School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Janine Burke Begun in 1914, Monet's Grand Décorations were his last and greatest works. But their solo completion is problematic, given their scale and number, combined with Monet's age and infirmities. Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, Monet's stepdaughter and daughter-in-law, was an accomplished artist, trained by him. In 1914, she returned to live at Giverny after the deaths of her husband, Jean, and of Monet's wife Alice. Georges Clemenceau, who commissioned the Grand Décorations for the Orangerie in Paris, stated that Blanche worked on Monet's canvases. This paper explores the significance of Blanche's relationship with Monet: as his student, artist- companion, studio assistant and agent provocateur of his late work. Janine Burke is an art historian, biographer, novelist and freelance curator. She has written a series of books about the Heide circle that includes Joy Hester, Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker and The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide. In 1987, she won the Victorian Premier's Award for her novel, Second Sight. With the Freud Museum London, she curated 'An Archaeology of the Mind: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection' for Monash University Museum of Art and Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney. Her most recent book is Source: Nature's Healing Role in Art and Writing. Dr Burke is a research fellow of Monash University based in English, Communications and Performance Studies.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Peter Murphy All egos, not least of all artistic egos, have vulnerabilities. That is to be human. Collaborations of different kinds aid, boost and enable fragile egos. Artists who are starting out on their life’s work or who have a reached an impasse need support. The same applies to intellectuals, and to human beings in general. While there is some truth in the old existential view, summed up by Jean-Paul Sartre, that hell is other people, it is an indubitable truth that we need other people. But whatever anxieties and weaknesses haunt artists, collaborators and muses are not simply props for threatened egos or instruments for the ego gratification of great artists. There are plenty of examples of the monstrous or tyrannical artistic ego. But just as importantly, in fact more importantly, collaboration is a mirror of creation. Collaboration, which can take on an infinite range of forms, has structural features that are akin to the nature of creation itself. Collaboration therefore acts as a preparation and a foil for creation. It is a visible acting out of the inward creative process. Collaboration is an outward experimental test bed for a combinatory process that is intrinsic to the inner nature of creation. Through collaborative relations, the combinatory process of creation is started, re-started, adapted and evolved. The paper will discuss this in relation to the work of Jasper Johns and his history of collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, Bruce Naumann, Frank O’Hara and Samuel Beckett. Peter Murphy is Associate Professor of Communications and Director of the Social Aesthetics Research Unit, Monash University. He is co-author with Simon Marginson and Michael Peters of Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy (Peter Lang, 2009), Global Creation (Peter Lang, 2010) and Imagination (Peter Lang, 2010). Other books by Murphy include Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism with David Roberts (Continuum, 2004) and Civic Justice: From Greek Antiquity to the Modern World (Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2001).

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Lyndell Brown and Charles Green The speakers will isolate principal distinct types of artist collaboration, noting the shifts in the reception of such working methods since the publication of Green's book, The Third Hand (2001), before explaining the evolution of their own long term working method as one artist since 1989. This is a presentation by artists who have reflected on the theorisation of collaboration and artistic work. Lyndell Brown is an artist. Charles Green is an artist and Associate Professor and Reader in Contemporary Art in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. They have worked as artist- collaborators since 1989. Their works are in most major Australian collections.

Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Ken Friedman For nearly five decades, the international Fluxus community has served as a laboratory of ideas in art and architecture, music and design. In 1966, Fluxus co-founder Dick Higgins sent a 16- year-old college student and avant-garde radio producer to meet Fluxus chairman and impresario George Maciunas. That youngster was Ken Friedman. Friedman planned on a career in the Unitarian ministry and a life as a theologian. Maciunas enrolled him in Fluxus. In a keynote presentation on community, culture, and context, Friedman will talk about a life in the Fluxus laboratory that unpacks the hermeneutics of collaboration. The talk will reflect on Fluxus as a way of life and Fluxus as an occasional but reluctant way of doing art. Ken Friedman is Professor of Design Theory and Strategic Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, and Dean of the Faculty of Design. Active since 1966 in the international laboratory known as Fluxus, he is also a practicing artist and designer. Friedman had his first solo exhibition in New York in 1966. He is represented in major museums around the world including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Modern, London and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. In 2007, Loughborough University awarded Friedman the degree of D.Sc. honoris causa for outstanding contributions to design research. Friedman's web page is located at URL: http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html

Truth, Art, Performance | Jeff Malpas Jeff is visiting Monash from Sept 21st to Sept 24th at the invitation of the School of English Communications and Performance Studies. During this time he will work with students from the Centre for Theatre and Performance on site-specific performance projects, and address the Truth in Performance reading group. He will also present two open lectures/forums. Jeff Malpas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania where he also holds an ARC Australian Professorial Fellowship. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor at LaTrobe University. His book “Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography” (Cambridge 1999) is a seminal work in the philosophy of place. He is the author of “Heidegger’s Topology” (MIT 2006) and co-editor of “Perspectives on Human Dignity” (Springer 2006). He has published extensively on topics in phenomenology, hermeneutics and place.

Place and Performance | Jeff Malpas Jeff is visiting Monash from Sept 21st to Sept 24th at the invitation of the School of English Communications and Performance Studies. During this time he will work with students from the Centre for Theatre and Performance on site-specific performance projects, and address the Truth in Performance reading group. He will also present two open lectures/forums. Jeff Malpas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania where he also holds an ARC Australian Professorial Fellowship. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor at LaTrobe University. His book “Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography” (Cambridge 1999) is a seminal work in the philosophy of place. He is the author of “Heidegger’s Topology” (MIT 2006) and co-editor of “Perspectives on Human Dignity” (Springer 2006). He has published extensively on topics in phenomenology, hermeneutics and place.

Revolutionary praxis is the task, but Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch differ in its conception. A key point of divergence is the role ascribed to subjective intention. For Bloch, an unintended consequence of industrial capitalism has been the new way in which subjective productivity can be thought. This enables collusion between his epistemology and ontology. The true is no longer the object of interpretation, but the result of willed intention on behalf of the revolutionary subject. Benjamin, on the other hand, envisages an intentionless praxis of pure destruction. Justice can never be the goal, but nihilism is the method. Nature becomes an important analogue for both thinkers For Bloch, it becomes the site of a breathtaking post-Darwinian anthropocentrism, where it is no longer an unknowable, indifferent other, but an ally who shares our aspirations. For Benjamin, nature’s blind, periodic catastrophes could provide precisely the destructive means that he seeks. David Blencowe is a postgraduate student in the Centre, researching an MA thesis on Bloch, Benjamin and utopia. He is a member of the editorial board of Colloquy.

Neo-liberalism has become one of the boom concepts of our time. From its original reference point as a descriptor of the economics of the “Chicago School” such as Milton Friedman, or authors such as Friedrich von Hayek, neo-liberalism has become an all-purpose descriptor and explanatory device for phenomena as diverse as Bollywood weddings, standardized testing in schools, violence in Australian cinema, and the digitization of content in public libraries. Moreover, it has become an entirely pejorative term: no-one refers to their own views as “neo-liberal”, but it rather refers to the erroneous views held by others, whether they acknowledge this or not. Neo-liberalism as it has come to be used, then, bears many of the hallmarks of a dominant ideology theory in the classical Marxist sense, even if it is rarely explored in those terms. This presentation will take the opportunity provided by the English language publication of Michel Foucault’s 1978-79 lectures, under the title of The Birth of Biopolitics, to consider how he sued the term neo-liberalism, and how this equates with its current uses in critical social and cultural theory. It will be argued that Foucault did not understand neo-liberalism as a dominant ideology in these lectures, but rather as marking a point of inflection in the historical evolution of liberal political philosophies of government. It will also be argued that his interpretation of neo-liberalism was more nuanced and less openly condemnatory than the more recent uses of Foucault in the literature on neo-liberalism. It will also look at how Foucault develops comparative historical models of liberal capitalism in The Birth of Biopolitics, arguing that this dimension of his work has been lost in more recent interpretations, which tend to retro-fit Foucault to contemporary critiques of either U.S. neo-conservatism or the “Third Way” of New Labour in the UK.

Writers and their world seminar series Motorcycles, Snails: Worlding and the Life of Words Professor Stephen Muecke Stephen Muecke is Professor of Writing at The University of New South Wales. He is one of the leading proponents of ficto-critical writing in teaching and through his own work. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Professor Muecke has previously held positions at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Technology in Sydney, where he was Professor of Cultural Studies. Two of his ficto-critical books are the travelogue No Road (Bitumen All The Way) (1997), and the collection of essays Joe in the Andamans (2008). He has won a WA Premier’s non-fiction prize, been shortlisted twice in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and was highly commended in the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ National Literature Awards.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | John Clute ‘Truth Is Consequence’ This talk will examine, briefly, three fictional/semifictional texts published in the last few months – by Francis Spufford, Ian McEwan and Ralph Nader – to see what clues they give as to how to narrate ‘planetary’ truths – truths about the shape of the near future – so that they can be conceivably acted upon. How do these three texts succeed or fail in the test of making truth consequential? I will end with a peroration drawn from my recent brooding on the matter, to the effect that most of the literatures of the fantastic – what I continue to call ‘fantastika’ as a whole – have shown scant grasp of the complexity of the task of making a lived-in future storyable. John Clute is a science-fiction writer, Director of the Department of Story Future in the Centre for the Future at Slavonice, and co-author of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993) and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997).

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Annette M Schneider As a child I avidly read science-fiction books. Inspired by the Space Race, they explored unlimited horizons. Authors like Frank Herbert also explored ecology and anthropomorphism. Relationships between Earth inhabitants is a primary focus in fiction. Ecological dystopian books can act as a wakeup call: we are not alone; look what might happen! DNA/genetic engineering developments are criticised for ‘undermining the distinction between humans and animals’. What distinction? Australian scientist, Gisela Kaplan, studies the communications and intelligence of other animals. In this paper, I will discuss these changes in scientific viewpoint and how they affect my art. Annette Schneider is the author/illustrator of Mobile Magic (2010). She has been a professional artist/graphic designer for 30 years. Her qualifications are as eclectic as her art: painting, sculpture, textiles, hot glass, ceramics, jewellery, mask-making gastronomy, film studies, animation, farming, teaching and the history and philosophy of science

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Rupert Read This paper suggests that future generations are collectively our children. Thus we ought to love them. Not merely to be fair to them. This fatally undermines the fundamental idea of Rawlsian liberalism, that ‘Justice [as fairness] is the first virtue of social institutions’. For if I am right that justice (especially, justice as fairness) is a deeply inadequate basis on which to place our most crucial social responsibility of all, our responsibility to the future, then it can hardly be the first virtue of social institutions. I urge instead that care/love is essential to our responsibility to the future. This, contrary to appearances, is less utopian than Rawlsianism, because it has at least some chance of delivering the safeguarding of future people that is so badly needed. Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, where he specialises in Wittgenstein, literature and philosophy, and environmental and political philosophy. His Applying Wittgenstein has recently appeared with Continuum Press, and his There is no such thing as social science with Ashgate.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Simon Sellars In a time of environmental concern, architecture is dominated by the mantra of sustainability. This is the ‘new high priest of moralism’ according to Francois Roche, a ‘green wash’ cordoning off nature as a sterile theme park. But can alternative solutions be found within the archetypal ‘dystopia’, within the fraught intertwining of the human and natural worlds that negatively generates the utopian rhetoric of sustainability? In this paper, I explore recent architectural practice that explicitly deploys science fiction, utopia and dystopia to investigate experimental relationships between humans, the built environment and the natural world. Juxtaposing the SF texts of architects including Greg Lynn and Roche with the work of novelist J.G. Ballard, an influence on many practitioners within this new discourse, I suggest that the movement towards the ‘dystopian’ in these texts can perhaps be simply read as ‘embracing change’, a new relationship that generates a new outcome: ‘affirmative architectural dystopias’. Simon Sellars is a Research Fellow at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, RMIT University, and an Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. He publishes the popular website www.ballardian.com, about the career and influence of J.G. Ballard, and is writing a book, Applied Ballardianism, on Ballardian philosophy.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Tamara ProsicIn 1997, the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, Bartholomew I, hosted an environmental symposium in California, where he called the destruction of the environment a sin. It was the first time any religious leader openly connected ecological negligence with a concept that exclusively refers to human relationship with god. Bartholomew I was nicknamed the ‘green patriarch’ and many have since praised his involvement in raising awareness about the human role in destroying nature, but few have asked about the theological premises on which the ‘green patriarch’ based his qualification of destroying nature as a sin. This paper explores some of the distinctly Orthodox utopian teachings and the unity of body and soul and the ways they feed into and enforce the idea that destroying nature is a sin. Tamara Prosic is a lecturer at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology, Monash University. Her research interests involve biblical studies and, more broadly, religious studies, cultural anthropology and critical theory. Recently, she has begun researching the utopian elements of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Jondi Keane