On this page:
o Art in Oceania
o Picturing Atrocity
o CONTACT: AAANZ 2011 Annual Conference
o Museums, Photographs and the Colonial Past Conference
o Dispersed Identities: Sexuality, Surrealism and the Global Avant-Gardes Conference
o Great Exhibitions in the Margins, 1851 – 1938 Conference
o Dark Sky exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery
o ‘Peripheral Relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art 1960 - 2011
Art in Oceania
Art in Oceania: A History will be published by Thames and Hudson in September 2012. Co-authored by Dr Peter Brunt (Senior Lecturer in Art History), Professor Nicholas Thomas (University of Cambridge), Sean Mallon (Te Papa Tongarewa), Dr Lissant Bolton (British Museum), Dr Deidre Brown (University of Auckland), Dr Damian Skinner (Auckland Museum and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge) and Professor Susanne Kuchler (University College London), the book is the product of a remarkable five-year collaboration led by Dr Brunt and supported by a grant from the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Additional funding and contributions were provided by Victoria University of Wellington, The University of Auckland, The British Museum, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. The book is edited by Dr Brunt and Professor Thomas, with the assistance of Stella Ramage, currently a doctoral student in Art History at Victoria University.
During its development, the book was based in the Art History Programme of Victoria where the project was assisted in many ways by School Manager Annie Mercer and several student Research Assistants over the years; namely Jessica Adams, Safua Akeli, Stella Ramage, Vivian Morrell and Mena Antonio.
With over 500 pages and more than 550 illustrations, the book ranges from the earliest archaeological evidence through the great historic works collected by voyagers such as Captain Cook, to the modern and contemporary arts of the last fifty years. It reveals the art of Oceania as profoundly grounded in tradition and customary society, yet also full of innovation. It does justice to the extraordinary variety of Pacific cultures, from those of the Highlands of New Guinea to the atolls of Micronesia and the furthest reaches of Polynesian settlement in Aotearoa New Zealand and remote Easter Island. It ranges across genres, from ancient rock art through ritual architecture to contemporary painting and installation art, as no previous survey has done. Its hallmark is the argument that art in Oceania is a product of history - from the changing relations among Pacific peoples in a profoundly interconnected world of voyaging and exchange, to their resilience and creativity in the face of colonial intrusions and the challenges of globalization.
Picturing Atrocity
Professor Geoffrey Batchen (Art History), Mick Gidley (Emeritus Professor of American Literature, University of Leeds ), Nancy K. Miller (Distinguished Professor, CUNY Graduate Center), and Jay Prosser (University of Leeds) have edited a volume of essays initiated by the ‘Photography and Atrocity’ symposium held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2005. The volume was published by Reaktion Press in 2012.
Ever since the landmark publication of Susan Sontag’s On Photography, it has been impossible to look at photographs, particularly those of violence and suffering, without questioning our role as photographic voyeur. Are we desensitized by the proliferation of these images, and does this make it easier to be passive and uninvolved? Or do the images immediately stir our own sense of justice and act as a call to arms? Are we consuming the suffering of others as a form of intrigue? Or can looking at pictures of atrocity become an act of empathy?
To answer these questions, Picturing Atrocity brings together essays from some of the foremost writers and critics on photography today, including Rebecca Solnit, Alfredo Jaar, Ariella Azoulay, Griselda Pollock, Shahidul Alam, Marianne Hirsch, John Lucaites, Robert Hariman, and Susan Meiselas, to offer close readings of images that reveal the realities behind the photographs, the subjects, and the photographers. From the massacre of the Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee to the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, from famine in China to apartheid in South Africa, Picturing Atrocity examines a broad spectrum of photographs. Each of the essays focuses specifically on an iconic image, offering a distinct approach and context, in order to enable us to look again—and this time more closely—at the picture. In addition, four photo-essays showcase the work of photographers involved in the making of photographs of brutality as well as the artists’ own reflections on these images.
Together these essays cover the historical and geographical range of atrocity photographs and respond to current concerns about such disturbing images; they probe why we as viewers feel compelled to look even when our instinct might be to look away. Picturing Atrocity is an important read, not just for insights into photography, but for its reflections on human injustice and suffering. In keeping with that aim, all royalties from the book will be donated to Amnesty International.
CONTACT: AAANZ 2011 Annual Conference hosted by Victoria University of Wellington
Hosted by Victoria University of Wellington’s Art History programme and organized around the theme of Contact, the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand 2011 Annual Conference brought over 200 regional and international delegates to Wellington.
With 143 papers in the main conference, and 29 papers in the post-graduate workshop, the conference theme ran through many strands, evoking encounters between cultures, peoples and objects and the issues and outcomes they spark, e.g. resistance and hybridity, intersection and divergence, purity and pollution, and other related questions raised by the theme of contact.
A selection of the papers for the conference will be published in a special, upcoming issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art.
KEYNOTE LECTURES:
Okwui Enwezor (Haus der Kunst, Munich)
Professor Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby (University of California, Berkeley)
For more information visit the AAANZ conference website
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby Keynote 51.36
Introduction / Bernard Smith Tribute 37.49
In conversation with Okwui Enwezor 39:16
In conversation with Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby 42:12
Reflecting on the theme of ‘Contact’ a conversation with delegates 36:04
Museums, Photographs and the Colonial Past Conference
Roger Blackley (Senior Lecturer, Art History) recently presented his paper ‘The Unpublishable Photograph’ at the Museums, Photographs and the Colonial Past conference hosted by PHRC De Montfort University and Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 12-13 January 2012.
The paper investigates a group of photographs made in the early years of the twentieth century at the country residence of Henry Stevens, the famous ethnographic and natural history auctioneer of Covent Garden. His guests at Addlestone Lodge were the London-based collector, Major-General Horatio Gordon Robley, and an exceptional collection of preserved Maori heads, all of whom Stevens memorialised in a widely dispersed trophy image with which Robley publicised his collection. Other photographs in the series depict the young daughter of Stevens’s neighbour as a startling foil to Robley and several of the tattooed heads.
Firstly the paper places these extraordinary group portraits within the context of their production—an outing to the country by the exhibitionist collector and his formidable entourage. What do we know about Robley’s collecting, and his relationship with Stevens? What precise purposes might these photographs have been intended to serve?
Then it considers the current limbo inhabited by the photographs, which are regarded as unpublishable by many of the repositories that hold them. What are the limits and consequences of such censorship? By drawing an impenetrable veil over an unsavoury aspect of ethnographic collecting, are institutions participating in an all-too-convenient museological amnesia? As depictions of human beings as much or more than of ethnographic artefacts, can such photographs ever be reclaimed as records of the adventure and indignity faced by this Maori diaspora?
Dispersed Identities: Sexuality, Surrealism and the Global Avant－Gardes Conference
Dr Raymond Spiteri (Lecturer, Art History) recently presented his paper ‘‘We don’t EAR it that way’: Dissent and the dispersal of identity in the culture of surrealism’ at the Dispersed Identities: Sexuality, Surrealism and the Global Avant-Gardes conference hosted by the University of Melbourne, February 3-4, 2012.
This paper looks at “We don’t EAR it that way,” a 1960 tract protesting the inclusion of a recent painting by Salvador Dalí in a New York exhibition, Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain. This protest delineates a fault-line between the political and cultural dimensions of the surrealist enterprise, and allows a reconsideration of the role of dissent in surrealism.
Great Exhibitions in the Margins, 1851-1938 Conference
Dr Rebecca Rice (Lecturer, Art History) will be presenting her paper ‘A ‘Ramble’ through art at the 1865 New Zealand Exhibition’ at the Great Exhibitions in the Margins, 1851-1938 conference hosted by the University of Wolverhampton (UK), April 26-27, 2012.
In response to the fine arts on show at the New Zealand Exhibition in Dunedin in 1865, a critic using the pseudonym ‘Rambler’ suggested that the watercolours exhibited by colonial artists were ‘quite equal to the works of some of the best artists at home and might be exhibited without fear of invidious comparison on the walls of old and new Water Color Societies of London’. ‘Rambler’ has since been identified as the politician and amateur artist, William Fox, himself represented in the exhibition, making his opinion somewhat biased. Nonetheless, his review is the first to group together the work of colonial New Zealand artists as a distinctive category worthy of its own evaluation. The exhibition itself was a remarkable grand-scale international exhibition, the first of its kind to take place in New Zealand, and an ambitious undertaking for a colony barely 25 years old. Fox’s review consequently highlights the ambiguities of a colonial culture on the margins: the desire to participate in and emulate metropolitan examples, while attempting to assert the colony’s uniqueness within the model of exhibition. Further, Fox’s identification of the ‘amateur’ highlights the conditions of artistic production in the colony and raises questions around the classification of ‘Art’ in nineteenth-century New Zealand: firstly in terms of what might constitute ‘New Zealand’ art and secondly in terms of the classification systems articulated through catalogues, exhibitions and reviews. This paper will explore the shifting boundaries of classification in art, as well as the embryonic processes of canonisation that occurred in the discourse around the Dunedin Exhibition, arguing that both were adapted to meet the needs of colonial culture.
Dark Sky exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery
Curated by Professor Geoffrey Batchen (Art History), and Tina Barton (Director, Adam Art Gallery), this exhibition explores how photographic artists, from 1874 until now, have turned their attention to the night skies. It originates from and will refer to the key historical event of the Transit of Venus in 1874 to draw together the histories of photography and astronomy. It is scheduled to coincide with the occasion of the 2012 Transit of Venus on 6 June.
1 May – 8 July, 2012
Adam Art Gallery
Victoria University of Wellington
‘Peripheral Relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art 1960-2011’ exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery
Work In Progress: Following the completion of his PhD, Marcus Moore is working towards an exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery based on his research. Opening on 27 July 2012, Peripheral Relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art 1960-2011 will explore the influence of Marcel Duchamp on New Zealand art, canvassing the history of Duchamp’s reception in New Zealand from 1960 to the present. As well as showcasing the work of 25 New Zealand artists, the exhibition will present seldom-seen works by Duchamp held at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, to document the little-known gift of his works as part of the Isaacs Bequest (1982), as well as reference the ground-breaking exhibition of the Sisler Collection of Duchamp’s works that toured New Zealand in 1967. Here we see Moore in collection storage at Te Papa with the 1961 edition of Marcel Duchamp's Boite en Valise. This work will be included in the exhibition and displayed so that its entire contents are visible, a rare outing for this important work that entered the national collection in 1982.
20 July – 30 September, 2012
Adam Art Gallery
Victoria University of Wellington
‘‘Shadowgraphs: Photographic Portraits by Len Lye’ exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery
Curated by Professor Geoffrey Batchen (Art History) and the 2011 Art History Honours students.
Drawn primarily from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery collection, this exhibition presented 26 of the photogram portraits made by Len Lye in 1947, a body of work that until recently was neither well known nor fully understood. Here Lye’s works was contextualised in relation to the tradition of the silhouette portrait and the camera-less photograph. This was the Adam Art Gallery’s biennial student-led project which enables students to research, write about and present an exhibition on a unique body of work. ‘Shadowgraphs was on view at the Adam Art Gallery, 19 November – 18 December 2011.