'B&D, S&M, D&S, RACK, PRICK, SSC... An entree of acronym soup and kink'

2015

Eleonora Belfiore has recently argued that ‘socio-economic impact has so far failed to successfully ‘make the case’ for arts funding and to provide a credible solution to the justification issue … [T]he same outcome is likely for humanities research unless a sustained attempt is made to broaden the debate from impact to public value’. In this semi-playful provocation, I suggest that a key strategy for asserting the value of both research and practice in the arts would be to reconfigure the mechanisms of the debate, as much as its terms and terminology. The Warwick Commission has argued persuasively, and with some effect, that the acronym STEM which has recently fixed educational priorities should be adjusted to STEAM to incorporate the arts. Although a successful pragmatic strategy, the deployment of acronyms here, I would argue, maintains a corporate politics that is allied to the agendas of impact and instrumentality. Acronyms, however, are not merely the simple, and prosaic, mnem...

Describing her intricately crafted sculptures as ‘lures’, Fiona Hall attempts to seduce and trap audiences into a protracted examination of their forms and relationships that reveal a critical subtext. Given her strong relationships with museums across Australia, and her frequent residencies in former colonies of the British Empire, her attraction and sensitivity to natural and cultural artefacts in public museums is matched by her indictment of the human impact on nature and the colonial impact on indigenous populations that are so often concealed, even sustained, by the museum’s order of things. In this way, Hall extends the subversive legacy of surrealist exhibition and display with her imaginative and playful combination of juxtaposition and resemblance. Hall’s appropriation and subversion of traditional museological order and display, from wunderkammen, natural history collections and modern museums, identifies the museum’s role in shaping knowledge and invites the spectator to be critical of its consumption.

2018

Queering Australian Museums addresses the problem of how queer or LGBTIQ communities can be further included in Australian museums on their own terms. It looks at four areas of museums—management, collections, exhibitions, and connections with audiences and communities—to consider barriers and enablers of queer inclusion in these often heteronormative institutions. Case studies of queer-inclusive efforts in public Australian museums are interpreted from institutional and community perspectives drawn from 25 interviews. The interviews are put into critical conversation with archival material and literature from museum studies and the emerging field of queer museology. The study evaluates the visibility of the history, cultures, and identities of queer communities in Australian museums. It establishes that many public representations of queerness have been driven by the efforts of LGBTIQ communities, particularly through community-based heritage organisations. It also gathers and reflects upon examples of critical queer inclusion that have occurred in public museums. Using these exemplars, it argues that queer communities should be empowered to make decisions about their own heritage with the support of museums and their unique attributes; that individual and organisational leadership, involving queer individuals and allies, should be brought to bear on this task; and that effectively navigating the tensions between museums and queer communities requires mutual understanding and accommodation. Through the process of queering the museum, it is suggested, each party might be transformed, leading to LGBTIQ diversity being valued as an integral part of society. The thesis addresses the gap in Australian museum studies literature on queer or LGBTIQ inclusion compared with Euro-American settings. It further contributes original case studies to the international field of queer museology, and to museum studies literature on including and empowering diverse communities. Both recognising the agency of queer communities and also engaging with the language and conventions of museums, it constructs a distinct account of how to navigate the historical tensions between the two. It thereby aims to enrich museum offerings for all audiences on the terms of those erstwhile excluded.

Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2012

While the artistic events taking place at the Brunswick Club since the artist collectives BEEF, CHAMP and Residence began occupying it in 2017 are diverse, they are unified by a frequent response to the material conditions of the building itself. In this regard they might be understood by comparison with similar instances in which artists inhabited and responded to formerly disused public spaces in attempts to critically re-read their purpose and history. Although many examples of creative re-imagining of former public buildings for studio and exhibition space might be given, I refer primarily to the exhibition Rooms at P.S.1 in 1976 in Long Island City. This group show intervened in the architecture of a former public school and Rosalind Krauss's reading of it through the sign of the index attracts my particular attention because of the indexical character in artworks by BEEF members (at the Brunswick Club). In this discussion, I'll reflect upon how the fabric and material history of the building itself impacted this aesthetic of indexicality, and how such art occurring today in Bristol breaks with and/or develops the indexical practices of Rooms. To support an understanding of the enquiry into the relationship between work and relaxation in events at the Brunswick Club, I will also briefly refer to critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin for their astute analysis of the conditions of labour, industry and leisure during the modernist period. THE INDEXICAL An indexical sign is one whose resemblance to its referent is along the axis of the physical. It is not a representation so much as a mark or imprint that occurs as a result of material contact between the object and its trace. Examples given [1] are those of the appearance of smoke alerting us to fire, and the spinning of the weathervane as an index of wind. Whatever the manifestation, that which is indexed, or pointed to, is the cause, or source. The indexical sign is of interest to modernist artists and art historians because, neither pictorial nor abstract, it instantiates a break with illusionistic verisimilitude. Krauss's essay Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America focuses on the P.S.1 exhibition as one that typified the impact that the technology of photography has had on abstract art. The artists involved, such as Gordon Matta Clark, (whose major works consisted of architectural interventions such as slicing an entire house in half as a form of social comment) adopted mainly the discipline of installation. They worked with the derelict state of the building itself as medium, taking aspects of its fabric, and through actions of removing, cutting into, inverting, rubbing and transferring parts of the architecture and its decor, pointed to the building itself as the message of the artwork. During this period the consensus was that photography possessed a documentary quality owing to its status as a direct trace of the real. Using these methods of selecting, cropping and directly pointing to the building and its decor, the un-coded character of photography was translated to that of installation art. THE AURA OF THE BRUNSWICK CLUB The exhibition at P.S.1 and Krauss's reading of it is worth remarking on for its correspondences, to varying degrees, with the events and exhibitions occurring at the Brunswick Club. In both cases disused urban real estate on the fringes of the city have, or are being, leased by, or for, artists' as studio and exhibition space. As with the P.S.1. group approach to indexing the fabric of the building, with its strong coding as a formerly public institution, the Brunswick Club's history of public use has also been directly and indirectly referenced by the current Bristol inhabitants. Several BEEF artworks, in responding to the history and material of the building itself, adopt indexical methods. This tendency can be understood in that the existing practices of individual artists within the collective had long sustained enquiry into site and material history. My own practice has gravitated increasingly toward exploration of traces, stains, soiling and marking and has been further influenced by the collective orientation toward indexical art and also by the aura of the building.

SL Magazine, 2017