I don’t have that much to say about the 19th Biennale of Sydney as a whole — like most shows of this scale there was work I liked and work I didn’t. But the framing of the 19th Biennale — “You Imagine What You Desire” — seemed very “European” and individualist, compared to the more anthropological/comparativist […]
Over the past week there has been intense discussion of the major sponsorship of the 19th Biennale of Sydney (BOS19) by the Transfield Foundation, a joint partnership between investment company Transfield Holdings and Transfield Services, with Transfield Holdings also holding approximately 11% of the shareholding in Transfield Services. Transfield Services are an infrastructure provider recently […]
Published in un Magazine 7.1 http://unprojects.org.au/magazine/issues/issue-7-1/theses-on-art-and-knowledge/ 29th July 2013. “Knowledge”, as described by educational institutions, is disciplinary knowledge. There is no way to know how much knowledge is held in an object of knowledge, (a report, for example) until one has done the work to understand how a field of knowledge is constructed. No report is […]
While sometimes situations organize into world-shifting events or threaten the present with their devastating latency, mostly they do not. — Lauren Berlant [1] Luke Willis Thompson’s sites of enquiry fit Lauren Berlant’s description of the ‘situation tragedy’: scenes where fragile subjectivities seek ‘the becoming historical of the affective event and the improvisation of genre amid […]
[To appear in the book Alex Monteith: Accelerated Geographies, edited by Rhana Devenport. New Plymouth: Govett Brewster Art Gallery, 2012. Preprint, please do not quote or cite this version.] Alex Monteith’s practice is best captured by the Antipodean colloquialism “getting amongst it,” or in more technical terms, “fieldwork.” There are the death-defying pieces that involve […]
At the end of the 18th century, Nazarene painter Eberhard Wachter rejected a position on the staff of the Stuttgart academy, noting that ‘there is too much misery in art already; I do not want to increase it.’ Wachter uttered his sullen epigram on art education well before the development of postgraduate programmes in studio […]
[This text originally appeared at EyeContact.] In his essay ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’ James Clifford explains how the classification of objects by collectors is doomed to be a temporary exercise, as objects do not remain in the value regimes of either artistic masterpiece or cultural artefact, but shift between them over time and space. […]
Catalogue Essay for PÅ«rÄkau poster project organised by Xavier Meade, 2010.
Three problems in whiteness discourse, and a fear of men’s support groups.
[This text initially appeared in the catalogue for The 4th Auckland Triennial – Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon. Documentation is on the artist’s website.] Alex Monteith is not a body at rest. A phone call is likely to find her en route to Blacks, Graveyards, Bluehouse or Indicators, to name a few favourite breaks. […]
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