Special meeting next Tuesday, 22 May 3:30pm, Ian Potter Museum

The next Aboriginal Art Reading Group meeting will be at the Ian Potter Museum at the University of Melbourne on Tuesday, 22 May, 3:30-4:30pm in the mezzanine level room. Curator Joanna Bosse will welcome the group with an introduction to a Groote Eylandt bark painting brought from the Leonhard Adam Collection archives especially for this event by newly appointed Curator of Academic Programs, Dr Heather Gaunt.

There will be two readings for the month of May, they are Stephanie Radok, “July,” in An Opening: Twelve Love Stories about Art, Wakefield Press, Kent Town, SA, 2012, pp. 62-80, and Djon Mundine, “A personal history of Aboriginal Art,” in Kasper Konig, Emily Joyce Evans and Falk Wolf (eds.) Remembering Forward: Australian Aboriginal painting since 1960, Paul Holberton Publishing, London, 2010.

Contact me if you would like to add your email address to our electronic mailing list. I use the mailing list to specify where to locate copies of the readings. Please note that we are meeting one hour earlier than usual, and on a Tuesday instead of our regular Monday. RSVPs would be appreciated for this meeting: kirar@student.unimelb.edu.au

Today at 1pm: Aboriginal Art’s digital future: current issues, new initiatives

University of Melbourne School of Culture and Communication Art History Seminar Programme, Old Physics G16 / Jim Potter Room, 1pm-2pm

“Aboriginal Art’s digital future: current issues, new initiatives,” Susan Lowish, Lecturer in Australian Art History, University of Melbourne

Recent developments in record keeping practices for Aboriginal art from remote communities represent significant changes to the amount and type of information being collected on individual artists and artworks. This paper outlines these changes and

Talk on the 17th: Indigenous Research: By Us or About Us. What’s in it for us?

For more about this event, click here. Admission is free but tickets are required.

The Lin Onus Conversations Presented by The Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts

Indigenous Research: By Us or About Us. What’s in it for us? Presented by the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts, the Lin Onus Conversations centre on Indigenous arts, histories and future directions, bringing leading practitioners and educators to the public. The Conversations are designed to foster collaboration and creative engagement between Indigenous and migrant peoples.

Join the conversation with guest speakers Professor Marcia Langton,

Djon Mundine lecture, Same But Different: Things That Matter

Thursday,  19 April, 7:30pm at the Institute of Postcolonial Studies,  78-80 Curzon Street, North Melbourne. More info here.

I think of the present day Aboriginal condition and the struggle over the last twenty years as akin to the Stalin – Lenin/Trotsky divide in the 1920s and the 1930s. One wanted to consolidate communism in one state; the other to spread the revolution universally – to take it into the international. Colonisation, I think, rolls in a progression,

April Meeting: Indigenous Australian Art Charter of Principles for Publicly Funded Collecting Institutions and Judith Ryan’s “The Ancient Made New”

The next Aboriginal Art Reading Group meeting will be Monday, 16 April, 4:30-5:30pm in room 215, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne.

There will be two readings for April: the Indigenous Australian Art Charter of Principles for Publicly Funded Collecting Institutions available from the Cultural Ministers Council publications page and Judith Ryan’s “The Ancient Made New,” Apollo: The International Magazine for Collectors, July/August 2011, that can be accessed through the University of Melbourne’s Discovery search.

Call for Papers

Australia and New Zealand Art Association Annual Conference, Sydney, 12-14 July 2012

Together <> Apart

 Relational Models of Curating and Art Making:  Local Histories and Indigenous Practices

The nature of contemporary biennales and large-scale recurring exhibitions is that they afford international curators, often from the global ‘North’, opportunities to arrive in cities and temporarily locate their practice within cultural contexts that can be new and unfamiliar.  This system produces and supports a whole spectrum of curatorial approaches, from the transitory implementation of pre-formed exhibition themes, to the close curatorial engagement with local histories, politics and ways of knowing.

The 18^th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations ‘intends to focus on inclusionary practices of generative thinking, such as collaboration, conversation and compassion, in the face of coercion and destruction’ (de Zegher, 2011). 

March Meeting: Katie Glaskin “On Dreams, Innovation and the Emerging Genre of the Individual Artist”

The next Aboriginal Art Reading Group meeting will be Monday, 19 March, 4:30-5:30pm in room 215, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne.

We will be reading Katie Glaskin (2010) “On Dreams, Innovation and the Emerging Genre of the Individual Artist,” Anthropological Forum: A journal of social anthropology and comparative sociology, 20:3, 251-267.

The article can be downloaded with a University of Melbourne student login via Discovery search.

* Change of rooms

Our upcoming meeting on Monday, 20 February at 4:30pm will now be in the John Medley Building room 215.

February Meeting: Darren Jorgensen, “Dreams and Magic in Surrealism and Aboriginal Australian Art”

The next Aboriginal Art Reading Group meeting will be Monday, 20 February, 4:30-5:30pm in room 106, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne.

We will be reading Darren Jorgensen’s 2011 “Dreams and Magic in Surrealism and Aboriginal Australian Art,” Third Text, 25:2, 553-562. The article can be downloaded with a University of Melbourne student login via Discovery search on this page.

This article points to the confluence of dreams and magic in the discourses adopted by two very different art movements that emerged during the twentieth century. The first is French Surrealism, which adopted dreams and magic as a way of translating esoteric ideas to a global spectatorship. The second is the Australian Aboriginal art movement, which continues to use these ideas as ways of explaining cosmologies that remain alien to colonial Australia. Thus dreams and magic become means of cross-cultural translation but, more than this, they make a radical critique of Western materialism in both historical situations. In the aftermath of violent events, in the First World War and in the invasion of Australia, these concepts become ways of contemplating truths that exceed the flux of modernity. Ultimately, they point less to an art history constructed out of the specificity of historical change than to the strategic similarities of avant-gardes wanting to illuminate the potentials of human consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tjukurrtjanu Tour this Thursday

This Thursday we are going on a special reading group only tour of Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Art at the NGV Australia, Federation Square, with exhibition curators Judith Ryan and Philip Batty! If you’d like to join us please send me an email (or comment on this post – it will be private unless I approve it to be published).