Alan Cruickshank, Executive Director, CACSA
David Elliot, Artistic Director of the 2010 Biennale of Sydney,

Alan Cruickshank Introduction:
David Elliott is the artistic director of this year’s Biennale of Sydney with the title The Beauty of Distance, Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age. He is a curator, writer, broadcaster and museum director, whose main interests concern contemporary art, Russian avant-garde and the visual cultures of central and Eastern Europe, Asia and the non-western world from the late nineteenth-century. Beginning in the early 1980s, he formulated a series of pioneering exhibitions in one of the first programs to integrate non-western culture with contemporary art. He has published a large number of books, articles and catalogues on these subjects and has also written extensively about the present-day role and function of museums and contemporary art.

He was the founding Director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo from 2001–2006, and in 2007 the first Director of Istanbul Modern, Turkey, where I saw his ‘Time Present, Time Past: Highlights from 20 Years of the International Istanbul Biennial’ (2007).

In Broadsheet’s interview with David Elliott in September last year, art critic Lee Weng Choy observed that biennales are often criticized for being prescriptive and repetitive. But he also questioned that if biennales are too prescriptive, it’s not just because certain artists and practices are being privileged, repeated, reproduced and circulated. Rather, the prescription of the biennale, in its most profound sense, is how it naturalises a certain global perspective. He argued for going beyond the critique of Eurocentrism—not by offering an alternative narrative, say, of an ascendant Asia—but by interrupting the elisions and closures of—‘the global’.

He went on to say that ‘the biennale’ is an exemplary form of bringing together, for display, a wide selection of global art and culture, but most exhibitions omit the great distances between the many locations represented—and that the trouble with biennale criticism is that only in the rare occasion does it read its object with a thorough commitment to the multiplicities available in the exhibitions discussed. Weng Choy asked how often does one hear a reviewer lamenting that he or she has—“seen it all before”. Whether or not such remarks are inaccurate, such rejections paradoxically only further consolidate the centrality of ‘the global’, they fail to adequately comprehend the possibilities of interrupting the global perspective. So, Lee Weng Choy asked the question of DE—“do you buy this argument that it’s important to interrupt the global perspective, and how might your Biennale attempt to do it”?

David Elliott responded with:

“I am making an exhibition specifically for Sydney that relates to the history of the sites, place and community but, importantly, also needs to stand up on the international stage. As Sydney/Australia are paradigms of colonial and postcolonial development and I have been looking, but not exclusively so, at a lot of new work in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific region, the Biennale should have a particular resonance that will also be comprehensible much further afield… I am skeptical about capitalist globalization that looks at the world purely as a ‘resource’ that can be owned and profited from, as well as a globalised art that reflects mainly the concerns of the art markets in New York or London. I am trying to put together an exhibition that, while being critically aware of this, comprehends and celebrates different kinds of aesthetic ‘goodness’—which, of course, is also about difference, distance and the multifaceted, sometimes horrific, faces of beauty.”





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RAEDA SAADEH: PUBLIC PERFORMANCE
AS PART OF THE ADELAIDE INTERNATIONAL 2010: APART, WE ARE TOGETHER
AT LION ARTS CENTRE COURTYARD, NORTH TERRACE, ADELAIDE.

Overhead photography by Nasim Nasr

CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART+CULTURE BROADSHEET 39.1 LAUNCH
FOR THE ADELAIDE FESTIVAL 2010
KERRY PACKER CIVIC GALLERY, HAWKE BUILDING, UNISA CITY WEST CAMPUS
WITH GUEST SPEAKER: RANJIT HOSKOTE

Ranjit Hoskote was born in 1969 in Mumbai. He gained a bachelorÕs degree in political science at Elphinstone College. At Bombay University he studied further and gained an MA in English Literature and Aesthetics. He has been the art critic of the daily The Times of India (1988-99) and an author and columnist for The Times (1993-99). From 2000-07 he was an art critic, commentator and editor of The Hindu and its magazine Folio as well as The Hindu Sunday Magazine. He has been president of the Poetry Circle Bombay (1992-97) and is now general secretary of the PEN All-India Centre and co-publisher of its magazine Penumbra. In his role as an art critic, Hoskote has authored a critical biography, monographs and major essays on many leading Indian artists, including Praneet Soi for the catalogue to Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together, curated by Victoria Lynn.

As a cultural theorist, Hoskote has addressed the cultural and political dynamics of postcolonial societies that are going through a process of globalisation, emphasising the possibilities of a 'non-western contemporaneity' and 'intercultural communication'. In many of his writings and lectures, Hoskote examines the relationship between the aesthetic and the political, describing this as a tension between the politics of the expressive and the expressivity of the political. He has explored, in particular, the connections between popular visual art, mass mobilisations and the emergence of fluid and fluctuating identities within the evolving metropolitan cultures of the postcolonial world. Additionally, Hoskote has reflected on the place of beauty and the sublime in contemporary cultural practice, stating in one essay, "the modern art-work is often elegiac in nature: it mourns the loss of beauty through scission and absence; it carries within its very structure a lament for the loss of beauty." Ranjit Hoskote was co-curator of the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008) in South Korea, collaborating on this project with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim. He has held an Associate Fellowship with Sarai CSDS, a new-media initiative of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi.

Ranjit Hoskote spoke at Artists Week Day One Friday 26 February panel, 'Global Frames and Critical Ruptures in Contemporary Art'.



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ARTS WRITING AND PAINTSKIN SURVEY LAUNCH FOR SALA FESTIVAL 2009
KEN BOLTON ANTHOLOGY AND PAUL HOBAN EXHIBITION


Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide.
Speakers:

Jim Moss, Chair of the Board, CACSA
Alan Cruickshank, Executive Director, CACSA

Alan Cruickshank: Executive Director, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia

Coincidentally I looked up today, 31 July, Ken's original email to me presenting the idea for a book of his writing, to discover that it was sent to me exactly one year ago, so tonight this launch is very much an anniversary of that idea, and its contents.

Ken proposed a publication of his writing about the same time as I was considering the same idea. It was agreed that this publication would re-look at and re-present the local. Rather than being a catalogue raisonné (there are many additional texts in Bolton's writing archive of non-SA art, artists and exhibitions), this anthology focuses upon South Australian art and artists.

Ken Bolton is rare if not peerless, in that residing in Adelaide for more than twenty-five years and observing and writing about art, he has been witness to successive generations of South Australian artists and their careers. He has been and remains one of the very few long-term, one-city domiciled art critics in Australia, his analytical evaluations over this period being more than a valuable resource in a national landscape that has seen Art's epicentre of activity and importance easterly determined and historicised.

In presenting this collection of texts, the first from 1988/89, its corporate focus is neither revisionist nor laundered. Bolton acknowledges the parameters of his selectivity, his art and artist preferences, the commissions or lack of. A number of well-known and/or commercially favoured artists do not register here, nor do numerous major events and productions that remain in my memory as being historically pivotal. Ken simply wasn't commissioned to write about these.

As commissioner of the CACSA's increasing list of publications-monographs, anthologies and catalogues-it has always been my strategy to equate the local with the national and the international, and given Ken Bolton's longstanding witness to and analysis of local visual art and its place in the national arena, the logic behind and demand for such a publication is quite evident. Art Writing, Art in Adelaide in the 1990s and 2000s, further exemplifies the CACSA's ongoing commitment to the publication, presentation and promotion of contemporary South Australian art and writing.

Jim Moss: Chair of the Board, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia

This evening we have two events to celebrate - Paul Hoban's exhibition opening-Paintskin Survey; and the launch of Ken Bolton's anthology of art criticism and commentary-Art Writing: art in Adelaide in the 1990's and 2000's.

Collectively both launches constitute twin aspects of the discursive practice that, for want of a better name, we call visual art (as distinct from say visual culture). Making art and writing about art have been intimate associates since Baudelaire and in the context of current art discourse one could no more survive without the other than could TV images survive without the presence of audio.

Most of you would be aware of the CACSA's multi-layed coverage of the art world, locally, nationally and all over the place (literally, not figuratively)-we have the gallery; Broadsheet and what in effect has become an adjunct to the publishing arm of the CACSA under Alan Cruickshank's directorship, the publication of artists' monographs and, in this case, an anthology of Ken Bolton's writing.

Ken Bolton has been described as a poet who often writes on art. There is of course a certain synergy between poetry and art, or, to be more precise, between writing poetry and writing in response to art. Ken likes thinking about art-he says so in the Introduction and for a poet thinking about art invariably means writing poetry or writing about art, both of which Ken does very well. And this is what this book is all about. But it's also, essentially, about Ken's writing. It's Ken writing about writing about art.

Charles Baudelaire once wrote, "Always be a poet, even in prose", an axiom that Ken has, consciously or not, taken to heart. After all, is not Ken a modern Baudelaire-(with hair). In fact, I've always been rather suspicious of the combination of Ken's fresh-faced appearance and his formidable intellectual/cultural repertoire. A more fanciful speculation puts Ken as an Antipodean reincarnation of The Comte de Saint Germain, perhaps? Ken is older than he looks and like the vampire he has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the graveÉ or, as it's been put elsewhere, Ken, cuts, "a moodily romantic figure in the beige Adelaide landscapeÉ" However, whoever Ken really is and from wherever he really comes (rumour has it he came from Sydney-a likely story) he has become a central player in the Adelaide art scene through his writing, and his association with the EAF and Dark Horsey, while simultaneously affecting complete disinterest in bourgeois greasy-pole climbing aspirations. And a very nice fellow he is-whoever he is.

A particular aspect of Ken's writing on art is that it's discernibly Ken's voice, his words and it's not the echoing voice of some critical alter-ego that he climbs into when it comes to reviewing the art of others. While anybody who knows Ken will hear his voice when reading this book, what I'm referring to is Ken's writerly signature that, in effect is, an absence of bullshit. This is not to say there's an absence of affectation-where would any writer be without it-but he affects what can only be characterized as authenticity, as in the authenticity of contributing to a strong tradition.

Ken's writing gets me thinking about Kerouak and Keasey and, obviously, alliteration... (but,... not metaphor!) As a writer, to transcend the use of metaphor is a sure sign of one's arrival; for a writer on art to transcend the siren call of metaphor suggests potential beatification.

Ken will occasionally refer to critical tropes but more often to other artists, particularly those of the generation he cut his art-theory teeth on. But this is not to say he's not a stylist nor unselfconscious-you know, James Elroy meets James Elkins sort of thing, but more often than not Ken records his own phenomenological take on the art under question in a sustained manner that is unusual to say the least in contemporary art criticism-certainly in terms of his intellectual engagement with the work, an engagement that is pursued without losing sight of the work in a forest of theory.

And then of course there are the gems and this book is littered with them. I can't imagine Baudelaire had much of a sense of humour, but Ken has. I won't try and read you any as I have a knack for killing funny bits, but a good thing about the compilation is that it concentrates the breadth of Ken's literary talents beyond the odd single review. In fact, there he is laughing on the front cover and, as it is with Ken, one can never be quite sure just what it is he's laughing about.



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DELAYED VOYAGE LAUNCH
GEORGE POPPERWELL MONOGRAPH


SASA Gallery, University of South Australia
Speakers: Greg Mackie, Executive Director Arts SA
John Barbour, University of South Australia
Alan Cruickshank, Executive Director CACSA


The reality of non-coffee-table art book publication in Australia gives every indication of it being poverty stricken - definitely not in ideas but very much in direct funding - as there is very little of it - from both State and Federal authorities. The reality of publications such as this is that they are, they become the product of contemporary art spaces and the like - it is not, for example, a Wakefield Press kind of book as they have differing publishing imperatives. And they are produced on what my grandmother would have called the proverbial smell of an oily rag!

Nonetheless in such a recessionist environment the CACSA has become the most prolific contemporary art space publisher with Broadsheet magazine and since 2004-6 monographs and anthologies. And to coincide with the SALA Festival in July we are further publishing a Ken Bolton anthology of 25 years of his arts writing - Ken's been around almost as long as George - along with a Paul Hoban catalogue for his survey exhibition at the CACSA.

Accordingly I would like to thank the Gordon Darling Foundation, who sponsored this monograph, as they did in 2005 with the Jacky Redgate monograph.

I had a rare idle moment recently - in thinking about the above I was contemplating a head count of artists - a who and what - from the CACSA exhibition programs since 2001. And I came up with some surprises. By the end of this year the CACSA would have:
- commissioned 77 exhibition projects plus two international projects last year in Singapore and KL - these two being a first for the CACSA;
- produced two seminars/symposia with local Australian and international speakers;
- produced 36 editions of Broadsheet magazine;
- published 2 monographs and 5 anthologies - and there are more planned for next year.

More striking are the following numbers, which should be of interest to some of the Doubting Thomases or Nicholases who have questioned both the nationality and the domiciles of the CACSA's exhibition program participants.

Those 79 exhibitions will have presented:
- 39 international artists;
- 50 Australian artists;
- 92 South Australian artists-including 26 SA artists in the 4-year Mentor Mentored projects.

These numbers exclude the members' exhibitions that lapsed prior to Mentor Mentored - and the Project Space - both of which presented similar numbers of SA artists.

It has always been my strategy for the CACSA to present the local - with the national - and the international - at the same level of investment and promotion - and to establish tangible national and international cultural partnerships - and from this comes the pleasure of seeing, for example, such outcomes as SA artists Matthew Bradley and James Dodd participating in the Australian survey exhibition Optimism at QAG/GOMA last year.

So - why George Popperwell I hear you ask? Several years ago I proposed to George that he exhibit at the CACSA the results from his research from two Australian Council residencies in Europe. Then I envisaged a publication that would be both a companion to the exhibition Exit Music: A Lake and a Stand of Trees which showed last year at the CACSA - as an encapsulation of both his 18 year investigation and production of his 'Holocaust' series and his practice since the early 1980s. Gordon Darling Foundation sponsorship was obtained. I then commissioned Ian North and Jim Moss as writers both having a long knowledge of George's practice and having worked with him at the SASA - both readily took on the idea of writing about George's work - until they tried pin George down and seek out the mysteries within. And of George of course! Richard Grayson and Christopher Chapman also readily agreed to allow previously published texts to be reproduced, to complement those of Moss and North, to create a bigger picture analysis of George's three decades of practice. George - being the shy chap that he is - presented himself as a somewhat reluctant subject for a monograph, but as I constantly reminded and urged George, it's all for a good cause!

We probably all have stories about George. I have one. I remember the first works I saw of George's, at the CACSA in 1992 - his Recent Work exhibition. I remember it well, as I photographed it for the CACSA, as I have done practically every artwork George has produced since. In 1994 I coerced George - now that he had 'come out' - of being shy that is - about exhibiting his work publicly - to exhibit in an underground warehouse installation exhibition I curated to coincide with the 1994 Adelaide Installations - that exhibition being Jemmy in the old fruit+veg markets of East End Rundle Street precinct. I quickly began to realise during that project George's style - he always took a little longer than other artists to get it together. The following year I included George in another warehouse installation exhibition - again in East End Rundle Street area in the Charlicks Building - Invisible City. This project had as its catalyst the notion of the darker side of Adelaide's history. By then, as a curator, I should have known what I was in for.

By the day before the opening of Invisible City the other artists had already located their sites and had installed their artworks. Except George! There was only one site within the building that remained empty and appropriate for usage - under and around the stairwell that led up to the next floor.

At 6pm on this day, 24 hours before the exhibition opening, George swanned in with his then-partner Joanne Harris. By this time I had finalised all aspects of the exhibition - the other artists and their works, the lighting, the booze, public health and safety measures, public liability insurance, the catalogue printed, publicity and so on. George greeted me as usual launching into a lyrical description of the multiple layers of meaning in his work and how it insinuated itself into the exhibition's theme and other artworks. I remember Joanne Harris sitting on a nearby plastic milk crate with a "Oh here we go again" expression, I assumed having heard it all before.

23.5 hours before the exhibition opened I said to George, that's great but I'm (expletive deleted) not interested in its meaning or whatever, you've got (expletive deleted) less than 24 hours to go before the opening. Get to it! George looked somewhat taken aback! Joanne Harris remained sitting on the milk crate still with a "Oh here we go again" expression. I walked out the door and left George to it.

Next day 1 hour before the exhibition opened I returned to the building and there was George's work - installed, tight, and very meaningful.

George, despite all his fondness for the telling of stories and risk%eacute; jokes and his attendant verbal wanderings - what Johnnie Dady has lovingly referred to as George wallying around - always had it together. And what an artwork! If any singular work remains in one's memory from that exhibition arguably it is George's. Daniel Thomas passionately wrote a review of this work even without a publisher in mind. George always knew what he was going to do - and how he was going to do it. He would always be on time - eventually - and with an enigmatic and conceptually challenging work. He was always - eventually - going to have it together. He just need to have a chat about it all first.



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BROADSHEET CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART+ CULTURE- Volume 37 No.3 LAUNCH
SINGAPORE BIENNALE

Broadsheet Volume 37 No 3 was launched - as Media Partner to the 2008 Singapore Biennale - during the Vernissage on 9 September 2008 by Matthew Ngui, a member of the Singapore Biennale curatorial team.

Matthew Ngui, who lives and works in Singapore and Australia, is a visual artist who has exhibited in Australia, Singapore and internationally in contemporary art spaces in cities such as Berlin, Bordeaux, Copenhagen, Graz, Hong Kong, London, Manila and Vienna. He participated in the Sao Paulo (1996), Venice (2001) and Gwanju Biennales (2002) and the tenth Documenta in 1997. Ngui has taught at art schools at the Australian National University, Curtin University of Technology, Edith Cowan University, Perth and the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore.

The launch took place at the Central Promontory, Marina Bay, an exhibition site for the Biennale, constructed by the Japanese artist Shigeru Ban.



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BROADSHEET CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART+ CULTURE- Volume 37 No.1 LAUNCH
VISUAL ANIMALS- ADELAIDE LAUNCH

2008 Adelaide Bank Festival of Art- Artists' Week

Guest speaker: Mabel Lee, Honorary Associate Professor of Chinese Studies, University of Sydney

Elder Hall, University of Adelaide
Monday 4 March, 2008


I thank Alan Cruickshank, Executive Director of the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, for inviting me to Adelaide to launch two publications produced by the Centre. Broadsheet: Contemporary Visual Art & Culture, Volume 37 No 1 that has just come off the press, and Ian North (ed.), Visual Animals: Crossovers, Evolution and New Aesthetics, published late last year.

Broadsheet covers many interesting facets of the Australian art world, but importantly, also places Australian art within an international context-it is widely read, particularly in East and South East Asia. This issue (Volume 37 Number 1) has a definite Asia focus, and highlights Australia's geographical advantage, as well as its early engagement with the art world of the region. The high quality of the articles testifies to Alan Cruickshank's long-standing involvement with the artists, art historians, curators, critics and the art institutions of the region.

I received Visual Animals some weeks ago, and I read it twice in fact, with interest and a great deal of excitement, and I will most certainly refer to it again and again. I congratulate the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia's Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies for supporting the production of this important publication.

Most of the essays in Visual Animals were initially presented at the Visual Animals Symposium held under the auspices of the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, 18-19 April 2007. The brainchild of Ian North, the Symposium brought together key researchers from various disciplines including comparative literature, art history, analytic philosophy, mathematics, architecture and bio-aesthetics to discuss the meaning and significance of art in the contemporary world. It would seem that the underlying aim of the Symposium was somehow to substantiate aesthetic experience with scientific evidence to bolster the status of art in these times that are dominated by science and technology, and when only innovation is a sign of progress. For almost a century, art has surrendered itself to a self-destructive political dynamic of revolution that has allowed the authority of art and artists to be manipulated by ever-changing theories about art, and left artists and teachers of art in a state of bewilderment. A situation has arisen in which the academies, art museums, government funding bodies and the market dictate what constitutes art, and there seems little interest in what artists have to say about art.

Aided by the research findings of bio-aesthetics, the essays of Visual Animals address here-and-now art issues with confidence, and with positive suggestions that validate their commitment to art. Significantly, amongst the contributors to the volume are academics who are practicing artists- notably, Ian North himself, A. D. S. Donaldson and Peter James Smith, although it is clear from the essays that all contributors have encountered the aesthetic experience of viewing numerous artworks.

Peter James Smith perhaps presents the most straightforward solution for restoring self-confidence to those devoted to the practice, study and promotion of art, a solution that releases them from the need to conform to the dynamic of theories or isms, as in the past. In his essay "Rediscovering Lines of Longitude: Signs of 'New Capture' for Art Practice at Postmodern's Demise," Peter James Smith makes the simple suggestion of taking a longer view of art history, one that "leapfrogs" the modernism of the 20th century, and instead "to start with Cezanne and to go back past the German Romantics, past the ornament of the French court and back into the Baroque." He argues that this is not to "condemn ourselves to repeating these ages, to reliving these ages, but to carrying the torch of their intentions... it is to attempt to fulfill the intentions of this period that have remained unfulfilled-to examine passion, wonder, humility, grace, enquiry-all hallmarks of the Enlightenment."

Australian indigenous art has claimed the attention of the world, and its motifs relate to a dreaming that is connected to the land and the people, and it is not uncommon for ancient cultures that did not develop a written language to transmit their histories via visual representations, for example as in the embroideries of the Miao people scattered in South China and various areas of Southeast Asia. In "Notes Towards a Natural Way to Do Art History," Ian North alludes to what he denotes as "spirituality" or "holiness," in Australian indigenous art. Other essays in Visual Animals refer to the "immanence" or "transcendence" of art. The example of indigenous art offers a key to understanding that significant art, whenever or wherever it is created is universal and transcends temporal and spatial boundaries, another of the issues considered in this volume.

"A Short History of UnAustralian Art" by Rex Butler & A.D.S Donaldson demonstrates how Australian artists from the beginning of the 20th century have been integrated with the international art scene, especially with long periods of residence and study in Europe, and later the USA. This and other essays also point to how migrant artists have brought the styles and training from their countries of origin with their persons and that Australian art now has many genealogical ties apart from settler art.

The essays of Visual Animals present so many new ways of approaching art and art history of the Western world than would be possible even to attempt to summarise here. The Antipodean location and concerns of the contributors place them in the advantageous position of "Other" vis-a-vis the larger and more powerful EuroAmerican centres of art history scholarship, while yet remaining a part of that scholarly matrix. Visual Animals stamps Australia's leadership credentials in scholarship on contentious issues concerning the meaning of art, beauty and aesthetics, the evaluation of art, the teaching and the documentation of art history.

The distance created from the Antipodes as "Other" has allowed for a wealth of lucid insights and findings in Visual Animals that will activate new directions in the policy-making and funding of art museums, as well as the teaching of art in secondary and tertiary institutions. As a good marketing strategy, I would urge Ian North and his colleagues to begin working towards the publication of a companion volume that will also consider contemporary Asian art, especially, the phenomenal impact contemporary Chinese art is having on the international market.

I congratulate every person connected with the production of Visual Animals and wish the book the success.

See for example, Robert Bevan's "Hidden History" in Life & Leisure, The Australian Financial Review, 23-24 February 2008.





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VISUAL ANIMALS: CROSSOVERS, EVOLUTION AND NEW AESTHETICS
Anthology Launch

Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art Conference, Crossing Cultures, University of Melbourne

Guest speaker: Daniel Thomas AM, Emeritus Director, Art Gallery of South Australia

Grand Buffet Hall, Union House, University of Melbourne
Monday 14 January, 2008


Visual Animals: Crossovers, Evolution and New Aesthetics is an important outcome stemming from the symposium. The collection of essays comprises an innovative, challenging and timely debate about the biological and social bases of art between fifteen scholars from Australia, New Zealand and the United States working in diverse disciplines. These include art history and theory, comparative literature, cultural history and theory, philosophy, bio-aesthetics, cognitive science and neurophysiology. Visual Animals is edited by Ian North, an Adjunct Professor of Visual Arts at both the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia, and a former curator at the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of South Australia.



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SOFT POWER: ASIAN ATTITUDE
Exhibition Launch

Softpower: Asian Attitude
Seminar: Curators VS Artists
Theme: Soft Power and Contemporary Art Practice

Exhibition launch 17 November, 2007
Alan Cruickshank participated as speaker Sunday 18 November, 2007

Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art
Bldg. 28, 199 Fangdian Rd., Shanghai, China 200135
http://www.zendaiart.com


Softpower: Asian Attitude
Since entering the twenty-first century, the rapid and powerful developments in Asia make it one of the most watched regions in the world. The progress in Asia has brought new opportunities as well as challenges to Asia's cultures and art. Being the continent with the largest amount of countries and the biggest geographical area, it is a place of complex political systems, diverse cultures, multitude of changes and expeditious development. It is inevitable that its progress will have enormous influences on the stability, modification and transformation of global political, economic structures.

The notion of "Asia" has in fact historically been a geographical concept in modern and contemporary Western society's peripheral vision. For Asians, however, the notion of "Asia" remains indistinct. Since the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, the expanding forces of the West propelled radical changes in Asian countries' social structures. After the long period of Cold War in the last century, Asian countries were confronted with modernity articulated in Western language. Embrace or resist it, Asian countries began to show Westernization tendencies in different forms. At the same time, economic prosperity, and continuously rising global political status and influences also allowed Asian countries to reinforce and emphasize the notion of self-identity in fields such as politics, economy and culture.

This exhibition will investigate and analyse Asian cultures through contemporary Asian art in the globalised and post-modern environment. It pays special attention to the ways in which contemporary Asian art manifests its unique cultural roots despite the predominantly Westernized context of modernity. The resilience of Asian culture as manifested by Asian contemporary art is considered from the aspect of "transient forces" - meaning forces that are subtle, under-the-surface and strong.



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VISUAL ANIMALS: CROSSOVERS, EVOLUTION AND NEW AESTHETICS
Seminar CVAPSA 07 Project IV

Curator Ian North

Wednesday 18 - Thursday 19 April 2007 at the Art Gallery of SA


AIM: To bring together some key researchers in disciplines usually working at a tangent to each other -notably including art history, analytic philosophy and bio-aesthetics-to discuss new or revised concepts of art that may influence current approaches to the writing of world art history.

Although interchange between the fields indicated has recently increased, art is nowadays most influentially discussed-within the Australian art world, as elsewhere-in terms of Cultural Critique (or 'Theory'), based on continental philosophy and cultural studies generally. Among its myriad insights social constructivism is dominant: the idea that all culture is a purely human and contingent artefact.

In contrast, bio-aesthetic research-the study of art and aesthetics as, in part, a biologically based phenomenon-seeks to explore the trans-cultural aspects of aesthetic behaviour in humans by placing an emphasis on what happens when people are creating or experiencing art. Aspects of philosophy, and especially analytic philosophy, seem pertinent here, reconsidering theories of beauty (for example) in the light of cognitive science and a new understanding of art's possible wellsprings, without resorting to a reductive determinism. A fresh art-theoretical approach, then, might help art historians to embrace the already well-established universalism of more broadly sociological or anthropological approaches to the understanding of human culture, with implications for the writing of both national and world art histories.

It may thus be possible to rehabilitate ideas about, for example, the character and role of beauty in art and the ability of art to transcend cultural and epochal barriers, as well as viable conceptions of art's intrinsic value-perhaps even its notional spirituality. It was a commonplace of the postmodernist/postcolonialist era that 'no-one knows what art is any more', or words to that effect. The discussion proposed might take us at least some distance towards an effective riposte.

Even so, the proposal is intended as a supplement to the theoretical discoveries and insights of the late twentieth century and the now thirty-five year old era of contemporary art following modernism's collapse. It is not conceived as a reactionary agenda, casting beauty or the aesthetic as a stick with which to beat 'Theory'. Nor does the proposal aim to deny all or any of those sociological, political, psychoanalytical or other concerns that dominate current discussions about art and art production. Art may occur in many modes, including beauty's opposite, disgust-even if beauty (perhaps in some radically expanded sense) might, after all, transpire to be a central element in what many individuals and cultures deem to be significant works of art.

The intention of the symposium, then, is to encourage an examination of art from the ground of art experience rather than to impose an abstract ideology. It is not intended as a search for a spurious essentialism, but rather to take into account the realities of the human genome and its evolution according to the laws of nature. Recent art-historical writing has been obsessed with problematic postcolonial concerns about power, gate-keeping and national identities generally. It would do well, arguably, to acknowledge as well the persistent qualities of common humanity, and consequently the similarly enduring aesthetic power of art.

The various speakers, with their widely varying academic perspectives, will have their own stories to tell, some of them, no doubt, qualifying and perhaps contradicting this broad rationale.






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