Griffith University

Architectural criticism, between art and design criticism

Convenors:
Dr Naomi Stead, School of Architecture, University of Technology, Sydney
Dr Andrew Leach, School of Geography, Planning & Architecture, University of Queensland

Architectural criticism is often assumed to belong within an art-historical critical tradition, even though the status and disciplinary definition of architecture as art is far from clear. This is partly because of the mixed nature of architectural practice, its fulfilling functional requirements as well as having aesthetic aspirations, but curiously enough architectural criticism has only rarely been placed in a continuum with design criticism, which also deals with questions of program and use simultaneously with aesthetics.

This session proposes to address the commonalities and distinctions between the criticism of art, architecture, and design, asking: how and why does architectural criticism implicitly or explicitly frame architecture as a genre or medium of art? What is the relationship between historiographic and critical processes in art, architecture, and design? What is the critical influence of writing, as itself a medium, form, technique, and mode of representation? How do the specific practices of art, architecture and design criticism fit within larger acts of cultural critique? Can art, architecture and design objects themselves enact criticism, within or across genres? What insights are revealed on those occasions when architecture is discussed by art critics, designed objects are discussed by architecture critics, and so on? What is revealed in the discussion of hybrid art and design practices, or those which take buildings as their site, medium, or object of representation? The session will attempt to address these questions and more.

Naomi Stead is a senior lecturer in Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney, and a widely published architecture critic.

Andrew Leach is a UQ Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ATCH Research Group at the University of Queensland. Among his books are Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History and What is Architectural History???? (forthcoming).

Contact:
Naomi.Stead@uts.edu.au
andrew.leach@uq.edu.au

Before Australia ??? Recent Reflections on 19th Century Art in the Asia Pacific Region

Convenor:
Dr Sally Butler, English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland

Contemporary Asia Pacific art continues to grow in significance and articulation, and it is now timely to reflect on the ???collective??? history of this regional construct and to examine the historical lines of interaction and connections between the different groups of artists who were working in the era before Australian Federation. Submissions are invited for papers relating to any nineteenth century activity within the visual arts in the Australia/Asia Pacific region. Papers are particularly encouraged that seek to break new ground in how we account for art from the period that embodies cultural difference, aesthetic diversity or redefinition of the concept of art itself.

Sally Butler is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Queensland. Her research focus is Australian Indigenous Art and Cross Cultural Critical Theory. Publications include Our Way, Contemporary Aboriginal Art from Lockhart River which accompanied a University of Queensland Art Museum international touring exhibition of the same name and curated by Sally Butler.

Contact: sallybutler@uq.edu.au

Charles Darwin and the humanities in Australia

Convenor:
Professor Jeanette Hoorn, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

February 12, 2009 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin. As part of the festivities happening all over the globe to mark the event, an exhibition of paintings, books and scienti???c materials will be held at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne in 2009. This exhibition will form a celebration of the in???uence of Darwinian ideas, both scienti???c and popular on Australian cultural life. In addition, the 2008 annual AAANZ conference will hold a session that will focus speci???cally on the impact of Darwinian ideas on the visual arts in Australia and in the Paci???c region. Papers are called for which seek to provide knowledge of how the ideas of this great thinker have impacted upon Australian and Paci???c visual cultures. Papers might explore such diverse areas as the voyage of the Beagle and Darwin???s visit to Australia and the Paci???c; the impact of Darwin on nineteenth and twentieth century Australian and Paci???c art and letters; on postcolonial and postmodern art; on contemporary academic art and on popular art forms that incorporate the cinema, video art, comics, the press and the media.

Jeanette Hoorn is Professor of Visual Cultures in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent book is Australian Pastoral, the Making of a White Landscape, Fremantle Press, 2007.

Contact: jjhoorn@unimelb.edu.au

Copies, replicas and translations: multiplying meanings

Convenors:
David Maskill, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Dr Lisa Beaven, La Trobe University, Melbourne

This session welcomes papers that address the phenomenon of the replication of works of art and the various meanings that result. Papers could examine any of the following: painted copies, artist replicas, translations of paintings or sculptures into other media such as prints or ceramics. Papers should address the process and effects of replication considering both what is lost and what is gained. Papers that address the role and status of copies in the formation of artistic, social and cultural canons would also be welcome. Papers are invited that engage with the themes of plagiarism, appropriation, pastiche and emulation. While primarily intended to appeal to scholars of early modern European art, papers that address these themes in other times and locations will also be considered.

David Maskill is senior lecturer and Programme Director of art history at Victoria University of Wellington. He specialises in French eighteenth-century art and the history of prints. He has published articles on the French portraitists La Tour and Tocqu?? in Dossier de l???art and Print Quarterly. He has organised a series of print exhibitions in the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University of Wellington, most recently Artiface: Artists??? Portraits in Prints (2005) and Pulp Fictions: The Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (2007).

Lisa Beaven is lecturer in art history at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She works on aspects of the history of collecting and art patronage in early modern Rome, recent chapters appearing in books such as Art and Identity in Modern Rome J.Burke and M. Bury (eds), Ashgate, 2008, and Possessions: Renaissance Cardinals, Rites and Rituals, Penn. State University Press, 2008. She is currently completing a book on the seventeenth-century patron and antiquarian Cardinal Camillo Massimi.

Contacts:
david.maskill@vuw.ac.nz
l.beaven@latrobe.edu.au

Critical Reflections on Discipline Crossovers in Modern Art

Convenor:
Dr Toni Ross, School of Art History & Art Education, University of New South Wales

A common gesture in postmodern discourse on the arts was to situate the crossing of boundaries between disciplines, media, and competencies as subversive of the modernist tradition. More recently, theorist Jacques Ranci??re has argued instead that from its earliest phases historical modernism was motivated to cross borders between different creative fields (such as art and design), and between art and non-art. This session calls for papers that reflect critically on claims of subversive intent or effect in multi- or cross-disciplinary forms of modern art, either historical or contemporary.

Toni Ross is Senior Lecturer in Art History at College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. She is currently researching crossovers between art and design in contemporary art.

Contact: t.ross@unsw.edu.au

Fashion and its Histories

Convenor:
Professor Peter McNeil, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

Historians have proposed different dates for the birth of fashion and placed it in both the east and the west. The notion of ???costume history??? has largely disappeared as a designation in recent years, replaced by the study of dress and culture, or clothing and appearance. This is not just a rubric, but also a result of 1970s literary theory that questioned the tenets of historical ???objectivity???. ???Costume??? carries within it the notion of a formal and structured system, rather than the element of more personal expression. The falling away of this term, which encompassed ???fashion???, ???dress??? and ???clothing???, frequently including the ethnographic and the anthropological, places certain new demands on the definition of fashion. There is a longstanding tradition within historical and antiquarian scholarship of studying fashion, and sometimes the historical and the contemporary are seen as antithetical. What is fashion, how do we define who makes it, what type of intensity must it hold, who needs to be permitted to access it, and how variable need it be?

The convener calls for papers that consider ways in which dress and fashion studies have been articulated, and productive ways in which history and theory have been brought together to produce new understandings of fashion. The session will mark twenty-five years of fashion history and theory being taught in Australian universities by Associate Professor Margaret Maynard (University of Queensland) and Dr Michael Carter (University of Sydney), both now retired.

Peter McNeil is Professor of Design History, University Technology Sydney and Professor of Fashion Studies, Stockholm University.

Contact:
Peter.McNeil@uts.edu.au

It???s Time: Constructing Australian Design History

Convenors:
Dr Denise Whitehouse, Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology
Dr Daniel Huppatz, Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology

In his pioneering Design History Australia (1988) Tony Fry called for the development of critical approaches to support the emerging discipline of Australian design history. Since then, Michael Bogle and others have made significant contributions to mapping design???s part in the history of modernism, identifying significant designers, moments and works, and compiling document anthologies. However, little progress has been made in developing a critical framework for understanding design as a distinctive discipline and professional practice, and for theorising the role of its sub-disciplines ??? graphic design, interior and exhibition design, fashion design, industrial and product design ??? within Australian economic, social and cultural production.

Twenty years later, it is perhaps time to review the state of design history in Australia. How far has it progressed from Fry???s attempt to shape a critical method for building a historical understanding of the practice and consumption of design in Australia? Is an identifiable field emerging with its own objects of inquiry, methods, modes of exposition and themes? Are critical and thematic narratives that address the specificity of Australia???s design culture beginning to shape? Is there the depth of knowledge necessary to rethink northern hemisphere biases of conventional design history? Should we be rethinking modernist historiography???s favoured modes ??? biographies, discipline-specific, era, stylistic and modernist surveys ??? to address the specificities of Australian design culture?

Papers for this session could respond to these questions while exploring Australian design historiography and methodology, narrative and thematic concerns (social and cultural), and critical studies of individual designers, disciplines, periods or products.

Denise Whitehouse is Senior Lecturer, Design and Cultural History, Swinburne University of Technology. Experienced in developing award winning design history programs within art and design schools, her papers and publications focus on design criticism, design education and Australian design history. Her essay ???The State of Design History as a Discipline??? will feature in D. Brody and H. Clark (eds.) Design Studies; A Reader (Berg forthcoming)

Daniel Huppatz teaches design history and theory at Swinburne University and RMIT in Melbourne. His poetry, fiction and critical writing have been featured in numerous publications in Australia and the United States. He maintains a blog on contemporary culture, Critical Cities: http://djhuppatz.blogspot.com/

Contact:dwhitehouse@swin.edu.au

Matters of Hierarchy and Order in Oceanic Art

Convenors:
Dr Prue Ahrens, English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland
Daniel Waswas, Melanesian Institute of Arts and Communication, PNG
Maud Page, Curator of Pacific Art, Queensland Art Gallery

Many researchers have realised the futility of attempts to apply Western artistic frameworks to Oceanic art. Western distinctions between art, craft and design, are irrelevant to the aims and methods of Indigenous cultural production. But is that to say there is no internal structure or hierarchy within Oceanic art at all? Pacific cultures are many and varied, but most have, or do, operate within chiefly structures and social systems within the family and wider community are deeply entrenched. Wouldn???t it seem that the art produced in such societies would engage with its social orders? Is art one way in which Indigenous artists resist or challenge internal authority and hierarchical order? As the global community closes in on Pacific cultures, do Indigenous artists remain bound by local social frameworks? Have they adopted or adapted modernist artistic systems in an attempt to speak to a wider non-specialist western public? Or have the conditions of western postmodernism and the associated fracturing of hierarchy and structure within western art established some preconditions for a global consumption of Oceanic art? This session will interrogate questions of hierarchy and structure within past and present Oceanic art.

Prue Ahrens is an Art Historian and Reader in Cultural History at the University of Queensland. She has published widely on Pacific history and cultural production.

Daniel Waswas is a practising artist and the Director of Melanesian Institute of Arts & Communication, University of Papua New Guinea. He is the founder of GalleryPNG, a non profit art organisation, and his work has been collected by The Museum of Confluences, Lyon and Rochefort Museum, France.

Maud Page is Curator of Pacific Art at the Queensland Art Gallery and, amongst other exhibitions, has contributed to the last two Asia Pacific Triennials of Contemporary Art.

Contacts:
p.ahrens@uq.edu.au
danielw@gallerypng.com.pg
maud.page@qag.qld.gov.au

Open Session

Convenor: to be advised

The conference welcomes abstracts for papers from any member of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand and any academic, student, artist, photographer, filmmaker, or other art and design professional concerned to engage with issues that advance scholarship and discourse around issues relating to visual culture.

Contact: r.hawker@griffith.edu.au

Photography Theory and Criticism

Convenor:
Dr Daniel Palmer, Lecturer, Department of Theory, Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University

This session explores new developments in photography theory and criticism. It seeks to open up new ways of thinking about the photographic image emerging from contemporary art practice, and welcomes critical responses to Michael Fried???s recent meditations on the medium (culminating in his 2008 book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before). Other topics that might be developed include new theories of documentary photography (eg. in light of new mobile technologies) and the transformation of photography archives into networked databases. Are current aesthetic categories capable of understanding the multiple guises of photography in the digital age?

Daniel Palmer is a Lecturer in the Theory Department of the Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University. He has written extensively on contemporary Australian art in journals such as Art & Australia, Broadsheet, Photofile and Frieze, and is the coauthor with Blair French of Twelve: Australian Photoartists (Piper Press, 2008).

Contact: daniel.palmer@artdes.monash.edu.au

Private Agendas/Public Spaces

Convenors:
Rebecca Coates, Independent Curator and lecturer, Associate Curator, ACCA, PhD candidate
Dr Kate MacNeill, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

Public artworks have not always been well received and are often controversial. Governments require developers to allocate funds to public art and local councils embrace public art as part of urban redevelopment and community building. Yet some of the more compelling examples of public art in Australia have been produced through private commissions. Papers sought for this session will examine the complex public and private dimensions to contemporary 'public' art and illuminate the way in which public art 'works'. They might explore the varying ways in which public art is commissioned, the controversies that surround public art and the motivations of artists who make art for the 'public'.

Rebecca Coates is an independent curator and writer with extensive professional experience as a curator in art museums and galleries in Australia and internationally. She is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Associate Curator at ACCA, Melbourne. Her dissertation examines private foundations commissioning site-specific ephemeral based artwork, both in Australia and internationally.

Kate MacNeill is undertaking a research project funded by the University of Melbourne in which she is examining the ways in which contemporary public art interacts with the 'public'. Kate???s PhD was on identity and contemporary art, she is a lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne where she teaches in the post-graduate arts management programs and she has published in the areas of the visual arts and the public sphere.

Contacts:
cmmacn@unimelb.edu.au
rfcoates@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

Sustainable Cultures/Sustainable Ecologies

Convenor:
Professor Pat Hoffie, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University

Although the world has responded to the need for a collective response to the critical nature of global environmental issues, the equally critical necessity of fostering and forging sustainable cultural practices has not yet been given the same concerted focus. Imaginative, creative responses to the problems and changes of contemporary contexts will need to draw from traditional indigenous knowledges and cultural practices as well as being informed by contemporary know-how. Although there is growing appreciation of the rich diversity and expression of contemporary indigenous cultural production of the Asia-Pacific region, there has been little research into the ways in which this production is intimately tied to custodianship of land and waterways.

This session will examine how the interconnectedness of the cultural and ecological complexity in the Asia-Pacific region has sustained the environmental diversity of the region, and calls for papers that explore deeper understandings of the ways in which biological diversity and cultural diversity are interdependent.

Pat Hoffie is a Brisbane based artist who has worked extensively in the Asia-Pacific region for the past fifteen years. She is a Professor at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.

Contact: p.hoffie@griffith.edu.au

The Anthropomorphic Impulse in Contemporary Art and Popular Culture

Convenor:
Associate Professor Ross Woodrow, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University

The anthropomorphic impulse in human thought has been recorded through art and critiqued in philosophy for more than two and a half millennia. Mostly this anthropomorphism manifested itself in the attribution of distinctly human features, traits or characteristics to nonhuman animals. Such thinking implied a permeability between human and nonhuman animals that ultimately expressed itself in universal theories from the Great Chain of Being to Darwinian evolution. The real and metaphoric relations between human and animal were further enriched after industrialization with the rise of the trichotomy of human/animal/machine. More recently techno-sciences or specifically biotechnologies have disrupted the distinction between the organic and mechanical, complicating attempts to symbolically define human identity based on a distinct biological entity measured against either machine or nonhuman species. When contemporary artists and theorists have critically engaged this posthuman condition, the focus has often been on cyborgs, virtual reality, cloning and cross-species exploitation.

This session invites papers that will demonstrate new perspectives on the human/animal relation in contemporary art and popular culture. We are particularly interested in papers that might demonstrate continuity in the anthropomorphic impulse through comparison with contemporary and historical examples ??? such as between recent popular animated films and nineteenth-century illustrated fables or the identification of post-cyborg species and the location of their origins. However, papers with singular focus on aspects of either historical or contemporary anthropomorphism or zoomorphism are also welcome.

Ross Woodrow is Deputy Director (Research) at the Queensland College of Art Griffith University. The history of the physiognomic sciences and their influence on popular imagery is one of his key research interests.

Contact: r.woodrow@griffith.edu.au

The connections (or non-connections) between Australia and Asia through contemporary art and culture

Convenor:
Dr Debra Porch, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University

Culture contacts were once limited to a few members of the elite, some long-distance traders and, from time to time, the soldiers who were sent out to conquer other peoples.
Wang Gungwu, Vice-Chancellor, University of Hong Kong, 1993.

Many would attest to Australia being part of a greater Asian region in the southern hemisphere, and not the brother or sister to the vast expanses of the Americas or Europe in the northern hemisphere. The Asialink program, based in Melbourne, began in the late 1980s to bridge contemporary art and ideas between Australia and the greater region of Asia and the Pacific. The first Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 1993, at the Queensland Art Gallery was, as Doug Hall said, 'a landmark exhibition and the first of its kind of this scale in the world to focus on the contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand.'

The Asia-Pacific region is now overflowing with other contemporary biennials and art fairs. Educational institutions have set-up cross-institutional links with partners in the aspiration of cultural exchange and education.
This session will address where the connections (or non-connections) have been realised between Australia and the Asia-Pacific in contemporary art and culture.

Questions that arise may be:

• Are there real connections or only opportunities for individual gain?
• What has been the impact of theatre, writing and cinema as cultural exchange?
• What have educational institutions really accomplished cross-culturally since the early 1990s?

Debra Porch is Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Fine Art at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and has been the recipient of grants and awards that include an Asialink Artist residency in Hanoi, Vietnam, 1996, and in 2000 the Art Gallery of NSW Moyra Dyring Studio residency at the Cit?? Internationale des Artes in Paris.

Contact: d.porch@griffith.edu.au

The Documentary Impulse in Australia's Audio Visual Culture

Convenors:
Associate Professor Pat Laughren, Griffith Film School, Griffith University
Trish FitzSimons, Griffith Film School, Griffith University

While Patrick White famously decried the ???dun coloured realism??? which he viewed as dominating Australian literature, the impulse to document, record and analyse the ???pro-filmic??? event has, arguably, made a much more positive contribution to Australia???s audiovisual culture. After all, the first Australian film commercially exhibited was the 1896 Melbourne Cup, of which the Bulletin remarked, ???It is something beautifully appropriate that the first Australian picture presented by the new machine should be a horse race???; and among the first Australian films to gain international acclaim were Damien Parer???s Oscar winning, Kokoda Frontline and John Heyer???s Venice Film Festival triumph The Back of Beyond. Mindful of Alessandro Cavalcanti's injunction that the documentarian should consider the technical, the aesthetic and the social, this session invites papers which contemplate the scope of the contribution of the documentary impulse to bear witness across all aspects of Australia???s audiovisual culture.

Pat Laughren is a filmmaker on the staff of the Griffith Film School. His credits include the broadcast documentaries The Fair Go: Winning the 1967 Referendum, The Legend Of Fred Patersonand Red Ted And The Great Depression. In collaboration with the National Film and Sound Archive, he has completed two compilations of early cinema, Queensland???s First Films 1895-1910 and Queensland???s Silent Films: the Newsreel Years 1910-1930. He is currently working on the third in that series, Queensland Film 1930-1960: from the Talkies to Television.

Trish FitzSimons makes documentaries and writes about the history and theory of documentary. Her productions include Snakes and Ladders: A Film About Women, Education and History, Another Way? and Channels of History. She is a senior lecturer in the Griffith Film School.

Contacts:
p.laughren@griffith.edu.au
t.fitzsimons@griffith.edu.au

The Moral Body

Convenor:
Dr Thomas Loveday, Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales

The recent closing of the exhibition of photographs by Bill Henson occupied media interest for some time. However, the hoopla surrounding the event has masked deeper cultural and artistic issues. Now that the event has passed, a deeper investigation may reveal something new about art and culture or perhaps merely remind us of what needs constant reiteration; that art must always challenge our values and in so doing will always also test the tolerance of those who reject such challenges. As such, is art constantly at war with society? Indeed, is art a 'war machine?'

The concern for Henson???s critics is the merging of artistic images of youthful bodies with other less savoury ones. In this merging, the inability to see the difference between one kind of use and another has lead to a struggle for control over the use of those images. According to these interests, children???s rights are being contravened under the mystifying imprimatur of art.

These interests claim that they speak for children. They 'value' children as the innocent occupants of natural bodies from whom will emerge, through a tragic descent or 'fall', adults. Their concern is to ease that descent, making it as painless and comfortable as possible, so as to create 'healthy' people. The principle seems to be that the body, as a source of desire, needs to be controlled. Children then need to be protected from the corrupting influence of unnatural desires to which they might become connected through images of their own bodies.

Underpinning this argument is an ethical and moral point of view about childhood, adolescence and adulthood as 'identity' and the way that identity is connected to a body. Children are 'innocent' and need to be ???allowed to be children,??? according to our Prime Minister. This particular and rather recent European 'Enlightenment' evaluation is not necessarily reflected in art practice. Art often presents more mysterious evaluations of childhood and childish bodies that are submerged and mostly denied within this populist evaluation.

This session calls for papers that consider the moral and ethical evaluations expressed by the images of bodies, bodily functions and parts, not only in Henson???s work but in past and contemporary art practice, history and theory.

Thomas Loveday is senior lecturer in the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales where he has pursued research interests in creative art and design practice and in theoretical aspects of design.

Contact: TomL@fbe.unsw.edu.au

Time Travel ??? Museum Futures

Convenor:
Dr Craig Douglas, Art Theory, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University

The nineteenth century understood time as already interpreted, as a social and historical phenomenon. The future was defined within contexts considering notions such as succession, periodicity and or duration. As such the future was conceived as a temporal category within a predetermined structure. It was always a future-present one that depended on a strict temporal and historical linear logic, clearly establishing what was the past and what was to come ??? the future.

As one of the major institutions of the nineteenth century, the museum was at the centre of this structured definition of time. Museums saw themselves in ideological terms, as situated between the past (which it preserved) and the future into which it projected the past it contained. In this way it turned time into grand narratives progressing visitors through a series of galleries. Within these spaces art was clearly defined by movements, schools and individual practices. With this structure in place the museum saw the future as an unquestioned extension of the grand narrative.

Today the museum is forced to think of the future outside categorisation and narratives. It must think of a more considered future of setting into motion difference. It must open space itself, what Jacques Derrida understood by l???a-venir, the ???to-come???.

This session calls on artists, designers, historians and theoreticians to consider the (art) museum, mindful of its??? innate promise to artists and viewers ??? ???Yes, come, there is (a) future here???.

Craig Douglas teaches art theory and curatorship at the Queensland College of Art Griffith University. His doctoral research focussed on regional art museums and galleries in Australia. He has curated and toured a number of exhibitions throughout Australia and internationally. Currently he is working with two regional Queensland art museums to curate a two-site exhibition project on a significant Brisbane based private art collection.

Contact: c.douglas@griffith.edu.au

Transgressing The Great Divide: Avant-Garde and Kitsch

Convenor:
Dr Fay Brauer, University of New South Wales and University of East London

In the face of encroaching Fascism and Communism, Clement Greenberg argued in Avant-Garde and Kitsch for the avant-garde to be not only free of cultural, economic and political constraints, but also from ???kitsch??? in the form of crass mass culture. Publication of his essay, 'Modernist Painting' only cemented this ???great divide??? between Modernist art and popular culture, as Andreas Huyssen calls it, as illustrated by the writing of Formalist histories of Modernist art. From this moment onwards, transgressing ???the great divide??? between Avant-Garde and Kitsch became equivalent to committing incest. Despite the intense trafficking between the avant-garde and mass culture, particularly the decorative arts and design, Modernism then became conflated with Formalism. Despite the political motivation of Modernists who transgressed the ???great divide???, Modernism was represented as an apolitical art form using the medium to criticize the medium itself. These historicist misrepresentations are what this Session seeks to redress.

Four years after the Museum of South Kensington (V & A) was established in London in 1857, William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had founded the decorative arts company of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., which became Morris and Company, and launched the Arts and Crafts movement. To revitalize the French arts and crafts, several years later the Central Union of Fine Arts Applied to Industry and the Society for a Decorative Art Museum were established in Paris fusing into the Central Union of the Decorative Arts in 1881 under the Presidency of Antonin Proust. Once Antonin Proust became French Arts Minister, the integration of design objects and aesthetics with fine arts became a Republican mission to generate ???Art by and for the people???. Despite ???the great divide??? between high art and design upheld by the Salon, from 1890 the so-called ???decorative arts??? entered the new Salons, an interdisciplinary model becoming the very mission of the Salon d???Automne. While Siegfried Bing???s ???L???Art Nouveau??? gallery burgeoned in Paris and at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, Art Nouveau flourished in Belgium, Denmark, Glasgow, Holland, Moscow, New York, Portugal, Prague, and Spain, while Jugenstil flourished in Germany and Vienna. With the 1925 showcasing of Modernism and design in the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Art Deco was launched. At the same time so many Modernists prized by Greenberg for their Formalist innovations, revelled in ???kitsch??? as illuminated by Gustave Courbet???s appropriation of folk art, the ???pioneering Cubists??? appendage of mass-produced wall-paper, stencils, packaging and advertisements, Marcel Duchamp???s Ready-Mades and the Surrealist Object.

To reveal how European Modernism was far removed from the historicist definition imposed on it by Clement Greenberg, this Session will investigate how it emerged not from specialization in a single discipline but from a close interaction between all art disciplines, particularly design, the decorative arts and ???kitsch???. It will also examine the links that may be forged between this Modernism, Pop Art, Postmodernism and the integration of art and design today.

Fay Brauer is Research Professor in Visual Theory at the University of East London and Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory at The University of New South Wales. Her PhD is from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her essays have been published in a wide range of books and art history journals including two essays on the body published this year in A History of Visual Cultures by Berg, and an essay in Marcel Duchamp et l?????rotisme, published by Les presses du r??el. Her book entitled Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, is forthcoming in 2008 with Ashgate Publishing. In 2009, The University Press of New England are publishing her co-authored book, The Art of Evolution: Charles Darwin and Visual Cultures. At the end of that year, Cambridge Scholars Publishing are launching her book, Making the Modern Art Centre: The French State, the Paris Salons and the ???Civilizing Mission???.

Contact: faebrauer@aol.com

21st Century Art History

Convenor:
Dr Rex Butler, English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland

What will the discipline of art history look like in the 21st century? What will the subject matter of 21st-century art history be? With the end of Eurocentric models of art history and even the end of post-colonialism, which still remained parasitic on the Eurocentrism it opposed, what ways of writing art history will be possible in the 21st century? What would a transnational, international or even non-national art history look like? How is one to conceive of a global art history? Is it a 'global' art history we should be aiming for?

Papers are invited that attempt to visualise the future face of art historiography. The chair is especially interested in receiving papers taking up the notion of a 'global' or 'world' art history, either addressing the notion generally or seeking to produce specific examples of such an art history, written either from particular places or about particular art scenes.

Rex Butler is Associate Professor English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland. His current research includes editing a collection entitled 'Radical Revisionism' on Australian post-colonial art and two volumes of Slavoj Zizek's selected writings.

Contact: r.butler@uq.edu.au

Sweat: art, design, architecture

Convenor:

Dr Andrew McNamara, Visual Arts/Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology

Leon Batista Alberti said that culture was more conducive to a warm climate (hence Italy over northern Europe). But how warm? And when is warm too warm? Is there a cultural law of "diminishing returns" when it comes to heat?

This panel will consider climate and environment and context across art, design and architecture, particularly in a sub-tropical setting. While the issue of environment in terms of landscape has long been considered in the visual arts, can architecture, for instance, ever avoid these concerns? Ever since Karl Langer's consideration of "Sub-Tropical Housing" it seems to have prevailed in one way or another ever since.This panel takes a broad look at the sub-tropical context and its relation to the contemporary practices of art, design and architecture.

Andrew McNamara teaches art history and theory at QUT. He is on the editorial board of the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art and co-ordinator of the AMDM research group at QUT. His most recent publication is Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, with Ann Stephen and Philip Goad, Melbourne and Sydney: The Miegunyah Press/Powerhouse Publishing, 2008.

Contact: a.mcnamara@qut.edu.au

Staking Out Animation

Convenor:
Keith Bradbury, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University

The DVD revolution is complete. VHS is dead. TV and the computer are now dominant agents of entertainment and information in Australian society surpassing movie going. Animation has proven to be dynamic visual agent in this technological shift facilitating a multitude of visual experiences ??? animated TV sitcoms, game playing, TV advertisements, a staple of children???s television, as the magic of special effects in feature movies, personal films ??? serving a diversity of interests, such as, TV sponsors, corporate business generally, education, art, design, entertainment, political comment and formation. This session will explore and debate animation???s role in visual culture and the means and ways various professions have, from the beginning of moving image technology, colonised animation and exploited its intrinsic appeal.

Keith Bradbury is a Senior Lecturer in Art Theory/History at the Queensland College of Art Griffith University. His research focus is the development of Australian animation. He has completed an ARC Linkage Grant with Dr Glenda Nalder and Professor John Stevenson of Griffith University Education. The project devised a model of knowledge transfer relating traditional animation skills to automated software programs. He is currently completing his PhD on the role of competition in the development of Australia's animation industry.

Contact: k.bradbury@griffith.edu.au

Understanding Art and Entertainment in a post-avant-garde era

Convenors:
Dr Mark Pennings, Visual Arts/Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology
Robert Leonard, Director, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

This session explores the relationship between art and entertainment in the contemporary world. Economic, political, ideological, and technological factors have made an impact on the nature and forms of elite art practice in the last decade or so. These include the influence of New Right Populism, fine art???s new accountability to the general public, and a booming international art market. Do such phenomena generate unprecedented exhibiting and sales opportunities for contemporary artists, or do they diminish them?

Theoretical analysis of this phenomenon has generally set oppositional critiques against models of complicity, immersion or even immanence. In part, these challenging debates reflect the fact that entertainment is a multifaceted activity that has a complex relationship with new economic paradigms like the Experience Economy and today???s cultural consumerism. New Media, the emergence of Filmic Art, the expansion of installation practice, and the revival of performance art are also engaged in realignments between art and entertainment.

Artists who may be considered include: Tino Seghal, Olaf Eliasson, Moriko Mori, Pipilotti Rist, Ana Prvacki, Christoph B??chel, Carsten Holler, Rita McBride, Mario Ybarra, Santiago Sierra, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Patricia Piccinini.

The session invites papers that consider phenomena such as:

• The impact of Biennials and Art Fairs on notions of entertainment in a global art market
• Relational Aesthetics as applied to mass entertainment as seen in forms of ???Festivalism??? at Biennials and other global exhibitions
• The role of theatre and performance in encouraging participation from the art audience in the contemporary situation
• Theories that examine post-avant-garde values in today???s culture
• Models of artistic production that respond to a lucrative and competitive market place, and the demands of wealthy collectors. These may include, the artist as arts consultant or manager of a small business
• Explorations and considerations of the theoretical possibilities that suggest resistance to the total environment of art as entertainment, such as Jacques Ranciere's examination of artistic forms as a 'redistribution of the sensible'.
• New manifestations of Institutional Critique that move beyond avant-garde oppositional models
• The impact of New Media installation and other practices that offer new forms of immersive entertainment in an experience economy

Mark Pennings is a lecturer in Art & Design in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology and is a widely published art critic.

Robert Leonard directs Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art. He was formerly based in New Zealand where he did time as a contemporary art curator at the National Art Gallery, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Dunedin Art Gallery and Auckland Art Gallery, as well as being director of Auckland's Artspace.

Contact:
m.pennings@qut.edu.au
robert@ima.org.au