Powerful Ideas: New Research in Art History at the University of Sydney is convened by Mary Roberts and 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 (click here to join).
August 29: Donna Brett, Modernist Photobooks, Propaganda & the Everyday
Conveying meaning often through photographs alone, the photobook is a radical format that enabled the widespread dissemination of modernist aesthetics through bespoke or commercial printers and publishers. The burgeoning of photographic books in the 1920-1930s coincided with the centrality of photographs to the illustrated press, to magazines and journalism, led by publishing houses such as Kurt Wolff. Like the illustrated press, photobooks provided unprecedented means for photographers to disseminate their work beyond the studio or exhibitionary models. Simultaneously the same benefits were recognised as a means to reach the wider public for the dissemination of social, cultural or political material. From Germanie Krull’s Métal and Franz Roh’s Foto-Auge to Heinrich Hoffmann’s Jugend um Hitler and El Lissitzky’s Industrii͡a sot͡sializma, this paper considers modernist photobook aesthetics and its intersection with the visual languages of politics and propaganda in Europe between the wars.
This research was undertaken as a 2024 Sloan Fellow in Photography at the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Image: Cover of Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold. Foto-Auge: 76 Fotos der Zeit (Photo-eye: 76 photos of the time). Stuttgart: F. Wedekind, 1929.
Donna West Brett
Donna West Brett is Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at The University of Sydney. She is author of Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge, 2016); co-editor with Natalya Lusty, Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2019), and with Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, 2024). She is Research Leader for Photographic Cultures at Sydney, Editorial Member for the Visual Culture and German Contexts Series, Bloomsbury, and Sloan Fellow in Photography at the Bodleian Libraries, 2024.
September 5: Robert Brennan Thresholds of Art in Renaissance Italy
In this talk, I will present a series of case studies from my current book project, which reevaluates sixteenth-century concepts of “art” in light of exchanges between Italy, Africa, and the Middle East. Building on recent studies concerning the circulation of African and Islamic artifacts in Renaissance Italy, my project focuses on a concurrent circulation of words, ideas, and most importantly, people – migrating artists, itinerant intellectuals, and enslaved people, who arrived in Italy with a deep, discursive knowledge of non-European traditions of art making. The talk will focus in particular on three case studies, the first involving a group of Afro-diasporic dancers active in Michelangelo’s milieu in Rome, the second an Egyptian textile artist active in Northern Italy, and thirdly a group of sources that suggest the importance of female embroiderers in the transmission of designs and artistic ideas between Christian and Islamic lands.
Detail from Five Medallion Carpet, Egypt, ca. 1500, New York, Metropolitan Museum.
Robert Brennan
Robert Brennan received a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 2016, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut) and the University of Sydney. Since 2022 he has taught as Lecturer in Art History at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy (Harvey Miller, 2019), as well as articles in Art Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, and Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics.
September 12: India Urwin, Missionary Position / Looking Forward to the Past AND Robert Miller, Looking Forward to the Past: The Rotational Collection of Art at Australian Parliament House, 1982-2023
India Urwin
Missionary Position: the irreconcilable decolonisation of Yuki Kihara’s Paradise Camp
Cultural institutions deploy art and artists to do decolonial labour for them, prolonging, rather than repairing, their status as colonial institutions. Simultaneously, this state of affairs fails to give sufficient weight to the forms of decolonisation that this art produces - such as affectual and somatic decolonisation. These incorporeal logics are overlooked generative conditions of decolonisation. For institutions to reckon with colonialism, it is necessary to re-examine decolonisation as an ongoing form of unsettling, rather than a means of completed reparation. Yuki Kihara’s exhibition Paradise Camp (2023-24) embodies this unsettling, entering into decolonial dialogue - not as a problem with an assumed solution - but instead as a tongue-in-cheek theatre in which colonial gender and sexual binaries play out in enigmatic aporia. Her installation explores her fa’afafine identity which stands uncomfortably within heteronormative museum space. However, Kihara doesn’t seek to resolve these contradictions, but rather shout and laugh at them.
India Urwin
India Urwin (she/her) is a decolonial art historian, curator and arts writer living and working on Gadigal land. India holds a BA with First Class Honours in Art History and Film Studies and a Master of Art Curating from the University of Sydney. India was the Assistant Curator of the Head On Photo Festival, and Assistant Editor of Interactional Magazine, an online photography magazine. Currently, India is undertaking a PhD under the supervision of Associate Professor Donna Brett. Her thesis, Unsettling: Contemporary post-colonial art and the promise of decolonisation, seeks to refocus the conversation of institutional decolonisation on art itself. Image: Fonofono o le nuanua: Patches of the rainbow (After Gauiguin), 2020 in Paradise Camp by Yuki Kihara. Photo: Zan Wimberley
Robert Miller
Looking Forward to the Past: The Rotational Collection of Art at Australian Parliament House, 1982-2023
This paper asks how many parliamentarians does it take to choose an artwork? The Parliament of Australia holds a little known, closely guarded collection of contemporary Australian art that adorns parliamentarians’ suites and the general circulation areas of the restricted part of the building. Only a fraction of the 6,800 works now held make it into the public spaces of Parliament or further afield. Many of the works in my view are modern masterpieces. The so-named Rotational Collection was begun in the early 1980s as the new Parliament was being built and has variously suffered or profited ever since through at the hands of those responsible for its curation. The research is believed to be the first full exposition of the Collection, achieved notwithstanding the restricted nature of the rich primary material. The questions by which the Collection is assessed are the malleable stated acquisitions policy and the collateral issue of (lack of) public access.
Robert Miller
Robert Miller only came to the study of art history after careers as an electrical engineer and a patent attorney. As an art enthusiast and modest collector, upon retiring Robert enrolled in the Diploma of Arts course to give life to that interest. This diverse, rigorous coursework, and especially the fieldwork in Paris, led to him undertaking a research master’s project jointly supervised by Prof Roger Benjamin and Dr Stephen Gilchrist. His subsequent doctorate, supervised by Prof Mark Ledbury, was conferred earlier this year. Image: Howard Arkley, Theatrical facade, 1996, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 203 x 153 cm. Rotational Collection. Source: arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/25/theatrical-facade-1996-canberra/.
September 26: Aiden Magro, Out of the Closet, into the Archives: Queer Photo Albums in Public Archives
Rather than understanding the archive and the closet as juxtaposed concepts, this project is motivated by their uncanny resemblances. Straddling an art historical and archival studies approach, I argue that the overlaps between the archive and the closet are bound in the private photo albums of queer photographers working in the 1970s and 1980s in so called Australia now kept in public archival institutions. Private, queer photo albums take on new functions in public archives. Despite their original intention for a limited audience, in archives they become publicly accessible sources of information about queer life. To what extent were they compiled with this function in mind? And to what extent do they still register as private? In this paper, I focus on the albums of photojournalist John Jenner whose albums and photo collages documented queer life in Warrane (Sydney) and are now kept in the Mitchell Library Archives. His “End of the Eighties” Albums and his “AIDS Photo Diary” provide a fertile ground to consider the functions of private photo albums in public archival institutions.
Aiden Magro
Aiden Magro is a researcher, writer and casual academic living and working on unceded, stolen Gadigal land. He received his Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours) in 2020 and was awarded the University Medal for his honours thesis “Exposing the State: Loo Zihan’s queer performance.” His current research interests include photography, queer art, and archives. Aiden is currently a PhD Candidate in the Art History department at University of Sydney. Image: John Jenner, Christmas 1989, David saying goodbye to his mother. Page from AIDS photo diary. Chromogenic print in album,1986-1990, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.
October 17: Drisana Misra, Transoceanic Currents and Pelagic Materiality during Japan’s Nanban Period
During the 16th and 17th centuries, seacrafts moved goods, artworks, and peoples. But these vessels were at the mercy of the ocean and its forces: winds, monsoons, typhoons, currents. The waters from the Philippines, Taiwan, Ryūkyū, and Japan are defined by the Kuroshio黒潮, meaning “black tide,” which ferries equatorial water northwards along the western Pacific. The current enabled mariners to optimize long-distance trade, connecting East and Southeast Asia to the Americas; but it also introduced contingency to transoceanic voyages, causing shipwrecks. As a warm, nutrient-rich stream, the current was also a source of media for the luxury products that sustained these tradelines. In Japan, new tradelines led to production of Nanban-mono 南蛮物 (lit. “Southern Barbarian objects”), a class of Iberian-influenced objects and artworks that were often decorated with mother-of-pearl, shagreen, shell, and other pelagic materials. In this talk, I will explore how Nanban objects not only reference the Kuroshio current but also engage with the materiality of the ocean itself.
A Nanban Lacquered coffer, kamaboko-gata蒲鉾型 (lit. “box in the shape of a fish sausage”);Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O14597/coffer-unknown/
Drisana Misra
Drisana Misra is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. She studies the material and intellectual exchanges between the Japanese archipelago, the Americas, and the Iberian Peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She received her PhD from Yale University in 2023, where her thesis won the Marston Anderson Prize in East Asian Studies. She is currently working on her first monograph, based on the dissertation, entitled Japanese New Worlds: Japanese New Worlds: Intersecting Imaginaries of the Nanban Period (c. 1543–1641). Image: A Nanban Lacquered coffer, kamaboko-gata蒲鉾型 (lit. “box in the shape of a fish sausage”); wood covered with plates of mother-of-pearl held by gilded copper rivets; and black and gold hiramaki-e lacquer; Japan, late 16th-early 17th century. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O14597/coffer-unknown/
Thursday 24th October – Alan Cholodenko. Trumping Animation: Donald Trump and the Hyperanimation of Hyperreality
Matt Bonner, Trump Baby, July 2018
This paper is necessarily speculative.
But it proceeds from the simple assumption that one needs to know as best as possible what reality one is dealing with, especially if it is a pervasive, or increasingly pervasive, ‘reality’ of radical, irreducible uncertainty, a hypervirtual, ‘post-truth’, ‘post-fact’ reality, whose hyperanimated character (including Trump) as hypercartoon distinguishes this daffy, nutty, delirious, virulent, monstrous, terroristic epoch I call the ‘Age of Endarkenment’.
Challenging that assumption, of the continued existence of second order reality and animation, are for me two overriding, entangled, mutually-reinforcing subjects: 1. Baudrillardian third/fourth order reality, hyperreality, as contemporary reality and hyperanimation as its mode of animation, with special focus on hypermedia as it relates to hyperpolitics today; and 2. Donald Trump the hyperanimator—extreme figure exemplary of hyperreality as a reality of extremes and extremisms, of pushing to the limit and beyond, the maximalising logic of hyperanimation.
Even as hyperreality trumps reality, is fatal to reality, so hyperanimation trumps, is fatal to, animation.
Alan Cholodenko
Dr Alan Cholodenko is former Head of Department and Senior Lecturer in Film and Animation Studies in the Discipline of Art History at The University of Sydney, where he is now Honorary Associate. He has pioneered in the articulation of film theory, animation theory and ‘poststructuralist’ and ‘postmodernist’ French thought. He organised THE ILLUSION OF LIFE—the world’s first international conference on animation—in Sydney (1988), edited the anthology of that event—The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation—the world’s first collection of scholarly essays theorising animation (1991), as well as did a sequel conference (1995) and anthology (2007).
October 31. Yvonne Low. Haunting History: The art and (life-) writings of Mia Bustam and Katharine Sim
In this paper, I will explore the feminist model of life writing in the autobiographical accounts of two female painters, Mia Bustam (1920-2011) and Katharine Sim (b.1913-unknown), reading their writings against the national and postcolonial narratives of ‘great art’ in Indonesia and Malaya respectively. Both artists held ambivalent positions in the canonical art histories despite leading exceptional lives; Mia Bustam’s political position as an advocate for socialism complicated and delayed any formal recognition of her participation in Indonesia’s anti-colonial history while Katharine Sim’s status as a privileged colonial artist belonged to “no-man’s land”, her contribution subsequently misrepresented as a ‘native’ painter in nationalist art histories. Haunting history, their writings serve as a form of historical truthfulness that is both confessional as it testimonial. As women’s discourse, they offer an alternative perspective to the oft-cited canonical male-centred narratives, destabilizing how they have been remembered and positioned.
Yvonne Low
Yvonne Low is an art historian in Asian Art. She is a lecturer at the University of Sydney, teaching Art History and Curating in the Undergraduate and Postgraduate programs. She researches on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, with an interest in Chinese diasporic cultures, women’s history, and digital methods. As editorial committee to Southeast of Now Journal (NUS Press), Yvonne is committed to advancing scholarship in the region. She is currently an advisory committee member for The Flow of History (AWARE/Asia Art Archive), The Womanifesto Way Digital Anthology (Power Institute, DFAT, 4A) and co-developer of digital tool, Artists Trajectories Map.
Contact
Mary Roberts, mary.roberts@sydney.edu.au
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