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Some later issues, recently. |
Column has never claimed to represent or survey the totality of art production and presentation. It is, after all, a publication whose primary role is to function as a forum for reflection on the discursive activities and contexts of a single artistic organisation and its community, activities that include the publication itself alongside the exhibitions, residencies and public programming activities. The selection of texts contained herein is by and large generated by or otherwise related to these activities, and necessarily takes them as their central focus. However, if certain threads that emerge as the texts, and the practices they discuss, enter into dialogue with one another in the context of this compendium are any indication, then certain shifts are at work within recent artistic practice, which, if not consciously developed in direct response to the economic crisis, certainly confront it in interesting ways.
It is possible to determine from the texts in this issue two key threads that have concerned Artspace and its broader community, which might be summarised in the dual sense of the term ‘autonomy’ as it pertains to art — the question of the autonomy of art as a practice distinct from other fields of human activity; and the political autonomy of the art worker, the degree to which the conditions that sustain the production of art might be determined by its producers themselves. Neither of these concerns is particularly new, and indeed they are common to many of the more nuanced understandings of the art of the past four decades. Nevertheless, it is their contemporaneity, the fact that these areas are being explored at the same moment in time, and in some cases their coarticulation, challenging institutionalised understandings of the limits and social function of art in a singular movement, that constitute fertile ground for theory and criticism, and for further practical activity.
It could even be posited that these practices are already theoretical and critical, not in the sense that they might conveniently illustrate a given idea about art, nor through the active and crucial participation of its actors in debates around contemporary art — an important function of the drive toward self-organisation — but that the works themselves effect sophisticated engagements with the ever-shifting frameworks of making and understanding art. As such they might be described as theory-producing. In testing the limits of what is understood as art, and, perhaps more importantly, of precisely how art is understood, they at once suggest the possibility of transversal exchange with other fields, and the necessity for theory, the act of thinking in public, to constantly challenge its suppositions, and to draw its energy from that which sits just beyond its grasp.
This issue of Column covers a particularly active period for Artspace, encompassing the calendar year 2009 and a very early part of 2010. Aside from Artspace’s regular exhibition program, this period saw a number of major discussion events, including a three-part investigation of organisational and institutional practices within the field of art and its various intersections with the social sphere. Beginning with the international conference Spaces of Art, whose texts comprised the fourth issue of Column, these discussions were extended and refined in the symposia One Way or Another: artist self-organisation in New South Wales and Common Knowledge: collectivity and collaboration in artistic, curatorial and critical practice. Selected texts from these programs are reproduced here. In addition to the Spaces of Art issue of Column, this period also involved the preparation of several major publications that significantly elaborate issues of relevance to the texts contained in this volume: Conceptual Beauty: perspectives on Contemporary Australian Art by Jacqueline Millner; Raquel Ormella: She went that way; and, produced in collaboration with Te Tuhi the Mark, Bruce Barber: Works 1970–2005.
A few introductory remarks are necessary with regard to certain contributions to this issue. The dialogue between Terry Smith and Rex Butler that appears in these pages is an edited and expanded version of a conversation that took place at the launch of Smith’s book What is contemporary art?, hosted by Artspace in November. In order to contextualise the discussion, which referred heavily to the book, and to a lecture given by Smith at the Power Institute the evening prior, we have reprinted a condensation of the ideas in the form of a text that first appeared in October, restoring its original title. We thank Hal Foster and the MIT Press for their permission to do so. The thirty-two-page section devoted to Imprint, curated by Anneke Jaspers with the support of the Arts NSW Emerging Curators Program, was commissioned for Column but also appeared as a self-funded standalone publication. It is intended to operate at once as a site of critical reflection on the exhibition project of the same name, as a forum for the presentation of supporting and developmental documentation, and as an experiment in using the format of publishing as a means of further extending the ideas explored in the exhibition. Finally, it should be noted the contribution of What, How & for Whom (WHW) was not developed as an essay as such, but is the text of a lecture presented as part of the Common Knowledge symposium; stylistically, it was written to be read aloud.
The contingent, performative tone of this last text is perhaps appropriate to the intentions of this publication. The texts and images contained in Column 5, are, as with each issue, reports, documents and analyses of activities that take place in the world, albeit within the capacities of a single institution. They are part of an ongoing process of dialogue and reflection that is integral to the development of Artspace’s artistic and discursive programs.
Žižek has noted of the vicissitudes of the economic crisis that ‘in late Spring 2009 it was “renormalized” — the panic blew over, the situation was proclaimed as “getting better”, or at least the damage as having been controlled (the price paid for this “recovery” in the Third World countries was, of course, rarely mentioned) — thereby constituting an ominous warning that the true message of the crisis had been ignored, and that we could relax once again and continue our long march towards the apocalypse.’ Though the Greek crisis and the panic around the valuation of the renminbi have since intervened, the case remains the same — whatever shocks may come its way, whatever gloomy prognostications are offered by the reformist Prechters, Soroses and Stiglitzes, global capital maintains an extraordinary and remarkably counterintuitive optimism about its own prospects. There is no more concrete illustration for this than the mood at a pub, situated directly behind Artspace, that is frequented by finance sector workers, presumably as a halfway point behind their jobs in Sydney’s CBD and their homes in Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay and the expensive apartments in Woolloomooloo’s Finger Wharf. Buoyant during the boom years, often filling up by 3 pm on a Friday afternoon, it fell almost completely silent in the immediate aftermath of September 2008. Slowly but surely, the bankers have returned, and with it a big-spending bravado apparently immunised against each subsequent shock. The lessons of history, it seems, can be forgotten in the blink of a dividend.
The contributions to this issue of Column and the practices they explore, no matter how specialised or episodic they may appear in isolation, collectively propose a thinking that runs counter to this blind addiction to ideology, embracing memory, processes of historical retrieval and enactment, and challenges to dominant epistemologies and hermeneutics as strategies that struggle toward an understanding of the conditions of contemporaneity, and the development of means by which to critically engage them. They are thought experiments made public, movements toward realising the political potential of art and writing, to reflect on, and to compel, action in the world.
A few introductory remarks are necessary with regard to certain contributions to this issue. The dialogue between Terry Smith and Rex Butler that appears in these pages is an edited and expanded version of a conversation that took place at the launch of Smith’s book What is contemporary art?, hosted by Artspace in November. In order to contextualise the discussion, which referred heavily to the book, and to a lecture given by Smith at the Power Institute the evening prior, we have reprinted a condensation of the ideas in the form of a text that first appeared in October, restoring its original title. We thank Hal Foster and the MIT Press for their permission to do so. The thirty-two-page section devoted to Imprint, curated by Anneke Jaspers with the support of the Arts NSW Emerging Curators Program, was commissioned for Column but also appeared as a self-funded standalone publication. It is intended to operate at once as a site of critical reflection on the exhibition project of the same name, as a forum for the presentation of supporting and developmental documentation, and as an experiment in using the format of publishing as a means of further extending the ideas explored in the exhibition. Finally, it should be noted the contribution of What, How & for Whom (WHW) was not developed as an essay as such, but is the text of a lecture presented as part of the Common Knowledge symposium; stylistically, it was written to be read aloud.
The contingent, performative tone of this last text is perhaps appropriate to the intentions of this publication. The texts and images contained in Column 5, are, as with each issue, reports, documents and analyses of activities that take place in the world, albeit within the capacities of a single institution. They are part of an ongoing process of dialogue and reflection that is integral to the development of Artspace’s artistic and discursive programs.
Žižek has noted of the vicissitudes of the economic crisis that ‘in late Spring 2009 it was “renormalized” — the panic blew over, the situation was proclaimed as “getting better”, or at least the damage as having been controlled (the price paid for this “recovery” in the Third World countries was, of course, rarely mentioned) — thereby constituting an ominous warning that the true message of the crisis had been ignored, and that we could relax once again and continue our long march towards the apocalypse.’ Though the Greek crisis and the panic around the valuation of the renminbi have since intervened, the case remains the same — whatever shocks may come its way, whatever gloomy prognostications are offered by the reformist Prechters, Soroses and Stiglitzes, global capital maintains an extraordinary and remarkably counterintuitive optimism about its own prospects. There is no more concrete illustration for this than the mood at a pub, situated directly behind Artspace, that is frequented by finance sector workers, presumably as a halfway point behind their jobs in Sydney’s CBD and their homes in Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay and the expensive apartments in Woolloomooloo’s Finger Wharf. Buoyant during the boom years, often filling up by 3 pm on a Friday afternoon, it fell almost completely silent in the immediate aftermath of September 2008. Slowly but surely, the bankers have returned, and with it a big-spending bravado apparently immunised against each subsequent shock. The lessons of history, it seems, can be forgotten in the blink of a dividend.
The contributions to this issue of Column and the practices they explore, no matter how specialised or episodic they may appear in isolation, collectively propose a thinking that runs counter to this blind addiction to ideology, embracing memory, processes of historical retrieval and enactment, and challenges to dominant epistemologies and hermeneutics as strategies that struggle toward an understanding of the conditions of contemporaneity, and the development of means by which to critically engage them. They are thought experiments made public, movements toward realising the political potential of art and writing, to reflect on, and to compel, action in the world.
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