Associate Professor Robert Nelson

Position title

Qualifications

• PhD LaT
• MA LaT

Statement

Robert Nelson's strongest interest is in the understanding of visual language. He wants to know how pictures make sense visually or what makes a jug or a cabinet or a building communicate spatially.

There are systems that organize the visual but they remain hard to fathom and most artists and designers rely on intuition to create their contributions to visual language. His means of understanding visual language involve four resources: art history, comparative language studies and philology, spiritual history and studio production itself.

He especially enjoys the two poles of contact with students at Monash: first year and graduate studies. In first year, students study the historical development of form and content; and in the Masters and PhD programs they deconstruct it critically for the sake of original contributions of cultural significance.

His publications have mostly centred on contemporary Australian art, with 100 essays in journals and catalogues and 800 newspaper articles as art critic for The Age in Melbourne.  

In 2000, he was awarded the Pascall Prize (a national prize for critical writing in all fields of the arts).   He is also a painter, with 11 solo exhibitions. His most recent work has been scene painting for Polixeni Papapetrou.

Research/Professional activities

Recent publications

Book

• The Spirit of Secular Art: a history of the sacramental roots of contemporary artistic values, Monash University ePress, Melbourne 2007

Book chapter

• ‘Social cohesion and cultural fragility: a paradox of Indigenous rapports with Eurasian Australia’, in J Jupp & J Nieuwenhuysen, eds. Social Cohesion in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and elsewhere, 2007, pp. 103–113;

Theory & criticism in journals

• ‘Setback’, Arena Magazine, no. 94, April–May 2008, pp. 37–39; ‘Aboriginal art — a sacred black cow?’, Arena Magazine, no. 90, August-September 2007, pp. 39-40

Conference Papers

• ‘The aura of the transcultural: Aboriginal art from the desert regions and its spiritual relation to western perceptual painting', Crossing Cultures, 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA), Melbourne 2008
• ‘From welfare to world-fair: encouraging Indigenous creativity through the workshop’, Backing our creativity: Education & the Arts, Research, Policy & Practice, National Education & the Arts Symposium (Australia Council) September 2005
• ‘Methodology for the design of electric bicycles: how to handle the impact of contemporary media and fashion on bicycle use', International design Congress, Taipei 2005.
• 'Design and morals in the globalized context: in search of dialectic'
 Futureground, Annual Conference of the Design Research Society, Monash University, 2004; 0. 'Pressure on the poetic: the politics of the next reverie in the studio' ACUADS Annual Conference, Australian National University, 2004;
• 'Design and morals in the globalized context: in search of dialectic' Futureground, Annual Conference of the Design Research Society, Monash University, 2004;
• 'Pressure on the poetic: the politics of the next reverie in the studio' ACUADS Annual Conference, Australian National University, 2004;