Abstracts

Janine Antoni

When the Object Looks Back

We will look at images in an effort to see where the invisible becomes visible; we will give attention to our physical presence; we will use our bodies as a vehicle to travel inward; we will see if our touch can be held in an object; we will ask ourselves why we are here in an effort to uncover our intentions for the conference.

Kate Briggs

Painting, an act of faith: moments in the work of Juan Davila 

Giorgio Agamben distinguishes secularization and profanation, noting that secularization "is a form of repression" leaving "intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one place to another", while profanation "neutralizes what it profanes." This distinction will be used to discuss a strategy evident in a period of Davila's work, contrasting it with some recent works in order to sketch a thesis concerning modernitiy and the depiction of women, sexual difference, faith and feminine jouissance.   

Karen Burns

Memory Home

What happens when memories find a home? How can architecture activate remembering and extend built history's purchase beyond the domain of site or heritage artefact to explore the ways in which we know history? This paper examines Melbourne architect Alex Selenitsch's "The House of a Missing Family" project (2005), a design partly generated from a vivid flash of recognition occurring in an official memory place: the German state memorial Neue Wache building in Berlin. "The House of a Missing Family" investigates the topography of domestic space and oral history, offering insights into the familiar and ritualised, and into the memory functions of memorials and museums.

Justin Clemens

Giorgio Agamben’s theory of art as gesture’

In a characteristically post-romantic vein, the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben attempts to imagine what the possible uses of art might be in our ‘era of accomplished nihilism.’ Drawing on a range of artworks (novellas, paintings, poems, video-pieces, film), Agamben outlines a number of modes by which art ruins the sacred truths in its little, almost derisory ways. This paper dedicates itself to presenting a clear account of Agamben’s account of art.

Sarah Curtis

Do we need more women to become good architects? Amy Carmichael’s design for the Dohnavur Fellowship in South India

Agamben says "at the point you perceive the irreparability of the world, at that point it is transcendent", invoking the question of a hole in the ozone layer and how this affects the future of the plastic arts – particularly architecture. Taking as Lacan’s maxim "the Woman does not exist" this paper will explore whether we need more women to become good architects by looking at Carmichael’s response to the British industrial revolution and her search for authenticity in earthly beatitude. It will present the design of the home she created for South Indian children who she believed were victims of paedophilia and discuss her creative activity with respect to an arena of contingency that, therefore, both excludes and is excluded from the arena of necessity.

Joanna Frueh

The Flowering of Vision

Taking vision as both a literal and figurative foundation of visual arts practice, this presentation theorizes and demonstrates a practice of vision for contemporary arts professionals. Working with various definitions and ideas of vision, such as "I see" meaning "I know" and vision meaning the sense of sight as well as the force or power of imagination, I discuss vision as a profound kind of visual literacy whose pursuit demands courage and whose effects are far-reaching.

Russell Grigg

God is unconscious

As it turns out, Nietzsche's report of the death of God was greatly exaggerated. The optimism of those like Freud who thought that the rise of science would result in the decline and eventual wasting away of religion has proved misplaced. Religion has a future if only because it satisfies the human desire for meaning in a world in which science, combined with capitalism, has produced a barren and meaningless landscape. There is a plaint here that is not new, but it no longer sounds like the nostalgia for religion as something lost. If anything, the advance of science has resulted in an increase in religious belief and practice. Why is this so? Let's explore the suggestion, by Lacan, that God is not dead, just unconscious!

Lily Hibberd

Bordertown's mythical dimension

Bordertown is a contemporary artwork in the form of a sculptural sound installation that was created earlier this year for exhibition at Artspace, Sydney. The work is comprised of a soundtrack that tells a partially fictional narration of two women, located in a community called “Bordertown” that straddles two Australian states: a place renowned for historic conflicts. Bordertown has been reconstructed for Out of Bounds and is on display on the ground floor of Building F, so rather than describe the piece I will use this paper to discuss parallel themes such as the theoretical contexts of social partition, conflict, and border construction in Australia. This approach will offer insight into the research processes I undertook in the development of this quasi-documentary work. I will firstly outline the paradoxical nature of border subjectivities and their configuration as an exclusionary dimension or as a non-place and invisible boundary. I will then examine the border in relation to contemporary constructions of the Australian State, sovereignty and militarisation, and the “border’s” antecedents in a colonial framework. The physical constructions of walls will also be discussed in terms of their paradoxical function as both barriers and voids. These aspects are then analysed in terms of mythical and religious connotations, which will finally allow me to emphasise the significance of ritual and conflict as a key to political resistance and social transformation.

Paul Ramirez Jonas

Relay

This illustrated lecture will trace an invented geneaology that traces the passing of creativity from one person to the other. It begins in the remote past and brings us to the present moment.

Donna Leslie

Embracing the Spiritual in Aboriginal Art

With hindsight, writings of the past two decades on Aboriginal art show that the term ‘urban’ Aboriginal art which was commonly in use in the 1990s appears to have been almost abandoned. Today, writings and exhibitions on Aboriginal art continue to focus on individual or communal artist’s stories, histories, and cultural characteristics, yet there is relatively little attention given to ‘urban’ dwelling Aboriginal artists, compared with artists living in remote areas who are defined or considered ‘traditional’. This paper critically analyses the terms ‘urban’ and ‘traditional’, with a special focus on the ‘urban’ category. It advocates the importance of a deeper awareness of the meanings of such terminology when applied to Aboriginal art, and the ways in which these can relate to forgotten Australian histories and restrict an holistic critical evaluation of the spiritual in Aboriginal art.

Leslie King-Hammond

FEAR NOT: Sacred Space and the African-American Experience

Anne Marsh

Body Art, Ritual and the Real

This paper explores the body and its representations/presentations in performance art and video performance. It is particularly concerned with performance events that tear at the screen of the Real. It considers ritual, shamanism and catharsis and attempts to situate contemporary practice within an historical context.

Tim Mathieson

Aid-Day

Paul Celan's notion of art as a "breath-turn" (Atemwende) will be explained with reference to his poem "Einmal", where metaphor is rendered untenable through the conflation of God and the Nazi State, the Flood and the Shoah. Instead of situating a name, the "I" turns back on the sublimation of the Voice, uniting the seen and the said by refracting the light (primary) repression would otherwise, always already absorb. The poem achieves this through the fulcrum of a silent period in the poem's last line. This acts as a precise prism. It could be called the schizo response to the paranoiac's "One" on the bi-polar plane of metonymy. Breaking open the light (the "ich" of "Licht"), it sounds the rainbow Returning Eternally by reversing the "endless night" of that which can only be repeated...Finally, this logic of the "turn" will be outfitted with an actual geography, and culminate in a "reading" of the poet's death.

Kevin Murray

From Ubuntu to Tango - Finding Ourselves at the Bottom of the World

Countries like Australia are very very very slowly loosening their moorings to the colonial centres in the North. What confronts us when we look down, at the precipice of civilisation, to the seeming void of the South? How to we find ourselves far from the familiar narratives of progress and global order? Look to the right, we find the collective spirit of Ubuntu which guides the new South Africa. Look to the left, we see the individual flourish of tango that creates a fragile dignity for the margins. The drum and the bandoneón set the rhythms of the future. Which way do we turn?

Robert Nelson

Art as sacrament: a materialist analysis of artistic spirituality

This presentation begins with an analysis of Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla’s, Returning a sound from 2004. In this video an action is performed of a semi-ritual nature in which the military presence of the United States is symbolically cleared from Vieques, off Puerto Rico. The ritualistic performance is taken as an example of a broader paradigm in the history of art for the sacramental agency of art. Unpacking some of the arguments in the book The spirit of secular art: a history of the sacramental roots of contemporary artistic values, the paper broaches the apparent contradiction between the strong materialist undercurrent of the avantgarde—both political and artistic avantgardes—and a persistent adherence in contemporary art to the spiritual traditions of western cultures.

Tom Nicholson

Collections and affiliations

The presentation of a fragment 'Printed pages/bearing images/1998-2008', a 100-minute video which elaborates a collection of images assembled over the last ten years. This work will be exhibited in The Hague later this year in the exhibition "Since we last spoke about monuments...", part of the Romanian curator Mihnea Mircan's ongoing exploration of the possibilties for a contemporary monument. The screening of this fragment will be followed by a discussion of the work, in relation both to the tradition of artists collecting images and to the idea of the monumental. 

Saul Ostrow

9/11 and the Cultural Revolution

Among the many casualties of 9/11, the date of the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, respectively symbols of the United State's military and economic might many artists' lost their faith in the value of what they were doing to create a political culture.  In a shocked state, they asked themselves how faced with such horrors could they continue to engage in what they could only now imagine to be the self-indulgent expression of the minutiae of their ordinary lives.  Hadn't the making of art become just another narcissistic activity?  What did it matter what they thought to be of theoretical or cultural importance?  What sense did it make to worry over an art's ability to have meaning or not, or to want to make transparent the mass media's control over our sense of self?  How could any of this matter in the face of a renewed sense of mortality and vulnerability? This doubt is not new, it feeds on an uncertainty that was endemic to Modernism, and has become a principle condition of  contemporary culture. Ironically, it is a condition that Capitalist society encourages for it makes the sphere of critical culture vulnerable to appropriation.

Daniel Palmer

Cherine Fahd: The Privacy of the Public

Cherine Fahd’s photographic series The Chosen (2004) features anonymous Parisians caught in seemingly religious repose on the banks of the Seine. Indeed, resonating with the redemptive title, their gestures mimic the demeanour of ecstatic figures in religious art found at the nearby Louvre. It is in fact the scene of Paris Plage, a temporary artificial beach/shower, complete with sand and palm trees, created during the European heat wave of 2003. Together with Fahd’s more recent photographs at Trafalgar Square, The Chosen recalls and reworks a celebrated lineage of candid portraiture, a diverse history of people caught suspended in private contemplation. This history includes such canonical photographs as Paul Strand’s 1916 portrait of a blind street peddler, made with a special right-angled lens; Walker Evans’ New York subway portraits (1938-41), shot clandestinely from under his coat (published as Many Are Called in 1966); and Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Heads (2001), gigantic strobe-lit portraits made on the streets of New York. My paper focuses on Fahd’s aims and broader art practice, the condition of anonymity and our desire to encounter the other, in light of what it reveals about photographic authenticity and current tensions between privacy and the privatisation of public space

Robert Pascoe

The unbearable lightness of a bag of wind

‘Thirty-six fools kicking a bag of wind around is not my idea of a Saturday afternoon’ scoffed one newcomer to Melbourne and its peculiar code of football. But for many Australians their attachment as spectators to a particular sport weighs on them so unbearably as to justify a Milan Kundera novel. Their conversations with both strangers and intimate others are threaded with the shared memories of sporting personalities, episodes and venues. How is this intangible heritage to be recognised and safeguarded? What are the crucial elements involved in assessing claims for cultural significance of sporting heritage? Turning away from the commercialised images of Australian football that dominate the media, artworks offer one valuable source in this process of cultural assessment. Australian football appears in the work of several painters, sculptors and other artists. How do their particular insights help us understand sporting heritage?

Elisabeth Presa

Freezing Images

Jean -Luc Nancy writes that the image is always sacred. Distinguishing between the sacred and the religious, (often used synonymously) Nancy defines the sacred as that which is distinct, separated and marked by the line, trait or boundary.   It is literally, out of bounds. The sacredness of the image cannot be touched. It comes from the skies (not the heavens) “as in the Latin firmamentum the firm vault from which the stars are hung... as the source of illumination it created a clarity that showed things as distinct, which reveals things in their shine and brilliance”. The image as illumination connects closely with Maurice Blanchot’s account of the originary space of art, which he, in turn, links to childhood.According to Blanchot the “golden light” , that is to say the light of the maternal face, “which bathes the world of the child does not reveal things, but rather as light that is pure reflection, it freezes things as images”.  

If the space of art depends on the reflected light of the maternal, then it is often a melancholic, fractured, disunited and discontinuous light. This is shown as much in Blanchot’s account of a young boy looking through a window onto a wintry, desolate garden beneath a pallid sky,  as in Rilke’s imaginary child (each of us) who seeks solace in small pieces of cloth or wood,  and Kristeva’s account of Collette who sublimated her loss and depression into a landscape of “mama’s body, of our house, a common fluid space, geraniums and cats” which she called by her mothers name “Sido”. I conclude with reference to the British psychoanalyst, DW Winnicott and his account of the relationship of transitional objects and spaces to experiences of art the sacred. “It is because the child is fascinated that the mother is fascinating, and this is why all the impressions of our earliest years have a fixed quality that arises from fascination.”

Bronwyn Stocks

When the Word goes for a walk: authority, inscription and reception in medieval manuscripts.

Medieval religious manuscripts are traditionally viewed as carriers of the authority of the word of god, faithfully transported to the physical world via the hands of scribes and artists. This notion of fixed, omnipotent authority has, however, been challenged in recent studies that explore the slippage between dogma and practice that occurs in the reception of artworks by their original viewers. This paper will consider ways in which the word was subject to multiple readings via the use of the personal prayerbook of the late Middle Ages, the book of hours. These small illustrated books facilitated prayer, prescribed at regular intervals throughout each day and in response to times of need such as funerals. Their spatial and temporal mobility meant, therefore, that the word was subject to new interpretations in response to shifting boundaries between public/private and secular/spiritual. This provides an extraordinary example of medieval artwork that was not site specific, but peripatetic and thus able to attract diverse locational identities when its text and illustrations were juxtaposed with various other images, sounds, etc. In some cases it appears that artists or designers of these books were conscious of this associative process and enhanced the potential of books’ imagery and text to resonate with other visual and aural stimuli.

Pip Stokes

Dresses my Mother Wore: A Poetics of Mourning

How can works of art contribute to the care of mourning, consolation and healing? This paper and images of an installation of art work entitled Dresses my Mother Wore, address themes of loss and absence, giving material expression to Merleau Ponty’s concept of ‘embodiment /disembodiment’ as a way of perceiving the feminine condition. I look at questions of perceived feminine "madness", creativity and repression in the light of an installation of paper, beeswax, and silk "dresses" and rose thorn branches cast in bronze. These feminine "garments" – empty skin-like structures – evoke an absence but are also a meditation on the repressive history of the dress itself. This work employs traditional dressmaking skills to construct a perverse form of dressmaking: it undoes the perfection of a finished dress with processes and materials antithetical to "women’s craft", such as tearing, binding and knotting or steeping materials in beeswax to make unnatural, translucent membrane-like "skins". The "dress" becomes an effacement, a disembodiment. Through a remnant, a fragment dress, the unpresentable is presented. Mourning and remembrance as aspects of Care are addressed in this paper. The work in its materialization of these aspects of the human condition also gestures toward consolation and solicitude in its meditative and labor intensive processes, resonant with the rites and rituals of liminal transition and materials from the bees, symbolic of healing.

Kathy Temin

MARKING MEMORY

This paper will explore my recent experience of participating in the March of the Living tour to Holocaust memorials and sites in Poland and separately traveling to Berlin and Budapest. The trip was based on the relatives of survivors and others interested in this history visiting the cities their families came from in order to share and mark a memory of their story at the related sites of their experiences. As an artist and as a child of a Holocaust survivor I have engaged with the theme of "presence of absence" and my father's experience influenced how I interpreted historical events. My work has explored identity through combining oppositional dialogues by recycling adolescent references, suburban and interior design, popular culture and art history. For this paper I will focus on the subject of the Holocaust memorial and the monument by referencing the sites I visited, the influence they have had on my practice, the writings of James E. Young, and how other contemporary artists have engaged with this subject

Claudia Terstappen

A world of the invisible

The presentation will refer to personal observations and experiences in Europe, the US, Japan and Australia that refer to religious beliefs in contemporary life. The paper will explain how people address uncertainty, fear, illness, death, sorrow and fertility and the desire to predict their future and gain stability in a life that is characterised by unforeseeable turns. Pictures, objects, rituals and places are intertwined in building a symbolical network that withdraws from any logical argument. It is a world of materials that represent a world of the invisible. Altars, whether man made or natural, memorials for the dead, objects and rituals that connect us with the past and address the future; all of these are as contemporary as ever. It is uncertainty and emotion that drive people to believe, have faith and act in certain ways. The paper evolves from my personal practice that explores a diverse range of contemporary expressions of religious beliefs, inviting the audience to question their own boundaries when being confronted with "the other".

Eiichi Tosaki

Against the Fourth Dimension: Van Doesburg and Mondrian

This paper touches upon the issue of an esoteric idea of the fourth-dimension in early twentieth century Europe. The concept of the fourth dimension in this era was argued mainly through Linda Henderson's publication, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press,1983). However, this paper deals with the concept mainly through esoteric channels such as Theosophy and the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, both of which profoundly influenced abstract artists such as Kandinsky, the Russian Constructivists and the De Stijl group. In response to discrepancy in understandings of the fourth-dimension, I will argue by way of another story: of the relationship between the two major figures in De Stijl , Mondrian and van Doesburg.

Peter Tyndall

Oh Bondage, up yours!

Paul Uhlmann

Painted skin: where does the body begin and where does it end?

Where does consciousness reside? For Australian theologian and scientist, Charles Birch, consciousness or "feeling" resides not only within in our minds, but expands also into in the external world around us. Birch further upholds that feeling is part of every living thing and manifests itself within even the smallest known particles, atoms or protons. With such a view we may well ask, where do our bodies begin and where do they end? Our skin ceases to be a border or a container and becomes part of a tremendously interconnected living field, which is ever-moving, ever-evolving and ever in flux. In this sense we, and everything around us, are part of a living process and potentially part of a single unifying consciousness. My paper examines the work of several painters including Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), Katherina Grosse (1961- ) as well as my own work through this lens of interconnected consciousness or "feeling". I will consider the body as a creative receptive site for engagement with sensations in the process of making as well as the importance of contemplation in a contemporary climate which appears to have no space or time for reflection. These concerns will be investigated through selected writings of Charles Birch (1918- ), David Bohm (1917-1992), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and Gilles Deleuze (1925 –1995).

Linda Marie Walker

“We use words to get to laughter, and laughter generates words – words that set forth and share – consecrate – the things that left us abashed, disconcerted, dishevelled, the events that did not enlighten but delighted us. Linguistics misses this use of words when it envisions words as discriminators, functioning to delimit and contrast. Language, like everything real, is based on positive entities, the positive, positing words that illuminate and consecrate. Words do not simply isolate entities by contrast and delimitation; the radiance of passing strangers, birds, trees, cars, and landscapes resonate in their tones and accent. Their inner pacing and resonance pick up that of the languidly sprawling summer landscape, the secretive and melancholy Medieval town, the vast desert under sheltering evening skies.” (Alphonso Lingis, ‘Violations’, in Dangerous Emotions, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 2000, p. 97)

This paper looks at writing as a way of being in "the field" of the world, amongst the infinite foldings and unfoldings, seductions and exclusions (colourful displays, events and emotions, chance encounters, sexual liaisons), as an acting toward the field (as if the field is ever shifting and atmospheric; as if one (indirectly, indirectly speaking) is always trying to sense what is past the given line (drawn, sounded, gestured). This though is almost imperceptible, on the level of writing itself (writing forms itself irrespective of its own capacity for lines and points, spaces and gatherings), or at the moments and situations where attention resides inside writing (where the sense is pointed at) – that it is instrumental, communicative, lawful, orderly, etc, even when "poetic" or "experimental" (what does it/you mean). There is a desire that surrounds writing, or circles writing (warlike) that is interrogative, that polices its fluids and heats, that wrecks its energies of hopes and dreams. This energy is not of a single, or determinable, kind, it arises in strange and exuberant ways on its own terms (in its own times and realms); it is often shapeless or of a shape exact and gossamer (and out of bounds, whistled into stillness, hands extended, bodies flying).  

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