Audio recordings of past FAN lectures and symposia. You can choose the Quicktime option and stream the audio online. Or select Download and listen on your iPod or MP3 player. Full list here or click on links to individual recordings below.
The 2008 Joseph Burke Lecture
Dr Alex Baker
Senior Curator Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria
‘It’s All About You: Generosity in the Art of Harrell Fletcher’
In a contemporary art world fixated on the artist as object-making superstar and the glamour associated with art fairs, international biennials, and mind-boggling auction figures, the artist Harrell Fletcher (based in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.) turns the present state of affairs on its head. In a practice spanning over a decade now, Fletcher makes few sellable objects, shuns the well-heeled collector circuit, and eschews the cult of personality so often associated with the artist these days. Fletcher directs the spotlight away from himself by shifting attention on to the aspirations and talents of others. From siting a temporary museum focusing on local peoples’ lives in a northern California shopping mall, to working with an eight year old boy as the principle decision-maker for a work of public art created for a park in France to his collaborative web-based project with artist Miranda July, Learning to Love You More, in which they assign people various tasks for which the results are posted on the site regardless of the participant’s standing as artists (anyone who fully completes an assignment is acknowledged), Fletcher’s art is really all about you, rather than all about him.
Recorded
Tuesday 22 May 2020
Elisabeth Murdoch Building, Theatre A
The University of Melbourne
Audio Recording: click here
Poster (pdf): click here
Symposium: Art in Baroque Rome. New Directions in Research
Baroque Arcadias — Baroque Display
Keynote Addresses by
Karin Wolfe
Dr Wolfe is an independent scholar attached to the British School at Rome and has published extensively on the art patronage of the Barberini, Caravaggio, Gianlorenzo Bernini, and Francesco Borromini, and is currently writing a monograph on the eighteenth-century painter Francesco Trevisani (by whom there is a fine work in the National Gallery of Victoria).
and
Tommaso Manfredi
Professor Manfredi teaches in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Reggio Calabria and is a leading scholar on Roman eighteenth-century architecture, with an exhaustive list of publications, essays, articles, and books dealing with the major 17th and 18th century Roman architects such as Borromini and Juvarra and with Baroque urbanism.
Speakers
David R. Marshall — Lisa Beaven — Tim Ould — Glenys Adams — Victoria Hobday — Mark Shepheard — Katrina Grant
Recorded:
Wednesday 14 November 2020 9.30-6.00 pm.
Elisabeth Murdoch Building, Theatre A
The University of Melbourne
Audio Recordings (papers recorded in pairs, click the names for the link to the associated recording.)
Karin Wolfe and Tommaso Manfredi Keynote addresses
Lisa Beaven and David Marshall papers
Tim Ould, Glenys Adams, and Victoria Hobday papers
Mark Shepheard and Katrina Grant Papers
Full program: click here.
Poster (pdf): click here.
The 2007 Margaret Manion Lecture
Dr David Maskill
University of Wellington, New Zealand
‘Imperial Lines: Harold Wright and Printmaking and Collecting at the End of Empire’
Harold Wright (1885-1961) is well-known to print curators in Australia and New Zealand as the founder of a unique scholarship for recipients to study the great print collection of the British Museum. But what has gone largely unacknowledged is the fact that the scholarship was an extension, after Wright’s death, of a process of education and acquisition that he conducted throughout his life as the major advisor to private print collectors and public institutions in our region.
At Colnaghi’s, the Bond Street dealers he served for over fifty years, Wright presided over the last flourish of the so-called ‘Etching Revival’. He believed that these British printmakers, following the lead of their French counterparts, were the true heirs to the great European tradition of printmaking, not the contemporary artists of the avant-garde. This view of the history of printmaking, while at odds with the prevailing canon, has directly informed the early print collecting of our major institutions.
Recorded
Tuesday 23 October 2020
Elisabeth Murdoch Building, Theatre A
The University of Melbourne
Audio Recording: click here
Poster (pdf): click here
The 2007 Joseph Burke Lecture
John Wolseley
‘Environment into Art, the Curlew, the Swamp and the Warming of the Seas’
Well-known artist John Wolseley examines the idea of an art which is deeply connected to the environment in which it is made. In this context, he aligns himself with a wide range of artists from Richard Wilson to Joseph Beuys. He discusses his own work in the Australian landscape and asks: what is the role of the contemporary artist when the natural world is in the process of disintegration?
Recorded
Tuesday 22 May
Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre
University of Melbourne
Audio Recording: click here.
Poster(pdf): click here.
The 2006 Margaret Manion Lecture
Dr David Hansen
Former Senior Curator of Art at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
‘Remarkable Characters’: John Dempsey and the Representation of the Urban Poor in Regency Britain
Recorded
Wednesday 24 May, 2006
Elisabeth Murdoch Building, Theatre A
The University of Melbourne
Audio Recording: click here (Note: The lecture (including introductions) starts at about 0:10 and finishes at about 01:19.)
Poster (pdf): click here
The Joseph Burke Lecture 2006
Ted Gott
Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
“It is lovely to be a gorilla sometimes”. From Paris Salon to King Kong - The art and influence of Emmanuel Fremiet, Gorilla-Sculptor
In 1859 the French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet (1824-1910) alarmed the jury of the Paris Salon, by submitting a greater than life-size plaster composition, Gorilla Dragging Away a Dead Negress – a work that was found to be too confronting for both its graphic violence, and its proximity to current debates about evolution, in the year in which Charles Darwin published his landmark On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection.
It remains an intriguing and little-known fact that the gorilla only became officially known to Western naturalists in 1847, when the first images of gorilla skulls were published in the Boston Journal of Natural History, prompting a hunt for gorilla remains by museums world-wide. The first gorilla specimens to be preserved by taxidermy in the Western world were placed on public display in Paris’s Museum of Natural History in 1852.
Emmanuel Frémiet had been trained as an illustrator at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, and he used their gorilla specimens as models for his extraordinarily realistic depiction, for its day, of a scene of violence in the forests of West Africa. (At this time gorillas were still widely believed to be ferocious carnivores.) Frémiet’s sculpture, which was destroyed in 1861 and is known from surviving photographs, stands as the first major representation in Western art of the primate that would soon be claimed as ‘man’s brother’ in the evolutionary debates that erupted in the wake of Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species. It was indeed the gorilla’s purported status as ‘a man and a brother’ that lay at the very heart of the evolutionary and theological problems created by its discovery.
In 1887 a new life-size plaster sculpture by Frémiet, Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman, provided another controversy for the artist; but this time a triumphal one, as Frémiet himself now carried off the Paris Salon’s Medal of Honour. Frémiet received permission from the French State to edition bronze versions of this new gorilla sculpture in a reduced size, and these proved to be highly popular collectables. The ambiguous but compelling Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman was also reproduced widely, by both engraving and photography. By all these means Frémiet’s sculpture entered the public consciousness as one of the defining images of its time.
With all the current attention on the gorilla being created by the release of Peter Jackson’s blockbuster remake of the 1933 blockbuster film King Kong, this lecture reminds us of the long visual lineage that lay behind the immortal cinematic imagery of Fay Wray in the arms of the beast Kong.
Recorded
Wednesday 24 May, 2006
Elisabeth Murdoch Building, Theatre A
The University of Melbourne
In collaboration with AHCCA
Audio Recording: click here
Poster (pdf): click here
Symposium
Art and Culture in Renaissance Tuscany. New Directions in Research
Keynote speaker: Anabel Thomas - author of Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy (Cambridge 2003) and The Painter’s Practice in Renaissance Tuscany (Cambridge: 1997)
Speakers include: Bill Kent; Robert W. Gaston; Peter Howard; Nerida Newbigin, Louise Marshall; Hugh Hudson; Diana Hiller.
Recorded
Thursday 16th November 2006
Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre
The University of Melbourne
Audio Recordings (Recorded in sessions, streaming only).
Keynote Address Anabel Thomas, click here.
Morning Session (Louise Marshall, Hugh Hudson, Nerida Mewbigin), click here.
Afternoon Session (Peter Howard, Diana Hiller, Robert Gaston), click here.
Closing Address (Bill Kent) and Plenary Session, click here.
Abstracts click here
Poster (pdf): click here
FAN Lecture
Andrew Wallace-Hadrill
Director, British School at Rome
Saving Herculaneum
Herculaneum, destroyed in the same eruption as Pompeii, is less well known but in many ways preserves a more vivid image of Roman life. A conservation crisis puts both sites in imminent danger of a second destruction. This lecture describes the attempts of the Herculaneum Conservation Project to rescue the site and some important new discoveries it has made. Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, director of the project, is Director of the British School at Rome, author of books and articles on a wide range of themes of Roman social and cultural history, including Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and broadcaster of many programmes on the Roman world.
Audio Recording: click here (Note that the lecture begins at the 19:00 minute mark.Introductory speeches begin at 9:30 minute mark.)
Poster (pdf): click here
