Art, Craft and New Media

The conference was a partnership between the National Gallery of Victoria, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the University of Melbourne and the Humanities Research Centre, The Australian National University.

Goals, proceedings, and outcomes of the conference

The National Gallery of Victoria and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image are collaborating on a large survey exhibition of contemporary Australian art, new media and visual culture opening June 7, 2004. “2004” spans both museums, representing a major commitment of their resources towards the support of new visual culture made between 2002 and 2004. As part of this project, we aimed to hold two colloquia in order to promote reflection and discussion on how to understand and identify the changing issues and outcomes in contemporary Australian art. We decided that the best way to encourage genuine reflection, as opposed to the performance of existing intellectual positions and academic papers, was to hold the two colloquia, and not to include any audiences nor to record the proceedings, especially in order to encourage a frank and direct exchange of viewpoints. To that end, we invited curators of contemporary Australian art (including but not exclusively consisting of the participating curators in the period following the majority of fieldwork undertaken around the nation), artists, expert academics from universities, and new media organization leaders. The first colloquium was held in the Board Room of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne at the start of February 2004, and focused on curatorial strategies and methods.

The second colloquium was the HRC event, held three weeks later, as a one day conversation between Australian writers on art and new media. This was very deliberately a colloquium—a conversation between the participants after short formal five to ten minute 1,000 word presentations by every participant, in which there was no audience, simply a freeranging, informal but structured conversation between the participants. Our aim was to explore and brainstorm, enriching the formation of the exhibition, in a forum for ideas and reflections unconstrained by the presence of an audience or by the writing deadlines of formal papers.

The result was an all-day, very intense and exhausting, rich exchange in which particular intellectual issues emerged, often unexpectedly, with great force. The event was particularly enriched by the active participation of the two HRC participants, Caroline Turner and Charles Merewether, who took an active role as interlocuters and short paper presenters. The issues that emerged consistely focused on the failure of curators and academics to forge bridges between the two vocations (the current event was clearly an exception, the issue was analysed by Charles Merewether), the irrelevence of the term Australian art to artists outside Sydney and Melbourne working in centres such as Brisbane (Rex Butler), the paradigm changing impact of indigenous art (Victoria Lynn and Rex Butler), and the cautious negotiation of national art institutional protocols and methods by an anarchic new media scene (Melinda Rackham, Axel Bruns and Julianne Pearce). Charles Green chaired all discussion.

List of papers presented (titles)

Chair Charles Green

Papers

1. Blair French, The Expectation of Truth and Meaning in Contemporary Art
2. Daniel Palmer, Contemporary Photomedia in the 2004 Mix
3. Rex Butler, The Australian Effect and indigeous art
4. Caroline Turner, Regional neighbours and Culture Wars
5. Julianne Pearce, Outside the Iron Triangle: different regional experiences with regard to new media art and visual culture
6. Jason Smith, The role and possibility of national surveys
7. Charles Merewther, The complexity of cultural flows and exchanges in terms of Asian andLatin American analogies
8. Melinda Rackham, Cinema and Games culture: the relationship of new cinema technologies to art
9. Axel Bruns, New Media culture: are art museums useful in the self definition of new media activity
10. Kelly Gellatly, Is video over already?
11. Russell Storer, Meridian: the MCA experience of national survey exhibitions
12. Victoria Lynn, ACMI: a new museum’s relationship to deterritorialized media

Plenary discussion all participants

Publications

The colloquium was quite deliberately and explicitly not recorded and proceeding were kept as informal, direct and frank as possible. This enabled a free exchange of otherwise radically different views. Several of the partipants then incorporated elements and themes from the colloquium in their essays for the catalogue for the exhibition. The participants who were contributors to the substantial book accompanying the exhibition (Charles Green (ed.), 2004, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2004) were: Charles Green, Victoria Lynn, Rex Butler, Blair French, Kelly Gellatly, Melinda Rackham. A copy of the publication will be sent to the HRC for its archives.

Charles Green, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2004.