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

is represented by Chalk Horse Gallery and is a member of the
Centre for Contemporary Arts and Politics.
12. Matthew Barney, The Cremaster Cycle, and the Crisis
of Ritual Abuse in the Contemporary Western World
Dr Lynn Brunet
Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002) follows a
trajectory in contemporary art of performance-based enactments
that involve the artist’s own body in space and include acts of
extreme physicality as well as incorporating ritualistic themes
and settings. Critics have regularly noted the relationship
between performance art and ritual practices. As early as 1974,
in response to the bizarre enactments of performance artists,
Lea Vergine tendered the possibility that the artists’ actions were
in some way related to religious themes or cult practices. In
The Cremaster Cycle Barney has highlighted this connection by
drawing attention to the role of Freemasonry, asking questions
about its influence and relating it to the artistic process.
This paper will examine Barney’s film cycle in the light of the
contemporary crisis of ritual abuse in the western world. Current
research notes that many groups that utilise initiatory rituals to
produce altered states of consciousness have also been sites
of child abuse. Among them, groups using Masonic rituals
and regalia are frequently noted in the literature. This paper
demonstrates that The Cremaster Cycle is littered throughout
with both overt and cryptic references to Freemasonry, its
history, rituals and symbolism. The paper asks whether Barney’s
work could be a deep and convoluted struggle with a profound
sense of trauma, even an aesthetically expressed accusation
of a serious crime, enacted on a grand scale, which can tell us
something about this current crisis. The artist has endorsed this
interpretation of his work.
Lynn Brunet’s research examines the coupling of trauma and
ritual in modern and contemporary art and literature. Her PhD,
awarded in 2007, addressed Masonic initiatory themes and
trauma in the work of contemporary artists. A subsequent study,
A Course of Severe and Arduous Trials: Bacon, Beckett and
Spurious Freemasonry in Early Twentieth Century Ireland (Peter
Lang, 2009) examined similar themes in a comparative study.
She was a full-time Lecturer in Art History and Theory from 1994
to 2006 and is now an independent scholar, living in Melbourne.
1. Exploring Pasts, Fabricating Presents: Recollecting
Southeast Asian Connections in Contemporary Art
Dr Michelle Antoinette
Resisting the limits of their ‘nationality’, a number of
contemporary artists in Southeast Asia express in their art the
complexity of their multi-ethnic, shared histories beyond the
colonially-defined borders of their nation. Rather, their art serves
as a means of historical inquiry, but also, as contemporary
fabrication, inspired by popular myths and the lack of definitive
historical archives regarding pre-colonial, cross-cultural overlap
in Southeast Asia. A further source of inspiration is likely a
political motivation to recognise the continuation of crosscultural
histories within and between the separate visions
of nationhood across Southeast Asia in the face of divisive
nationalist politics. This paper will examine contemporary artistic
practices concerned with the creative reimagination of Southeast
Asian pre-colonial connections in contemporary Southeast
Asian art and their relationship to contemporary Southeast Asian
identities.
Michelle Antoinette received her PhD in Interdisciplinary
Cross-Cultural Research through the Humanities Research
Centre, The Australian National University. She is a researcher
of modern and contemporary Asian art and has been a Lecturer
on Asian and Pacific art and museums at the ANU. Her
most recent publications include The Art of Race: Rethinking
Malaysian Identity Through the Art of Wong Hoy Cheong (2009),
Contending with Present Pasts: on developing Southeast Asian
art histories (2009), Intimate Pasts Resurrected and Released:
Sex, death, and faith in the art of Josè Legaspi (2008), and
Deterritorializing Aesthetics: International art and its new
cosmopolitanisms, from an Indonesian Perspective (2007).
2. Signs of the Contemporary: Austral/Asian Horizons at
the Crossroads of the South
Dr Francis Maravillas
In this paper, I examine the ways in which the variously
constituted Asian artistic diasporas in Australia have unravelled
some of the spatial and temporal assumptions that underlie
the conventional narratives of both Australian and Asian art.
On the one hand, the very presence and work of ‘Asian’ artists
in Australia represents an assertion of coevalness that not
only challenges the categorical otherness imputed to Asia,
and Asians in Australia, but also redefines the boundaries of
Australian art, of which they are an increasingly significant
and integral part. At the same time, as diasporic artists with
transnational connections with the region we know as ‘Asia’,
their work also highlight the shifting contours and heterogeneity
of this region, notwithstanding the emphasis on regional unity
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