Mona, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, is the largest private museum in Australia, with a collection ranging from antiquities through Australian modernism to contemporary international art. Its owner is Tasmanian-born David Walsh, who, in sharing his collection with the public and through an ambitious exhibition and publication program, seeks to challenge conventional approaches to art, to received wisdom and to the intersections between culture and biology. Mona is an experiment: questioning, unpredictable, and fun. When the museum opened in 2011, it was almost entirely subterranean, a structure you could hardly see until you were in it. There was one tunnel. All that has changed in 2018. The tunnels have multiplied, are longer, layered, turn corners; and are not yet finished. The underground interior has expanded and erupted, upward and outward, into the light. Jane Clark, Senior…
Tag: Lecture
Lecture Series | Uncommon Knowledge at ACCA
Uncommon Knowledge | ACCA’s annual lecture series this year focuses on artists and the special interests that inspire and inform their art practice. Leading Australian artists such as Bill Henson, Fiona Hall and Ronnie van Hout will discuss the subjects and pastimes that occupy them – from eavesdropping, UFOs, to the body and Brexit, the stolen Picasso and art activism, architecture, social media and The Australian Ugliness. Presented on Monday evenings at 6pm from April through November, the series offers a trans-generational insight into the inner lives and thinking of artists. Tickets are $35 per lecture or $200 for a Season Pass to all eight lectures (includes drink). The program includes: 30 April, Bill Henson: The wilderness within: The body as the last frontier Internationally renowned photographer Bill Henson will explore his lifelong fascination with the human figure. Henson, who represented Australia in…
Lecture | Things Fall Apart – Putting the world back together one document at a time – Robyn Sloggett | University of Melbourne
Faculty of Arts Dean’s Lecture: ‘Things Fall Apart’ – Putting the world back together one document at a time The world as we know it swirls around us as objects, ideas and aspirations. How we make sense of it is dependent on what we have access to, what we can imagine and how we are enabled to think, learn and do. The loss, degradation, or inauthenticity of cultural material threatens the security of our knowledge and the construction of identity, and community that is unable to access its cultural, historic and scientific records is impeded in its ability to construct relevant and effective cultural futures. Conversely, a well-secured cultural record assists a community to tell its stories, understand its past, and cement its identity into the future. Taking Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel as the point of departure, in this lecture…
Lecture | Skin Deep: Reading Emotion on Early Modern Bodies – Prof Evelyn Welch
This lecture will explore the ways emotion was understood on the body’s surface and how this was represented both materially and visually in early modern Europe. Based on traditional medical theories, early modern skin was often described as a ‘fishing net’, something that held the body in place and offered a decorative surface but had no function of its own. At the same time, the body’s surface also told you about its interior wellbeing. Learning to read the body meant both examining the exterior and sampling the interior’s waste products ranging from urine to hair and tears. This approach was as true of animals as it was of people. Manuals described how to read faces and skin, and argued for and against blushing. You could also predict astrological futures by reading the lines on foreheads as well as on hands…
Lecture | ‘Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy’ an influential, posterity-averse art dealer – Dr Judith E. Stein, Writer and Curator | University of Melbourne
During the early 1960s in New York, the Chinese-American art dealer Richard Bellamy (d. 1998) ran the fabled Green Gallery on Fifty- Seventh Street where he launched the careers of many of today’s iconic Pop, minimalist and maverick artists. In an illustrated talk based on her engrossing biography, Eye of the Sixties, Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016), Stein brings alive this beatnik with a legendary eye who was the first to show Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, Mark di Suvero and George Segal, as well as Yayoi Kusama’s sculpture and Warhol’s printed money. He even brokered Yoko Ono’s first sale. “There was nobody like Bellamy. I certainly consider myself his pupil,” art dealer Leo Castelli later reflected. Judith Stein is a writer and curator specialising in post-war…
Lecture | Joan Kerr: the making of a feminist art historian – Joanna Mendelssohn | Ursula Hoff Lecture 2017
Joan Kerr: the making of a feminist art historian Ursula Hoff Lecture 2017 Associate Professor Joanna Mendelssohn, art historian, University of New South Wales Date: 6:30pm, 11th December 2017 Venue: Forum Theatre, Arts West Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic, 3010 When Professor Joan Kerr was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the year before her death in 2004, her friends were determined that her intellectual legacy should continue. The reason for this was not just friendship, nor a determination that a great feminist scholar should survive the strange machismo of Australian art historiography. Rather it was a recognition that Kerr’s inclusive approach was especially rewarding as a way of mapping Australian art and its objects. By challenging the traditional hierarchies of media and association that privileged both oil painting and networks of mateship, Kerr revealed a rich tapestry that not…
Lecture | James Elkins – Limits of the Criticism of Writing in the Humanities | University of Melbourne
Ever since new criticism, literary study has been developing ideas of close reading. Since the inception of poststructuralism there has been wide acknowledgment of the constructed nature of the text. In the last 15 years there have been even more models for understanding texts, including ‘distance reading’ and ‘surface reading’. Given that amazing richness of interpretive possibilities, it is strange that the humanities continue to teach writing on a rudimentary level, stressing clarity, concision, and organisation – basic pedagogy that was already out of date 100 years ago. This talk is an informal survey of the absence of the tools of literary theory and rhetoric in fields such as sociology, anthropology and art history, with special reference to examples such as Rosalind Krauss, Alex Nemerov, T.J. Clark, Stephen Greenblatt, Steven Pinker and Saul Kripke. James Elkins’ lecture is coordinated in…
Keir Lectures on Art | The Limits of Globalisation in Art History – James Elkins | Sydney
The Power Institute with Sydney Ideas is pleased to present a lecture by James Elkins, Professor Art History, Theory and Criticism, and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Elkins is the third speaker in our Keir Lectures on Art series. ABSTRACT | This lecture is not concerned with global art per se, but with the global writing of art history. Current initiatives supporting the international practice of art history, such as the Clark Art Institute’s Mellon Foundation-funded projects, are aimed at the exchange of information and the facilitation of travel and study. Such programs, Elkins argues, can promote a homogenised approach. In this lecture, Elkins challenges the assumption that there are traditions of art-historical scholarship different from those that are widely acknowledged, suggesting instead that scholarly practices exist, but not as art history…
Free Public Lecture | Design Sensibility: Viennese émigrés in Australia | Harriet Edquist
Annual Duldig Lecture for 2017 | Wednesday 18th October 2017 Design Sensibility: Viennese émigrés in Australia Professor Harriet Edquist, Professor of Architectural History, RMIT University Situated between international modernism on the one hand and local debates about “Australian” architecture and design propounded by Robin Boyd and others on the other, Viennese designers negotiated the values of domestic design they had absorbed in the cities of Europe within a fast-changing postwar Australian environment. In this lecture Harriet Edquist will show how personal histories of émigré and refugee Viennese designers throw into question Australian design history’s often limited definition of design as a purely modernist professional practice beholden to a national agenda. It will argue that on the contrary, geographical and cultural boundaries are fluid, that learning never stops, that memory was often central to the émigré expression of “home” and…
Rae Alexander Lecture 2017 | Dr Richard Haese on the landmark exhibition The Field at the National Gallery of Victoria
This year’s 20th annual La Trobe University Art History Alumni Rae Alexander Lecture will be presented by leading art historian Dr Richard Haese. He will explore the landmark exhibition, The Field on the 50th anniversary of this remarkable showcase. The Field is regarded as a landmark exhibition in Australian art history – a radical showcase of 74 abstract and conceptual, colour field, geometric and hard edge paintings and sculptures. Influenced by the American origins of abstract art, the exhibition opened to much controversy at the NGV in 1968 with its silver foil-covered walls and geometric light fittings, boldly launching the careers of a generation of young Australian artists including Sydney Ball, Peter Booth, Janet Dawson and Robert Jacks. The Field Revisited will be on exhibition at the NGV in May 2018. Dr RICHARD HAESE is an art historian and is currently…
Beyond Disegno: Professional Identity and Material Experimentation in mid 16th-century Italian Portraiture – Dr. Elena Calvillo
Beyond Disegno: Professional Identity and Material Experimentation in mid 16th-century Italian Portraiture Dr. Elena Calvillo, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Richmond Date: 5:30-7pm, 17th August 2017 Venue: Lecture Theatre C (Room 124), Old Arts Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic, 3010 More info here: https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/9214-beyond-disegno-professional-identity-and-material-experimentation-in-mid-16th-century By 1531, the Venetian artist Sebastiano del Piombo had resettled in Rome after the Sack, received a lucrative sinecure as the keeper of the papal seals and won acclaim for his method of painting in oils on stone supports. Two decades later, Agnolo Bronzino produced a series of portraits on tin supports while working for Cosimo I de’ Medici. This lecture examines the ways in which their innovative use of materials in portraiture contributed to both the painters’ and patrons’ identities, and how it made claims of originality and invention that might otherwise…
Lecture | Dr Christopher Heathcote – Discovering Dobell | TarraWarra Museum of Art
2pm, Saturday 22 July Dr. Christopher Heathcote, curator of Discovering Dobell, as he shares his fresh insights into the work of William Dobell. Exploring in detail Dobell’s London years, his portraits of Sydneysiders, and the more experimental New Guinea paintings, Heathcote’s lecture will present a close examination of the artist’s practice, shedding new light on the processes and methods by which the artist developed ideas from sketches to paintings. Exploring in detail Dobell’s London years, his portraits of Sydneysiders, and the more experimental New Guinea paintings, Heathcote’s lecture will present a close examination of the artist’s practice, shedding new light on the processes and methods by which the artist developed his ideas through several drawings and studies to reach one or more paintings. Dr. Christopher Heathcote is one of Australia’s foremost art critics and has written on a broad range of topics…
Lecture | ‘Re-visiting Peter Lely’: a Dutch painter in seventeenth-century London – Diana Dethloff | University of Melbourne
The Dutch-born artist Peter Lely was an important figure in seventeenth-century British portrait painting. His position as Principal Painter at the court of Charles II, and his portraits of royal mistresses and privileged courtiers have, for many, come to define the Restoration period, as well as earning Lely the reputation of being nothing more than a fashionable face painter. This lecture aims to present a more balanced assessment of an artist who enjoyed a working life of almost forty years, only half of which were as royal painter, and examines Lely’s work during the earlier periods of English civil war and Commonwealth government, in addition to that for the Restoration Court. As well as arguing for a more balanced view of this interesting and prolific artist, this discussion will provide a useful context for the National Gallery of Victoria’s own Lely portrait…
Lecture | Cecilia Vicuña, About to Happen – Julia Bryan-Wilson | University of Melbourne
Associate Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson will give a lecture on Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña. Her lecture will discuss Vicuña’s sculptural work looking closely at her textile-based work from the 1970s to think through issues of production and materiality. Drawing on her forthcoming book, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, Julia Bryan-Wilson investigates how Vicuña’s use of knotted threads and strings signified politically during the Pinochet dictatorship and in relation to Andean systems of knowledge production. She explores a range of art and performance from several decades of Vicuña’s practice to illuminate how textiles unravel preconceived ideas about handicraft, industry, and memory. Julia Bryan-Wilson’s writing has appeared in Afterall, Aperture, Artforum, Art Journal, Bookforum, October, Oxford Art Journal, and Parkett. Her work centres on feminist and queer theory, artistic labour, performance, and craft histories. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War…
Lecture | Something on High: Van Gogh, Nature and the Seasons – Sjraar van Heugten | NGV International
Something on High: Van Gogh, Nature and the Seasons Sjraar van Heugten Date: Saturday 29th April 2017, 2pm Venue: Clemenger BBDO AUditorium, NGV International Tickets $16 M / $20 A / $18 C (Book here http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/program/something-on-high/) The seasons had profound meaning for Vincent van Gogh: they represented the circle of life within nature – birth, bloom, maturity and death. For the artist, this ongoing cycle represented the greatness of nature and the existence of a higher force. Celebrate the opening weekend of Van Gogh and the Seasons as exhibition curator Sjraar van Heugten explores Van Gogh’s love of nature in both his life and work and the role of the seasons in his oeuvre. Sjraar van Heugten is an independent art historian and former Head of Collections at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Sjraar joined the Van Gogh Museum in…