The 4th Auckland Triennial, Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon is now closed. However, I would like to take a moment to thank everyone who has been involved, supported, volunteered and generally helped us achieve this Triennial which included 28 artists and 85 events.
Don’t forget that the catalogue is still for sale here
The next Auckland Triennial will be in 2013.
May Symposium
Saturday 22 May, 3pm
Charlotte Huddleston
Collecting Contemporary
Charlotte Huddleston is currently the Curator, Contemporary Art at The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and is an adviser for the Wellington Sculpture Trust. She has worked with collections to curate a number of exhibitions and is involved in commissioning and collection development in her current role. She has previously worked at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Enjoy Public Art Gallery.
May Symposium
May Symposium
Sunday 23 May, 3pm
Gwyn Porter
Distribution in the digital age
The internet has of course provided new opportunities for the distribution of magazines, but being ‘distributed on-line’ in a wider sense offers significantly more: the possibility of relative independence from market demands; more heterogenous content within and between issues; voluntary, collaborative structures; and more human timeframes. Porter will discuss the online art magazine Natural Selection magazine project in terms of its non-financial nature.
Gwynneth Porter is a writer, editor and publisher living in Auckland. She is co-director of the art book publishing house Clouds and is co-editor of the art magazine Natural Selection. Current writing projects include a contribution to the forthcoming Sriwhana Spong book, Nijinsky, an essay on Rosemary Johnston’s clouds works from the 1970s for Natural Selection 7, and a book project entitled I must explode: art writing and tacticality. She is presently editing the collected writings of Julian Dashper, and a survey publication on the work of Sean Kerr.
May Symposium
May Symposium
Sunday 23 May, 12 noon
Jan Bryant
“… he asks them to keep his ideas secret, to be careful of strangers.”
We know that the academy is resistant to experimentation, this is its history, its power, its platform against which oppositions and small revolutions are earnestly levelled. And yet, with funding for universities linked to research outcomes, which must then align to rigid governmental systems of evaluation, it seems that if these systems of pre-defined quality are to be met, the future of criticism from within the academy will become increasingly conformist. However, is it all about bureaucratic methods of control, or are there other reasons why we struggle today to find robust, critical voices?
Jan Bryant writes on contemporary art and film working particularly with local artists. She is a contributor to Reading Room #4 2010 and to Natural Selection 7: Conversation. Sheis currently Head of Research at AUT School of Art and Design.
May Symposium
May Symposium
Sunday 23 May 2pm
Jon Bywater
Bad ideas about art writing
Jon Bywater has written about art in a variety of contexts and genres. He has contributed a monthly column to the New Zealand Listener —for a general, national audience— and currently reviews —for a specialist, international readership— in Artforum. He works regularly with artists and institutions to produce texts to accompany and document exhibitions — sometimes expository catalogue essays, sometimes less explicit, ‘ficto-critical’ responses. He develops themes of this critical writing for theoretically-inclined venues such as Afterall and Reading Room. In this presentation he will offer some hypotheses on writing about art grounded in this experience. Addressing ideas of complicity and objectivity, he will discuss the contemporary functions of criticism for various audiences, including the artist.
Jon Bywater writes regularly on art and music for Artforum, The Wire and Mute magazines. He has previously held columnist roles as a critic for LOG Illustrated, The New Zealand Listener, and Art New Zealand. He teaches at The University of Auckland where he is Programme Leader for Critical Studies at Elam School of Fine Arts.
Recent publications include contributions to Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation (Phaidon, 2009), One Day Sculpture (Kerber Verlag, 2009) and It isn’t what it used to be and will never be again (Glasgow CCA, 2009). Excerpts from his essay “Interrupting Perpetual Flight” (Afterall, 2006) are included in Situation (Whitechapel & MIT Press, 2009) in the series Documents of Contemporary Art.
May Symposium
May Symposium
Saturday 22 May, 12 noon
Tyler Cann
One artist: one curator, eight shows
This talk is about curating the Len Lye Collection and Archive at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Focusing on selected exhibitions, including ‘Len Lye: Body English’, ‘The Cosmic Archive’ and the 2009 retrospective at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the talk explores the potential for solo exhibitions to unfold various facets of an artist’s practice and activate a collection in the process.
Tyler Cann is the Curator, Len Lye at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. He has lectured internationally on Len Lye and kinetic sculpture in the 1950s and 1960s and curated several exhibitions of Lye’s work at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, including Individual Happiness Now!, Body English, and Five Fountains and a Firebush, and The Cosmic Archive. Cann co-curated the 2009 Len Lye retrospective at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, and was a contributing co-editor of the recent monograph on the artist’s work. His current projects include a survey of Lye’s work at IKON Gallery, in Birmingham, UK.
May Symposium
(21 - 23 May 2010)
Saturday 22 May, 11am
Bettina Steinbrügge
Modes of Curatorial Practice: Moving between art, cinema and performance
Borders between art and cinema are becoming increasingly impermeable, and it is the condition of mutability that informs every aspect of this lecture. In the 1960s and 1970s, experimental film work gave way to video art, once the introduction of video cameras and the technology of moving-image reproduction became economically accessible. For the past fifty years, the love/hate affair between the two has triggered vital aesthetic, social and political responses that constantly renew the way we understand our age. Critical debates about new ideas of representation, fuelled by the collapse of disciplinary boundaries, have created a new model of specificity – one that created a new kind of consideration towards the space of projection or exhibition.
Using the example of Forum Expanded, a division of Berlin International Film Festival, this lecture reflects about curatorial practice in the intersection of art and cinema, between the classical format of a film festival and the cinematic practices in the context of art and other fields. For curating moving images, it is essential to understand the technical development of the media, the various genealogies that attend the moving images, and the broader context in which the work arises.
Bettina is a freelance curator, writer, lecturer and publicist in Berlin. She studied art history, English philology and comparative literature. From 2001-2008 she directed Halle für Kunst Lüneburg eV, supervised the artist-in-residency Schloss Bleckede and taught art theory and curatorial practice at the University of Lüneburg in the Department of Cultural Theory.
Lately she was curator of “Zero Gravity - The Architecture of Social Space” (Plovdiv, Bulgaria); and since 2009, she is co-curator of Forum Expanded, a division of the Berlin International Film Festival and in 2010/2011 is responsible as associated curator for the artistic program of “La Kunsthalle Mulhouse” in France.
Her last publications, published at JRP / Ringier, are “Cooling Out - On the Paradox of Feminism”, “Outlandos”, the first monograph of Jeanne Faust and together with the Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design in Génève “EDU TOOL BOX”, a book on art education. Bettina Steinbrügge writes for catalogues and various art publications such as the magazines Art South Africa, or IDEA, and sits on juries, such as the “International Competition of the Outdoor Gallery of the City of Gdansk” since 2005.
Bettina is presenting with the support of the Goethe Institut.
May Symposium
In the lead-up to the May Symposium (21 - 23 May 2010), i will post some details about the speakers and the subjects of their talks over the next couple of weeks.
Lee Weng Choy
11am, Sunday 23 May at the Auckland Art Gallery.
a country of last whales — who reads art criticism anymore?
A priest, a filmmaker and an art critic are on a radio talk show discussing censorship. Sounds like the opening of a joke, and I wish that it were — or that I could find the right punch line. But, yes, it’s something that really did happen. I was the critic in question, and the programme took place years ago in Singapore. Some listeners called in to say things like, if there wasn’t censorship, there would be riots on the streets. I couldn’t roll my eyes fast enough — thankfully, you can’t detect facial expressions on the radio. But, no, I wasn’t snarky in riposte. I was polite to everyone, albeit categorical in my criticisms: censorship is always arbitrary; it is about the high-handed power to silence speech, rather than the high- minded protection of minors.
My presentation in Auckland, however, will not concern itself, not directly at least, with censorship. When thinking about the question of “exhibition”, one of the main themes of the symposium, my response is to think about the “public” (and all the main players in this arena are evoked in my anecdote: the moral guardians, artists, intellectuals, the state, the media, and the audience at large). Although on this occasion, I’m more interested to discuss that public that comes after the exhibition: those people who read about exhibitions. So who reads about art these days? Is there a republic of readers of criticism? Does criticism still have any relevance? How does art writing — from reviews to criticism, to histories — shape artistic and curatorial practice today? Very large questions, admittedly, but I’ll keep my focus tight, looking at the little art pond that is the contemporary scene in Singapore.
Lee Weng Choy is an art critic based in Singapore; he is director of projects, research and publications at the Osage Art Foundation, and is a consultant lecturer with the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Singapore. Weng Choy has lectured on art and cultural studies, convened international conferences, and written widely on contemporary art and Singapore. His essays have been published in Art AsiaPacific, Art Journal, Broadsheet, Column, eyeline, Forum On Contemporary Art & Society, Journal of Visual Culture, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, and Yishu. Weng Choy also serves on the academic advisory board of the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, and is president of the Singapore Section of the International Association of Art Critics. From 2000 to 2009, he was artistic co-director of The Substation arts centre.
Presented with the support of National Arts Council Singapore.
May Symposium
We think the design of the Triennial catalogue is pretty fabulous - thanks Arch and Sarah at Inhouse. This is not least of all for the cover’s transformative properties, as demonstrated in this video clip Inhouse put together. Thanks guys!
How does it work? The cover was first printed with the concentric circles, then over the top of this several layers of heat sensitive ink were screen printed.
Get your copy of the catalogue for $35 at one of the venues or contact the Auckland Art Gallery shop +64 9 307 7530 or shop@aucklandartgallery.govt.nz.
The opening night for the Triennial last Thursday went off with a bang. Held at Shed 6 for the first time, the magnificent industrial space created an amazing backdrop to the celebrations. Showers, umbrellas, firey torches, Kapa Haka and Japanese drumming performances, art, artists and art lovers all came together in an event I’m sure many are still talking about. I hope you enjoy the photos.
