Caroline V Wallace

In 1970, the United States’ pavilion at the Venice Biennale faced open opposition by its own exhibiting artists in the form of a large-scale boycott and collective withdrawal. Back home in New York City, attempts to restage the exhibition precipitated a heated debate over the representational politics of both museum and activist communities. At the urging of black feminist activists, the exhibition was re-conceived as the Liberated Biennale – an ‘open’ counter exhibition. The protest of the Biennale was just one of a number of boycotts and withdrawals of the later 1960s and early 1970s, as artists harnessed an active agential role in exhibition making a push for greater political influence. However, opposition to the expanded ambitions of the Liberated Biennale revealed, in both activist and institutional contexts, the limited terms of the commitment to museum as democratic space in late sixties America.

Exhibition:
July 2015
The Dax Centre Gallery

Creaturely Feelings is part of the 2015 Australian Animal Studies Group international conference Animal Publics: Emotions, Empathy, Activism. This interdisciplinary conference will consider the roles played by emotions, empathy and activism in the often contradictory way in which we relate to animals in both public and private spheres.

This exhibition explores the emotional impact of the human/animal bond. Scientific studies have confirmed the social, behavioural, physical and emotional effect of human relationships with animals. Artworks in this exhibition will investigate this shared life of human and non-human animals

Imprint: Contemporary Art in Print, no.3 vol. 49, Spring 2014, pp.14-15

This article, the cover article of a special edition of Imprint devoted to global contemporary art, discussed the work of Turner prize nominee Ciara Phillips through her use of exhibition spaces as a site for shared labour.

PhD Dissertation
The University of Melbourne

Abstract:
In this case study of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the intense period of artist-activism in late sixties New York is posited as a dialogue of institutional critique between the Whitney and artists; where both were actively engaged in challenging the narrative and interpretive functions of the Museum. For artist-activists, the Whitney was variously conceived of as a space for their art production, an arena for their political views, or a text for cultural representation: a ‘forum’. This dissertation argues that the ideals of these artist-activist groups were increasingly incompatible with the restrictions of the Museum’s structure, resulting in the relocation of the activists’ ideals to new, non-museological spaces whilst the Whitney, in response to this divisive environment, repositioned itself as a ‘fortress’; preserving its collection, but becoming resistant to the influence of artists.