School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

This talk will consider theories of spatialisation and the application of topology to cultural studies via recent and historical examples. Rob Shields is Academic Research Director for the City-Region Studies Centre. He also serves as Henry Marshall Tory Chair, professor in the Department of Sociology and professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta. His research career focus has been Urban Cultural Studies, particularly the social uses and meanings of the built environment, urban spaces and regions, including tourist destinations and local identities. He is also interested in the impact of changing spatializations on cultural identities. His book publications include The Virtual (London, Routledge 2003), Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics (London, Routledge 1999) and Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London, Routldege 1991).

By analyzing the image of George W. Bush’s startled look at the moment he was told of the planes crushing into the World Trade Center, I will argue that sovereignty resembles the triangle of representation. Thus, what is primary for an understanding of sovereignty is not the institutions of government, but rather the narratives that communicate the “value” of these institutions. Dimitris Vardoulakis teaches philosophy at the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (Fordham, 2010). He has edited Spinoza Now (U. of Minnesota P., 2011) and co-edited After Blanchot (U. of Delaware P., 2005). Forthcoming books include the co-edited volumes Kafka’s Cages (Palgrave, 2012) and “Sparks Will Fly”: Benjamin and Heidegger (SUNY, 2012). The presentation is from the introduction of a book on sovereignty he is contracted to write for Fordham UP.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Adrian Martin “I do not regret my time with Antonioni.” These are the closing words of German filmmaker Wim Wenders’ book-length memoir about his contribution to a remarkable feature film, Beyond the Clouds (1995), credited to famed Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni – who, after a massive stroke, had limited motor capacities and almost no ability to speak. Wenders was, technically, the ‘back-up’ director contractually required for the project; on other projects (most of them, alas, unmade) Antonioni had Atom Egoyan and Martin Scorsese lined up to play the same role. In the event, Wenders was put in charge of making elaborate framing and linking episodes for the film (which is based on short, mostly erotic stories written long before by Antonioni), and keeping an eye over the shoot as whole: which meant, as for everyone on the crew, trying to intuit and execute what Antonioni wanted, but could scarcely convey, except in a few enigmatic sounds and gestures. Wenders’ expression of ‘no regret’ belies the fact that his book is, despite the evident respect for his Master, one long howl of frustration, exasperation and bitterness: the chronicle of a collaboration that was – at l east in the subjective terms of Wenders’ experience, if not in the objective terms of the finished work – fraught, even a failure. This presentation will reflect upon the difficulty of collaboration in both artistic and literary spheres. It draws upon the range of my own collaborative critical writings (with Paul Taylor, Nicole Brenez, Philip Brophy), as well as the acidic memoir What’s Welsh For Zen? by the modern composer John Cale, and the light cast upon the composition of Anti-Oedipus by the recent publication of Félix Guattari’s drafts for that radical philosophical book which he wrote with Gilles Deleuze. Adrian Martin is Associate Professor, Co-Director of the Research Unit in Film Culture and Theory and Head of Film and Television Studies at Monash University (Australia). He has written five books. His work has appeared in many magazines, journals and newspapers around the world, and has been translated into over twenty languages and has regular columns in the Dutch De Filmkrant and in Cahiers du cinéma España.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Jacquelene Drinkall The paper investigates the relationship between telepathy, collaboration and politics in conceptual and contemporary art. Conceptual artists and theorists Larry Miller, Carolee Schneeman, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, Jean Jacques-Lebel, Marina Abramovic all worked with telepathy in their collaborative practices in the 60s and early 70s. They worked with telepathy and collaboration to deal with issues of abuse trauma, the repressed feminine, the alchemy of social sculpture, guerrilla revolt and the fusion of mysticism and Marxism. Theorists such as Rosalind Krauss and Lisa Blackman enable further examination of conceptual and body art through an appreciation of the value of telepathy, via psychoanalysis and affect theory, for understanding aesthetic and communicative transmission and contagion. Blackman’s notion of self that extends beyond the individual’s body is crucial. Also key is Krauss’ connection between post-mediumism and the narcissism of telepathy in technologically mediated performance. Further, the paper looks at the late/post-conceptual telepathetic collaborative tendencies and relationship between conceptual artists Robert Filliou, Arakawa and Imants Tillers, as well as discourse connecting the telepathy of Tiller’s with that of Abramovic/Ulay’s collaboration in the 80s and 90s. This leads into an examination of past and recent discourse about Tillers’ subsequent collaboration with indigenous Australian artists Gordon Bennett and Michael Nelson Jagamara. Post-colonial theory of William Du Bois reflects on the relationship of psychic andpolitical states. Finally, the paper looks at contemporary artists, 90s – 00s, such as Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Jane and Louise Wilson, Gianni Motti and various ways they have connected telepathy to intersubjectivity, collaboration and crowd consciousness. Younger Australian artists Ms&Mr, Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples and Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano could be seen to be consolidating a nexus between telepathy, collaboration and narcissism. How is it possible, or indeed necessary, to locate these young Australian artists within an emerging genealogy of the politics of telepathic collaboration? How does their love extend to the social? Jacquelene Drinkall has lectured in a range of full-time, sessional and casual positions at Canberra School of Art at Australian National University; College of Fine Arts at University of New South; Design Lab, Faculty of Architecture at University of Sydney; and School of Creative Arts at James Cook University. She holds a PhD in Art History and Theory, Masters by Research in Visual Art and a BA in Visual Art (Painting). Jacquelene has received many awards and grants such as Curriculum Refresh grant; NAVA grant; two COFA Student Art Prizes; an Artspace residency; a Cite International des Arts Paris residency; Australian Postgraduate Award; Marten Bequest; Telecom Travelling Scholarship; Janet Johnston Award; two AGNSW awards; University Medal; and she was a 7 time finalist and 5 time exhibitor in the NSW Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Anne Marsh Performance art and video performance/installation had its genesis in the late 1950s and 1960s, respectively. The collaborative and participatory Happenings and the movement for artists’ access to TV broadcasting both had an activist edge as artists challenged modes of production and distribution and sought to break out of the conventions of the modernist white cube. In this paper I am interested in analysing collaborative modes of performance and video performance that have challenged conventional notions of the art work and its contexts. Whilst considering the historical context, this paper will focus on recent performance collaborations by women, including Sen Voodoo, Monika Tichecek and The King Pins. Anne Marsh is Professor of Theory and Acting Dean of the Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University. Her most recent book is LOOK! Contemporary Australian Photography (2010). She is author of Pat Brassington: This is Not a Photograph (2006), The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire (2003) and Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia, 1969-1992 (1993). She has received two ARC Discovery grants in the last four years, most recently for Remediation: Performance Art and Video performance. This research includes the building of an on-line video archive in collaboration with Matthew Perkins and Elena Galiberti – The Australian Video Art Archive http://www.videoartchive.org.au. Anne is also a contributing editor for Eyeline Contemporary Visual Arts.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Andrew Dearman Would it be strange if Shakespeare appeared up the back of a theatre in which one of his plays was being performed and called out; ‘I didn’t write that!’? Would it be odd if Pollock sent the NGA an email advising them that ‘Blue Poles’ had been hung upside down? Most probably, given that both are dead; however such questions raise interesting issues of interpretation and agency. Among other things, interpretation involves a performance of the space between various sites, such as; the viewer, the viewed, and the maker. Likewise a conventional understanding of collaborative practice is that it is one in which a relationship between multiple sites of agency is performed. Added to this is the understanding that agency is performed within agreed upon boundaries, whether they be contextual, conceptual or material. This performative space of meaning becomes interesting however, when one site is less active than the other—when one is in fact dead. Using examples such as vernacular family photo albums; Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’ and Tacita Dean’s ‘Floh’, this paper considers the degree to which the agency of the author of the vernacular photograph may be re-enacted and performed by proxy through the inclusion of the image in a work produced by an artist. The paper asks how such works might sit within conventionally understood definitions of collaboration. The theoretical frame work within this paper is provided by the material semiotics of STS studies, which privileges the role that inanimate objects play in the construction of the social relations that surround them—in other words—inanimate objects actively collaborate. Thus, images of the dead, by the dead, can be said to collaborate in highly complex ways. Andrew Dearman teaches Art History at Adelaide College for the Arts (TAFESA) and Drawing and Art History at the South Australian School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia where he completed his PhD titled 'Art Practice and Governmentality; The role modelling effect of contemporary art practice and its institution' in 2008.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Justine Grace Gino Severini is widely acclaimed in Italy and abroad as one of the founders of futurism. Yet his religious commissions and church decorations, despite being produced almost exclusively for ten years throughout the 1920s and 1930s and continuing to engage the artist throughout his career, have been largely ignored within the majority of the literature concerning the artist. My paper proposes to address this lacuna through a study of the dynamic collaboration between Gino Severini and the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain. Maritain’s influential text Art et Scholastique (1920) sought to relate the medieval metaphysic of St. Thomas Aquinas to the modern art world as a means of establishing a new methodology, grounded in Christian thought and social ethics, for thinking about modern aesthetics. Severini read the text in 1923, soon after their first meeting, which consequently marked the beginning of a truly reciprocal friendship where Maritain provided the assistance for Severini to make the leap to a spiritual art while Severini helped to shape the philosopher’s position on the import of modernism. Justine Grace is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the enduring presence of religious iconography and traditions in the modern and contemporary art world.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Ann Schilo and Anna Sabadini This paper draws on Barbara Bolt's emphasis on a material approach to understanding art where the artist's engagement with her surrounds through bodily activity is all important and has alignment with Joanna Zylinska's call for an ethical dimension to the encounter with everyday life where, through the agency of the feminine sublime, materiality, body, language and ideas can be reconnected. The paper uses a form of decriture feminine - a writing of impossible description - and rather than making claims for a universal, all encompassing aesthetics, both writers ground their approach to understanding artistic practice in a specific and localised response in which an encounter with painting is both an act of looking at an object, an artefact with all its attendant meanings, and a realisation of the act of painting itself, the art of mark making and visualisation. The collaboration itself generated a parallel set of critical investigations and proved transformative for both authors in regard to the activity of painting and its theorization. It counters the conventional modernist approach to art criticism that delineates a single viewpoint and produces closure through one authorial truth. The creative partnership opened up new ways of considering art by revealing that perception is both elusive and inclusive. It allowed us to explore how another sees, and the relationship of this to the temporality of practice (both theoretical and practical), its devolution. Therefore, two ways of seeing (literally - viewer and artist, as well as metaphorically - theorist and practitioner) that are normally polarized find a rhythm of interconnection and an open-ness conducive to the transformation of each. Importantly in the process of collaboration, we were opened to the pragmatics of feminist ethical engagement. Ann Schilo is currently Director of Graduate Studies in Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University. Ann’s teaching and research concerns intersect in various areas and follow a number of key themes surrounding contemporary art theory and practice. She is particularly interested in the areas of women’s artistic practices, feminist art theory, the visualisation of place and folk material culture. As an experienced supervisor, she has also developed an ongoing concern for best practice in the delivery of postgraduate research programs and is recognised for her work in the area of creative production theses. As well as contributing to national and international conferences through the presentation of papers, Ann writes for local and national art journals and catalogues. Anna Sabadini graduated from Curtin University with a Doctorate in Creative Arts in 2007 and is establishing a promising career as an emerging artist scholar with a growing national reputation. She was selected for the Art of the Wall exhibitions in Brisbane and Melbourne in 2008 and is represented by key galleries in Australia. Underscored by her location as a woman artist living in regional Western Australia, her work engages in questions surrounding her Italian heritage, Australian culture, philosophy and art history/theory. Her first novel Father was short listed for the Tom Hungerford Prize in 2005. Anna contributes essays and reviews to a number of national journals.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Susan Rothnie The seventies decade in Australian art history is often dismissed as the ‘anything goes’ period. Characterised by the rash of anti-establishment arts ‘movements’ that suddenly appeared, it has been seen as a transition period between Modernism and Postmodernism. The idealistic cultural, social and political impulses which were sweeping the West around this period profoundly affected many artists. Encouraged by promise of change offered by ‘alternative’ culture, they experimented with new modes that challenged traditional art categories and the Modernist art narrative. Their aim was to fabricate a new cultural paradigm which recognised the existence of multiple valid alternatives. Operating collaboratively and collectively was essential for artists wishing to explore and assert new concepts of social subjectivity at this time. As a profusion of interest groups surfaced, from political to environmental to feminist, they were sustained by the emergence of a vast array of art spaces, often collectively run. Alternative and experimental spaces such as Pinacotheca and the Ewing and George Paton Gallery in Melbourne, the Tin Sheds and Inhibodress in Sydney, and the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane and Praxis in Perth encouraged collaboration between like- minded artists, who sought both to cut through traditional frameworks and hierarchies, and to express their regional identity. Their facilitation of the production of new work and its critical reception helped reconfigure the art scene. This paper will examine the way in which collaboration and collectivism in the art scene in Australia in the seventies contributed to a fundamental shift in the way art functioned. It will also demonstrate how that shift foreshadowed the inclusive attitudes which typify the processes of art making today, and contributed to a fundamental change in the way Australians view themselves. Susan Rothnie has completed degrees in art history and visual arts. She is currently undertaking her PhD at the University of Queensland, researching Australian art in the 1970s.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Kate Daw and Stewart Russell A Simple Act occupied Daw and Russell for the past two and a half years. It explored the involvement of Australian champion sprinter Peter Norman in the 1968 Olympic Games. Peter Norman famously stood alongside US athletes Tommy Smith and John Carlos on the podium after the 200 m sprint final and supported their political protest (about the civil rights of black people) by wearing the ‘Olympic Project for Human Rights’ badge. Peter Norman stood up for something he believed in to the cost of his athletic career. Daw and Russell were inspired by Norman's ‘simple act’ (the subsequent title of their project) and consider the artwork developed out of this subject to embody many things they care deeply about; social justice, politics, memory and the question of courage. The project clearly has its roots in sport, and incredibly, while Peter lived in Melbourne until he died late in 2006, he is not a ‘household’ name in Australia, although his act (with Smith and Carlos) deeply affected many around the world. This work was exhibited in 2008 to great acclaim in the Basil Sellers Award at the Potter Museum at the University of Melbourne and purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria. A large-scale installation in format, the work included collected texts from an interview with Peter Norman (completed shortly before he died). One of the many positive outcomes of this exhibition was a connection forged with the National Sports Museum (NSM) at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). Daw and Russell have been working at the MCG during 2009/2010 as recipients of the inaugural Basil Sellers Fellowship and through this experience have developed a major new project, Two Homes. Daw and Russell will discuss how their collaborative processes allow us to operate and interact with subjects, institutions and other contexts. We would be interested in discussing our new work, in particular how a small central Australia desert community and the MCG have become collaborative partners in an exciting new art work; Two Homes, and how our collaborative work as artists has enabled this to happen. Kate Daw and Stewart Russell have been collaborating for the past six years on visual art projects. They share a strong interest in bringing other people’s memories, opinions and experiences into their artwork and also have continually used concepts of narrative and the documentation and chronicling of aspects of contemporary culture as the basis for their ideas, inspiration and project outcomes. Daw and Russell are particularly interested in locating and resurrecting forgotten histories.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Clare Leporati ‘Meridians Shanghai 2010: Art & Sound in Public Space Project’ is an international collaboration to create a public artwork for Australia’s contribution to Shanghai World Expo. The project provides a case study in which to compare audience engagement with contemporary public art. Audiences in Shanghai are able to experience the material artwork in-situ; this audience is then extended into virtual space, where people can interact with the work online beyond its physical time-restricted manifestation. This paper explores how online interactive technologies create a platform for the public to engage with public art beyond its physical materialisation and how this has the potential to construct a new form of social fabric. Social media and interactive online tools, created in Web 2.0, have been described as an ‘architecture of participation’. They have the potential to facilitate users collaboratively creating and participating in content production. The Meridians Project provides an insight into the conditions required to inspire virtual audiences’ interest in remixing, and re-conceptualising their encounters with the artwork into new forms of creative content. The incidence and impact of collaboration between the artwork’s creators and audiences across different virtual applications is mapped and assessed using three diverse models of engagement. Each model identifies the role and placement of the creator and audience in relation to the artwork and notes the hierarchy and/or openness towards collaboration. This case study provides an example for the potential for creative art practice in physical public spaces to be cognisant of the contribution interactive virtual audiences can make as active participants in collaboration. This new creative discourse could shift the parameters of what constitutes the artwork and potentially transform it beyond its physical specificity and singular authorship to generate new knowledge about artistic collaborative behaviour. Clare Leporati has over 15 years of professional experience working in the arts including in galleries and museums; writing and publishing; and training and research in Australia, the UK and Canada. Most recently she initiated and project managed the intercultural collaborative project Meridians Shanghai 2010: Art & Sound in Public Space' for the official Victorian Cultural Program within Australia's contribution to Shanghai World Expo. Clare holds a Bachelor or Arts majoring in art history and history, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Arts and Entertainment Management. She is currently undertaking her Masters in Art in Public Space focused on the research project 'Meridians Sited/Sighted/Cited' exploring engagement with a physical public artwork in virtual public spaces.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Leslie Morgan This paper will utilise the first-person narrative to outline the emergence of the Black Art Movement in 1980’s Britain. The author exhibited as part of a minority arts strategy and as an educator was involved in attempts to develop an inter-cultural curriculum. This paper will describe: the conditions that led to an assault on the British Art Establishment; identify key exhibitions e.g. The Other Story; discuss the implications for art education and the white curriculum; identify the principle actors and explore the issues associated with black art and blackness in Britain. Leslie Morgan is an artist (painter), lecturer and researcher with experience in a diverse range of educational settings in Britain and Australia. Morgan’s art practice spans thirty years and his work is represented in private and public collections in Britain, Australia and the USA. Morgan completed his PhD by exhibition and thesis: The Significance of Diaspora Aesthetics in the Visual Arts in 2006 at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. The thesis dealt with the migrant perspective in the visual arts using his own work and case studies of migrant artists from Britain and Australia. He is author of two books Illegal Action (2005), The Significance of Diaspora Politics in the Visual Arts: art, protest and belonging (2008), book chapters and journal articles. Morgan is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art at RMIT University where he has responsibilities for Learning and Teaching, a Drawing elective and higher degree supervision.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Eduardo De La Fuente In her recent study of the contemporary creative class in New York, The Warhol Economy, Elizabeth Currid suggests that Andy Warhol pioneered a new approach to creativity: ‘Andy Warhol exemplified... in both his work and his Factory, the collective nature of creativity: that fashion, art, film, music, and design did not reside in separate spheres – that instead they were constantly engaging each other and sharing ideas and resources across creative sectors’. However, the types of social interactions that Currid points to – the interactions of creative personnel at art gallery openings, dance clubs and bars – doesn’t exactly fit traditional understandings of artistic collaboration. As Currid admits, Warhol ‘saw the significance of the social spaces in which these industries and creative people interacted – his Factory merged cultural production with a social scene’. Similarly, Simon Frith and Howard Horne argue that, what figures such as Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren learnt at art school, was that their own social circles were the ‘art world’ and everyone who mattered was a member. The question I want to raise in this paper is: what understanding of social interconnectedness characterizes the ‘networks’ of sociability of postmodern creatives? And why do postmodern creatives blur the line between work and leisure, making art and socializing? My suggestion will be that if Currid's ethnographic account is accurate then collaboration has been largely replaced by networking; and involvement in an ‘other’s’ creativity is less like love or friendship, and more like the feeling of ‘being connected’. Eduardo De La Fuente is Lecturer in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, at Monash University. He has recently published a book, entitled, Twentieth Century Music and the Question of Modernity (Routledge, 2010), and co-edited (with Peter Murphy) Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Music (Brill, 2010); as well as a number of essays on art, aesthetics and social theory, in journals such as Sociological Theory, Cultural Sociology, Journal of Sociology, Classical Sociology, Distinktion and Thesis Eleven.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Carina Nandlal In 1920, a ballet designed by Pablo Picasso with music by Igor Stravinsky premiered. Despite the pedigree of its collaborators, the reaction was generally mild and the work has slipped out of the repertoire. However, this ballet is significant as the unique collaboration between two of the great modernist artists of the early twentieth century. The story of this collaboration began in Naples 1917 when, under the umbrella of the legendary Ballets Russes, these two artists met. Picasso and Stravinsky immediately struck up a friendship. They not only shared similar aesthetics, their friendship was deeper than mutual appreciation. Their shared love of popular entertainment saw them scouring the city for kitsch memorabilia and their enjoyment of nighttime carousing saw them jailed for lewdness. During this time they immortalised their friendship in a series of reciprocal exchanges, which demonstrate a desire to mimic the style and technique of the other in their own medium. Soon after meeting, Picasso and Stravinsky began sketching ideas for a commedia dell’arte ballet. Pulcinella started with an excited fervor yet in the intervening three years the production changed dramatically. It veered from the initial idea of bringing a low cultural form onto the high art stage, towards an extravagant 18th century Baroque fantasy. Finally, the collaborators returned to their initial vision based on their shared experiences of the commedia dell’arte in Naples and in so doing produced a key statement of the emerging new classicism of the postwar period. This paper explores the sole product of the collaboration between these two artists through the lens of the reciprocal exchanges they made in friendship to one another. This artistic dialogue is foundational for understanding the aesthetic achievement of the ballet. Ultimately the collaboration itself as well as these reciprocal exchanges demonstrates how crossing the spheres between art and music provided both Picasso and Stravinsky new insights into their own medium. Carina Nandlal is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on Picasso's work as a theatrical designer in the Ballets Russes between 1917 and 1920. She is particularly interested in the friendship and collaboration between Picasso and the modernist composer Igor Stravinsky.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Roberta Crisci-Richardson In art-historical literature, French nineteenth-century painters Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas are often singled out as high bourgeois, close in class belonging and urbanity. However, it is evident that they were two very different kinds of bourgeois. While Manet wanted and could afford to fight alone his heroic struggle for success, promoting himself as a solitary genius, or “temperament,” as Zola called it, it is often forgotten that almost all his life Degas was a bohemian who worked within the Parisian rebellious culture of solidarity and mutual support among artists: not only during the 1860s, when he had to portray friends for free in order to build up a reputation as a painter, but above all in the years until 1886, when Degas was one of the chief organizers of the independent exhibitions held since 1874 by the Impressionists on the boulevard des Italiens. In this paper, I will explore the implications of Degas’s engagement both in the activity of the Impressionist societies and in the collaborative printmaking practiced by Degas, Camille Pissarro, Ludovic Lepic, Félix Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt as a tool of their self-fashioning as Northern painters-printmakers in the seditious Montmartre of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Roberta Crisci-Richardson completed her PhD degree in the history of art at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis is titled “Mapping Degas. Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917)”. She is currently writing on Edgar Degas's view of marriage and how this intersects with the painter's avant-gardism.