ACUADS 2009 ConferenceInterventions in the Public DomainQueensland College of Art, Griffith University |
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Conference Papers
Published papers listed by sub-theme:
- Public Art: Towards a Critical Discourse
- Sustainability, Design, Education and Transformation
- Documentary and Narrative
- Theory for Practice
- Refereeing the Visual
- Roundtable
PUBLIC ART: TOWARDS A CRITICAL DISCOURSE Convenor: Jay Younger, Artist and Curator, Associate Professor, Queensland College of Art. When it comes to vocal attacks on public art, the voice of the art world is most often heard. In many ways, public art is generally seen by the art world as an inferior form of artistic practice that is constrained conceptually by its democratic ‘dumbing down’ for the public context. The list of criticisms of the artistic outcome is long and comes from all quarters: the art world, mainstream media, the ‘taxpayer’, the community, the artist, the architect, and the commissioner. The nature of positive outcomes and the processes required to avoid negative outcomes are subjects that have consistently been addressed by many in the field. Negative criticisms, of which there are many, describe the outcomes of public art as ‘bogus’, ‘bad’ ‘ghastly’ or ‘disastrous’. While there is consensus that public art outcomes are lacking or problematic, when the critic’s expectations are analysed they, perhaps predictably, vary greatly. The diverse nature of these criticisms supports the claim that expectations of public art are confusing and at times contradictory, which in turn supports Patricia Phillip’s often quoted claim that it is not possible to please everybody1. Because these criticisms are diverse and based on unstated assumptions, a lack of clarity regarding the nature of successful outcomes remains persistent in the field. Papers sought for this session will examine projects and discuss theory relevant to the improvement of critical discourse in the arena of public art. The following questions are put forward as a starting point to provide a focus for the session: 1. Patricia Phillips, ‘Out of Order: The Public Art Machine’, Art Forum, vol. 27, no. 4, (1988): p. 95. |
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Awkward Politeness: Public Artwork in Western Australia and Critical Discourse |
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‘Collectivity as “muse”: Being public without a parachute’ |
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The Politics of Temporary Public Art in Wellington: One Day Sculpture A Case Study |
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Doris Salcedo - Fissures: Exploring the public art(s) of memorialization |
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Is it place making or advertising? |
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write/here |
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Spatializing Memory: Bodily Performance and Minimalist Aesthetics in Memorial Space |
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After the Courtship, is the love lost?….The engagement of art and architecture in Queensland’s Art Built-in |
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SUSTAINABILITY, DESIGN, EDUCATION AND TRANSFORMATION This strand was introduced by Tony Fry who leads the Master of Design Futures Program at the Queensland College of Art, and explored how the imperative of sustainability will radically transform the agenda of design education. The papers to be presented will be selected on the basis of reporting thinking, research and teaching practice that rises to the challenge of educating for sustainment – the expectation is not that the challenges have been fully met and all problems solved. Rather what will be expected to be delivered will be reports of ‘work-in-progress.’ that outline the kind of problems being faced and engaged. |
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Aftermath: Teaching sustainability and the practice of public art. |
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Design that keeps designing: designing for participation |
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The bulul and the economy of patience. (musings on sustainability and the emergence of contemporary art in the Philippines) |
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Introducing Design Research: Three reasonings to encourage design research among newly established teaching institutes |
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Seeking Scenarios for Sustainability |
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Recommendations for intervention in the visual domain: a study of undergraduate design student’s visual literacy and predominate learning modalities. |
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Awakening ethical consciousness of global issues in graphic design students |
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Convenor: David Lloyd, Deputy Director, Research, Queensland College of Art By the middle of the 20th century, theorists began to acknowledge the confluence of documentary practice with some qualitative research methodologies. Becker suggested that sociologists should learn photography 'because photographers [documentists] have studied many of the same things which sociologists routinely study' (Becker, 1974). By the time of, and subsequent to Becker’s writing, documentary practice had produced seminal works that, today, are acknowledged as rigorous, intelligent and discovery based practices. Reproducing ourselves through stories, whatever the medium, Aristotle argued '...is implanted within and separates us from animals' (Butcher 1902). Through imitation we learn our 'earliest lessons and derive, universally, pleasure” (Poetics Section 1 part iv). The greater the versimilitude the more immense the learning and the pleasure derived 'not only to philosophers but to men in general: whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited' (Poetics Section 1 Part iv). Bathes argued the tautological qualities of the photograph, Sontag that 'photography is acquisition…a possession which give photographs some of the character of unique objects' and 2400 years ago Aristotle observed that 'we delight to contemplate [stories] when produced with minute fidelity' (Aristotle Poetics). The importance of the photo document is, therefore, that the common person, like the philosopher, delights in knowing. |
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Recent Australian Broadcasting Cultures and Documentary Practice |
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"Transforming the rhetoric: making images as practice led research |
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Australian Documentary: the State of the Art of the Art of the State in the 1960s |
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What does photography document? |
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Convenor: Associate Professor Ross Woodrow, Deputy Director (Research and Postgraduate) Queensland College of Art. Questions about the nature and status of practice-based research have dominated debates in university art and design schools over the past decade. This focus on theorizing, interrogating or repositioning studio practice within a research framework has been driven in large part by the dramatic rise in popularity of studio-based research higher degrees. A significantly greater number of studio-based Doctoral students are currently enrolled in Australian art and design schools than there are PhD candidates in traditional university art history or art theory departments. The research status of the traditional art history thesis is well established since it conforms to the expectation that research 'activity involves considerable reading rather than looking' and 'turning images into words'1. On the surface at least, the sort of research model evolving in studio-based programs in art schools is in many ways the antithesis of this by privileging looking and substituting images for words. The aim of this strand of the conference is to explore the ways art theory has developed or is evolving in art and design schools to meet the demands of the new practice-based research paradigm. This is potentially a very rich field so any papers that engage the topic of Theory for Practice will be considered; however, to help crystallize current thinking we would particularly encourage papers related to the demands of writing theory in a studio context. A particular interest will be the exegesis – now the standard terminology for the written element of a higher degree studio submission. Papers might explore the form and role of the exegesis or research paper in a studio-based postgraduate submission: or, demonstrate ways undergraduate students are being introduced to the complexities of exegetical writing. 1. Michael Ann Holly, “What is Research in Art History, Anyway?” in Michael Ann Holly & Marquard Smith eds. What is Research in the Visual Arts? Yale Univ. Press, 2008, p. 3 |
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‘Not quite theorist, not quite artist’: the place of the exegesis in studio-based Research Higher Degrees |
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The Effective and the Evocative: Reflecting on Practice-led Research Approaches in Art and Design |
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The innovation agenda and practice-led research in the Arts, Design and Media: Beyond the postgraduate degree |
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Theoretical Critique and the Work of Art: Co-producers in Research |
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An exegesis: from theory to practice and back again |
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The refractive folio: exegesis and assessment in the open studio |
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The Final Judgement: How should dance be evaluated at a post-graduate level? |
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Verbal transfigurations: when the daughters of the night dance in daylight |
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Some positive developments in a professional practice program |
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Boning up on Theory: aligning practice along a ‘Theory Spine |
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Convenor: David Lloyd, Deputy Director, Research, Queensland College of Art In the latter part of the 20th century post modern theorists (Pink, S (2004), Prosser, J (1997), Banks, M (1993), Harper, D (1993) et al) argued for a broadening of research methodologies seeking to acknowledge the lived experience of both the subject and researcher as critical to the research undertaken and the conclusions drawn. In particular they questioned the dominance of the systematic and argumentative modes of inquiry and the over-reliance on text to disseminate knowledge derived through research. New emerging research methods developed that acknowledged and incorporated the subjective experiences of both the researcher and the participant. Modes of dissemination were examined and new models emerged within qualitative frames. The challenges forwarded by postmodernism coupled with an emerging focus by contemporary qualitative researchers on the lived experience 'paved the way for the visual to be increasingly accepted in researching the human condition…for it is no more subjective or objective than written texts' (Pink, S 2004). Today, while the epistemologies underpinning fields within visual practice may differ, the methodologies of the contemporary in-field researcher and the visual researcher run parallel. Neither seeks just to explain or describe the phenomenon under investigation, rather they seek ‘to know’ that phenomenon. That is, to have lived, and to allow their audience to have lived, the phenomenon under investigation. Is it possible to referee the visual? Knowledge embedded within visual research often results from studies of the non-rational elements of human practice. It is these areas that have been largely ignored by the traditional researchers for they do not lend themselves to measurement nor can they be captured and transported easily within traditional modes of communication. For the academic determining how scholarship within the visual may be acknowledged and privileged has become the source of heated debate and urgency. |
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Poetics of the Visual |
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Can a ‘portrait’ paint a thousand scholarly words |
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Reading Pictures: an Impossible Dream? |
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Revolutions in art and design research and publication with the DAAO |
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