Day: November 19, 2019

by Chris Nash

Chris Nash was Professor of Journalism at Monash University, and previously Director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at UTS.

The radical upheavals of the late 1960s generated by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement soon created a searching critique of the entire social framework, and all social institutions found themselves under scrutiny. Art institutions were no exception, with radical formal innovation such as land art (like Wrapped Coast), video art (like the work of  Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman) and performance art (like Gilbert and George) implicitly undermining art museums’ exhibition models. Sometimes the museums were also under explicit political attack for their connections to conservative politicians, and it all came to a head when they moved to protect rich and powerful trustees from criticism. In part 2 of his series on Hans Haacke and the convergence of art and journalism, Chris Nash describes the build-up to Haacke’s infamous 1971 Guggenheim Museum exhibition. This is the story of a period of particularly fertile transformation in the New York art world which became a precursor to the institutional critique of much contemporary art, including the EXTRA!EXTRA! newspaper that you’re reading right now.

Hans Haacke produced and exhibited a wide range of natural systems artworks up until the late 1960s.  The best known to later audiences are the various versions of the Condensation Cube (sometimes called a Weather Cube), comprising a sealed plexiglass cube into which a small amount of water had been inserted. Because of the differential temperature inside the cube caused by light energy from the surrounding environment, the water vaporises then condenses on the inside walls of the cube, forming rivulets as it runs down to collect and vaporise again in an endless cycle whose visual patterns never repeat themselves.  

by Louise Curham

Louise Curham is an artist, archivist and filmmaker, and a researcher at University of Canberra’s Centre for Creative and Cultural Research.

Australians are terrible at criticism. John Gillies made this point to me when I began postgraduate study with him in the year 2000. The arts community in Australia is relatively small, people don’t like to say anything nasty about each other, and if something nasty is said, we don’t know how to talk about it.  The massive down side to this is a) we have to read between the lines to gauge how our work really goes down; b) we all lose the skill of criticism which turns us into quiet australians.

There is a training in the public service called ‘giving and receiving feedback’ to upskill people at this process. It’s a hospitable approach, and that’s always the rub: if someone invites me to respond, I always feel I must be a good guest. However, I think we must evolve our idea of a good guest from a quiet  guest to one who is defiant in good heart.

by Lucas Ihlein

There were two errors in the article “‘Society has changed’ – Gender representation and Kaldor Public Art Projects” in Edition 1 of EXTRA! EXTRA!. 

There was a production error in our listing of Asad Raza. While Mr Raza is the named artist, the project involved the following collaborators, including four male and five female artists: Daniel Boyd, Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, Megan Alice Clune, Dean Cross, Brian Fuata, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Jana Hawkins-Andersen, Khaled Sabsabi and Ivey Wawn. In addition, Wawn presented a choreographic collaboration with Ivan Cheng, Daniel Jenatsch, Julie Lee, Eugene Choi and Taree Sansbury.

The article quoted Jo Holder saying that the only time women appear was when they were naked on their knees. Holder remembered this as a reference to Vanessa Beecroft’s project, but in fact it was Xavier Le Roy’s Temporary Title, 2015, presented at Carriageworks in Sydney. Some of the women in the Beecroft work wore tights, although not all.

by Amber Jones

Amber is an interdisciplinary performance artist, theatre-maker, and journalist

Art and journalism have been noted throughout history to have crossed paths and converge time and time again. During the French Revolution some images represented contemporary social conditions and politics began to appear in the works of artists like Francisco Goya and J.M.W. Turner. Both artists and journalists play similar roles within society bearing witness in some way to history or individual experience, both telling us the truth about our society – even if it’s what we don’t want to hear.

Throughout our time here at the Kaldor studio, we are manufacturing a weekly newspaper that responds critically and playfully to Making Art Public, while raising and addressing questions and concerns from our contributors as well as the general public. 

While our editorial team consists of many reputable journalists who have been established within the media industry for years, we have also invited artists to join the bandwagon to contribute a piece of content that engages with ideas that live within the exhibition, but also, ideas that resonate and communicate with their own creative practice and interests.