4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is an initiative of the Asian Australian Artists’ Association Inc. (4A), a non-profit organisation established in 1996 to present and promote the work of Asian and Asian-Australian artists. This organisation was established by a group of artists who sought to highlight the cultural contribution of Asian migration to Australia and to develop Asian and Australian cultural relations.
The Asian Australian Artists’ Association launched Gallery 4A in 1997 on Sussex Street in Sydney’s Chinatown. 4A launched with an exhibition featuring three Asian-Australian artists: Emil Goh, Lindy Lee and Hou Leong. Curated by Melissa Chiu, 4A’s first curator and director, the exhibition considered the breadth and depth of contemporary Asian- Australian practice.
In this lecture Dr Mikala Tai will consider this inaugural exhibition and the context in which 4A launched and has continued to expand and thrive within.
Dr Mikala Tai is the Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and a curator, researcher and academic specialising in contemporary Asian art and Australian design. Tai has collaborated with local, national and international organisations to strengthen ties between Australia and Asia. As an academic Tai has lectured at both RMIT and the University of Melbourne, and devised and delivered the inaugural Contemporary Asian Art syllabus at RMIT (2012 – ) and the first China Fieldwork Course (2015 – ) with Rebecca Coates and Kate McNeill at the University of Melbourne. Tai was the founder and director of Supergraph – Australia’s Contemporary Graphic Art Fair, which has been held twice at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne and exhibited at Somerset House, London (2015). Tai currently sits on the board of BUS Projects, Melbourne.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
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 the second year of this two-year series, seven more 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 what constitutes art itself. This program traces the legacies of artists and curators, addresses the critical reception of selected 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.
This two-year series is presented in association with Abercrombie & Kent and Research Partner, Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) at The University of Melbourne and supported by Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, Triple R, The Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and the City of Melbourne.
FREE DIGITAL DELIVERY:
As ACCA is currently closed to support public health measures we will be recording our entire 2020 season and releasing all lectures online as freely available videos and podcasts on ACCA’s website and promoted across our social media channels.
A bespoke cocktail recipe created by The Melbourne Gin Company using Capi will be available alongside each lecture. We encourage you to make the cocktail with us.
Defining Moments: Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS
Lecture Topic: Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS 1994, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Speaker: Dr Ted Gott
In 1994 it was hard to open a newspaper in Australia, listen to a radio broadcast or turn on a television set without encountering some discussion of the ‘new’ disease AIDS and its causative factor, the HIV virus. In the same fashion, HIV/AIDS had come under scrutiny in many forms of cultural response from theatre and dance, to fiction, poetry, music and soap opera; such that the Australian public often then found its ‘entertainment’ engaged in serious debate around issues of illness, prejudice, medical research and death.
Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in Age of AIDS (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 12 November 1994 – 5 March 1995) presented over 200 works on the subject of HIV/AIDS by more than 100 Australian and international artists. This lecture looks back at the scope of the exhibition, and some of the stories around its inception.
Dr Ted Gott is Senior Curator of International Art,National Gallery of Victoria. He has curated andco-curated twenty-five exhibitions, includingNapoleon: Revolution to Empire (2012), Gustave Moreauand the Eternal Feminine (2010), Salvador Dalí: LiquidDesire (2009), Modern Britain 1900–1960 (2007), Kissof the Beast: From Paris Salon to King Kong (2005) andThe Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay(2004).In his former role as Curator of European Art at the National Gallery of Australia, Gott curated Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS (1994), among other key exhibitions of international art. He has published widely on Australian, Britishand French art.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
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 the second year of this two-year series, seven more 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 what constitutes art itself. This program traces the legacies of artists and curators, addresses the critical reception of selected 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.
This two-year series is presented in association with Abercrombie & Kent and Research Partner, Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) at The University of Melbourne and supported by Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, Triple R, The Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and the City of Melbourne.
FREE DIGITAL DELIVERY:
As ACCA is currently closed to support public health measures we will be recording our entire 2020 season and releasing all lectures online as freely available videos and podcasts on ACCA’s website and promoted across our social media channels.
A bespoke cocktail recipe created by The Melbourne Gin Company using Capi will be available alongside each lecture. We encourage you to make the cocktail with us.
Defining Moments: ‘Aratjara: art of the first Australians and ‘Fluent: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Judy Watson’
Lecture Topic: Aratjara: Art of the First Australians 1993, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf and fluent: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Judy Watson 1997, Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale
Speaker: Stephen Gilchrist
For almost a decade, working on opposite sides of the world, Aboriginal activists Gary Foley and Charles (Chicka) Dixon and Aboriginal artist Lin Onus worked with Swiss-born artist and curator Bernhard Lüthi on the development of the first major, Indigenous led exhibition to tour internationally. Aratjara: Art of the First Australians travelled to the Kunstsammlung in Düsseldorf, the Hayward Gallery in London, and the Louisiana Museum in Denmark over 1993-94. The exhibition included over 150 works of art by more than 100 artists and drawn from some of the most significant art producing communities in the country. Three years later, Australia’s official contribution to the 1997 Venice Biennale took the form of fluent, an exhibition of works by three leading contemporary Aboriginal artists. Curated by Brenda L Croft, Hetti Perkins and exhibition manager Victoria Lynn, fluent included major works by Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Judy Watson, and woven sculptures by Yvonne Koolmatrie. The exhibition subsequently toured to six major Australian venues, including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, in 1998. In this lecture, Stephen Gilchrist will consider these two major exhibitions as key examples of Indigenous curation that encode Indigenous philosophies of critical care and value.
Dr Stephen Gilchrist belongs to the Yamatji people of the Inggarda language group of northwest Western Australia, and is Lecturer of Indigenous Art at the University of Sydney. He is a writer and curator who has worked with the Indigenous Australian collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2003–05); the British Museum, London (2008); the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005–10); and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (2011–13). He was also the Australian Studies Visiting Curator at the Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University (2012–16). Gilchrist has curated numerous exhibitions in Australia and the United States and has written extensively on Indigenous Art from Australia.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
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 the second year of this two-year series, seven more 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 what constitutes art itself. This program traces the legacies of artists and curators, addresses the critical reception of selected 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.
This two-year series is presented in association with Abercrombie & Kent and Research Partner, Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) at The University of Melbourne and supported by Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, Triple R, The Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and the City of Melbourne.
FREE DIGITAL DELIVERY:
As ACCA is currently closed to support public health measures we will be recording our entire 2020 season and releasing all lectures online as freely available videos and podcasts on ACCA’s website and promoted across our social media channels.
A bespoke cocktail recipe created by The Melbourne Gin Company using Capi will be available alongside each lecture. We encourage you to make the cocktail with us.
Defining Moments: First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1993
Lecture Topic: First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1993
Speaker: Doug Hall AM
After two regional gallery directorships in Victoria, Doug Hall arrived in Brisbane in April 1987 and Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s premiership was on the rocks – the Fitzgerald Inquiry would begin its hearings in July. When Wayne Goss won the election in 1989 he took on the role as Premier and Minister for the Arts. This is the climate in which the Asia Pacific Triennial was developed. The gallery was allowed a vast organisational, curatorial and intellectual change.
The APT was central to an institutional and geo-cultural realignment, one which shaped the advocacy for building the Gallery of Modern Art. This lecture presents the unique circumstances of the APT and how it was conceived as inseparable from an art museum’s conduct, from collections development and the reach of other institutional and programming activity.
Doug HallAM was director, Queensland Art GalleryǀGOMA, Brisbane from 1987 to 2007. The first Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art was held in 1993. He conceived the idea for the Gallery of Modern Art and oversaw its development and opening in December 2006. He was Commissioner for the Australian exhibitions at the Venice Biennales in 2009 and 2011. He returned to Melbourne in 2010 and later appointed Associate Professor and Honorary Fellow, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne. He was an inaugural member of the Asia Art Council, Guggenheim Museum, New York, and has served as a board member of the Australian Japan Foundation and the Australia Thailand Institute. His book Present Tense was published by Black Inc in 2019.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
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 the second year of this two-year series, seven more 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 what constitutes art itself. This program traces the legacies of artists and curators, addresses the critical reception of selected 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.
This two-year series is presented in association with Abercrombie & Kent and Research Partner, Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) at The University of Melbourne and supported by Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, Triple R, The Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and the City of Melbourne.
FREE DIGITAL DELIVERY:
As ACCA is currently closed to support public health measures we will be recording our entire 2020 season and releasing all lectures online as freely available videos and podcasts on ACCA’s website and promoted across our social media channels.
A bespoke cocktail recipe created by The Melbourne Gin Company will be available alongside each lecture. We encourage you to make the cocktail with us.
Defining Moments: The Aboriginal Memorial at the Biennale of Sydney
Lecture Topic: The Aboriginal Memorial, Biennale of Sydney 1988
Speaker: Djon Mundine OAM
In the 1980s, conservatives of all shades in politics were turning against what they perceived to be immoral and untrue academic and artistic texts pursuing themes of revisionism in our national history – a legacy of the 1960s generation of the left. Chief among these issues for debate was the role and place of Australia’s Aboriginal population. Although conflict between Aboriginal and European colonists occurred right from the beginning of the colony, it was not recognised at the time and in subsequent official histories as a ‘war’ in the legal sense: that is, a war was never officially declared at any time over the last 200 years.
It was within this environment of denial that Djon Mundine conceived of the idea for an Aboriginal Memorial. At this time, Mundine was working as the coordinator of the arts and crafts co-operative in the community of Ramingining in Central Arnhem Land.
In this lecture, Mundine reflects on his personal account of the development of the memorial from a series of projects, which involved all sections of the local art community, to the genesis of an idea for a memorial, through to the process of its realisation into the form it took at the 1988 Biennale of Sydney, and it’s subsequent permanent installation in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
Djon MundineOAM is a member of the Bandjalung people of northern New South Wales, and is an independent curator, activist and writer. His career has helped revolutionise the criticism and display of contemporary Aboriginal art, including through prominent curatorial positions held in many national and international institutions, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Queensland Art Gallery. Between 1979 and 1995 He worked as art advisor at Milingimbi in the Crocodile Islands and at Bula-bula Arts in Ramingining in Arnhem Land where he originated and oversaw the Aboriginal Memorialproject. In 1993 he received the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the promotion and development of Aboriginal arts, crafts and culture. In 2005-2006 he was Research Professor at The National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka, Japan.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
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 the second year of this two-year series, seven more 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 what constitutes art itself. This program traces the legacies of artists and curators, addresses the critical reception of selected 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.
This two-year series is presented in association with Abercrombie & Kent and Research Partner, Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) at The University of Melbourne and supported by Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, Triple R, The Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and the City of Melbourne.
FREE DIGITAL DELIVERY:
As ACCA is currently closed to support public health measures we will be recording our entire 2020 season and releasing all lectures online as freely available videos and podcasts on ACCA’s website and promoted across our social media channels.
A bespoke cocktail recipe created by The Melbourne Gin Company using Capi will be available alongside each lecture. We encourage you to make the cocktail with us.
Defining Moments: Recession art and other strategies, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1985
Lecture Topic: Recession art and other strategies 1985, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane
Speaker: Peter Cripps; Respondent: Channon Goodwin
In response to the social, political and cultural contexts of the 1970’s and 80’s, Peter Cripps curated the exhibition Recession Art, at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane in 1985. According to Cripps, ‘Recession art refers to art which is made under the pressure of little money and an insignificant market. It tends to be small, easy to produce, store and dispose of. It included the development of new strategies for the sale of works; the possibility of replacing parts as they sell with replicas. It is an art based on the limited means of production, speed of production and small size of constituent units, which, since they can form larger works, do not restrict the artist in the scale of his work. It is an art based on intellect rather than on formal qualities.’
In his lecture, Cripps reviews this exhibition, interrogating its legacy, as well as exploring perceived synergies between historical and contemporary independent art practice. Additionally, he assesses the role and impact of this type of artist thinking and practice on the contemporary context.
Peter Cripps is an artist and a former Director of the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane (1984–86). As an artist has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally since the 1970s, with recent major individual survey exhibitions including Peter Cripps: Endless Space at the IMA, Brisbane in 2012, and Peter Cripps: Towards an Elegant Solution, ACCA, Melbourne in 2010. Between 1973 and 1988, Cripps worked as a curator and various other roles within a number of major Australian museums, galleries and alternative art spaces, as well as in a freelance capacity.
Permanent Recession: Art Labour & Circumstance – Channon Goodwin and Peter Cripps in conversation
Channon Goodwin is an artist and arts-worker based in Melbourne. Goodwin is the Director of Bus Projects, founding Convener of the All Conference network, and makes films and podcasts for Fellow Worker.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
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 the second year of this two-year series, seven more 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 what constitutes art itself. This program traces the legacies of artists and curators, addresses the critical reception of selected 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.
FREE DIGITAL DELIVERY:
As ACCA is currently closed to support public health measures we will be recording our entire 2020 season and releasing all lectures online as freely available videos and podcasts on ACCA’s website and promoted across our social media channels.
A bespoke cocktail recipe created by The Melbourne Gin Company will be available alongside each lecture. We encourage you to make the cocktail with us at home!
Defining Moments: Popism at the National Gallery of Victoria 1982
Lecture Topic: Popism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1982
Speaker: Judy Annear
The exhibition POPISM was held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1982. At 24 years old, recent honours graduate and founder and editor of Art & Text magazine, Paul Taylor was invited to curate an exhibition of contemporary Australian art. The NGV was usually described as ‘the bunker’ with apparently little connection to the local art scene or experimental practice. POPISM came like a bolt from the blue, hard on the heels of the first five issues of Art &Text.
This lecture will discuss the exhibition and the artists (Howard Arkley, David Chesworth, Ian Cox, Juan Davila, Richard Dunn, Paul Fletcher, Maria Kozic, Robert Rooney, Jane Stevenson, The Society for Other Photography, Imants Tillers, Peter Tyndall, Jenny Watson, and Tsk Tsk Tsk), provide some background and context to the ideas and practices, and the evolution of Taylor’s thinking and working. I will trace this through Taylor’s published writings, the various reactions to his activities, and the recollections and interpretations of his peers – then and now.
Judy Annear is an independent researcher and writer based in Victoria on Dja Dja Wurrung land, never ceded, and Honorary (Principal Fellow) School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. Her fields of research include literary feminisms, and modern and contemporary art practice underpinned by a focus on periods of major technological change. Amongst other projects, she is currently researching Allan Sekula’s first visit to Australia in 1980, as a guest of Working Papers On Photography, Melbourne. Her recent publications include a small book of experimental texts The Ls 2019, as well as contributions to Photomedia Now/Everything is Interesting’ in Art Monthly Australasia October 2018, and an encyclopaedic history, The Photograph and Australia 2015.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
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 the second year of this two-year series, seven more 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 what constitutes art itself. This program traces the legacies of artists and curators, addresses the critical reception of selected 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.
This two-year series is presented in association with Abercrombie & Kent and Research Partner, Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) at The University of Melbourne and supported by Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, Triple R, The Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and the City of Melbourne.
FREE DIGITAL DELIVERY:
As ACCA is currently closed to support public health measures we will be recording our entire 2020 season and releasing all lectures online as freely available videos and podcasts on ACCA’s website and promoted across our social media channels.
A bespoke cocktail recipe created by The Melbourne Gin Company will be available alongside each lecture. We encourage you to make the cocktail with us at home!
Defining Moments: Object and Idea
Lecture by Ian Milliss
National Gallery of Victoria Curator Brian Finemore saw the 1973 exhibition Object and Idea as a smaller conceptualist sequel to the 1968 exhibition The Field. But one invited artist, Ian Milliss, declined to participate having already moved on to working with trade unions and resident action groups rather than exhibitions, galleries and art audiences. At Finemore’s request Milliss wrote a catalogue essay titled New Artist explaining his thinking, the beginning of a politicised cultural activism that was really only accepted by the art world many decades later with the rise of relational aesthetics and social practice.
Ian Milliss is a writer and artist. His early interests in minimalism and then social practice in the late 1960 to early 1970s, led to an early form of cultural activism in his involvement with the Sydney Green Ban movement, the Victoria Street Resident Action Group and squatting. He was subsequently active in protests around the Sydney Biennale, the formation of the Artworkers Union, anti-prison and anti-uranium campaigns, sustainable farming, the Australia Council’s Art & Working Life program and the foundation of Union Media Services.
Listen to the podcast
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.
Defining Moments: Post Object Art in Australia and New Zealand
Lecture by Anne Marsh
The Australian & New Zealand Post-Object Art: A Survey (April-May 1976) was the first major exhibition curated by the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide. It was a landmark exhibition that demonstrated a network of experimental art relations between Australia and New Zealand.
The term ‘post-object art’ was in circulation between 1969 and 1985 and described ‘practices that extended sculpture into temporary, multi-part, mixed media, largely ephemeral situations’ (Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand).
In his catalogue essay for the Australian & New Zealand Post-Object Show Donald Brook, called it ‘a fragment of jargon,’ a misleading term, which stems from the artist’s disenchantment with art and its institutions. According to Brook terms such as Alternative, Non-Commodity, Idea Art, Conceptual, Process, and Documentation Art describe more specifically what Post-Object Art includes.
Anne Marsh will consider the legacy of the Post-Object Show for experimental art in Australia and the development of a theoretical dialogue about such work in Donald Brook’s writings.
Listen to the podcast
Professor Anne Marsh is Professorial Research Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She is known for her expertise on photography, performance and feminism. In 2018 she presented the symposium Women, Art and Feminism in Australia since 1970 at the Victorian College of the Arts, together with Doing Feminism / Sharing the World a series of artist residencies and public program. In 2015 she curated Performance Presence/Video Time at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation showcasing performance art live and on screen, followed by You Had To Be There, a national symposium. Her books include but are not limited to: Performance Ritual Document, Macmillan, 2014, LOOK:Contemporary Australian Photography, since 1980, Macmillan, 2010, and Body & Self: Performance Art in Australia 1969-92, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Please note, all lectures open at 5:30pm for a 6pm start.
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.
Defining Moments: A room of their own: creating a space for the feminist collective
Lecture by Janine Burke; Respondent: Helen Hughes
The mid-1970s were a time of radical feminist intervention in both Australian art history and contemporary art. Janine Burke was closely involved with significant curatorial enterprises that were initiated at the University of Melbourne. With Kiffy Rubbo and Lynne Cook, she co-curated A Room of One’s Own: Three Women Artists (1974), one of Australia’s first feminist art exhibitions. The following year Rubbo commissioned Burke to curate Australian Women Artists: One Hundred Years 1840-1940, a national touring exhibition. At the same time, the visit of New York-based critic Lucy Lippard lead to the foundation of the Women’s Art Movement.
In her lecture, Dr Burke reviews these events, interrogating their legacy as well as exploring perceived synergies between historical and contemporary women’s art, and assesses Rubbo’s role as a catalyst for collective feminist action.
Listen to the podcast:
Janine Burke is an art historian, curator and award-winning novelist. In 1975, she curated the landmark exhibition and publication Australian Women Artists: One Hundred Years 1840-1940 at the George Paton Gallery. In 2014, she organised the conference ‘Kiffy Rubbo: Curating the 1970s’ at the University of Melbourne, leading to a book of the same name co-edited with Helen Hughes in 2016. Dr Burke was the inaugural Lecturer in Art History at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1977 and is now Honorary Senior Fellow, Centre of Visual Art, VCA.
Helen Hughes an art historian and curator. She is a lecturer in Fine Arts at Monash University and her research focuses on Australian art history and international contemporary art. She co-founded and co-edits the Melbourne contemporary art journal Discipline, and is an editor of the peer-reviewed art history journal EMAJ. From 2016-18 she was Research Curator at Monash University Museum of Art, and co-curated the 2016 TarraWarra Biennial: Endless Circulation with Victoria Lynn and presented exhibitions and Discipline lectures at Gertrude Contemporary and beyond.
Please note, all lectures open at 5:30pm for a 6pm start.
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.
Defining Moments: Almost Anything Goes: Sculpturescape 1975 at Mildura
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.
Listen to the podcast now:
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.
Defining Moments: Clifton Hill Community Music Centre
Lecture by David Chesworth; Respondent: Kelly Fliedner
The Clifton Hill Community Music Centre (CHCMC) was a lively place from 1976 to 1984, where artists from two distinct generations created, performed, debated and occasionally shirt-fronted each other. In the dilapidated rooms of the ex-organ factory—where generations earlier, Melbourne Town Hall’s grand organ was assembled—an emerging postmodernism rubbed up against counterculture aesthetics.
CHCMC was one of the first places in Australia where the boundaries of performance, music-making, filmmaking and installation-making were dissolved. Musicians made films, visual artists made music, critics and theorists performed. Initially encouraged by Ron Nagorcka and Warren Burt, performers producing work in vastly different ways included Tsk Tsk Tsk, Adrian Martin, Maria Kozic, Jayne Stevenson, Essendon Airport, Peter Tyndall, John Nixon, Ros Bandt, Ernie Althoff and Chris Mann, among others.
Events were free and artists received no payment. It was significant that the performers and audience were deemed to be on an equal footing, where anyone could (and was encouraged to) be a performer, often utilising cheap technologies (cassettes, toy instruments and super-8 film) and readymade materials of any variety rather than traditional instruments.
Coordinated by David Chesworth from 1978-82 with distinctive posters designed by Philip Brophy, the artist-run space, chimed with punk and post-punk’s attitude of ‘just do it’. Paul Taylor, who founded the art journal Art & Text, was a frequent visitor, even performing at one event. Later, Taylor’s breakthrough Popism exhibition at National Gallery of Victoria also featured many CHCMC artists.
David Chesworth is an artist and composer. For five years (1978-82) he was coordinator of the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre and early in his career he was co-founder of post-punk band Essendon Airport. He is known for his experimental and minimalist music, and has worked with electronics, contemporary ensembles, film, theatre and experimental opera. Together with Sonia Leber he creates films and installations that are speculative and archaeological, responding to architectural, social and technological settings. Their works are collected by institutions nationally and internationally, and was recently shown at the 56th Biennale of Venice: All the World’s Futures in 2015. A mid-career survey of six of their video works Architecture Makes Us was exhibited at Centre for Contemporary Photography in 2018, touring to UNSW Galleries and Griffith University Art Museum in early 2019.
Kelly Fliedner is a Perth-based writer and curator who writes fiction and art criticism, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia where she is writing on contemporary art practices from South Asia.
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.
In 1970, Sydney-based artists Peter Kennedy, Mike Parr, Tim Johnson and others co-founded Inhibodress, one of Australia’s first artist-run initiatives. While Inhibodress was short-lived – operating only until 1972 – it was instrumental in supporting, and exposing the Australian public to, early experimental performance, movement, light, sound and video art. Among many impactful works shown at the Woolloomooloo space was Peter Kennedy’s But the Fierce Blackman (7-29 March, 1971); a performative environment/installation understood to be one of the earliest sound art works produced in Australia. Exhibited alongside Kennedy’s major neon installation, Luminal Sequences, the exhibition was grounded in ideas of interference, which subsequently became central to Kennedy’s practice. Recognised as a key moment in the development of critical discourse on conceptual art in Australia, in this lecture Kennedy will reflect on the importance of Inhibodress and this significant work.
Sue Cramer, curator of Inhibodress 1971-1972, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1989, will consider the legacy of this work in conceptual art practice, and the politics of working with the history of performance art and restaging historical exhibitions.
Peter Kennedy is an artist and co-founded of the artist-run Inhibodress gallery. His work has been presented and collected by major institutions in Australia and around the world.
Sue Cramer is a Curator at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.
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Please note, all lectures open at 5:30pm for a 6pm start.
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.
Defining Moments: Digging for Honey Ants: the Papunya mural project
Lecture by John Kean; Respondent: Hannah Presley
The creation of murals at the Papunya School in 1971 is cited as the singular catalyst that set off the Western Desert Painting movement. The truth of this claim is in fact more complex, confounding and consequential. This lecture examines the subject of the murals, and the broader social context in which they were created. The lecture reveals how this mythic gesture (on walls that few outside the community saw), signifies a telling shift in colonial relations.
The subject of the largest mural, the tunnels and chambers of Yerrampe (the Honey Ant site) leading to Papunya, makes visible songlines and kinship networks that connect country – the unseen realities that govern life in Central Australia. The authority of individuals, previously relegated to duties as yardmen and gardeners, became apparent as they painted resonant icons in a pedagogical setting. Their power was made manifest through the depth of their relationship to the images they created. Already an artist and go-between, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa was critical to this process – it was he who negotiated the form of the Yerrampe mural with senior custodians and school authorities. Kaapa’s genius was to give tangible form to the totemic landscape on which the colonial edifice of Papunya was sited.
John Kean was Art Advisor at Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd from 1977-79, the inaugural Exhibition Coordinator at Tandanya: the National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, 1989-92, Exhibition Coordinator, Fremantle Art Centre 1993-96 and Producer at Museum Victoria 1996 -2010. John is currently undertaking a PhD in Art History at the University of Melbourne. John has published extensively on Indigenous art and the representation of nature in Australian museums.
Hannah Presleyis an Aboriginal curator based in Melbourne, with family connections in Alice Springs and Peppimenarti in the Northern Territory. She is currently the inaugural curator for the Yalingwa program at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Presley was First Nations Curatorial Assistant for My Horizon: Tracey Moffatt at the 57th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale 2017. Her practice focuses on the development of creative projects with Aboriginal artists, working closely with artists, learning about the techniques, history and community that informs their making to help guide her curatorial process.
Please note, all lectures open at 5:30pm for a 6pm start.
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.
Defining Moments: Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Coast 1968-69
Lecture by John Kaldor; Respondent: Rebecca Coates
Described as ‘somewhere between a monument and an event’, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet, at Little Bay, Sydney, in 1968–69, was an extraordinary project that had an indelible impact on public art and inspired an enduring legacy for Australian culture. Wrapped Coast was the first major environmental project by the internationally acclaimed French husband-and-wife artist duo. Wrapped Coast was the inaugural Kaldor Public Art Project and, over a 50-year period, 33 ground-breaking projects followed.
John Kaldor AO is a dedicated collector, patron and supporter of contemporary art. He has been collecting and commissioning contemporary art since the early 1960s and since 1969 has shared his love of art with the Australian public through his series of art projects.
Rebecca Coates is the director of Shepparton Art Museum (SAM), and an established curator, writer and lecturer, with experience in Australia and overseas. She was awarded a PhD in Art History from the University of Melbourne, focused on Kaldor Public Art Projects.
Please note, all lectures open at 5:30pm for a 6pm start.
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.