as have been other networks of peripheral collaborations, translating desire across cultures and bodies, cannibalising received histories. From his early works with machines and perception to his late works in which the body beats to the sound of political dissent and indigenous drums, translating and transferring languages and pulsations, another perhaps erotic map of video networks might be traced.

7:30pm
Discipline, Más allá del fin Launch!

Please join us for a drink to celebrate the launch of Discipline, Más allá del fin.

Please note: Mueller Hall is wheelchair accessible by prior arrangement, please email info@discipline.net.au.

Download Programme

 

Saturday, 24th August 2019, 11:00am
Andrew McNamara
‘On Udo Sellbach:
Selected Works 1966–68’
Milani Gallery
270 Montague Road
West End QLD 4101

Andrew McNamara will reflect on the significance of German emigre artist Udo Sellbach’s 1966–68 body of abstract paintings, a selection of which are presented at Milani Gallery. Based on his paper ‘Udo Sellbach: Seeing it, Still’, co-authored by Wiebke Gronemeyer, for Discipline Nº 5.

Saturday, 31st August 2019
Outer Space
1/170 Montague Road
South Brisbane

12:30–2:00pm
‘Felting/Feeling’, a wool felting workshop led by Christy Gast

Open process-ing (making and talking): Wet felting of wool is a tactile process during which the animal fibres must be shocked, massaged, and submerged in hot and cold water repeatedly. Wool dyed with foraged, plant-derived colours will be shocked and bound into a subtle spectrum. What is shocking? Why does visibility matter?

2:30–3:00pm
‘Generative Writing’, a poethical writing workshop led by Camila Marambio

Inspired by the dramaturgical exercises of María Irene Fornés, the scholarly work of Nina Lykke, and the poems of Clara Brack, in this workshop we will tap into the potency of automatic writing and the subconscious. Bring your writer's block, a creative question, a writing task, a problem or a question to explore its language and what it wants.

4:30pm
Carla Macchiavello
‘¡Ayayay! (From Eye to I to Ay!): Reflexive Translations and Video Bodies in Downey’s Videos and Beyond’

‘I wish to eroticise politics’, said Juan Downey in one of his notebooks when working on one of his best-known series of video works, Video Trans Americas (1973–79). Eroticism was here understood as a larger human project of survival, needing inter-species, human-machine collaborations. Feedback would meet eros, the thinking I/eye would meet the feeling body/¡ay!, looping desire, longing, bodies, memories … Downey’s works have been analysed as part of larger North American networks that created feedback loops between art and anthropology (as both were working with audiovisual technologies and reflexivity), art and television/agency of media, art and science. But the connections between politics and eroticism have been largely downplayed by scholars, as have been other networks of peripheral collaborations, translating desire across cultures and bodies, cannibalising received histories. From his early works with machines and perception to his late works in which the body beats to the sound of political dissent and indigenous drums, translating and transferring languages and pulsations, another perhaps erotic map of video networks might be traced.

5:30pm
Discipline, Más allá del fin Launch!

Please join us for a drink to celebrate the launch of Discipline, Más allá del fin.

Download Programme
 

 

Saturday, 16th November 2019, 2:00–4:00pm
Nick Croggon
‘Three Images of
Environmental Crisis’
UNSW Galleries
Corner of Oxford Street and Greens Road
Paddington NSW 2021

Introduced by Helen Hughes
and Verónica Tello

This paper tests one of the central stakes of Discipline, Más Allá del Fin: the aesthetics and politics of limits. It does so by drawing on one of this issue’s galvanising nodes: the Chilean, New York-based artist and architect, Juan Downey. In the early 1970s, not long after Downey had first moved to New York, there emerged in the US a disturbing awareness of the earth’s limits, couched in the language of environmental crisis. First heralded in the environment and countercultural movements of the 1960s, this language reached the mainstream with the global think-tank Club of Rome’s 1972 report, The Limits to Growth. Using projections derived from a complex computer model, the report warned that the unfettered growth that had underpinned industrial capitalism since the 19th century was reaching a crisis point, as pollution and overconsumption of resources bumped up against the very limits of the biosphere. This paper considers three images that illuminate, even as they obscure, this moment of crisis: two from the pages of Time Magazine, and one by Downey himself. It explores the differing strategies and techniques employed to envisage a new, post-industrial society—beyond the end of the world.

Anna Parlane
‘Shaping young minds: On religion, pedagogy and the art of Michael Stevenson’

What, if anything, does Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel have in common with Evangelical pastor John Wimber? Tertiary courses taught by these two controversial figures face off in the mirrored structure of Michael Stevenson’s Serene Velocity in Practice MC510/CS183. While Thiel’s 2014 book about business start-ups, Zero to One, was subtitled ‘how to build the future,’ Wimber famously claimed that ‘church planting is the best form of evangelism.’ In this lecture, Anna Parlane will situate Serene Velocity in Practice in the context of Stevenson’s broader practice, drawing out links between this major new installation and lesser-known works he produced in New Zealand early in his career. Focusing on Stevenson’s interest in both religious thinking and pedagogy, she will demonstrate that the question of how ideas take effect in the world has always been central to his work.

Anna Parlane is a writer and art historian with a particular interest in contemporary New Zealand art. She received her PhD from Melbourne University in 2018, where she currently works as a researcher and sessional academic. Anna is a regular contributor to Memo Review, and her work has appeared in publications including emaj, Reading Room and Un magazine. She previously worked as Assistant curator at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

A Scanner Darkly

A Scanner Darkly is a 2006 American animated science-fiction film directed by Richard Linklater. Based on the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick, it tells the story of identity and deception in a near-future dystopia under constant and intrusive high-tech police surveillance in the midst of a drug epidemic. Linklater’s neo-noir thriller involves an undercover cop (Keanu Reeves) assigned to root out the junkies and dealers of Substance D, only to form his own addiction to the mind-warping drug.

Pip Wallis’s lecture examines the renewed interest in Donna Haraway’s writing on ecofeminism, inter-specieism and post-humanism in contemporary art today, with particular focus on the current MUMA exhibitions. Wallis will explore the impact of Haraway’s poetic, embodied and speculative methods, and ask why she has re-emerged as a touchstone three decades after the publication of her canonical text: ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’.

Wallis is Curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria, where she has organised exhibitions by Helen Maudsley and Hito Steyerl, and performances by Adam Linder and Simone Forti. She was previously Managing Editor, X-TRA Contemporary Quarterly, Los Angeles; Curator in Residence, Chisenhale Gallery, London UK; Editor, un Magazine, volume 9; and Curator, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne. Her interest in Haraway is underpinned by her recent curatorial work with VNS Matrix, Hito Steyerl and Rosi Braidotti.

Donna Haraway, feminist thinker and historian of science, is perhaps best known as the author of two revolutionary works, the essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (Routledge, 1991) and the book Primate Visions (Routledge, 1989). Both set out to upend well-established “common sense” categories: breaking down the boundaries among humans, animals, and machines while challenging gender essentialism and questioning the underlying assumptions of humanity’s fascination with primates through a post-colonial lens.

Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Delight features Haraway in a playful and engaging exploration of her life, influences, and ideas. Haraway is a passionate and discursive storyteller, and the film is structured around a series of discussions held in the California home she helped build by hand. Subjects include capitalism and the anthropocene (a term she “uses but finds troubling”); science fiction writing as philosophical text; unconventional marital and sexual partnerships; the role of Catholicism in her upbringing; the suppression of women’s writing; the surprisingly fascinating history of orthodontic aesthetics; and the need for new post-colonial and post-patriarchal narratives.

During the 1960s the Tasmanian artist Tony Woods (1940 – 2017) emerged as a rare talent in the Australian art scene. An advocate of modernism’s pluralism, his bold figuration, vigorous abstract formalism, irregular shaped canvases that often incorporated collage and the readymade, was a synthesis of American mid twentieth century avant-garde, Pop and counter-cultural mysticism edged with existential angst. This diversity was not so much a contradiction but a fluid enquiry into ideas that informed his analysis of visual representation.

When Woods began exhibiting on the Australian mainland he acquired an impressive collector base that included the American millionaire Harold Merz, the modernist architect Robin Boyd, Bernard Smith, Lord Talbot of Malahide, with Joseph Burke and Albert Tucker as avid admirers. These connections partly explain Woods’s award of a Harkness Fellowship to New York in 1967 (the last given to an Australian artist) and a guarantee of a Power Institute Cité des Arts International studio in Paris; he also hosted the American art critic Clement Greenberg on his Hobart visit in 1968. To all appearances, Woods’s reputation and suc­cess was sealed.

In the final months of his Manhattan residency, however, fire gutted his studio and he lost everything; his American dream a palpable absence that left him in a state of disequilibrium. Returning to Australia Woods slowly recovered and went about re-establishing his career and, while his artistic production expanded into a rich body of paintings, drawings, prints, video and sound works, he lacked validation from the art system and gradually retreated into seclusion. In this lecture I consider problems of inclusion and exclusion and why a talented artist like Tony Woods became peripheral. Paradoxically, this ‘negative freedom’ enabled him to explore alternative mediums and concepts of ‘error’ as a positive projection and absence as a productive presence. As an artist Tony Woods was ‘a laboratory of approaches that lies outside of —or in vital opposition to — quotidian and bourgeois structures of value and meaning’, in which his visual aperture revealed the undisclosed rather than the obvious in both real and abstract terms. Despite the art critic Patrick McCaughey once rating Woods as ‘perpetually promising’, a new generation of young artists from the late 1990s onwards recognized his artistic integrity, his invigorating cultural knowledge and the value of Woods’s empirical enquiries that complemented postmodernity’s instability.

Dr Sheridan Palmer is an art historian, curator and biographer, who has published extensively in art and literary journals. She has degrees from the Victorian College of Arts, La Trobe University and a PhD from the University of Melbourne where she is an Honorary Fellow. Sheridan has worked in painting conservation, as independent art dealer and has curated The Goddess Grins: Albert Tucker and the Female Image at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2007 and The Lake Hindmarsh Project, 2010, for which she received an Arts Victoria Creation Grant. She was awarded the National Gallery of Victoria Trustees Prize for sculpture (1973) and Joseph Brown Prize for drawing (1976) and as an art historian has been awarded numerous grants, including a Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art research grant in 2012, a Harold White Fellowship at National Library of Australia in 2010, a Sidney Myer Arts Grant, 2009 and a Manning Clark CAL Residential Fellowship in 2009. She was shortlisted for the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship in 2013 and the Australian Book Review Raft Fellowship in 2016.

Her books include Dean Bowen: Argy Bargy; Centre of the Periphery: Three European Art Historians in Melbourne, which is a major study of the establishment of art history in Australia, and Hegel’s Owl: The life of Bernard Smith, among others. She is currently researching post-war Australian modernism.

Doug Hall AM graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts and was director of two regional galleries before moving to Brisbane in 1987 where until 2007 he was director of the Queensland Art Gallery. Under his directorship the Queensland Art Gallery expanded its international focus and developed a strong engagement with Asia, especially through his initiative, the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. He conceived the idea for the Gallery of Modern Art and oversaw its development. He was Commissioner at the 53rd and 54th Venice Biennale from 2009 to 2011, and was appointed Associate Professor and Honorary Fellow in the School of Culture and Communications, Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.

Doug initiated, negotiated and curated many major exhibitions from within Australia and internationally and continues with academic and advisory roles in Australia and abroad. He has worked for cultural organisations including the Visua Arts Board of the Australia Council, as a member of the Australia International Cultural Council (Department of Foreign Affairs); and as a member of the Asia Art Council, Guggenheim Museum (New York), Executive Committee of the Australia-Thailand Institute, Australian Japan Foundation, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Gertrude Contemporary and Chairman of the Michael Buxton Collection.

He is widely published in newspapers, magazines and journals and wrote art criticism for the Australian Financial Review. His forthcoming book will be published in 2019. Hall was awarded the University of Queensland’s Doctor of Philosophy honoris causa for his contribution to the visual arts in Queensland and in 2001 he was awarded a member of the Order of Australia. In 2006 he was made a Chevalier dans l‘Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the Republic of France.

The lecture series will run from 23 August to 29 September at different locations in Victoria, featuring six newly commissioned papers by a group of art historians, curators, writers and artists based in Australia: Charles Green, Chari Larsson, Chris McAuliffe, Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks, Tina Baum, and Léuli Eshraghi. This lecture series is conceived alongside TarraWarra Biennial 2016 as a site for research and reflection, one that will draw the Biennial’s themes of circulation, iteration, critique, and making-public into different intellectual territories.

The six papers will be published in November 2016, towards the close of the TarraWarra Biennial, as part of a special issue of Discipline.

Carla Macchiavello is an art historian who works with Latin American contemporary art, performance and video, and the relations between art, politics and performative practices. She has published articles and essays on contemporary Chilean and Latin American art since the 1970s with an emphasis on artistic practices aimed at social change. After receiving a PhD in Art History and Criticism from Stony Brook University, New York in 2010, she worked as Assistant Professor in Art History at Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, and since 2015 she has been an Assistant Professor in Art History at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, New York. She has curated exhibitions on recent Latin American art and formed part of curatorial and editorial committees, including La Otra 2011 (Bogotá), the journal Cuadernos de Arte of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Seismopolite, and Más allá del fin/Beyond the End for Ensayos, an art and science program in Patagonia.

It does so through mediums and methods of sound being used by artists, bio-acousticians and scientists to make sense of, and communicate, earth system changes. Mapping out a range of eco-acoustic practices from field recordings to data and geo-sonifications, the talk investigates how such practices seek to delineate, highlight, and/ or overcome, distinctions between natural and social, urban and rural, exceptional and everyday.

This talk argues that these delineations are critical to perceptions of climate change, and its uneven human causations and effects. Fundamental to this investigation is the claim that such delineations affect the ability to listen to, and take care of, the myriad and complex ecosystems of which humans are a part. Grounded in research coming from the geo-humanities, this talk demonstrates that rather than being separate realms, the natural and social are deeply entangled and implicated in one another. As this talk emphasises, sound, as a medium that brings the world into proximity and envelops us, is uniquely placed to approach and communicate these critical, and ever more urgent, entanglements.

Anja Kanngieser is Vice Chancellors Fellow at the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research, with a background in geography and communication studies. Her work focuses on the intersections of political economy and ecology, sound and social movements. She is interested in the ways in which people strategise, antagonise and collaborate to create the living and working conditions they desire. Bringing into dialogue political economic theory with audio practices, she is engaged in the experimentation and invention of sound based methods in the social sciences.

Drawing upon audible and not so audible projects by a variety of artists including Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson, Pierre Huyghe and Laurent Grasso, this enquiry begins with Roger Callois’ musings on the writing of stones, detours through the accidental discovery of the the sonic record of the Big Bang in New Jersey in 1964, and culminates in a consideration of the relationship between sound fossils and ‘arche-fossils’ (Meillassoux) to sketch out the significance of mineral ontologies to contemporary artistic production.

Amelia Barikin is a contemporary art historian currently living in Brisbane, Australia. Her current research interests include time travel, contemporary art, science fiction, historiography, speculative paleontology, chronophobia, material animism, non-sites, and philosophies of time. She has worked as a writer and curator on numerous exhibitions and arts projects both independently and with broader cultural organisations, most recently with TarraWarra Museum of Art as co-curator of Pierre Huyghe: TarraWarra International 2015 with Victoria Lynn, and has published extensively. Her book ‘Parallel Presents: The Art of Pierre Huyghe‘ was published by MIT Press in 2012, her anthology ‘Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction‘, co-edited with Helen Hughes, was published by Surpllus in 2013. She is currently researching the relation between art and science fiction as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Art History at the University of Queensland, where she also teaches.

‘The twittering, babbling, echoing media and the murmurous crowd can be heard as the sonic materialization of a tone that supports a particular sonic/media ecology. But whereas echoing media perpetuate (literally) power-without-substance, echoing voices—in the street, in the market, at town hall gatherings, festivals, and demonstrations—articulate the common, public space in which sound resounds within and through a multiple rather than a unity. The repetitions in poetic speech and practises such as the people’s microphone might be a form of echoing within language, a way of ensuring perhaps the duration or longevity of expression, but they are also a direct, acoustic representation of reverberative space which is a space populated by things, substances, people—a space of extension and a space of finitude. This physicality is absent from the media-echo as the resounding of sound, its resonance, occurs anechoically and anaerobically—in the absence of an environment in which echo can occur, and the air through which the reverberation is carried.’ — Frances Dyson, The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology (MIT Press, 2015) 

Frances Dyson is Emeritus Professor of Cinema and Technocultural Studies at the University of California, Davis, and Visiting Professorial Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, University of New South Wales. “Frances Dyson’s audacious and rigorous study of the economies of noise, tone, sound, and music spells out a new politics of sound for the age of Occupy and global ecological crisis, and a new agenda for sound studies.” — Marcus Boon, Professor of English, York University; author of In Praise of Copying.

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist. His artistic work explores questions of social life and cultural agency, using sound, performance, text and sited constructions. This results in situational and contextual projects that create forms of intervention in public spaces, acts of translation and archiving, as well as micro-actions aimed at the sphere of the (un)common.

English singer and guitarist Richard Dawson is a skewed troubadour—at once charming and abrasive. His shambolically virtuosic guitar playing stumbles from music-hall tune-smithery to spidery swatches of noise-colour, swathed in amp static and teetering on the edge of feedback. His songs are both chucklesome and tragic, rooted in a febrile imagination that references worlds held dear and worlds unknown.

84 years young, Tom Ogley is a resident of Docklands and is one of many volunteers at the Mission to Seafarers situated at 717 Flinders street Docklands. The Mission to Seafarers is very lucky to have Tom look after the venue’s beautiful garden, a secret little green oasis right in the heart of the city. In his spare time, Tom enjoys rock and roll dancing—and is also a great tap dancer!

The clutch of late 2013/early 2014 ISIS videos have been near-unanimously accepted as being real—mostly out of fear that they might be real. Yet the videos employ multi-camera set-ups, pixel-tracking, void-compositing, particle effects and diffusion plug-ins which are utilised in Hollywood, television advertising and video art production—all of whom ape cinematic effects for various purposes.

The contemporary dilemma is not whether one believes the videos to be real or unreal, but how one distinguishes their divination from the consternation of Zero Dark Thirty, the hysterics of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, or the rhetoric of Harun Farocki’s Serious Games. Each voids the others’ effects through mimicking, adopting and transplanting each other’s desperate drive to evidence reality, and thereby transform the world in its image.

‘Institutional critique’ thus runs rampant, supplying an endless demand for symbolic intervention. Lo-fi terrorist tracts, ethical Hollywood movies, and large-scale museographic commissions all subvert and re-route language codes from one channel of cultural address to then re-broadcast it as liminal or oppositional information. All effectively terrorise their language of address.

For the intelligentsia, this involves acts of ‘decoding’ and ‘exposing’. For ISIS, it involves recoding and posting. The question to be begged: if it is socially acceptable for the intelligentsia to mount critiques of ‘the State’ deemed responsible for inducing terrorist acts, why is it ethically unacceptable for a terrorist cell to engage in identical critiques by using identical artistic and linguistic operations?

What does it mean when a terror cell adopts the aesthetic of the enemy it seeks to unravel?

If Hollywood is the opposite of reality, why have those in the Western media been so quick to accept the veracity of slick ISIS productions? Do facts even matter, or is the threat of violence – as opposed to the inflicting of violence – the point of all horror movies? How do we understand the difference between performed and documentary horror if the vision is near-identical?

Graphic content warning: While this event will not include the screening of footage depicting actual violence or confronting imagery, it may include still images (of dubious veracity) which some attendees may find disturbing or uncomfortable.

I am using ‘approach’ here in the double sense of a signpost and a method (a ‘how to speak’ and a ‘how to make’). This double-approach carries with it an understanding that artists have the power and the right to have an encounter with politics today: that is, the ‘power’ in the Agamben-Aristotle sense of having the power to act, whether one exercises it or not, and having the right in the sense that Foucault uses it in his lectures on parrhesia, as the ‘right to speak the truth.’ We remember, though, that such power and such parrhesia carries risks, since artists, speakers, writers, and philosophers must also accept the consequences of their ‘outspokenness.’ The tyrant has the power to react, but not in the sense above, but in a much weaker form (ethically, ontologically) as the power to impose force. Is this where we are today, stuck in the tyrant’s glare?

This lecture will look at the problematic of how art might approach political questions in its continuing encounter with neo-liberal capitalism and forms part of a forthcoming book on contemporary approaches to politics and art.

Jan Bryant teaches art history and theory in Fine Arts at Monash University. Her recent publications are: ‘Adelle Mills,’ NEW15, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2015; ‘Fiona Macdonald at Margaret Lawrence,’ Eyeline, forthcoming in 2015; ‘Et. Al. For the Common Good,’ West, Groenewegje Den Haag, The Netherlands, 2015.

In Rorschach Audio: Art and Illusion for Sound, Banks offers a critical account of Spiritualistic and allegedly supernatural Electronic Voice Phenomena (ghost­voice) recordings, tracing the uncanny phenomena back through the histories of art, literature and the little-known audio monitoring work by U.K. wartime intelligence agencies. Banks argues that ‘the earliest form of sound recording technology was not a machine but was written language,’ illustrating the argument via a series of fascinating and bizarre psychoacoustic illusions.

Emerging in London in the mid 1990s, Disinformation pioneered creative uses of electromagnetic (radio) noise radiated by live mains electricity, lightning, magnetic storms, high­ voltage plasma discharges, industrial, IT and laboratory hardware, railway and metro systems, and the sun. From the beginning, Disinformation’s imagery was strongly driven by research into fields including military research and development, space physics, and psychology of perception and illusion. While other young artists were subscribing to Artforum, Joe was devouring journals on defence electronics and communications psychology. In 2012 he published the book Rorschach Audio: Art and Illusion for Sound exploring the relation between techniques of recording and mechanisms of perception, through figures as diverse as parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive, artist Jean Cocteau, and the art historian and wartime intelligence eavesdropper E.H. Gombrich. Joe lives in London, near the set of traffic lights which inspired physicist Leo Szilard to conceive the theory of the thermonuclear chain reaction.

David Raskin is Mohn Family Professor of Contemporary Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Editor-in-Chief of caa.reviews. He is author of Donald Judd (Yale University Press, 2010), and other scholarly publications, including essays on Noriyuki Haraguchi, Ad Reinhardt, Jo Baer, Olle Baertling, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Carl Andre, and pragmatic aesthetics. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the United States Study Centre, University of Sydney, Australia.

Raskin’s visit to Australia has been supported by the United States Study Centre, University of Sydney.

This is the screensaver, where a temporary project acts as a transition slide for a city yet to come. Screensaver architecture can be read cynically as low-cost aesthetic camouflage that may disguise speculative development to follow. Or it may provide fleeting moments to create new civic meaning and forms outside of market-driven property and planning frameworks. Whatever position you may take, the screensaver needs you, the creative, to join in on the fun. What should you do as a creative citizen? Do you resist, revolutionise or compromise? What is the potential of screensaver architecture, which straddles two moments in time?

Timothy Moore is a director of architecture office SIBLING, which is completing two projects in Collingwood, VICE’s Australian headquarters and a contemporary gallery that will house a Gertrude Contemporary project space. Prior to SIBLING, Timothy worked at architecture offices in Melbourne, Amsterdam and Berlin, and as an editor for two influential architecture magazines, Volume and Architecture Australia. Timothy’s work has extended beyond architecture and publishing to strategic urban design when working as a project director for Right Angle Studio developing temporary activation strategies for large urban regeneration sites, and is currently undertaking a PhD in the University of Melbourne’s Architecture, Building and Planning Faculty on this topic. He currently sits on the City of Yarra Arts Room To Create Advisory Committee, and is co-creating a series of community conversations for the City of Melbourne as a core commitment of its Arts Strategy.

This panel will delve into current discourse around freedom of speech, civil liberties, discrimination and human rights in the context of global terrorism. It will consider the role of the artist in these debates along with issues around censorship, the politicization of cultural difference and the aesthetic dimension of politics.

Justin Clemens has published extensively on psychoanalysis, contemporary European philosophy, and contemporary Australian art and literature. His recent books include Lacan Deleuze Badiou with A.J. Bartlett and Jon Roffe; Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy; and Minimal Domination. He was the art critic for the Australian magazine The Monthly (2004–2009) and is well-known nationally as a commentator on Australian art and literature.

Sary Zananiri is a Melbourne-based Palestinian-Australian artist and writer. His current interest is responding to absent sites in the public realm and their recreation through documentation.

Nur Shkembi is a Melbourne based contemporary Muslim artist and the Arts Officer at the Islamic Council of Victoria. The Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV) is the peak body for Muslim organisations in Victoria.

Lizzie O’Shea is responsible for Maurice Blackburn’s national social justice practice. Based in Melbourne, Lizzie works on cases that address issues of community concern that are in the public interest. She provides access to justice for community groups that are fighting battles which have an impact beyond their own individual case, and people who would otherwise be unable to afford legal representation, such as asylum seekers and refugees, workers who have been underpaid, and people who have been unfairly targeted by national security legislation. Lizzie is also Chair of the volunteer human rights not-for-profit media organisation Right Now.

Where is the future? Such a question deliberately situates the future as a territory to be engineered, a future not merely unveiled by mechanisms (or automatisms) of critique. The future demands an exercise rooted in the speculative labour of linking knowing with doing, namely ethics, and not sheer gestures of cognitive negativity. The future demands affirmation. This diagrammatic talk will cull from recent (left) Accelerationist discourse and probe the constructability of futurity, partially via the humble back door of artistic practice.

Patricia Reed is an artist and writer. Exhibitions have included those at the Witte de With (NL); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (DE); Kunsthaus Langenthal (CH); Württembergische Kunstverein (DE); Audain Gallery (CA); and 0047 (NO), amongst others. As a writer she has contributed to several books and periodicals including: #ACCELERATE — The Accelerationist Reader; The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Vol. II; Mould Magazine; Material #4; Who Told You So?!; A Joy Forever (in Polish) Institutions By Artists; Intangible Economies; Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics; Critical Spatial Practice; C Magazine; Fillip, Art Papers, Shifter and Framework. Lectures have included those at The Future Summit — Montreal Biennale (CA); Tate Britain (UK, Speculative Tate); University of Westminster (UK); Dampfzentrale (CH); Artists Space (US); MIT (US); abc Berlin (DE); Archive Kabinett (DE); and The Winter School Middle East (KW). Reed plays host to the Inclinations lecture series at Or Gallery in Berlin, where she also lives. She teaches and is a board member for The New Centre for Research & Practice, and is part of the Laboria Cuboniks working group.

Sean Dockray is an artist and writer and a PhD candidate at the VCA. He initiated the autonomous pedagogical projects The Public School and AAAARG.ORG, and was a founding director of Telic Arts Exchange in Los Angeles.

Currently online, the critic James Elkins — on his way out of art history and preparing to write a novel — is developing a fascinating website project titled ‘Writing with Images’. He means this in two senses: how does writing conventionally ‘go with’ images in art criticism, how are the two media arranged in relation to each other? His critique of this traditional art/text relation in the worlds of publishing, criticism and academia is often rightly withering. So then he intends the phrase radically: is it possible to write with images themselves, and to bring the two ‘writings’ — text and image — into a more dynamic, fertile combination? Such arguments about ‘text and art’ have gone on, at various, levels for at least forty or fifty years, and not least in Australia. They have also happened in other areas with which Elkins seems unaware, such as film criticism — where the recent trend of the ‘audiovisual essay’ endeavours to write with text, image and sound simultaneously, instead of only published words. This lecture will outline some of the key issues Elkins raises and embed them in diverse practices of contemporary arts criticism and hybrid ‘creative commentary’ experiments.

Adrian Martin has just finished a two-year stint as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Film Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt. He is about to relocate to Spain to be a full-time writer and audiovisual essayist, but remains Adjunct Associate Professor of Film at Monash University.

The Karrabing Film Collective’s short feature film When the Dogs Talked blends documentary and fictional modes to track the lives of the people that made it. As the film shows, finding ways to live life can be exhausting — we often run out of batteries. The film offers at least one way in which a group of people might charge these up again. But where can the film itself find a place? Is the rapaciously expansive world of contemporary art such a place? Can the abstract globality of contemporary art be brought back to earth?

Led by Landings and Discipline, these two public meetings, one in Melbourne and one in Brisbane, will bring diverse voices to bear upon the film’s semi-fictional account of life across urban dwelling and Aboriginal homeland, questioning how choices can be made amid the incommensurable conditions of settler-colonial politics.

Key invited guests will structure a ‘plenum’ in which the voices of members of the public will be facilitated to join in. Guests will include: members of the Karrabing Film Collective, including Linda Yarrowin and Trevor Bianamu; Elizabeth Povinelli, Columbia University, New York; Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne; Denise Ferreira da Silva, Queen Mary University, London; Julieta Aranda, artist and editor, e-flux journal; Rachel O’Reilly, critic, poet and editor; Tom Nicholson, artist; and Richard Bell, artist (Brisbane only).

They will discuss their approaches to curating contemporary Turkish art, highlighting the individual concerns, challenges and circumstances that motivate and inform their curatorial approaches. Following the panel discussion, Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practise at Monash University and Editor at-large for The Exhibitionist, Tara McDowell, will facilitate a Q&A with the audience.

Mari Spirito is the Founding Director of Protocinema, a nonprofit realising transnational, site-aware exhibitions around the world, based in Istanbul. Protocinema recently presented Diner Noire, with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Tristan Bera in Istanbul; early work by Gerard Byrne in a former Chinese deli in New York; and new work by Ahmet Ögüt in New York in partnership with Itinerant. Spirito served as an Advisor to the 2nd Mardin Biennial, Turkey (2012). Prior to founding Protocinema, she was Director of 303 Gallery in New York for 12 years, where she worked on large-scale, site-specific works by Mike Nelson and Doug Aitken. She holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. Spirito is a Consultant for Art Basel’s Conversation and Salons, and is on the boards of Participant Inc. and New Art Dealers Alliance in New York; and Collectorspace in Istanbul.

Övül Durmusoglu is a curator and writer based in Berlin and Istanbul. She completed an MFA in Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design at Sabanci University, Istanbul and participated in the Critical Studies program at Malmö Art Academy, Sweden (2005–06). In 2007, Durmusoglu was awarded the Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi Young Curators Award for her exhibition Data Recovery, GAMeC, Bergamo, and in 2010 she received a Rave Scholarship to work on a collaborative project of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa), Stuttgart and the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. In 2013, Durmusoglu curated the festival Sofia Contemporary. As a Goethe Institute Fellow at Maybe Education and Public Programs for dOCUMENTA (13), she organised the programs, What is Thinking? Or a Taste That Hates Itself; Readers Circle: 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts; and Paper Mornings: Book Presentations at dOCUMENTA (13). Durmusoglu has contributed to different catalogues, publications, and magazines such as Frieze d/e, Flash Art International, and …ment.

Basak Senova is a curator and designer. She studied literature and graphic design (MFA in Graphic Design and PhD in Art, Design and Architecture at Bilkent University) and attended the 7th Curatorial Training Programme of Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam. She has been writing on art, technology and media, initiating and developing projects and curating exhibitions since 1995. Senova is an editorial correspondent for ibraaz.org and one of the founding members of NOMAD, as well as the organizer of ctrl_alt_del and Upgrade!Istanbul. Senova was the curator of the Pavilion of Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). As an assistant professor, she has lectured at various universities in Istanbul, such as Kadir Has University, Bilgi University and Koç University. She co-curated UNCOVERED (Cyprus) and the 2nd Biennial of Contemporary Art, D-0 ARK Underground (Bosnia and Herzegovina). Senova is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Istanbul Biennial and D-0 ARK Underground, and of the Advisory Committee of Protocinema. She is the curator of the Helsinki Photography Biennial 2014, Jerusalem Show, and the Art Gallery Chair of SIGGRAPH 2014 (ACM), Vancouver.

November Paynter is Associate Director of Research and Programmes, SALT in Istanbul. She was previously Curator for Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center 2002–2006, Assistant Curator of the 9th International Istanbul Biennial in 2005, and among other achievements was the 2003 recipient of the Premio Lorenza Bonaldi per L’arte – EnterPrize, as the first curator under the age of 30 to be recognised with this award. In 2007, Paynter was Consultant Curator at Tate Modern for the exhibition Global Cities and her recent independent curatorial projects include New Ends Old Beginnings at the Bluecoat and Open Eye galleries in Liverpool (2008); The columns held us up at Artists Space in New York (2009); and As the Land Expands at Al Riwaq Art Space in Bahrain (2010). Paynter also worked on 0 – Now: Traversing West Asia (co-curated with Russell Storer) for the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane in 2011. Paynter writes for art periodicals including Artforum, Bidoun and ArtAsiaPacific, as well as for artist and exhibition publications.

Mari Spirito, Övül Durmusoglu, Basak Senova and November Paynter have been brought to Australia by Artspace, Sydney, in partnership with Protocinema, Istanbul, in the lead-up to the Australian-Turkish year of collaboration (2015). This curatorial research visit and public talk is generously supported and enabled by the Australia Council for the Arts and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

How should we think the weaponisation of sound? And what, if anything, has law got to do with it? The ‘sonic booms’ over Nicaragua were raised in proceedings before the International Court of Justice, but made legally cognisable only as airspace violations. In legal terms, the LRAD is so readily available internationally precisely because it is presented as a ‘communication device’ rather than a ‘weapon’. Torture is in principle criminalised, but the invisibility of sound in ‘interrogation practices’ is invariably exploited in order to mask its violence, and the playlists in question (Britney, Metallica, Barney the Dinosaur) are far more likely to raise a chuckle than juridical concern. Is law capable of any sort of purchase here at all? Or is it in fact a part of the problem? What, in other words, is the jurisprudence of sonic warfare?

Dr James Parker is a lecturer at Melbourne Law School, where he is also director of the research program ‘Law, Sound and the International’ at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities. He is currently putting the finishing touches to a monograph – Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) – which considers the trial of Simon Bikindi, who was accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of inciting genocide with his songs. James is also an active music critic and radio broadcaster. These days he does most of his music writing for Tiny Mix Tapes. Since 2011, he has presented a weekly radio show dedicated to experimental sounds on Melbourne’s PBS 106.7fm.

In this lecture Smith will trace the responses to the article up to the present day, including his own changes of mind. He will consider how the problems and possibilities identified in the 1970’s  have fared since then, and how world pictures changed during the shift from late modern to contemporary art.

Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. He is the 2010 winner of the Franklin Jewett Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA), and in 2011 received the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate Award.

Smith is the author of a number of books, notably Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Transformations in Australian Art, volume 1, The Nineteenth Century: Landscape, Colony and Nation, volume 2, The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King; Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011 and 2012), Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), and Sodobna Umetnost in Sodobnos: Zbirka Esjeci [Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity: Collected Essays] (Ljubljana: SDLK, Slovensko drustvo likovnih kritikov [Slovenian Society of Critical Aesthetics], 2013).

It covers such figures as Thomas Watson, Henry David Thoreau, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Joyce Hinterding and Alvin Lucier, Kahn’s former teacher. Investigating the trade between acoustics and electromagnetism in aesthetics and the arts poses questions for new approaches in the arts, ecology and media where sound is but one energy among others.

Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation and Australian Research Council Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW Art and Design, and formerly Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University of California at Davis. Kahn’s writings are central to the fields of sound studies, sound in the arts, media arts history and history of experimental music. His books include Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Avant-garde (MIT Press, 1999), Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (MIT Press, 1992), Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966–1973 (University of California Press, 2011), Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts (University of California Press, 2012), and Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013). His current project is A Natural History of Media.

Building on ideas drawn from Uwe Wirth’s theory of discursive stupidity and the re-situation of genius as the cousin of foolishness, this lecture will outline an argument for wit and stupidity as strategies for painting. This argument is attended by the proposition that a connection can be drawn between the outside-ness of stupidity and the outside-ness of critical distance, and that the point where the two meet is in aesthetic experience, in the meta-cognitive space that constitutes neither thought nor sensation, and which resists an end in understanding. 

Helen Johnson (born 1979) is an artist and writer based in Melbourne. Recent exhibitions include Ex-execs at Minerva, Sydney; Time Enough For Love at Chapter House Lane, Melbourne; Meantime at Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; Mural Problem at Otras Obras, Tijuana; Air to Surface at Prism, Los Angeles; Melbourne Now at the NGV and Collage: The Heide Collection at Heide Museum of Modern Art. She is a regular contributor to Un Magazine and Discipline. She recently completed a PhD at Monash University entitled Critical Form: On Proceeding as a Painter.

At the same time, she was producing exhibitions and installations under the moniker “Design Office”. In this lecture, Branden W. Joseph, editor of Is It My Body?, a collection of Gordon’s early art writing published this year on Sternberg Press, will discuss the little known range of Gordon’s aesthetic practices and critical views from that time, as well as certain continuations of Gordon’s artistic practice to the present day.

Branden W. Joseph is the Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He is the author of several books, including Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone Books, 2008) and Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 2003), which appeared in French translation on Éditions (SIC). His writings have appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Art Journal, Critical Inquiry, October, Texte zur Kunst, Parkett and Les Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne, as well as in a number of edited volumes and catalogues. He was a founding editor and is currently editorial board member of Grey Room, a journal of architecture, art, media, and politics published quarterly by the MIT Press since 2000.

Perhaps Blackness emancipated from science and history would wonder about another praxis and wander away and beyond the World, guiding the Feminist to an imagining of other ways of knowing and doing. From without the World as we know it, gazing at the Horizon of The Thing – where the imagination plays unchained – such a Black Feminist Poethic could expose the whole field of possibilities for knowing and doing.

Towards this End, as a preliminary move, this talk returns to the task some call the critique of representation, with an account that confronts juridical (the authorised total violence of the police and the courts) and economic (the expropriation of total value from indigenous lands and enslaved labour) moments of racial subjugation.”

The Gertrude Contemporary – Discipline: Contemporary Art Lecture Series is a collaboration between Melbourne-based contemporary art journal Discipline and Gertrude Contemporary. The series presents lectures on key concerns, artists and theories of contemporary art. Throughout 2013 lecturers have spoken from the perspective of a variety of different disciplines — including philosophy, cultural studies, art history and literary studies — as well as from academic and non-academic backgrounds.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is a Professor in Ethics at Queen Mary-University London and currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at La Trobe University. She approaches Ethics and Political Theory with tools from critical legal theory, historical-materialism, feminist theory, racial and postcolonial/global studies. Her recent publications include: Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Notes Towards the End of Time (2013), “No-Bodies: Law, Raciality, Violence” (Griffith Law Review, 2009), “Accumulation, Dispossession and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism,” W/ Paula Chackravartty (American Quarterly 2012), and “To be Announced: Radical Praxis (at) the Limits of Justice” (Social Text, 2013).

Vivian Ziherl is a researcher, curator and critic. Since 2011 she has been a Curator at  If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part Of Your Revolution in Amsterdam. Independent projects include “Landings” (Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art and other partner organizations) and “StageIt!” (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam). Her writing has appeared in periodicals including e-flux Journal, Scapegoat, Pages Magazine, Frieze, LEAP Magazine, Metropolis M, Discipline, Eyeline and the Journal of Art (Art Association of Australia and New Zealand), among others.

Dockray, initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms The Public School and AAAARG.ORG, will draw on computer science to trace the shifts in online knowledge sharing in what he calls “a dark lecture, written under the cloud’s shadow”, but one that will attempt to gesture toward “cracks in those interfaces that define the seemingly impermeable contours of this new reality.”

The Gertrude Contemporary – Discipline: Contemporary Art Lecture Series is a collaboration between Melbourne based contemporary art journal Discipline and Gertrude Contemporary. The series presents lectures on key concerns, artists and theories of contemporary art. Throughout 2013 lecturers have spoken from the perspective of a variety of different disciplines — including philosophy, cultural studies, art history and literary studies — as well as from academic and non-academic backgrounds.

Sean Dockray is an artist, a founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms The Public School and AAARG.ORG. As a research fellow the Post-Media Lab at Leuphana University last year, he explored the physical infrastructure of the sharing economy, focusing on Facebook’s new northern European datacenter. His written essays address topics such as online education (Frieze), the militarization of universities (in Contestations: Learning from Critical Experiments in Education), book scanning (Fillip), traffic control (Cabinet), and radio (Volume).

Jake Goldenfein is a Fellow and PhD candidate at the Centre for Media and Communications Law at Melbourne Law School doing socio-legal research on histories of communication technologies and the legal regimes governing them with a focus on state archives (criminal records, photos and dossiers). He has been a researcher at Melbourne Law School, New York Law School, and The Swinburne Institute for Social Research in the fields of intellectual property, media and communications history and theory, communications policy, privacy and media law. His recent publications cover topics such as police photography, informal media economies, legal accidents, and the history of the archive.

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith is a critic and occasional curator who teaches in the School of Irish, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore and Linguistics at University College Dublin. In addition to his writings on literature in the Irish language he has published widely on contemporary art. Among his most recent publications are monographic essays on the work of Douglas Gordon, Annette Kelm, Elad Lassry, Anj Smith, John Stezaker and James Welling. He is a contributor to Afterall, Artforum, Frieze, Parkett and Tate Etc. He has curated exhibitions in Dublin, London, Amsterdam and New York and was a juror for the 2005 Turner Prize.

Rebecca Coates is an independent curator and writer, Associate Curator, ACCA, and lecturer in Art History and Art Curatorship, School of Culture and Communications, University of Melbourne. In 2013 she completed a PhD in the field of exhibition histories. She has worked extensively as a curator in Australia and overseas, including ACCA, the NGV, and MOMA Oxford, where she curated and developed an extensive program of touring exhibitions and collaborative projects with art spaces and museums in the UK and Europe. She writes regularly for Australian and international art journals and publications.

During her talk, Cornell will give a succinct overview of art engaged with the internet, and explore how the vastly accelerated circulation and distribution of contemporary art has facilitated the emergence of new communities, new aesthetics and formal trends and a host of discursive opportunities, and challenges. Cornell will focus on her work with Rhizome, as well as recent exhibitions she has organized, including Free (2010) at the New Museum, and Circulate (2012) at Foam, Amsterdam, and briefly discuss her work as Curator of the Museum as Hub and The 2015 New Museum Triennale.

Formerly Executive Director of Rhizome, Cornell is now Curator of 2015 Triennial (with Ryan Trecartin), Curator of Digital Projects and the Museum as Hub, which is a new model for curatorial practice and institutional collaboration at the New Museum. During her visit to Australia Cornell will be researching for these projects, meeting with artists, galleries and other curators. Her dynamic approach has been recognised internationally and she has co-curated two recent pivotal exhibitions; The Generational: Younger than Jesus, 2009 (co-curated with Massimiliano Gioni and Laura Hoptman) and Free, 2010, both at the New Museum, amongst numerous other exhibitions.

This lecture will coincide with the publication of Clemens’ forthcoming book Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy published by Edinburgh University Press.

Justin Clemens writes extensively on contemporary Australian art and European philosophy. His books include Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2013); Minimal Domination (Melbourne: Surpllus 2011), a collection of writings on art; and, with Dominic Pettman, Avoiding the Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP 2004). His creative works include the poetry chapbook Me ‘n’ me trumpet (Sydney: Vagabond 2011); the novella Black River (Melbourne: re.press 2007), with collages by Helen Johnson; and the mock-epic poem The Mundiad (Melbourne: Black Inc 2004). He is also the co-editor of collections on and by such major contemporary thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Jacqueline Rose. He teaches at the University of Melbourne.

We can see the current politics of the liberal democratic, in which sovereign aggression is excused by sovereign care. Where law both pushes the subject into the abyss in the interests of its protection, and where flesh is cut, tortured and even killed as a mode of justice. A contemporary democratic politics that embodies such paradox offers a thin space between the air and the ground, and demands the fantasy of endless capture, for some, and the foreclosure of the possibility that flesh may fall and not be caught.

Dr Juliet Rogers is Faculty Member at the School of Political Sciences, Criminology at the University of Melbourne, and currently an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow undertaking a psychoanalytic examination of the ‘Quality of Remorse’ after periods of political and military conflict. She was formerly a community worker and then a psychotherapist. She turned from this life to work in academia and she has recently been a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, at Yale Law School, Connecticut and at the University of Cape Town Law School, South Africa. Her work is always a melding between psychoanalysis and law, that is, it is always a concern with the limit. She recently published Law’s Cut on the Body of Human Rights: Female Circumcision, Torture and Sacred Flesh which will be out in July with Routledge, and she is currently working on a monograph on Remorse.

Maria Tumarkin is a Melbourne-based writer and cultural historian. She is the author of three acclaimed books of ideas: Traumascapes, Courage and Otherland. Maria’s essays – tackling our culture’s preoccupations and blindspots – have been included in Best Australian Essays 2011 and 2012. Maria holds a PhD in cultural history from the University of Melbourne. She has taught at universities and writing centres, directed video clips, written radio documentaries, contributed catalogue essays for galleries and museums, and forged ongoing collaborations with artists and psychologists. She is a 2013–14 Sidney Myer Creative Fellow.

Nixon has been lauded for continuing the radical experiments of Russian constructivism, criticised for not being truly experimental, and positioned as continuing an avant-garde tradition that somehow brings together the monochrome and the readymade. In this lecture and accompanying paper, published in Discipline No. 3, Rex Butler reads Nixon’s work through the writings of art critic Boris Groys to suggest that it is—of all things—communist. The lecture was a fantastic success, with over 175 attendants and a well-defined critical debate taking place at its conclusion.

Rex Butler teaches in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, specialising in contemporary and Australian art. He is currently working on a book on Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?

HOMEWORK considers the manifold ways that embodied life (birth, death, love, friendship, solidarity, race, gender, sexuality, citizenship) are conditioned by a world that appears both ruinous and full of potential. Snack Syndicate asks how to read ruins and how to read the prophecy of hope that threads together a long history of survival and struggle. The book offers a guide for this reading, taking study to be a lifelong practice. It suggests a model for homework as the promise we make to each other through study and to the ghosts who carry us forward.

“HOMEWORK is done in all those ‘illegitimate’ places, which are everywhere, if one takes the time to look and listen. And even if done in isolation, in all the places where nonhistories live, this work is never done alone. Leave the geniuses to squabble over their canon, the best art usually occurs in kitchens, bedrooms, side-alleys, and public libraries. It is written in the margins, with love, alongside and through what we choose to read and hear. That’s why this book invites snacks, coffee stains, and dog ears on top and bottom, let your notes trespass into and through the text. This is the best way to respond to books, and this book in particular.”—from Homework for Love and Trouble by Tom Melick

The exhibition presented a variety of readymade, found and modified objects—many sourced from the University campus—in geometric configurations on the classroom floor, accompanied by a flyer and information sheet.

The publication University Construction serves as a record of the exhibition. It includes photographs of the exhibition, along with scans of the flyer and information sheet. The publication also includes More Minor Constructions, a series of photographs taken several weeks after the exhibition closed, in the classroom where the exhibition was held.

The publication serves a documentary function; it also builds a discursive context around the exhibition. It features texts by David Homewood, Helen Johnson, Paris Lettau and Elizabeth Newman. The texts draw out ideas, issues and themes related to the exhibition, directly and indirectly. Each text engages an old question that continues to exert a hold on the present—the question of the relationship between art and the university, and the university and art.

This publication takes as its subject Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough’s The Lost World (Part 2) exhibition and intervention in the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. This project is the subject of essays by Gough herself, Dacia Viejo-Rose, Ellen Smith and Christoph Balzar, with photography by Mark Adams, and a foreword by Nicholas Thomas. It is introduced by the exhibition’s curator, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, also the editor of this publication. The Importance of Being Anachronistic is a peer-reviewed publication, and a collaboration between the journals Discipline and Third Text.

This publication focuses Discipline’s interest in contemporary art onto the practice of art history itself, including essays by three of the discipline’s leading practitioners: Ian McLean, Amelia Barikin, and Terry Smith. In their essays, McLean, Barikin and Smith reflect on the stakes of a properly contemporary art history: its semantic precursors and philosophical potential, its link to the undead and, ultimately, its necessity.

The Biennale of Sydney, founded in 1973, has enjoyed for over 40 years the support of Transfield, a now multi-national business whose philanthropy has allowed the event to become one of Australia’s most important artistic platforms.

Since 2012, Transfield Services, a member of the same corporate structure as Transfield’s philanthropic arm, has been contracted by the Australian government to build and operate detention centres on the islands of Nauru and, later, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, where the Australian government mandatorily detains asylum seekers in order to prevent them reaching Australian shores.  In early 2014, Transfield Services accepted a major new contract worth 1.2 billion dollars to take over welfare and garrison support at the detention centres.

Australia’s detention centres have received local and international condemnation for their cruel treatment of asylum seekers, and these practices are seen to be in breach of Australia’s international law and human rights obligations.

On 19 February 2014, an open letter signed by 37 participating artists was sent to the Board of the Biennale, asking it to cut ties with Transfield and to, in turn, send a message to the Australian government that its current asylum seeker policies are ‘ethically indefensible and a breach of human rights’. On 21 February 2014, the Board responded that without Transfield, the Biennale of Sydney would not exist, and that it would therefore continue as planned under its sponsorship.

The debate raises significant and complex questions about what we should expect of art in the 21st century, the conditions under which such art can and should be shown, and its relationship to the world of people that make up its content, audience and context.

For us, the Biennale’s continued structural entanglement with Transfield is more than just a blight on the art it claims to represent, but also a disavowal of the positive actions against Australia’s deplorable policies that it and its art are capable of. The Board’s evasive response was a complete failure to meaningfully engage with the important issues raised by the 37 artist-signatories to the open letter.

Although the Biennale’s Board may not have much to say, this is not true of the rest of the Australian art community.

Accordingly, over the coming weeks Discipline will be publishing here on our website a series of short responses by key art writers, artists and thinkers, analysing the situation and offering suggestions as to how to proceed.

We offer this platform in the hope of deepening and developing the broader understanding of this complex issue, and as an embodiment of the critical and compassionate thinking that is one of our strongest weapons against the politics of cruelty under and against which art today must be thought and made.

—Helen Hughes & Nicholas Croggon, 1 March 2014

Institute Zagreb 1986 intertwines two narratives about a religion conceived by a pair of demographic analysts on the rooftop of an abandoned building, and a rock-collecting character named The Saxon. The narrative is collated through a process of uncovering archived audio recordings retained by an ʻexplosion proofʼ telephone. Institute Zagreb 1986 is interspersed with a series of graphic elements created for the publication by Joshua Petherick. The Air of Conquerors is a piece of surreal detective fiction set against a backdrop of the South Australian Desert scattered with ruined Parisian monuments. It chronicles two investigatorsʼ search for a lonely telephone operator who has disappeared into a subterranean hotel. The narrative was written in reference to a series of photographs that were taken by Nicholas Mangan in Paris in November 2011 and sent to the author as part of a project exploring the fictionalisation of images — both historical and the everyday.

Since 2009, Lore has written fictional texts to accompany a number of exhibitions by Melbourne-based artists and curators, including: Christopher LG Hill, Dylan Martorell, Liv Barrett, Nathan Gray, Alex Vivian, Marco Fusinato, A Constructed World/Speech & What Archive, James Deutsher, Gambia Castle/The Reader, Joint Hassles/Harriet Morgan, Helen Hughes, Genevieve Osborn, and Nicholas Mangan. He is also a regular contributor to the Melbourne-based contemporary art journal Discipline, in which he is publishing the serialised novel, Watts’ Tale of Endless Ore — one chapter per issue.