Why we should care: Art Writing and care ethics (2)
2 December 2022 at 4:30:00 am
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Session Convenors
Dr Gretchen Coombs
Associate Professor Jacqueline Millner, La Trobe University
Session Speakers
Dr Daniel Connell
Clare Fuery-Jones, University of Melbourne
Crisia Constantine, Queensland College of Art
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?
Writing a new art vocabulary: socially engaged practice exposing the invisible action of the arts
Dr Daniel Connell
Socially engaged art, (SEA) stripped bare of spectacle, novelty and even the visual, uses writing as form, medium and contextualisation. SEA demands of artists a new rigour to explain its location in contemporary art and justify its perceived ethics. SEA has diminished the author as hero and stopped feeding an audience fetish for consuming the individual narrative. SEA has redescribed art as: hospitality for the unfamiliar, courage before difference, an alternative to the utility imperative, being at ease with ambiguity and negotiating care relationships. To see this type of work truly valued in society for its potential to renovate human connectivity, we need to expose the critical but invisible actions of the engagement this art produces.
This presentation argues that SEA offers art writing a new vigour and a new vocabulary to be shared broadly. Writing can generate critical dialogue and document radical encounters and be arts’ vehicle into the vernacular.
Show, don’t tell
Clare Fuery-Jones, University of Melbourne
If the point of art writing is to, amongst other things, elucidate, interpret, and question art, there is an implicit assumption forwarded by such writing that art is of value, or, at the very least, worthy of being discussed for some reason or other. This point, however, is often taken for granted; rarely do we see arguments for why art matters. Perhaps it is not a question of how to integrate this kind of content more obviously or forcefully – surely this would risk authors’ (moralising, self-aggrandising) megaphoning, and detract from the art itself. Rather, we could ask how, in art writing, might showing rather than telling prompt a more willing, genuine and meaningful engagement on the part of the public? And thereby, allow for self-realised, and private revelations for individual readers as to art’s significance? Whereas “telling” is pre-formed, didactic, and may be imposed, “showing” is an offering, and in this sense invites involvement; a being-with, rather than detached-from, the art discussed. Questions that would require exploration include: What does it mean to show rather than tell? What might such art writing read like? What might be its fallout, or effect?
Writing with Art
Crisia Constantine., Queensland College of Art
This conference intervention focuses on art writing as creative practice. It proposes the understanding of art writing as writing with art, and surveys the potential of art works to function as prompts that led to creative productions in their own right. In my opinion, art contexts (art galleries and museums, but also art journals, artists’ talks and even art-based courses) create ‘safe spaces’ of reflection upon different collective histories - but also personal ones - as modes of difference. Also, they explore and expand knowledge possibilities. Therefore, art writing becomes a creative space that encapsulated introspection, critical reflection, and knowledge production, but also artistic expression.
Biographies
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 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.
Clare Fuery-Jones, University of Melbourne
Clare Fuery-Jones is currently undertaking a PhD in Art History at the University of Melbourne, and teaches there part-time as a Graduate Research Teaching Fellow. Her PhD research focusses on the cross-cultural and identity-shaping potentials of contemporary Australian landscape painting. In 2020 her article Law-less silence: Extraordinary Rendition, the Law and Silence in Edmund Clark’s Negative Publicity, was published in INDEX Journal.
Crisia Constantine, Queensland College of Art
Crisia Constantine is a Rromani-Romanian visual artist, writer and curator, educator and art facilitator. Her practice draws across different artistic mediums (installation, photography, alternative drawing, textile). Her work was featured by the Head On Festival, Art and About Festival, Nomadic arts Festival, 1st Worldwide Studio and Apartment Biennale, Brighton Photo Biennial, Internationale Kunst Heute, the Central East-European House for Photography in Bratislava, the Art Gallery of the University of Kent. Crisia Constantine is undertaking doctoral research in nomadism, childhood trauma and community memory at Queensland College of Art, Australia.