2009 AAANZ Conference Abstracts - The Art Association of Australia ...

9. KEYWORD CURATING:
CAN ART HISTORY BEBLIND TO PRACTICE
“Originally I agreed to write this to keep Studio International from calling me a minimalist”, concedes Donald Judd in his introduction to an article
published in Studio International in April 1969. Forty years later in 2009, Donald Judd is still called a minimalist, least of all by art history. For although
some writers have abjured minimalism’s nomenclature as erroneous, they have done so in texts nevertheless entitled ‘minimalism’ one way or
another. While it is possible to contend that theory and its culmination in art history need not necessarily follow an artist’s view of their practice to
be right, this conference session will explore not only this but also the potential suppression of new art that can occur when practice is shaped by
theory at the expense of what theory has yet to understand of practice.
This session investigates actual instances where a disjuncture between an art practice and the theoretical or historical record of that practice has
occurred, to reveal an alternative understanding previously suppressed; or explore the likelihood and ramifications of this disjuncture occurring as a
consequence of current limitations and procedures for curating contemporary art in museums, today.
Convenor:
1. The Author as Proposer: Intentionality in Contemporary
Art Practice
David Akenson
Gail Hastings
If, despite the embargo placed on authorship in the wake Roland
Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’, postmodern agency was able to
flourish under the auspices of feminist, post-colonial and queer
theory, the authorship debate lent little support to artists operating
outside these culturally specific categories. With the passing of
postmodernism we might expect agency to once again submit to
the hegemony of the social context.
In this paper I argue the case against interpretations of Barthes
that conflate authored art with authorship in general, arguing that
art ontologically arises from an audience response to intentionality,
or what has been proposed. The artist occupies a necessary place
as the one who proposes something. I make the point, that the
‘reader’ of a work of literature may well do without the author, and
rely, in absentia, on the text alone to experience literature, but when
it comes to visual art, the author’sintention, whether clear or not,
is necessary, rather than supplementary, to our experience of the
proposed object as an object of art.
I support my argument with a reading of Marcel Duchamp in the
context of Immanuel Kant’s theory of intentionality outlined in the
third Critique. After discussing intentionality and agency through
a number of modernist examples of art, I focus on ‘relational
aesthetics’, a term used to cover various collaborative efforts where
individual authorship appears least evident. I argue, paradoxically,
that when the author appears least present (readymades and
collaborative practice) authorial intention is most pronounced. I
make the further, related claim that the assumption of an author’s
intention is integral to the experience of art as art and not something
one can choose to either emphasise or repudiate.
David Akenson is a visual artist. He completed a PhD in 2009
entitled: Art in Parallax: Painting, Place, Judgment. David teaches
Art Theory and History at the School of Creative Arts, University of
Southern Queensland.
2. When Art History is Blind to Practice: The Exclusion of
Created Space
Gail Hastings
In December 1960, Donald Judd was not known as an artist, but as
an art critic. Yet behind his monthly contributions to Arts magazine,
tucked away from public knowledge, there thrived a longstanding
studio practice in which Donald Judd was, at the time, taking his
first tentative steps into three-dimensions. His monthly review for
December 1960 in part, reads, ‘Bontecou’s constructions stand
out from the wall like contoured volcanoes. Their craters are voids
but exceedingly aggressive ones, thrust starkly at the onlooker;
these are threateningly concrete holes to be among’. Studio time
and philosophy classes at Columbia University, had just paid off.
The threatening space of the black hole at which he looked (from
outside, as something concrete) was the same space within which
he looked (from inside, as extended space). Consequently, while he
looked, he was in two opposite places at the same time. Dwelling on
the polarities of a ‘concrete hole’, by 1963 Donald Judd had begun
to exhibit the ‘specific space’ of his works of art: a created, not a
phenomenological, space. And yet this decentred space in art was
not ascribed to Lee Bontecou’s work in what became a classroom
classic, Rosalind Krauss’ Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977),
but to an artwork made nine years later, the Double Negative. Lee
Bontecou was one of the first to make this new three-dimensional
art, Donald Judd many a time said. Yet in Passages in Modern
Sculpture, she is without mention. Excluded, too, is Donald Judd’s
created space. Why
I am an artist who makes sculptural situations.
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