Dr Nerina Dunt, Adelaide Central School of Art

The Western canon of art and the milieux to which it is intrinsically linked is made vulnerable in the art history classroom as methodological frameworks equip students with the theoretical tools they need to critique the past. This paper considers the role of pedagogy in presenting such frameworks, which have the capacity to facilitate alternative histories and bodies of knowledge. Taking an innovative curriculum model at Adelaide Central School of Art as its focus, the paper explores how art historical encounters with science, censorship, decolonisation, gender, materialism and archives, among others, confront old tropes, giving learner practitioners of contemporary art permission to do the same. Whilst an objective of activism is typically social and political change, the revelation of truths is equally important.

Sasha Grbich, Adelaide Central School of Art & Flinders University

This paper takes its lead, and indeed half its title, from Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s book Unlearning Imperialism: Potential Histories where the relentless ‘new’ of contemporary art is read in correlation with the formation of imperial progress narratives. I start from the understanding that the archives of contemporary art are, in Australia, formed in relation to colonial epistemologies that have excluded bodies and knowledges. In answer to Azoulay I explore my own question, considering how can students be supported to undertake inquiry that thickens potential histories, rather than rearticulating historical omissions? In looking for ways to then teach art history and theory I consider approaches where constellations of thought might be formed between urgencies past and present, and where notions of linear progress are unpicked. I locate my inquiry within my current research with Flinders University Art Museum into the exclusion of women from Post-object art in Australia, and with examples of course design drawn from my work at Adelaide Central School of Art where since 2020 I have developed a course that addresses urgencies in contemporary art.

Dr Louisa Bufardeci, University of Melbourne

In this paper I will present a tacktical methodology for engaging with and making art. This methodology learns from First Nations and feminist philosophies of relationality and draws on the various etymological relations of the words ‘tack' and ‘tact’. It suggests a way of working that is tacky (sticky), that tacks (attaches two or more things together to see if they fit), and that tacks (moves in a zig zag fashion to negotiate powerful forces). And it also proposes ways of engaging with and making art that produces what the American psychologist B. F. Skinner called a 'tact’. This is part of the associative learning process that raises the probability that a person repeats a particular behaviour.

In this paper I will discuss the ways applying a tacktical methodology may shift the way we engage with art. I will demonstrate the way it can recall the privilege of critique with an analysis of Irish artist Richard Mosse’s video work Incoming (2015-16). And reflecting on ideas presented by Australian writer Tyson Yunkaporta I will also discuss the way a tacktical methodology might foster conditions for emergence that encourage flourishing. This might mean thinking and creating in an “ante-factual” space, that is, in the space before things happen.

​

​