Powerful Ideas: New Research in Art History at the University of Sydney is convened by Mary Roberts and Nicholas Croggon presented by the discipline of Art History at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.
Select Thursdays (see programme below) • 03:00PM - 04:30PM. Schaeffer Library Seminar Room 210, Mills Building (A26) Free. This research seminar series is also accessible via Zoom Join via Zoom
Contact: Nicholas Croggon, nicholas.croggon@sydney.edu.au
David Corbet: Turning Sorrow into Meaning
Thursday, 27 March 2025
Following recent publication of his book Trauma, Art and Memory in the Postcolony (2024), David will give a brief, illustrated overview of its main sections, respectively dealing with perception and trauma (Aisthesis), historiography (Historia), public art, memorialisation and museums (Mnemonikos), creative production (Praxis), and spatio-cultural translocality (Topos). The book aims to contextualise the work of artists and curators within urgent socio-political, environmental and philosophical debates of our time, drawing on Cameroonian writer Achille Mbembe’s concept of ‘the Postcolony’(2001).
The focus of the seminar will be one of the central enquiries of the book, arising from the late American writer Toni Morrison’s observation that certain kinds of human actions are so ‘stupefyingly cruel’ that ‘art alone can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning’. Without implying equivalence, this proposition is contextualised in relation to such human actions as the transatlantic slave trade (c1500-1850), the European Holocaust (1941-1945), Australia’s (attempted) elimination of its First Peoples (c.1780-1960), and Israel’s destruction of Gaza (2023-25). Diverse discursive, artistic and curatorial responses to these and other such ‘events’ are considered, including the proposition that some such catastrophic experiences may be beyond representation or commemoration.
Key readings relevant to the seminar include Jill Bennett’s Empathic Vision (2005), Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts (2008), Hal Foster’s Return of the Real (1996), Donna West Brett’s Photography and Place (2016), James E. Young’s The Texture of Memory (1993) and Archie Moore’s Venice Biennale project kith and kin (2024), among others.
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David Corbet
David Corbet is a writer, researcher and educator based in Sydney. He is an alumnus of Central St Martin’s, University of the Arts, London (UAL) (Postgrad Diploma); UNSW (MFA); and the University of Sydney (PhD). He has taught into history, theory, curatorial and studio courses at Australian universities over several years. He is the founder of a long-established design and art consultancy with diverse clients across many sectors, and he has creatively led many projects as a curator, editor, and designer, writing numerous articles and book chapters about contemporary visual cultures, and editing and designing several books and exhibition catalogues. His personal visual practice encompasses graphic and spatial design; drawing, printmaking, painting and photomedia; installation and environmental projects.
This new book emerges from several years of postdoctoral research into memorial and counter-memorial practices occurring in the contemporary visual arts worldwide, across diverse postcolonial topologies and imaginaries. Commissioned in the UK under the aegis of Switzerland-based global publishing giant Springer Nature, it is envisaged as a wide-ranging ‘reader’ which will be relevant to students, researchers and subject experts across the fields of visual arts, architecture and urban planning; cultural and memory studies; trauma and affect studies; curatorial and museum studies.
Jaye Early: The self-design of contemporary confessional video art
Thursday, 10 April 2025
If the 1990s saw what Outi Remes has identified as ‘the confessional turn’ in contemporary art, more recent practices have sought to further deconstruct coercive mechanisms of ritual and shame. Michel Foucault’s late examination of the confessional and its potentiality to form ‘the technologies of the self’ that break the bonds of confessor and confessant marks out confessional practices as the establishment of power structures that lends itself to its own subversion. More recently the ubiquity of confessional forms in culture and its structural relation to institutions of power have taken on different sets of values than earlier art examined. As Boris Groys has attested in a set of essays (2009–2019), there exists an anxiety of self-image and the consumption of that image that marks out a different set of conditions from that explored by Foucault. The shift – from the ‘zero-design’ confessional of Rousseau to the ‘self-design’ confessional of Shia LaBeouf – has been widely embraced by a new generation of video artist. This presentation suggests that the previous oppositions – zero-design = truth, sincerity, shame vs. self-design = mistrust, insincerity, power – demand a deconstruction. This presentation argues for the capacity of contemporary confessional video art practices to occupy these slippages.
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Jaye Early
Dr Jaye Early’s recent book publication, Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity: Private Experiences in Public Spaces, was published by Bloomsbury in February 2025. This book is a monograph of his practise-led PhD that was completed at the Victorian College of the arts, the University of Melbourne in 2018. Early’s painting and video-based performance work appear in several private and public collections including, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Victorian University. Early has exhibited both nationally and internationally since 2015. Additionally, Early’s painting work have been included in several prestigious national art awards, including: the Archibald prize, John Sulman Prize, the Leicester prize, Moran National Portrait Prize, Victorian Indigenous Art Awards, Redlands Art Award, Darebin Art award, Koorie Art Prize, Bayside Acquisitive Prize, and the Waverley Art Prize.
Anthony Gardner: Art in an Age of Perpetual Distraction
Thursday, 8 May 2025
We live in an age of perpetual distraction. Think of our compulsions for social media. Or the algorithmic marketing that seeks to lure our focus from website to website and product to product. Or the pervasiveness of mobile technologies and rapid editing that bombard us with images at home, on the streets, and in our places of study and work. All these demands for our attention are transforming how we concentrate, how we process information, and how we engage with everything around us in ways that align with, but also extend beyond, the rapidly burgeoning diagnoses of ADHD in children and adults alike. We are instead in the midst of an “attention economy” around which contemporary capitalism now pivots and which has, its flipside, a growing sense that our distractibility now defines our contemporary world.
How we respond culturally and socially to these remarkable global changes is thus a pressing issue facing us today. While it’s tempting to lionise slowness as a countermeasure to change, this risks ignoring how we still need to work with the tools and challenges of distraction given their ubiquity. Can we therefore reimagine distraction as a generative force or is always doomed to be negative and deservedly demonised? If our visual and sensory media are the primary means by which this global social change is happening, can we look to artists and artworks for other ways to use those media and thus to imagine distraction otherwise? Could distraction be a means to ignite other frameworks that are central to arts and the humanities – such as curiosity, empathy, or pedagogy – that also hinge on connection differently from the apathy, entropy, and ailment with which distraction is usually associated?
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Anthony Gardner
Anthony Gardner is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Oxford and the Sir William Dobell Visiting Chair in Art History at the Australian National University. He has published widely on subjects including postcolonialism, postsocialism and curatorial histories, with articles in On Curating, ARTMargins,Third Text, Postcolonial Studies and many other journals and anthologies. From 2012 to 2021, he was an editor of the MIT Press journal ARTMargins, for which he continues to serve as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board. Among his books are Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (Melbourne, 2013), Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015) and, also through MIT Press in 2015, the anthology Neue Slowenische Kunst: From Kapital to Capital (with Zdenka Badovinac and Eda Čufer), which was a finalist for the 2017 Alfred H Barr Award for best exhibition catalogue worldwide. In 2016, he co-authored (with Charles Green, University of Melbourne) Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art, published by Wiley-Blackwell.
Tara McDowell: Simone Leigh's Maternal Sentinels
Thursday, 15 May 2025
“The world was interested in shaming me at every turn for being an artist and a mother at the same time,” Simone Leigh recently recalled. In Leigh’s sculptural and social practice work, mothering extends multi-directionally across generations and horizontally, even sisterly, to her chosen communities. Such a plurality of “othermothers” is always tempered by refusal, proving that as both a political position and an aesthetic choice, refusal is also an act of mothering. This talk considers Leigh’s sculptural installation for her 2019 exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum, The Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat. How to closely read these sculptures while attending to their refusals and opacities, as well as the spaces of intimacy and collectivity that Leigh maintains and protects for Black women, is an unresolvable tension animating this paper.
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Tara McDowell
Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include contemporary curating, exhibition histories, art institutions, feminist and queer spaces of sociability and production, and the various support structures of art, including home, school, exhibition, labour, and friendship. Her books include The Artist As (Sternberg Press, 2018) and The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess (The MIT Press, 2019). McDowell currently leads the Australia Research Council project Care and Repair: Rethinking Contemporary Curation for Conditions of Crisis. Her presentation on Simone Leigh is drawn from her current book project, The Mother Artist, which was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a Henry Moore Foundation Research Grant (both in 2023).
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