ANECDOTE OF THE JAR
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
- Wallace Stevens
This 8-week series of seminars at the Centre for Cross
Cultural Research addresses questions of form in art.
Form, in its concrete yet strangely nebulous universality,
remains elusive to definitions across and even within
disciplines. It may be that our own forms of interpretation
and explanation are themselves academic refractions of
the very cultural forms we study. These recursive characteristics
of form provoke us to explore questions of art that range
across cultures, objects and modes of interpretation.
Throughout this series, speakers from a range of artistic,
anthropological and historical disciplines will address
the nature of form as it manifests for practitioners,
audiences and interpreters of art; both in Western traditions
and Indigenous art and material culture from Australia
and overseas.
Seminar Schedule
March 17
Gordon Bull (Canberra School of Art)
“Minimal form”
March 22 (Associated Lecture)
Professor Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
“Winged Eyes & Feathered Pictures: Towards a
New Iconology”
March 24
Kate Bowan (Humanities Research Centre)
"On a New Formula: Hooper Brewster-Jones's Musical
Experiments.”
March 31
Daniel Thomas (Emeritus Director, AGSA)
““Glover’s view of a House by the Derwent:
Old Forms in a New Land”
April 7
Luke Taylor (AIATSIS)
"Negotiating Form among Kuninjku Bark Painters"
April 21
Stephen Zagala (Centre for Cross Cultural Research)
“Image Gardens: the Cultivation of Earthworks”
April 28
John Carty (Centre for Cross Cultural Research)
“I’ll give you form…”
May 5
Imants Tillers
“Additional Form”
May 12
Diana Young (Centre for Cross Cultural Research)
“The Colours of Things”
