Why we should care: Art Writing and care ethics (1)
2 December 2022 at 2:30:00 am
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Session Convenors
Dr Gretchen Coombs
Associate Professor Jacqueline Millner, La Trobe University
Session Speakers
Dr Ruth Skilbeck
Dr Lisa Andrew, Museum of Contemporary Art
Dr Kate Warren, The Australian National University
As we endure vexing and intertwined assaults on culture, arts writing faces difficult questions about its relevance and survival. This roundtable panel considers how art writing can demonstrate an “ethics of care”[1] as a possible way forward. A focus on care ethics in contemporary art explores how creative practitioners interpret and enact new models of care. These practical solutions and models of practice offer new ways to think about contemporary art and its social function, but might also be the basis for alternative ethics and aesthetics to counter the harms of neoliberalism.
What role can art writing, in its myriad forms, play in reconfiguring how artists, communities, social issues are re-presented and understood, and therefore valued? How might we develop art writing that will breach arts’ boundaries into ethnographic, journalistic and decolonial praxis in an effort to imagine different futures? Can art writing be a form of alliance or accomplice building? What formal qualities will demonstrate these shifts at a time of social, cultural and environmental uncertainty? What kinds of changes can and should be made to our current practices and which platforms seem best equipped for the current dynamics? How do we best organize ourselves and our writing?
Ethical Representation and Cultural Care in 'Polyphonic' Art Writing
Dr Ruth Skilbeck
In Issue 25, 2003, of Australian Art Collector I published a series of interview-based articles with the title 'Australian Contemporary Art Comes of Age'. To compile these, I interviewed a panel of eight 'experts' by phone and email, transcribed the interviews, wrote the articles interweaving representative, illuminating, and enlightening quotes from the experts, who included art historians, curators, and gallerists, and if necessary conversed with each one to ensure they agreed with how they were represented. As founding editor of an arts journal Arts Features International (2018-2020) I adapted and amplified this dialogic and polyphonic approach, encouraging artists to write of their work themselves; and developed innovative forms of art writing as journalism which included environmental damage protest art writing. In this paper I give examples that demonstrate and support my proposal that such methods of art writing provide a way of enabling diversity, and enlarging the caring conversation into cultural, social and political realms, that with care can be sustainable and beneficial for the mental, emotional and psychological well being of culturally diverse individual artists and communities, which is now necessary to enable the survival and renewal of culture, and of humans, at this time of emotional and environmental catastrophe.
Writing with the blind: the agency of ad when writing on art with access in view
Dr Lisa Andrew, Museum of Contemporary Art
This paper considers the radical potential of Audio Description (AD), and asks, what can art do for AD and, in turn, what can AD do for art writing? Writing description of artworks for people who cannot access vision has made apparent art’s agency through a multisensory approach; threading expression, such as movement, temperature, sound and materiality. This demonstrative language weaves expression with access in mind by not privileging sight; and seeks a counterpoint to language which reinforces stereotypes and the authoritative voice associated with traditional audio description.
The paper draws from practice and research; for the past six years I have collaborated with artist Tully Arnot to develop AD at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney; the practice of artist and academic Fayen d’Evie, the Alt Text as poetry project by Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan and audio descriptive writing at MCA Chicago.
Provocation: “It’s not all about criticism.”
Dr Kate Warren, The Australian National University
Histories of arts writing in Australia are underdeveloped, and frequently focused on the role, position and quality of arts criticism and review. Public debates about the quality of arts criticism in Australia have taken place for many decades, and they are often tied up with broader perceptions of philistinism and perceived lack of support for the arts in this country. While these discourses and debates are vital, they can also exclude important considerations about the role, impact, and usefulness of other forms of arts communication. Popular and commercial forms of arts writing and communication are frequently ignored (at best) or derided (at worst). My provocation, “It’s not all about criticism” is a call to consider how more popular forms of arts communication, including in the mainstream media, have been (and can continue to be) used to foster understanding and visual literacy in broad audiences. It also seeks to unpack questions around how/whether arts writing can concurrently embody modes of criticality and advocacy, at a time when broader public perceptions of the arts and their value have come under scrutiny and even attack by recent public policies and government priorities.
Biographies
Dr Gretchen Coombs
Gretchen Coombs is a researcher and art writer who investigates the forms and structures of care in socially engaged art projects. She also considers how cultural institutions practice care through curation and public programming. Gretchen has a PhD in cultural anthropology and uses ethnographic and creative methods to evaluate art projects.
Associate Professor Jacqueline Millner, La Trobe University
Dr Jacqueline Millner is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at La Trobe University. She has published widely on contemporary Australian and international art in key anthologies, journals and catalogues of national and international galleries. Her authored, co-authored and co-edited books include Conceptual Beauty: Perspectives on Australian Contemporary Art (2010), Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum (2014), Fashionable Art (2015), Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes (2018), Contemporary Art and Feminism (2021) and Care Ethics and Art (2021). She has curated major multi-venue exhibitions and public programs and received several prestigious research grants and residencies including from the Australian Research Council, Australia Council for the Arts, Arts NSW, and Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris.
Dr Ruth Skilbeck
Dr Ruth Skilbeck is an author of Australian Fugue novels set in the art world and a book of musico-literary studies (The Writer's Fugue), and she has broad experience as an art writer, having written for numerous art periodicals, and edited an arts anthology, Arts Features International. She has a PhD from the University of Technology Sydney and has worked as a non-tenured lecturer at UTS and the University of New South Wales.
Dr Lisa Andrew, Museum of Contemporary Art
Lisa Andrew is an artist with practice-based research in textiles and languages. Andrew’s research, Modified Fruit: Weaving a transcultural practice through leaving, returning and about being from elsewhere, traces the agency of objects and languages in motion. Andrew works in audio description at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia.
Dr Kate Warren, Australian National University
Kate Warren is a Lecturer of Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University. Her research expertise covers modern and contemporary Australian and international art, with a particular focus on photography, film, video and media art. Her current research explores histories of how the visual arts and art history have been represented in the popular Australian press, particularly in magazine and television coverage in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Her most recent article, “Tracing cultural values through popular art historiographies: Australian popular magazines and the visual arts” in the Journal of Art Historiography, can be found here.