Art and the Politics of Withdrawal
The controversy surrounding founding Biennale of Sydney corporate sponsor Transfield, and its simultaneous operation of refugee detention centres, raises much broader issues. At first glance, could there be anything more diametrically opposed than a multi-national corporation capitalising on human suffering and a mass cultural event implicitly believed to democratically celebrate global difference?
History is a Dying Star, Jelena Telecki, NEW14, ACCA, Melbourne
Jelena Telecki’s paintings prove that the representation of subjective truth need not automatically result in simple illustrative narratives. In the artist’s recent body of work, references to the overreaching ‘utopian’ ambitions of states and their leaders, are unhinged from easy readings of historical causality.
Something in the Air: Internet Art as Archive and Strategy Beyond the Gates of the Museum
Internet art’s seeming peripherality to the greater art world is uncanny when the internet has so radically altered the ways in which anyone with access to such technology, views both art and the world generally. Meanwhile, the virtualisation of Capital, labour, art and culture, is far more pervasive, far less obvious and far more insidious than simple ‘VR’ technology would suggest.
Plenty of Nothing; Art/Money/Installation
Even today, installation art, properly defined by its dependency on site and its irreducibility to isolable components, poses especial challenges. Never is this truer than when the installation art in question appears to exhibit ‘nothing’. In a global climate founded squarely on reinvigorated traditionalist principles of material accumulation, contemporary installations in which ‘nothing’ is exhibited pose important questions concerning art’s value.
Art/Social/Capital
The massive mediation of our contemporary cultural terrain obviously has a notable impact on the activities of contemporary art, particularly in a globalised context. In fact, what is especially noteworthy about much contemporary art impacted by this communication imperative, is its heightened emphasis on the value of communicability itself.
New Worlds Inc. the Global Museum Franchise
A new cultural district in Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island, incorporates new lavish outposts of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums. These particular ‘outposts’ will feature specially designed buildings by high-ranking glitterati of the international architecture firmament, Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel. The resulting ‘utopia’ is of a kind that only the conjoined cooperation of global multinationals could conjure.
To produce value under Capital is a misfortune because it means producing value for somebody else.