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

15. REAL EMERGENCY: ART AND THE
CRISES OF THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
This session looks at the way art and aesthetics approaches real events (disaster, catastrope, conflict, economic and environmental crises). It covers
the development of new “post-documentary” approaches to both art making and exhibition practice, as well as the role of art in relation to media
images and media defined “crises”.
Convenor:
1. Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Crisis after 9/11
Professor Jill Bennett
What does it mean, I wondered, that visual culture has so little to say
about an event so overwhelmingly important and so overwhelmingly
visual James Elkins on 9/11 (Visual Studies, 81)
A number of prominent theorists have commented on the difficulty
of assessing art’s response to 9/11 within a visual framework. This
paper argues that a new kind of aesthetics is required to map and
evaluate the complex ways in which crisis (both real and imagined)
is manifested in visual culture.
The paper outlines a concept of aesthetics and affect and also
discusses the recent exhibition REAL Emergency, featuring work by
Hito Steyerl, Yang Shaobin and others on contemporary crisis (Ivan
Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, 2009, curated by Jill Bennett and Anna
Munster).
Jill Bennett has recently become inaugural Director of the National
Institute of Experimental Arts at UNSW, where she is also Director
of the Centre for Contemporary Art & Politics and Associate Dean
Research (College of Fine Arts). She has recently completed a book
on Practical Aesthetics. Her previous books include Empathic Vision:
Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (Stanford UP, 2005).
2. Criticism’s Crises: Art Criticism and the Judgement of the
Relationship between Art and History
Dr Jolanta Nowak
Professor Jill Bennett
(Centre for Contemporary Art & Politics COFA, UNSW)
When art critics examine how artists represent real crisis events
they ultimately consider the relationship between art and history.
Analysing this relationship demands judgement: a judgement about
the efficacy of art works to bring to light significant features of the
artist’s subject matter. Evidence of this kind of judgement can be
seen in the fact that the critical discussion of, for example, art which
deals with Germany’s history in the twentieth century, (works by
artists as diverse as Boltanski, Richter and those dealing with the
Baader-Meinhof group) centres on the problems and advantages of
specific modes of representation and the effects these have.
It is argued in this paper that art criticism requires the help of
philosophy in its endeavour to make and understand judgements
about the relationship between art and history. This need to
consider the nature and meaning of judgement in art criticism,
whether that judgement be Kantian, phenomenological, ethical,
or even deemed to be an impossibility, is something which recent
writings by James Elkins, Michael Newman, the editors of October
and others have invoked but not explored in sufficient detail. If
critics are to provide a persuasive account of the strengths and
limitations of art’s approach to significant historical events – and
hence of our understanding of those events – it will need to examine
deeply its own critical tools.
Jolanta Nowak graduated from the University of Melbourne in 2007
with a PhD thesis on the relationship between contemporary art
and ethics in the thought of Levinas. She has taught Art History at
several institutions and has lectured in the History of Ideas at Trinity
College, University of Melbourne. Her current research is concerned
with the philosophical history of art’s autonomy.
3. Art Under Occupation
Dr Jennifer Biddle
This paper explores contemporary Central and Western Desert art
in light of the Emergency Intervention into the Northern Territory.
The Closing the Gap policy has positioned Aboriginal literacy as a
key measure of Aboriginal disadvantage and lack; an unacceptable
‘fact’ in a country providing “a fair go for all Australians” as Kevin
Rudd enigmatically has claimed. Recent art challenges the charge
of Aboriginal illiteracy directly, destabilising the policed boundaries
separating ‘art’ from ‘literacy’, and instigating a critical reappraisal
of what it means to ‘write’. A close examination of the works of
June Walkutjukurr Richards (Winner of the 2009 WA Award for Best
Artist) will be provided, revealing a radical ordinary of a distinctive
Ngaanyatjarra literacy that belies the so-called ‘gap’ and the
assimilatory politics of current policy aims.
Jennifer Biddle is a Visual Anthropologist and Senior Research
Fellow at the Center for Contemporary Art and Politics (CCAP),
CoFA, UNSW. Her publications include Breasts, Bodies, Canvas:
Central Desert Art as Experience (UNSW 2007) and Buying
Aboriginal Art: An Ethical Guide (Berg/UNSW forthcoming).
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