Coaxing chaos: spontaneous demonstrations in contemporary art (2)
1 December 2022 at 4:30:00 am
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Session Convenors
Professor Gregory Minissale, University of Auckland
Victoria Wynne-Jones, The University of Auckland
Session Speakers
Victoria Wynne-Jones, The University of Auckland
Amanda Watson
Dr Daniel Connell
This panel seeks to explore artistic practices that co-opt spontaneity in order to coax chaos and the unpredictable into being demonstrative.
How can we evaluate the successes of planned demonstrations compared to those not planned but which are nevertheless, in retrospect, transformative and meaningful? And what can we learn from deconstructing the premeditated and intentional? Which artistic practices in history, recently and in the making, are inspired by alternatives to the notion that an author and a plan are necessary for something to be demonstrative? How can various forms of art, performance, social practice, and art as activism become the butterfly’s wing, the agent for the swarming of historically necessary transformations that dislodge social inequities and the power structures that produce them? Is there an alliance or synthesis possible between premeditated aims and spontaneous ruptures that usher in change? Resisting the didactic impulse, this panel invites us to think, examine and create unpremeditated and unprethinkable revolutions in thought, action, and being.
How might artistic practice challenge the indexicality of demonstration, particularly the pre-conceived taxonomies of museum studies and histories of art? Can artworks and/or exhibition-making manifest troubling ontologies that challenge individuation, making manifest an interplay of affect, rhythm, chaos and entropy?
Against Nature: strategic categorisation in Alicia Frankovich’s Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies
Victoria Wynne-Jones, The University of Auckland
Rhubarb, mushroom, moon. Without prompting, spontaneity arises from a momentary impulse. To be spontaneous is to act without deliberation, external influence, restraint or manipulation, it involves naturalness. The so-called ‘natural’ and the ways various phenomena are categorised as such is questioned in Alicia Frankovich’s installation Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies (2019-2022). Taking as precedents Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas and the more contemporary rubric of the Google Image Search, Frankovich adopts a strategy of undermining the classificatory function of the natural history museum, making undifferentiated chaos in order to enact processes of re-categorisation and posit alternative ways of seeing, describing and knowing.
Lichen, skeleton, bloom. If demonstration is said to involve conclusive proof, the Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies is an experimental exhibition of excessive entities and organisms that deliberately undermines their received descriptions and explanations. More-than human actors and materialities are re-framed within an immersive installation, in novel groupings and networks in order to liberate structures and logics from existing hierarchies and the narratives that rely on them. This paper takes as a point of departure Frankovich’s strategies of displaying and displacing apparently spontaneous demonstrations so that their complexity might be restored. I will argue that Frankovich’s Atlas presents one way of conceiving Félix Guattari’s concept of chaosmosis as a process of rebalancing the osmosis between the mind and chaos.
Encountering Places
Amanda Watson
This paper explores the practice of contemporary painter Amanda Watson and the way that she engages with environments, materials and process to make work that explores encounters with place. The methodology of facilitating the participation between natural uncultivated places, the studio environment, painting materials, and the artist enables these various actants to work together to make paintings.
Through demonstrative acts during the painting process in-situ the unpredictable and the surprising become generative and integral to this way of working, where understandings of place are explored and where place can be a creative protagonist rather than a passive object of representation.
In the context of ‘new materialist’ theory, particularly Jane Bennett’s ‘vital materialism’, where interactions between things can occur to create new understandings and Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘borderlands’ as places where the push and pull of knowledge occur, the paintings yield a dense and complex view of place and makes manifest the relationships between process, gesture, environments, and the artist, and in this way reveals experience of place in unexpected and multifarious ways.
Chaos, encounter and sustained relationship as form
Dr Daniel Connell
My doctoral research investigated the re-framing of a traditional drawing practice as socially engaged art. This shifted a made object practice to a practice of sensing. Within the ‘chaos’ of relationships formed because of drawings; I became a sensor of art events. The realisation that these were art, often emerged in retrospect, via the recognition that they demonstrated the necessary qualities of art in form and intention. This process also generated a diverse art vocabulary: hospitality, courage, risk, negotiation, reflexive reliance, co-identification, useless-utility, and love. The question I have faced since and attempt to resolve in this presentation, is at the core of this panel’s provocation: how do we bring institutions to understand this complex, invisible and unformed-form? It is possible that institutions may not have the agility to run with the us, but I believe the public do. The renovated vocabulary and vision of chaos and encounter as art offers a new opportunity to increase the ownership of contemporary art, and hence the value of art in society. This is not to diminish and dilute its complexity but to centre art’s essential connection to people and communities.
Biographies
Professor Gregory Minissale, University of Auckland
Gregory Minissale is Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland. His research combines psychology and the arts in the service of mental health. He is the author of The Psychology of Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Rhythm in Art (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Victoria Wynne-Jones, The University of Auckland
Victoria Wynne-Jones is the author of Choreographing Intersubjectivity in Performance Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Auckland. As a scholar and gallerist she works to support contemporary art practice from within and outside of academia. Her research interests include: intersections between performance art history and dance studies, contemporary art theory and philosophy, curatorial practice and feminisms. She lectures, supervises and examines across the academic disciplines of art history, dance studies and fine arts.
Amanda Watson
Amanda Watson is a visual artist and researcher, she has a Bachelor of Fine Arts, a Masters of Arts with Distinction (Painting) and her research has been published in peer-reviewed Journals. Her work has been exhibited and shared through exhibitions, art awards, editorials, published reviews and articles and accessioned into public and private collections. Alongside her practice she is an Associate Editor with the Journal of Visual Art Practice and teaches fine arts at the Waikato Institute of Technology.
Dr Daniel Connell
Dr Daniel Connell is an artist and educator, concerned with articulating the action of art in society. Daniel’s practice, singular and with the Dar’iaa Collective, is described as sustained encounter. Major works include SAPNAM the largest free and voluntary mployment service for migrants in Australia, the Matilda Street share house for new migrants, the parent visa campaign, Kirat Karo a network to support victims of wage theft and Turbans and Trust. Daniel was selected for the Australia Council Leadership program as an individual artist 2020-22. His PhD investigated portraiture as a socially engaged practice. Daniel works between Australia and India.