Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
Art in Politics Conference Schedule Friday 17 November 2006
9:30-10:30 10:30-11:00 11:00-13:00 Keynote Lecture Professor Alison Young (University of Melbourne) Morning Tea Session 1 Jolanta Marie Nowak (University of Melbourne) Anna Davis (UNSW) Tim Gregory (UNSW) Lunch Session 2 Rebecca Eliot (ANU) Eve Vincent and Lucas Ilhein (UTS and Deakin Zanny Begg (UNSW) Closing speaker TBA Drinks
13:00-14:00 14:00-16:00 University) 16:00 17:00
Abstracts:
Alison Young September 11th and the Documentation of Trauma: Authority, Sincerity and Ethics This paper will investigate the relation between the authority of authorship (the question of who is speaking) and the authority of
sincerity (the question of how they are speaking). It will do so in the context of certain responses to the events of September 11th 2001, namely the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. These are: first, the short film by Alejandro González Iñárritu (part of the collection of short films known as 11’09’’01), which uses ‘found sound’ taken from media recordings on the day to recreate cinematically the experiences of those present during the attacks. The second example is the book, In the Shadow of Two Towers, by Art Spiegelman, in which the graphic art of the comic strip is deployed to capture Spiegelman’s experiences as a witness to the attacks and their aftermath. The final example is taken from the 9/11 Commission Report, in which a commission of inquiry provided a narration of the attacks as a prelude to their inquiry into official actions taken on the day. These three examples, taken from cinema, graphic art, and official or legal discourse, allow an interrogation of the notion of documentation, its relationship to sincerity and authenticity, and its potentialities and limitations in the representation of trauma and disaster. Jolanta Marie Nowak Introducing Terror: On the Relationship between Art and Politics To Introduce Terror: The RAF Exhibition, held in Berlin in 2005, presented art works and documents dealing with the Red Army Faction (or Baader-Meinhof Group), a left wing terrorist association active in Germany from the late 1960s until after the controversial deaths of key members of the group in 1977. While many of the art works in the exhibition question the representation and mythologising of the group which has occurred on both sides of politics -- works by artists including Beuys, Polke, Richter and Ruff -- the exhibition itself sparked controversy regarding its potential impact on our understanding of the RAF. For some, the exhibition threatened to turn the RAF into heroes at the expense of any acknowledgement of the RAF's victims. That the government also (initially) funded the exhibition was also the source of much debate. The controversy surrounding To Introduce Terror exposes some critical issues regarding art's relationship with politics. It is argued in this paper that while art and curatorial practices do influence our responses to political issues and therefore clearly have political responsibilities to meet, a question remains about the often weighty assumptions made regarding art's actual ability to influence politics and political thinking. On some occasions this understanding of art's political influence
ignores and obscures some of the meaning of individual works. These issues are explored by investigating the extent to which the fears about the exhibition and the debate surrounding it emerged as political responses to reading art rather than the reverse. In other words, while the assumption evident in the debate surrounding the exhibition is that art influences politics, it is more accurate to say that in this case politics has influenced our understanding of art. Anna Davis Creating a social anxiety interface in the interactive artwork In the house of shouters… Research in new media has centred on overcoming social anxiety rather than conceptualising it as a positive mechanism within humanmachine embodiment. This approach is particularly evident in terms of interactive personas, as these entities are frequently touted as a reassuring ‘social’ inter-face and a means of facilitating more agreeable modes of human computer interaction. Conversely, this study explores the affective potential of activating social anxiety at the interface between live and digital bodies, and presents an innovative mode of quasi-social interaction based on micro-gestural resonance. Social anxiety can be a very unpleasant experience. Subjective accounts and empirical studies both pointing towards an amplification of micro-gestural rhythms (for example: rapid eye-scanning, muscular twitching and trembling limbs) and a heightened sensitivity towards these minor disturbances, perceived to be occurring in our own bodies and the bodies of others. Social anxiety in everyday speech also highlights this sense of gestural and temporal unease. People often complain of feeling rattled or jittery, or shuddering and stammering, as if their agitated bodies had begun responding to a volatile new beat. Social anxiety appears to both intensify and distort our experiences of these micro-gestural rhythms and is thought to be highly contagious. However as these qualities suggest, this much maligned bodily state also has the rare ability to literally shake us out of our everyday complacency, and energetically alert us to the mutable quality of our own embodiment. Vitalizing what might otherwise have been a mundane social situation into an amplifying intensity of uncertain exchange. The expressive possibilities of this hypothesis are tested in the artwork In the house of shouters… a central goal of which has been to explore the relationship between corporeal and digital flustering, and to witness what might happen at their dynamic intersection. In the house
of shouters… reflects on the correlations between the ‘unnatural’ temporal registers of digital bodies, and disturbances to human embodied temporality evident in states of social anxiety. Questioning ideas that suggest social anxiety is primarily a psychological condition, In the house of shouters… explores the notion that it may arise and become contagious in relation to the transference of micro-gestural rhythms across human and digital domains. This paper examines the conceptual and experimental methodology behind In the house of shouters… and speculates on how this interaction between live and digital bodies can create a ‘social anxiety interface’ counteracting both the prominence of linguistically-driven, ‘conversational’ methodologies, while also avoiding tendencies in affective computing where embodied interaction is often reduced to the measurement of physiological indicators correlated to a database of symptoms. Tim Gregory Amoral proximity – masturbation, internet sex chat rooms and how marital sex became a performance My paper examines Marc Augé’s conception of ‘non-place’ explaining its unique ability to maintain co-present proximity without forming systems of morality or community. As the non-place expands from its traditional spaces of transit (airport/freeway) and appears as spaces of habitation, the role of sex in a non-place becomes an interesting issue. I believe that sex, particularly in the suburban non-place home, has become a performance in order to affirm membership to the pure singularity of suburbia. I argue that this has shifted the expression of sexuality away from co-present interaction towards the auto-erotic satisfaction of internet sex chat rooms. Having spent a year in such rooms I am in a position to present my findings on this type of sexuality and how it physically manifests. Informed by Agamben and Jean Lu Nancy, I demonstrate how non-place sexuality does not create identity or community. Internet sex chat does not involve individuals exploring and discovering their difference, but rather it is a form of masturbation which reinforces stereotypes and weakens identity. This would not be problematic if masturbation was, as it has been up until now, one form of sexuality, however in the non-place it threatens to become the only form of sexuality. Rebecca Elliot Two Decades of American Painting: Cultural Imperialism and
India in the 1960s In 1967 the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), organized a traveling exhibition of American modern art paintings produced between the mid 1940s and mid 1960s. The exhibition, entitled Two Decades of American Painting, went to India, Japan, and Australia as part of MoMA’s International Program. The International Program was designed to send American art around the world, often in conjunction with the American government, reflecting MoMA’s long history of involvement in ventures of Soft Power imperialism. The United States Information Service (USIS) was the sponsor of Two Decades of American Paintings inIndia. A group of significant American artists and intellectuals, including Clement Greenberg, were hired by the USIS to accompany and support the exhibition. In this paper I will discuss aspects of American cultural imperialism in regard to India and Cold War politics.India was a country redefining its global position in post-colonial independence in the era of the Cold War and therefore a possible ally for the United States. I will discuss the important role of Soft Power as a means of infiltrating and enabling political gain. The theory behind Two Decades of American Painting was that by directing attention to American ideals through art rather than through conflict, the Indian audience would be more willing to accept ideas presented to them, adapting them into their own culture. Although the reaction to American Imperialism was not violent, culture imported into India was closely examined and questioned. Eve Vincent and Lucas Ihlein Participation and Experience: Redfern Waterloo Tour of Beauty The desire for an active spectator-participant was a key goal of avantgarde art during the twentieth century. Rhetoric surrounding such art practice often connected "aesthetic interactivity" with the ideal of a wider participatory democracy. During the 1960s, in an attempt to overcome the separation between "art and life" which characterised the museum-based practice of much modernist art, artists like Allan Kaprow developed "Happenings" which occurred in the everyday places and rhythms of city life. Utilising the tools bequeathed by Kaprow's Happenings, artist group SquatSpace now runs the Redfern Waterloo Tour of Beauty -- wherein the "work of art" is to facilitate discussion about neighborhood life and community organising in innerurbanSydney. This paper moves through the perennial question "but is it art?" in order to examine the Tour of Beauty as a case study of "Art as Experience" (John Dewey). This co-presentation engages two
perspectives -- SquatSpace collective member Lucas Ihlein talks about the making of "the tour as art", and Eve Vincent speaks from the perspective of a participant-audience member. Zanny Begg Event, Aesthetics, Politics Maurizio Lazzarato has described the Seattle protests against the WTO meeting in 1999 as an "event". Although not explicitly referencing Alain Badiou his use of the term "event" can be understood in a Badiouian way, as an experience which brings in to being the new, creating its own subjectivity and potentiality. Whilst the Seattle protests were proceeded by many important demonstrations -- the French strikes and the Zapatista uprising -- and were followed by some very large and powerful protests -- the Argentinian crisis of 2001 and the Genoa demonstrations -- Seattle was a moment when it became obvious that a new form of politics had emerged. Seattle combined various existing strands, autonomist Marxism, anarchism, direct action, rave culture, ecological activism into a new synthesis throwing into question previous understandings of social agency and class. Badiou describes four key areas where the "event" manifests: art, science, love and politics. This paper will focus on the first area, assessing how artists have been affected by this event. Since the end of the 90s a number of artists have responded to the anti-capitalist movement whose work could be considered to have fidelity to the event of Seattle -- not to its ideas, organisation, or representation -but to the subjective space from which this event sprang. This paper will address some of the trends within the work of these artists with a particular focus on a few exhibition projects which have sought to connect aesthetics and politics, particularly a recent exhibition Self Education-Self Organization, held at the Moscow Centre for Contemporary Art.
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