Demonstrating limits and possibilities through conceptual practices
2 December 2022 at 4:30:00 am
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Session Convenors
James Gatt
Session Speakers
James Gatt
Dr Elizabeth Pulie
Dr Mark Titmarsh, University of Technology Sydney
Amelia Winata, University of Melbourne
In response to the idea of 'demonstrations', this panel will address how conceptual art continues to demonstrate problems for art and its institutions. Artists Dr Elizabeth Pulie and Dr Mark Titmarsh, and writer and curator Amelia Winata, will deliver papers in response to this question with the aim of bringing historical, curatorial and artistic perspectives to the panel. The panel will address the ways in which conceptual art has presented problems for defining, exhibiting and collecting art by surveying unorthodox strategies of artists and curators in the production of art and exhibitions. For the purposes of the panel, conceptual art will be considered transhistorically, reaching backwards in time as far as Duchamp and extending to the postconceptual period of contemporary art. The problems raised by conceptual art highlight social, political and ontological boundaries for practices of art broadly. Thus conceptual art continues to demonstrate the limits of and for art while simultaneously working to breach them.
Demonstrating the Limits of Postconceptual Art
Dr Elizabeth Pulie
In 1917, Duchamp submitted Fountain to the ‘jury-free exhibition of contemporary art’ held by the Society of Independent Artists. By rejecting the work, the Society assisted Duchamp in demonstrating a flaw within its ‘jury-free’ declaration, revealing that boundaries – a sense of judgement – did in fact exist in relation to the objects they would consider ‘art’. In 1969, artist Joseph Kosuth identified Duchamp’s ‘unassisted readymades’ as significant to the genesis of conceptual art, stating that: ‘all art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually’. In order to consider, or define, art as a concept – to separate it from other concepts – it is necessary to identify that which is ‘not’ art. The period of conceptual art may be seen as a series of attempts to demonstrate that which is ‘not’ art. The current moment, ‘post’ conceptual art, is frequently defined as open, as embodying a state of absolute freedom, similar to the claim made by the Society a century ago. But is this the case? How do artists demonstrate the limits or boundaries of the concept ‘art’ when boundaries are not perceived to exist? This paper considers the possibilities available to contemporary artists to demonstrate art’s limits.
Its only painting, conceptually
Dr Mark Titmarsh, University of Technology Sydney
The broad history of painting has involved a gradual transition from image to object to event. A drive to get beyond the image-based nature of painting begins in the first decades of the 20th Century when avant-garde artists become as concerned with the form of the work as they are with its contents. Aspects of representation that might have been confined to the flatness of an illusionary surface are detached as general principles and applied to concrete materials and situations resulting in the conceptual deconstruction of painting and a tendency in the 21st Century towards events or constructed situations. This paper takes an overview of these developments through the influence of Conceptual Art, moving from non-objective painting to constructed painting to expanded painting and finally conceptual painting, or works that could only be called painting, conceptually. In this light, conceptual painting is viewed as a radical revision of the visual aspect of painting in favour of an ontological ‘presencing’ that tends towards spatial environments and temporal events. These issues will be developed in relation to the ideas of Rosalind Krauss and Thierry deDuve with particular reference to the work of Duchamp, Ian Burn, Jessica Stockholder, Tino Sehgal and Sandra Selig.
Charlotte Posenenske’s Products of Resistance
Amelia Winata, University of Melbourne
In this paper, I suggest that the Serie DW Vierkantrohre (Series DW Square Tubes) by German artist Charlotte Posenenske (1930–1985) demonstrated resistance towards the increasingly prevalent consumer logic in Cold War West Germany influenced by the Allied forces. In the wake of the Marshall Plan and subsequent Economic Miracle, a growing number of newly enfranchised working- and middle-class were purchasing products at record rates—so much so that even the art market experienced a marked shift in sales. In response, Posenenske produced the Vierkantrohre as un-editioned and unsigned sculptures, allowing them to be produced according to demand and selling them at cost price. In treating her sculptures like products as much as artworks— and in also inscribing them with a very unique set of sale and production caveats—Posenenske effectively resisted any institutional reification of her sculptures. A case study, the 1967 one night only happening event Dies alles Herzchen wird einmal Dirgehören—staged at Galerie Dorothea Loehr and curated by Paul Maenz—further underscores the way in which Posenenske resisted the new market forces rampant in her home country. For this group happening, Posenenske instructed delegated performers to assemble and dismantle the Vierkantrohre in the gallery’s courtyard throughout the evening—an act that ultimately resulted in nothing and which resisted the logic of a purchasable artwork. The paper ultimately paints a picture of Posenenske as a key conceptual artist working through the socio-political climate of 1960s West Germany.
Biographies
James Gatt
James Gatt (b.1988) is an independent curator and writer working on Gadigal land (Sydney). He is founding editor of the conversation journal Kafay Larday and Associate Director at Sarah Cottier Gallery. From 2015 to 2017, Gatt was founding director of Squiggle Space, a hybrid studio and project space dedicated to open-ended enquiry and critical discussion. He has worked closely with contemporary artists since 2015 on solo and group exhibitions including Horizon of Possibility (2021) and Contemporary Recalcitrants (2019). In 2022, he curated Elizabeth Pulie’s survey exhibition, #117 (Survey) at UNSW Galleries, Sydney, for which he co-edited the publication ‘#117 (Survey): Reader’. ,
Dr Elizabeth Pulie
Elizabeth Pulie is an artist based in Sydney. She completed her PhD at Sydney College of the Arts (The University of Sydney) in 2016, and has presented papers at twelve conferences and symposia, both locally and abroad, since 2014. Pulie recently contributed a chapter to the upcoming publication of the 7th volume of the EAM book series, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies. She has been exhibiting regularly since 1988; recent exhibitions include #117 (Survey) at UNSW Galleries curated by James Gatt, and New Old Paintings at Sarah Cottier Gallery, both in 2022. Pulie is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. https://independent.academia.edu/ElizabethPulie
Dr Mark Titmarsh, University of Technology Sydney
Mark Titmarsh (born 1955, Ingham, Australia, PhD, UTS, 2009) is a visual artist working in painting, video and writing. His current work executed under the rubric of ‘expanded painting’ is painting about painting or painting that dissimulates into objects, videos and texts. His book Expanded Painting was published by Bloomsbury in 2018. He is currently a tenured, part time lecturer in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology, Sydney. His artworks are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, QAG, NGV, AGWA, AGNSW and in private collections overseas.
Amelia Winata, University of Melbourne
Amelia Winata is a Naarm/Melbourne based writer. She has written for The Saturday Paper, Artforum, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). She is also an editor of Memo Review and the peer-reviewed journal Index. Amelia is currently completing her PhD in art history at the University of Melbourne on the German artist Charlotte Posenenske.