Public Seminar Series

• All Welcome

• 12.30 pm

• Every Wednesday during term

• Room 9c25

 

Art and Other Questions is a lunchtime seminar series designed to showcase the creative practice, cultural research and intellectual interventions of staff within the Faculty of Arts and Design, and to provide a forum for visiting artists and researchers.

 Programme for Semester 1 2010

 

 March 3

 

Margo Lanagan

On Writing

 

Margo Lanagan’s most recent novel, Tender Morsels, was published to immediate critical success in the US, the UK and Australia, is a Printz Honor book and won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Her 2006 collection of speculative fiction short stories, Black Juice, was also widely acclaimed, won two World Fantasy Awards, two Ditmar and two Aurealis Awards, was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and also won a Printz Honor, and stories from it were shortlisted for a Hugo, a Nebula, a Theodore Sturgeon, a Bram Stoker, an International Horror Guild Award and a Tiptree. Her third collection, Red Spikes, was the Children’s Book Council Book of the Year for older readers, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the World Fantasy Award, and longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.

 

She lives in Sydney and is working on another novel.

 

N.B. Margo’s presentation will take place in Building 14 (‘The Boiler House’).

 

 

March 10

 

Petra White

Poetry and Work

 

Petra White was born in Adelaide in 1975 and lives in Melbourne. Her first book, The Incoming Tide (John Leonard Press 2007), was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Prize. Her second collection, The Simplified World, is forthcoming from John Leonard Press in 2010.

 

She works as a researcher for a government department.

 

N.B. Petra’s presentation and all other seminars henceforth will be in Room

9c25.

 

 

March 17

 

Paul Magee

Tregedy at the Root of Knowledge

 

This paper begins with a visual survey of some works by contemporary installation artists (Hirst, Sierra, Guo-Qiang, Noble and Webster, Gober, Eliasson). It then turns to Aristotle’s Poetics, which gives the following formula for the best tragic theatre: events happen to the tragic hero ‘unexpectedly, and yet out of inner logic’, and so give rise to fear and pity in the work’s audience. His key example is Sophocles’ Oedipus. There are two things that intrigue me about Aristotle’s pithy formulation: 1) the suspicion that actually many if not the majority of modern art works can be approached through a similar rubric — they present phenomena that are unexpected, and yet on closer inspection those phenomena betray an inner logic that leads one to conclude that they are indeed of our world, and deeply so; 2) the fact that Aristotle’s formulation is part of an argument about art’s contribution to knowledge.

 

Paul Magee is an Associate Professor of Poetry in the Faculty of Arts and

Design at the University of Canberra.

 

 

March 24

 

Gervork Hartoonian

Crisis of the Object: Look Who is looking!?

 

Contemporary attention to Walter Benjamin, especially his ideas concerning the impact of technology on culture, demands rewriting the implications of the crisis of the object for architecture. The project’s importance has to do with the early modernist infatuation with the machine, and the present turn to electronic technologies to the point that, it’s not the image of machine anymore but the very technique itself that determines the process of design and perhaps the final form. This presentation would like to discuss the theoretical issues pertinent to the crisis of the object. Of interest is the shift from construction to surface, a subject central to the advocates of the international style architecture. In the age of digital reproduction, the return to surface has many implications for architecture including the tendency to imagine the object as a prosthetic subject, one with expressionistic and theatrical proclivities.

 

Gevork Hartoonian is an Associate Professor of Architecture in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra

 

 

April 7

 

Danie Mellor

A Transformed Landscape

 

Danie Mellor's work deals with the nexus of Indigenous and Western cultural frameworks through a wide spectrum of iconographic images. His work is held in most State gallery collections within Australia as well as the National Gallery of Australia and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Recently he has won the 2008 National Works on Paper award, the 2009 Indigenous Ceramic Art award and was the overall winner of the 26th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art awards in Darwin. He is currently a lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.

 

 

April 14

 

Kate Holland

An Encounter with 'Ethics Creep'

 

In this talk I explore the notion of ‘ethics creep’ with reference to concerns raised by a university ethics committee about a research proposal that invited people who may have experienced a diagnosis of mental illness to participate. Drawing upon perspectives from postpsychiatry and the  activism of the consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement I offer a critique of the committee’s concerns as posing a barrier to a more inclusive research agenda and a shift away from clinical knowledge structures in the field of mental health. In considering each of the committee’s concerns I suggest that they reflect assumptions about mental illness and the practice of research itself that do not take account of certain perspectives and modes of inquiry. I also argue they maintain the ideology that the knowledge gained through clinical expertise and research is more ‘valid’ than experiential knowledge and qualitative research and reproduce the illusion of disinterested, value free research. Based on my critique, and from the perspective of reading psychiatry against the grain, I suggest some points of recognition that ethics committees might wish to consider when reviewing research proposals involving people diagnosed with a mental illness.

 

Kate Holland is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the News Research Group in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra.

 

 

April 21

 

Jeff Brownrigg

Anzac Cove the Hollywood

 

Signaller Tom Skeyhill landed at Anzac Cove on the morning of 25 April, 1915. He quickly recognized the danger of being there, and feigned blindness to escape. With his eyes hidden behind smoked-glass goggles he returned to Australia and the Tivoli Vaudeville Circuit as the ‘blind soldier-poet’. His book of verse, Soldier-Songs from Anzac, quickly went past 50,000 sales. But by 1917, with the War causing rising anxiety in Australia, he moved to the USA and in 1919 met Sergeant Alvin C York, America’s most decorated WW1 hero. Skeyhill wrote York’s War Diaries and these were made into Howard Hawks film, Sergeant York, in which Gary Cooper won his first Oscar.  In American lectures, Skeyhill claimed that 20,000 men died in the boats on the first morning at Gallipoli. Stories such as these, good theatre though they might have been, augmented his slippery line in ‘snake-oil’, making him wealthy and eventually bringing him down. Why have we forgotten him?

 

Jeff Brownrigg is an Associate Professor of Cultural Heritage in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra.

 

 

April 28

 

Chris Dew

Uncommissioned Art/Commissioned Research and Vice Versa

 

Chris Dew is an artist/researcher who lives in Queensland.  Before this, she was a senior lecturer in the History Program at La Trobe University.  She is  the author and principal photographer of Uncommissioned Art: An A-Z of Australian Graffiti (Melbourne University Publishing, 2007), and is working on a companion volume.  In 2009 she documented the remote and regional tour of Indigenous ‘super band’, the Black Arm Band.  She was also artist-in residence for the Bay Views filmmaking project on Queensland’s Southern Moreton Bay Islands and artistic director of its inaugural Floating Pictures Film Festival and Art Fair.  As an ARC Research Associate (La Trobe University) Chris developed the concept for the multi-media component of the Kew Cottages in Memory and History project.

 

She currently works for the North Stradbroke Island Historical Museum making films with Robert Anderson, an elder of the Ngugi people, for an exhibition celebrating his life and achievements.

 

May 5

 

Stuart Stark

Death of the Homosexual Beast

 

While man on man sex is as old as Lot, Foucault declares 1870 as the origin of the homosexual, establishing an alternate identity rather than aberrant behaviour. Naming the homosexual beast allowed it to develop a personality. It  took a nearly century for that beast to firmly establish its place in popular culture, in part by congregating in urban ghettos and thriving sub-cultures. But what fate for the post-gay beast, married in the suburbs? The apparently prosaic existence of the Maupin's fifty-something Michael Tolliver? Beyonce meets Kurt on the television set of Glee? Or a return to the confines of Sedgwick's closet?

 

Stuart Stark is completing a PhD in Communication in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra.

 

 

May 12

 

Stephen Barrass

Flotsam, Jetsam and Lagan

 

Three smooth nodules of driftwood that transmit sonic waves. They have been designed to be attached to an oar or the hull or the body of a water sports  person, and to float in case of mishaps. They provide sonic biofeedback about cadence, stroke, rate and other aspects of water sports. They can also  be a listening pleasure that may enhance performance and reduce fatigue. This seminar will describe  a series of creative practice-led experiments, installations and performances being used to design aesthetics and function in sonic interfaces for sports, fitness and health.

 

Stephen Barrass is an Associate Professor of Digital Design and Media Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra.

 

 

For all further inquiries, please contact the seminar convener:

 

Dr Paul Magee

Associate Professor of Poetry
Convener, Writing Degrees
Faculty of Arts and Design
University of Canberra
ACT 2601
02 6201 2402