Defining Moments: Almost Anything Goes: Sculpturescape 1975 at Mildura

Mon 2 Sep 2019
6pm

This is a past program.
ACCA Foyer
Season Pass: $200/$130 Casual Session: $35/$20

PRICING
Season Pass: $200/$130*
Single ticket: $35/$20*
Ticket includes complimentary cocktail on arrival created by The Melbourne Gin Company
*Concession cards must be shown to obtain concession price

Lecture by Julie Ewington

In the 1970s Mildura became an unlikely epicentre of contemporary experimental art in Australia. Under the visionary leadership of Tom McCullough, the Mildura Sculpture Triennial staged by the town’s Arts Centre morphed from an exhibition of recent sculpture into a freewheeling consideration of contemporary forms that the state art museums could barely contemplate, let alone accommodate. Earth art, conceptual art, performance, feminist artists, ephemeral installations, artists living on site: Mildura commissioned and supported some of the first manifestations in a public art gallery in this country of ‘the expanded field’ of post-object art. Its influence on artists, audiences and other institutions was profound, especially when McCullough took Mildura’s broad scope to his directorship of the second Biennale of Sydney in 1976.  As a young student Julie Ewington saw the 1973, 1975 and 1978 Mildura exhibitions. In this lecture, she will explain why the 1975 edition was particularly outstanding.

Julie Ewington is an independent writer, curator and broadcaster. Between 2001-14 she was Head of Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art. Since 2014 she has written numerous catalogue essays, and reviews for journals including The Monthly and Artforum and major publications include monographs on Fiona Hall (2005) and Del Kathryn Barton (2014). In 2016 Julie curated the Sculpture of Bronwyn Oliver for TarraWarra Museum of Art, and in 2017 she was part of the curatorial team of Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2017- 2018).

Please note, all lectures open at 5:30pm for a 6pm start.

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ABOUT THE SERIES:

What are the landmark exhibitions that have shaped Australian art? From 2019 to 2020, ACCA’s Lecture Series, Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968–1999, will take a deeper look at the moments that have shaped Australian art since 1968. In this two-year series, sixteen guest lecturers will analyse the game changers in Australian art, addressing key contemporary art exhibitions staged over the last three decades of the twentieth century and reflecting on the ways these exhibitions shaped art history and contemporary Australian culture more broadly.

Ambitious, contested, polemical, genre-defining and genre-defying, contemporary art exhibitions have shaped and transformed the cultural landscape, along with our understanding of the very nature of what constitutes as art. This program traces the legacies of artists and curators, addresses the critical reception of select significant projects, and reflects on a wide range of exhibitions and formats; from artist run initiatives to institutions, as well as interventions in public space and remote communities.

Presented by Abercrombie & Kent with Research Partner, Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) at The University of Melbourne, the two-year series brings together a diversity of voices with hour-long lectures and conversations involving exhibiting artists, curators, art critics and historians, with the first set of lectures scheduled from April to November 2019.

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