Full Description
What is the position of art in contemporary culture, where it is threatened by an ever-greater diversity of media, discourses, practices, genres and forms? Contemporary Art and Other Obstructions sets out to answer this through exploring art and social agency, communication, the problem of Biennales and other major events, and the shadow of postcolonialism as it hangs over art and indigeneity.
Produced over the last two decades, the material gathered together here, and previously published only to a largely Australasian and Southeast Asian audience, is the product of a close collaboration between author Adam Geczy and editor Alan Cruickshank. With a new preface by the author and introduction by the editor, they have been adapted for an international audience, and re-edited for a critical engagement in the uneven and elusive notion that is contemporary art.
Contents
Introduction: Alan Cruickshank
Part One: Tribulations of Global Art
1. From Participatory Art to Participatory Criticism: The Big Noise
2. Drained and Confused: Insistent Voice on "The Contemporary"
3. Touching Reality
4. They don't make art like they used to: Late last year in the Wall Street Journal Camille Paglia mounted a frontal onslaught on contemporary art
5. A dish served lukewarm
6. Is there such a thing as global curating?
7. Transorientalism and the pavilion attitude to attitude to race and identity
8. The Australia Effect
9. Spectres of Video: The Ends of Video Art
10. Art and the loss of vision
11. Metaresistance
Part Two: The Art Institutions
12. The New textuality for the Visual Arts: Entrenchment in the Academy
13. The Sordid Fraud of Outsider Art
14. Art is not Research
15. Sanitised Situationism
Part Three: Asia-Pacific Perspectives on the Biennale
16. Regionality and Nationality
17. Overdressed for the Prom
18. Be Careful What You Wish For
19. C'mon let's stick together. On collaboration, inclusion and consonance in the 18th Biennale of Sydney
20. Art Apartheid in the South Pacific
21. 'Biennale Baroque' Unveiling the 17th Biennale of Sydney
22. Sex, revolution and circumlocution
Part Four: Art and Indigeneity
23. Who owns dots? Or, spirituality for the highest bidder, or, can you buy aura?
24. In Whose House? Craig Walsh Embedded'
25. Aboriginal Art Diagnostic
Bibliography
Index
