Sign up now for ACCA’s highly acclaimed lecture series of art history in free-fall. Enlivening iconic works of art and design. Sit back, enjoy a glass of wine and be entertained and inspired. Get in quick, these lecture series sell out.
Monday 28 July
Cindy Sherman: ‘Untitled Film Stills’ 1977-80
Juliana Engberg
Without doubt, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series, 1977-80, has entered into the canon of late 20th century masterworks. Sherman’s series, featuring a female protagonist, located within a variety of carefully constructed mise-en-scènes, tapped into a number of key theoretical attitudes informing the post-modern period. In Sherman’s self-directed images, ideas from pop-culture, feminism, psychoanalytic theory and art history were brought together to produce visual vignettes that had the instant appeal of a classic; probably because they emerged from already confirmed classics and fine art archetypes.
Juliana Engberg is a curator, writer, publisher and designer, she is the Artistic Director of ACCA and was the Artistic Director of the 19th Biennale of Sydney, 2014.
In some ways Gillian Wearing’s suited man holding up a sign saying ‘I’m Desperate’ came to represent a post-market-crash, recession sentiment. He might have been desperate for love, or desperate for his next sale, whichever: like many in the rat race he was on a treadmill – making him frantic but getting him nowhere. Gillian Wearing’s Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say tapped into a mood and was part of the next wave of British social realism, building upon a legacy that stretches back to the 19th century rural disenfranchised in early industrial Britain. Flash forward to the ‘90s, and Britain was post-industrial and struggling to pull itself out of recession. Art that was spare and built upon the economy of humanity would rise in response.
Monday 11 August
Mike Nelson: ‘The Coral Reef’ 2000
Helen Hughes
Over three months during late 1999 and early 2000, the English artist Mike Nelson built a fifteen-room, totally immersive installation at Matt's Gallery in London's East End called The Coral Reef. Each of the rooms resembled a different reception area, and the floor plan of the installation was based on the shape of a swastika, with each corridor seemingly turning back on itself, causing viewers to become highly disoriented. Two of the fifteen rooms were perfect replicas of each other, which made it even more difficult for people to find their way out of the maze-like work. The Coral Reef was both a critique of global capital, and a highly reflexive meditation on medium. It led to Nelson's nomination for the Turner Prize in 2001, was acquired by the Tate Britain in 2008, and has since become emblematic of contemporary installation art. What does The Coral Reef tell us about trends in contemporary art since 2000?
Helen Hughes is co-founder and co-editor of Discipline, a co-editor of emaj, and a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Melbourne.
Monday 18 August
Umberto Boccioni: 'Unique Forms of Continuity in Space' 1913
Anthony White
Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a work which represents a striding figure who appears to be coming apart at the seams, has become an icon of the Italian avant-garde movement known as Futurism. In 1913, the time of the work's creation, Italy was rushing headlong into a future that promised much but would turn out to be horrific in its consequences. Within 10 years, Boccioni was dead, millions had been slaughtered in the carnage of WWI and Mussolini's fascist government was in power. What can Boccioni's sculpture tell us about this most tumultuous period in Italy's history?
Anthony White is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Melbourne, a specialist in Italian modern art and the author of Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch (MIT Press, 2011).
Monday 1 September
Barbara Kruger, ‘I shop therefore I am’
Juliana Engberg
What’s in a word? Plenty, or as Barbara Kruger would write later – ‘Plenty Should be Enough!’ Before that, Kruger reformulated René Descartes’ philosophical proposition of cognitive existence, ‘I think therefore I am’, into a motto for the hyper-ventilated acquisitive world of the 1980s boom time, replacing ‘think’ with ‘shop’. This pithy critique of capitalism and its social vacuity, loaded with irony on shopping bags, T Shirts and other products of consumption travelled out into the world – a free-floating philosophical observation, and part of a parade of post modern thinking infiltrating the centre from the margins.
Monday 8 September
The Icon: its use and abuse in the modern age
Annemarie Kiely
The Oxford Dictionary defines the word ‘icon’ as 'a devotional painting of Christ or another holy figure, typically executed on wood and used ceremonially in the Byzantine and other Eastern Churches' or 'a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol or as worthy of veneration'. A word once reserved for religious images or symbols is now overused and abused by designers, marketers, and in contemporary media. But what does and doesn’t constitute an iconic work of design?
Annemarie Kiely is the Melbourne Editor of Vogue Living, a former Melbourne Editor of Belle Magazine, and a writer with twenty year’s experience contributing to a wide range of international and local art and design publications.
Monday 15 September
Peter Zumthor, ‘The Therme Vals’
Aaron Roberts
Atmosphere, experience and the sensorial nature of a building is often left out of the conversation within the fetishised, form obsessed, rapid turnover of media relating to design and architecture. However it’s these qualities which consciously or subconsciously influence those who occupy the built realm. Every building has a sensorial profile, but some are highly considered, tailored to evoke particular experiences and memories. At the pinnacle of such work stands Peter Zumthor, a Pritzker Laureate and winner of the 2013 RIBA Gold Medal Award. Slowly crafting cinematic architecture, acutely aware of its influence on the human body and environment, Zumthor has been described by Swiss critic Peter Rüedi, as “an essentialist of the sensual.” The sensorial nature of Zumthor's work will be discussed via his iconic project, the Therme Vals in Graubünden, an astonishing building Zumthor describes as a love affair between stone and water.
Aaron Roberts is founding Co-Director of Room11 architecture studio.
Monday 22 September
Jeff Koons, ‘Rabbit’
Juliana Engberg
High and low references galore, Jeff Koons’ Rabbit 1986 combines a lofty legacy and an upstart brashness, all delivered in a quixotic, slippery, reflective surface. Koons went beyond post-modernism with his critiques of power and money, to a create a hyper-commodity: one that embraced the market-place. The semiotics of surfaces, the psychology of the self-reflective, and the cultivation of the cute, camp and kitsch were all a part of this wascally wabbits’ raison d’etre. But what does this have to do with Durer? Well that remains the question.