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

11. MODERNISM-IN-CRISIS
DOWN SOUTH
The period of the 60s is conventionally described in terms of crisis, the moment before post-modernism, when the aims, boundaries and
possibilities of modernism changed. This decade also coincides with the institutional acceptance of modernism in the Southern hemisphere as a
new generation of local artists were identifying with the international ascendancy of American orientated abstraction. Yet the very idea of a succession
of painting movements one after the other, each time both advancing and preserving “its avant-garde impetus” had, however, been unraveling as
a proposition through the course of the decade. Certain projects began to question not only what qualified as art but the spectacle and routines of
display in the modernist museum. Such works have come to represent a watershed in modernist art, and now appear as precursors to installation
and other site-specific art practices.
The panel will explore the terms and meaning of modernism-in-crisis from the perspective of the southern hemisphere.
Convenors: Dr Susan Best Dr Andrew McNamara Dr Ann Stephen
1. Robert Hunter, Geometic Abstraction and the 1960s
Angela Goddard
This paper will examine the Australian artist Robert Hunter’s
works from the 1960s onwards in relation to both the international
reverberations of the critical reception of post-war American art,
and recent scholarship by French philosopher Jacques Ranciere
which attempts to recalibrate the modern/postmodern schema. In
particular, it will explore the implications of the conceptual and postobject
nature of several of Hunter’s early works, the settling of his
practice into a methodology persisting throughout the consequent
decades to the present day and his connections with the American
artist Carl Andre.
Angela Goddard is Curator (Australian Art) Queensland Art Gallery
and a Masters student in Art History at UNSW.
2. Minimalism as Lost Object: The Australian Situation
Keith Broadfoot
(University of New South Wales) (Queensland University of Technology) (University of Sydney)
What is distinctive about the appearance of minimalism in Australia
is that before it had time to properly develop it became associated
with art exploring the idea of disappearance in the landscape.
This is exemplified by the important Sculpturscape exhibition of
the 1970s, with its title obviously playing upon this phenomenon
of the disappearance of sculpture into landscape and landscape
into sculpture. Through the analysis of the work of several artists
included in this exhibition I will examine how some of the key
qualities of minimalism, in particular the ‘homeless’ nature of the
object, interacted with historical issues around the representation of
landscape in Australian art.
Keith Broadfoot teaches in the Department of Art History and
Theory, University of Sydney.
3. Gego: Kinetic Art and After
Dr Susan Best
In Australia, as well as some South American countries, the
kinetic art of the 1960s frequently developed out of the concerns
of abstraction and the crisis or unravelling of modernist painting.
While some of the most well know kinetic artists were expatriate
South Americans (Julio Le Parc, Jesús Rafael Soto), my concern
in this paper is with the European émigré to Venezuela, Gertrude
Goldschmidt, or Gego is she is more commonly known. Her work
slowly undoes the kinetic language of the big three Venezuelan
Cinéticos (Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Alejandro Otero) creating in the
place of a language of movement, a more subtle sense of liveliness
or liveness in the most unlikely materials. Curiously, like her South
American contemporary Lygia Clark (then based in Paris), some of
these organic abstract works are titled Bicho or creature.
Susan Best teaches in the Department of Art History and Theory,
UNSW.
4. Michael Fried’s Worst Nightmare - Jumping Through the
Mirror
Dr Ann Stephen
Why so many mirrors in late modernism And what links and
differences are there in the mirrors of contemporary art Artists
began to use actual mirrors as part of a world wide response to the
purported end-game of modernism, teasing and confounding the
viewer while disquieting if not alienating the conventions of the art
museum, creating a theatre of self-consciousness that anticipated
what the art writer Michael Fried came to lament as ‘decadent
literalist art’. Mirror pieces sat on the side of ‘objecthood’ in a battle
between idealism and materialism that would consume modernism
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