Neoliberalism and the Visual: Notes on a Politics of Refusal (2)
1 December 2022 at 2:30:00 am
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Session Convenors
Dr Chari Larsson, Griffith University
Session Speakers
Dr William Allen, University of Oxford
Dr Chari Larsson, Griffith University
Emeritus Professor Catherine Speck, University of Adelaide
Jude Adams
Dr Giles Fielke, Monash University
In the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008, increasing scholarly attention is now being paid to neoliberalism’s social and ideological agendas. If neoliberalism is understood in its narrowest sense, as a set of economic policies, we risk neglecting the extent that it has fostered new forms of social relations and subjectivities. With its emphasis on productivity and enterprise, what are neoliberalism’s invisibilising tendencies? What other forms of subjectivities are ignored or forgotten because they are not valued or promoted?
In line with the conference theme of ‘demonstration’, the aim of this panel is to investigate neoliberalism’s engagement with the visual, broadly imagined. What opportunities exist for visual arts practitioners for critique and disruption of neoliberalism’s normative frameworks?
Invisibilising Precarity: The “Pacific Solution” and the UK-Rwanda Deal
Dr William Allen, University of Oxford
Dr Chari Larsson, Griffith University
The question of immigration for the UK’s Conservative Party presents a vexing double bind. On the one hand, its neoliberal wing champions the belief in the primacy of market forces. On the other, policies that impose greater selectivity over immigrants’ entry have been—and remain—popular among voters. At the time of writing, both leadership contenders Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are proposing hard-line immigration policies: both seek to expand the highly controversial Rwanda deal, which will allow the UK to send refugees to Rwanda in ways that effectively outsource asylum processing. Modelled on Australia’s “Pacific Solution,” these UK policy developments fit broader patterns of high-income countries outsourcing immigration management to low-income countries.
Against this backdrop, our paper takes up the questions of how asylum-seekers are visually represented, and how these relate to empathy. Media images play crucial roles in the development of spectatorial empathy. However, what happens when the opportunity to develop empathy is curtailed by the withdrawal of images from circulation? While scholars have examined the politics of visual dehumanisation of asylum seekers, how may we account for processes of invisibilisation? We argue that the disavowal of empathy, combined with the geographical distance and isolation of offshore detention, has emerged in Australia as a powerful political strategy.
Adelaide’s ‘Progressive Art Movement’: Art as Politics
Emeritus Professor Catherine Speck, University of Adelaide
Jude Adams
The 1970s was a time of alternative cultural movements, protests, left leaning politics, a shift away from producing art as a commodity and anti-American sentiment. Demonstrations against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war and conscription were held across the nation. Within this charged environment, this paper considers Adelaide’s Progressive Art Movement, or PAM as it was known, which was active from 1974-1977. The founders were the high-profile political activist and philosopher Brian Medlin, and South Australian School of Art lecturer, artist and feminist Ann Newmarch.
The political situation in SA at this time was more liberal than elsewhere in the country, under the progressive Dunstan Labour government, but industrially, there was escalating worker/management conflict at the two American-owned car industries. We examine how PAM members, who saw their art practice as political practice, operated in this ethos. This included working as artists in factories, producing prints with an overt political agenda, and demonstrating against MOMA’s touring exhibition Recent American Art, the National Gallery of Australia’s acquisition of the American, Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles painting, and Terry Smith’s Art and Language event at AGSA. While short-lived, their art by members including Mandy Martin, Ann Newmarch, Bob Boynes, Pam Harris and Andrew Hill is testament to the passion and politics of the era.
Down to Earth: Jim Cairns’ and The Bad Society
Dr Giles Fielke, Monash University
In December 1976, at a location on the Cotter River in the ACT, the first “Down to Earth” Festival was staged over five days and proposed the urgency of the need to SHAPE ALTERNATIVES NOW. Earlier in the year, the Festival had been promoted at the Federal Houses of Parliament by the former Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer in the Whitlam Government, Dr Jim Cairns. A former police officer and leader of the moratorium on the Vietnam War, Cairns spent the final months before his retirement—and amongst the fiasco of the Whitlam dismissal—circulating a leaflet addressed to the following people:
“Aborigines, ethnic communities, women's liberation groups, peace activists, homosexuals, lesbians, members of rural and city communes and co-operatives and those concerned with self-management and work democracy, law reform, ideology, theories of social change, alternative food, health, energy, living structures, education, psychotherapy, yoga and meditation.”
The event was a success, and continues in a contemporary form as the ConFest, run by the Down To Earth Coop, now based in Victoria. This paper focuses on the documentation of the first Down To Earth festival and a subsequent film, shot in part by the artist filmmaker Michael Lee. The film, titled The Bad Society, shares some scenes with Lee’s later experimental feature Turnaround (1983). What relation the festival has to visual culture in Australia has not yet been established. In the context of the general condition of contemporary art as participant in the ‘festivalisation of culture’ (Bennett, Woodward, & Taylor, 2015), as well as in the turn to neo-liberal concerns for ‘self-management’, what can these particular events in 1976 reveal to us only now through their documented survivals, and as art history?
Biographies
Dr Chari Larsson, Griffith University
Dr. Chari Larsson is a Senior Lecturer in art history at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art. Chari is the author of Didi-Huberman and the image (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).
Emeritus Professor Catherine Speck, University of Adelaide
Catherine Speck is Professor Emerita of Art History and Curatorship at the University of Adelaide, and a Fellow of the Academy of Humanities of Australia. She is a specialist in all areas of Australian art. Her publications and ongoing research are in the areas of the intersection between art history, museology and curatorship; gender and art history; cross-national and post-national art histories with reference to Australian expatriate artists and impressionism; exhibitions of Australian art including early exhibitions of Aboriginal art; and the protests against and visual responses to British atomic testing at Maralinga. She is an exhibition reviewer for The Conversation.
Jude Adams
Jude Adams is a former lecturer in Art History and Theory at the South Australian School of Art (UniSA). She was an active member of the Women’s Art Movements in Sydney and Adelaide initiating one of the first 'women and art' courses (1976) and the ground-breaking exhibition The Lovely Motherhood Show (Experimental Art Foundation, 1981). Adams co-coordinated FRANFEST (2017), a major event celebrating the work of South Australian women artists, past and present. Recent publications include "Beginnings, Endings and Returns; The Women's Show 40 years on", n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal (2017) and "Ann Newmarch: artist, activist, feminist", The Adelaide Art Scene 1939-2000 (ed) Margot Osborne (forthcoming).
Dr Giles Fielke, Monash University
Giles Fielke is a Lecturer at Monash University and an Editor of Index Journal and Memo Review.