- Professor Charles Green,
Art History, School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010 Australia - +61 3 8344 4429
Understanding Displacement Aesthetics reframes the way refugees and the conditions of displacement are seen. Through a blend of historical research, and long-term collaborative curatorship, it aims to challenge the limitations that... more
Understanding Displacement Aesthetics reframes the way refugees and the conditions of displacement are seen. Through a blend of historical research, and long-term collaborative curatorship, it aims to challenge the limitations that contexts of displacement present for artists, art galleries and institutions addressing refugeedom and its legacies.
The exhibition contains a work by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
The exhibition contains a work by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
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The subject of this article is the absence of Aboriginal art during the period that established the idea of a distinctively Australian modern art. It is intended as a contribution to the historiography of modern and contemporary... more
The subject of this article is the absence of Aboriginal art during the period that established the idea of a distinctively Australian modern art. It is intended as a contribution to the historiography of modern and contemporary Australian art history. The period discussed is the two decades between 1962, when Bernard Smith published Australian Painting,
1788–1960, and 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary. The article explores what changed in these years when art historians, critics, and curators, albeit belatedly and reluctantly, finally began to acknowledge the great contemporary Aboriginal painting that had long been in many artists’ sights as inspiration and model, and in plain view on display in the so-called primitive cultures’ sections of state museums. It argues that this was because it did not seem part of the national story of art.
1788–1960, and 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary. The article explores what changed in these years when art historians, critics, and curators, albeit belatedly and reluctantly, finally began to acknowledge the great contemporary Aboriginal painting that had long been in many artists’ sights as inspiration and model, and in plain view on display in the so-called primitive cultures’ sections of state museums. It argues that this was because it did not seem part of the national story of art.
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Artists, writers and gardeners have continually delved beneath the stormy waters of their lives, seeking images to convey turbulence, find refuge, or even explain and forgive their own privileges through appeals to the laws of disruptive... more
Artists, writers and gardeners have continually delved beneath the stormy waters of their lives, seeking images to convey turbulence, find refuge, or even explain and forgive their own privileges through appeals to the laws of disruptive nature. In this book, we explore disruption and conflict in images of gardens and plants, which are usually taken to represent peace and harmony. The connection that artists make between art, gardens and conflict has changed over time because the understanding of conflict is always entangled with political, cultural and scientific change. Indigenous peoples have experienced this right up to the present, to their great cost. And of course, today, contemporary artists often frame their ideas about gardens within the overwhelming, urgent perspective of climate change. In this book, we aim to place gardens and plants and art within a long, panoramic view-across centuries of upheaval and war that have led towards the present.
Enwezor’s biennial was, the authors of Biennials, Triennials and documenta. The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (2016) argue, the site of an intense and telling disagreement about the role of a biennial of contemporary art in a... more
Enwezor’s biennial was, the authors of Biennials, Triennials and documenta. The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (2016) argue, the site of an intense and telling disagreement about the role of a biennial of contemporary art in a time of crisis. It was caught in the frictions between Enwezor’s internationalist ambition to scrutinize globalization from a postnational perspective, hailed by international reviewers, and South African demands for identity politics and nation building at a time of enforced financial austerity, all resulting in a sometimes hostile local reception and its marginal importance to civic leaders. Although located in a radically different time and space, the critical reception of the second Johannesburg Biennale seems to foreshadow the response that documenta 14 (2017) received twenty years later in Athens, where curator Adam Szymczyk was blamed for crisis tourism, for turning Athens into an exemplary showcase of the destructiveness of neoliberal austerity measures while allegedly not taking into account the needs of the local scene enough. And it is perhaps no coincidence that the authors draw attention to the necessity to understand the power and nuances of such patterns of critique in the wake of Brexit, in an era when nationalist policies have gained new momentum across the globe and the dream of a postnational world seems to move out of reach. In times like these, we should turn to Okwui Enwezor’s legacy, reminding ourselves one year after the curator’s tragically early death, that his exhibitions were always generous interventions within specific and charged histories, opening up new realities yet to come.
This paper looks at Australian art criticism at the start of the 1970s and at the emergence of a short-lived art journal 'Other Voices' featuring a young art critic and art historian, Terry Smith. The essay argues that writing on... more
This paper looks at Australian art criticism at the start of the 1970s and at the emergence of a short-lived art journal 'Other Voices' featuring a young art critic and art historian, Terry Smith. The essay argues that writing on art by scholars from the emergent discipline of Australian art history was significant in contemporary art's innovations. But, it is argued, Australian art history also distorted the course of Australian art. The art historians' false consciousness of nation remained central within Australian art history. Emergent generations of young art writers and art historians could not participate in the establishment of a sustainable and sustained discourse on contemporary art without participating, within the context of Cold War politics, in a reification of the categories of 'Australian' in opposition to the idea of 'International' art, no matter how hard they tried. Young art critic Terry Smith's pessimistic evaluation, even bef...
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In 1989, at the old Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in the Domain Gardens, we saw the collaborative duo Russian artists Komar and Melamid talk about their work. We were both fascinated. We loved the sheer skill of the socialist... more
In 1989, at the old Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in the Domain Gardens, we saw the collaborative duo Russian artists Komar and Melamid talk about their work. We were both fascinated. We loved the sheer skill of the socialist realism of their work, its cleverness, and the weird mysteriousness of not knowing who did what, there being really one artist out of two. Back in the studio, as we talked about it, we gradually realized how relevant this was to us, for we'd been talking about how much we wished elements in photographs, such as the still life bric a brac, the pages of text, the shiny surfaces, could move into paintings, to get the deep somber spaces of Green's paintings and his background in conceptual art into Brown's photographs of carefully arranged objects and texts. A recent series of re-created pre-collaboration works (figures 1 and 2) was a way of recapitulat-ing, understanding and absorbing that pre-collaboration history into our work via a retrospe...
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Introduction The subject of this essay is one of the most important travelling exhibitions ever to arrive in Australia, Two Decades of American Painting (henceforth, Two Decades), a large exhibition of postwar New York School paintings,... more
Introduction The subject of this essay is one of the most important travelling exhibitions ever to arrive in Australia, Two Decades of American Painting (henceforth, Two Decades), a large exhibition of postwar New York School paintings, many of which were indisputable masterpieces, coordinated and curated by the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.1 During 1967 the exhibition toured to two Australian cities, first to Melbourne at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and then to Sydney at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), at the end of an itinerary that had comprised Kyoto in Japan and New Delhi in India.
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In 2007, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, who have worked as one artist in collaboration since 1989, were commissioned by the Australian War Memorial to serve as Australian Official War Artists in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were given... more
In 2007, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, who have worked as one artist in collaboration since 1989, were commissioned by the Australian War Memorial to serve as Australian Official War Artists in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were given complete artistic freedom and unique access to the unfolding War on Terror’s two principal conflict zones, but their deployment occurred at a point where both zones definitively escaped the West’s ability to impose its imperial power, and thus they were often hemmed in by the realities of two deteriorating wars and the fantasies of their hosts. This chapter, illustrated by their works both during and after their official commission, unpacks the process by which the artists tried to make artistic sense of their experience.
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Abstract This essay explains how and why three contemporary artists took on a commission from the Australian War Memorial. In doing so, it will examine how art that deals with conflict during the contemporary period has expanded and... more
Abstract This essay explains how and why three contemporary artists took on a commission from the Australian War Memorial. In doing so, it will examine how art that deals with conflict during the contemporary period has expanded and altered. It surveys the increasing preoccupation with conflict art and war photography in the West during the twenty-first century due to Western enmeshment in ongoing conflicts since Vietnam and up to Iraq, Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, Libya, and Syria. It argues that different types of war image have emerged that blur the edges of art, document, and technology; in engaging with contemporaneity and contemporary art, war images have turned away from the traditional rhetoric of war art – both pro- and anti-war – and therefore challenge the public's investment in evolving national stories that, it has been far too easily assumed, would be made manifest in official war art and photography.
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Contemporary art is rife with attempts to join itself to sport and entertainment, from Matthew Barney's Cremaster 4 (1994) and 1 (1995) to Gabriel Orozco's abstractions of newspaper sports images in Atomists (1996) to Douglas... more
Contemporary art is rife with attempts to join itself to sport and entertainment, from Matthew Barney's Cremaster 4 (1994) and 1 (1995) to Gabriel Orozco's abstractions of newspaper sports images in Atomists (1996) to Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's filmic portrait of French soccer star Zin dine Zidane, Zidane, un Portrait du 21e Si cle (Zidane: A Twenty-first Century Portrait, 2006). Similarly, Australian artist Shaun Gladwell's videos are saturated with images of the artist and his peers at play. The games they play are serious and usually risky. With sumptuous, slow-motion cinematography - but minimal post-production digital manipulation - Gladwell's videos portray seemingly casual feats of physical coordination, grace, and endurance by him and other skateboarders, as well as breakdancers, capoeira practitioners, and BMX bicyclists. Yet, the easy grace of these movements belies their intrinsic, complex motivations. Moving beyond notions of critique and critical practice, so vital to 1990s art and theory, Gladwell's games embrace immersive infotainment. While such strategies have been examined for their political potential, we argue that Gladwell's videos - which offer gesture as their sole content - are more ambivalent in their political charge. They tap into an older understanding of the affective ground that underpins the merging of art and mass culture.
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Enwezor’s biennial was, the authors of Biennials, Triennials and documenta. The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (2016) argue, the site of an intense and telling disagreement about the role of a biennial of contemporary art in a... more
Enwezor’s biennial was, the authors of Biennials, Triennials and
documenta. The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (2016) argue,
the site of an intense and telling disagreement about the role of a biennial
of contemporary art in a time of crisis. It was caught in the frictions
between Enwezor’s internationalist ambition to scrutinize globalization
from a postnational perspective, hailed by international reviewers, and
South African demands for identity politics and nation building at a time
of enforced financial austerity, all resulting in a sometimes hostile local
reception and its marginal importance to civic leaders. Although located in a radically different time and space, the critical
reception of the second Johannesburg Biennale seems to foreshadow
the response that documenta 14 (2017) received twenty years later in
Athens, where curator Adam Szymczyk was blamed for crisis tourism,
for turning Athens into an exemplary showcase of the destructiveness of
neoliberal austerity measures while allegedly not taking into account the
needs of the local scene enough. And it is perhaps no coincidence that
the authors draw attention to the necessity to understand the power and
nuances of such patterns of critique in the wake of Brexit, in an era when
nationalist policies have gained new momentum across the globe and the
dream of a postnational world seems to move out of reach. In times like
these, we should turn to Okwui Enwezor’s legacy, reminding ourselves
one year after the curator’s tragically early death, that his exhibitions
were always generous interventions within specific and charged histories,
opening up new realities yet to come.
documenta. The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (2016) argue,
the site of an intense and telling disagreement about the role of a biennial
of contemporary art in a time of crisis. It was caught in the frictions
between Enwezor’s internationalist ambition to scrutinize globalization
from a postnational perspective, hailed by international reviewers, and
South African demands for identity politics and nation building at a time
of enforced financial austerity, all resulting in a sometimes hostile local
reception and its marginal importance to civic leaders. Although located in a radically different time and space, the critical
reception of the second Johannesburg Biennale seems to foreshadow
the response that documenta 14 (2017) received twenty years later in
Athens, where curator Adam Szymczyk was blamed for crisis tourism,
for turning Athens into an exemplary showcase of the destructiveness of
neoliberal austerity measures while allegedly not taking into account the
needs of the local scene enough. And it is perhaps no coincidence that
the authors draw attention to the necessity to understand the power and
nuances of such patterns of critique in the wake of Brexit, in an era when
nationalist policies have gained new momentum across the globe and the
dream of a postnational world seems to move out of reach. In times like
these, we should turn to Okwui Enwezor’s legacy, reminding ourselves
one year after the curator’s tragically early death, that his exhibitions
were always generous interventions within specific and charged histories,
opening up new realities yet to come.
Artists, writers and gardeners have continually delved beneath the stormy waters of their lives, seeking images to convey turbulence, find refuge, or even explain and forgive their own privileges through appeals to the laws of disruptive... more
Artists, writers and gardeners have continually delved beneath the stormy waters of their lives, seeking images to convey turbulence, find refuge, or even explain and forgive their own privileges through appeals to the laws of disruptive nature. In this book, we explore disruption and conflict in images of gardens and plants, which are usually taken to represent peace and harmony. The connection that artists make between art, gardens and conflict has changed over time because the understanding of conflict is always entangled with political, cultural and scientific change. Indigenous peoples have experienced this right up to the present, to their great cost. And of course, today, contemporary artists often frame their ideas about gardens within the overwhelming, urgent perspective of climate change. In this book, we aim to place gardens and plants and art within a long, panoramic view-across centuries of upheaval and war that have led towards the present.
This essay discusses the recent artistic depictions of contemporary war by four artist-academics based in Australia. The families of all four have served in some of the twentieth century's major conflicts and, more recently, each has been... more
This essay discusses the recent artistic depictions of contemporary war by four artist-academics based in Australia. The families of all four have served in some of the twentieth century's major conflicts and, more recently, each has been commissioned in Australia or the UK to serve as war artists. Collaboratively and individually they produce artwork (placed in national collections) and then, as academics, have come to reflect deeply on the heritage of conflict and war by interrogating contemporary art's representations of war, conflict and terror. This essay reflects on their collaborations and suggests how Australia's war-aware, even warlike heritage, might now be re-interpreted not simply as a struggle to safeguard our shores, but as part of a complex, deeply connected global discourse where painters must re-cast themselves as citizens of the 'global South'.
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In 1967 the exhibition Two Decades of American Painting, organised by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, travelled to Sydney and Melbourne. While the exhibition has often been framed as introducing Australian artists to new forms of... more
In 1967 the exhibition Two Decades of American Painting, organised by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, travelled to Sydney and Melbourne. While the exhibition has often been framed as introducing Australian artists to new forms of abstract painting, this paper argues that the paintings exhibited were just one manifestation of the transnational proliferation of abstraction globally, and that the exhibition precipitated a series of resonances, contacts and missed contacts between New York and Australia.
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... Abramovic and Ulay's unqualified appropriation of the Aboriginal and Tibetan other goes with ... and connections with Aboriginal painters were the foundational experiences henceforth shaping their art. ... and Ulay run up against... more
... Abramovic and Ulay's unqualified appropriation of the Aboriginal and Tibetan other goes with ... and connections with Aboriginal painters were the foundational experiences henceforth shaping their art. ... and Ulay run up against a sceptical bias in contemporary Western cultural ...
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Research Interests: Art History, Contemporary Art, Cold War and Culture, Museums and Exhibition Design, Exhibition, Museum, Expositions and Worlds Fairs, and 7 moreBiennales, South-south cooperation, Art and Globalization, Biennials, History of Exhibitions, Art History, Exhibition History, Museum and Curating Studies, and Curating contemporary art
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As late as the early 1990s, it seemed to many Australian art critics that a multicultural, appropriation-based POST-MODERNISM would constitute a distinctively Australian contribution to art (see IMANTS TILLERS). However, by the... more
As late as the early 1990s, it seemed to many Australian art critics that a multicultural, appropriation-based POST-MODERNISM would constitute a distinctively Australian contribution to art
(see IMANTS TILLERS). However, by the mid-1990s, for reasons at the same time political, economic and simply artistic, it was no longer possible to reduce the art made at the so-called periphery (in Australia) and art created at the so-called centre (at the traditional North Atlantic hubs of art production and consumption) to relationships between Post-modern (even post-colonial) copies and North Atlantic originals. Post-modernism as a coherent framework for explaining either Australian or international art was finished.
(see IMANTS TILLERS). However, by the mid-1990s, for reasons at the same time political, economic and simply artistic, it was no longer possible to reduce the art made at the so-called periphery (in Australia) and art created at the so-called centre (at the traditional North Atlantic hubs of art production and consumption) to relationships between Post-modern (even post-colonial) copies and North Atlantic originals. Post-modernism as a coherent framework for explaining either Australian or international art was finished.
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This essay discusses the writing and personalities surrounding the 1981 establishment of the Australian art magazine, Art & Text, and traces its progression under Paul Taylor’s editorship up to his relocation to New York. During this... more
This essay discusses the writing and personalities surrounding the 1981 establishment of the Australian art magazine, Art & Text, and traces its progression under Paul Taylor’s editorship up to his relocation to New York. During this period, Art & Text published Taylor’s own essays and, more importantly, those of other writers and artists — Meaghan Morris, Paul Foss, Philip Brophy, Imants Tillers, Rex Butler, Edward Colless — all articulating a consistent and complex postmodern position. The magazine sought the niche and status of an antipodean October. The essay argues that the magazine’s founder and editor, Paul Taylor, personified the shattering impact of postmodernism upon the Australian art world as well as postmodernism’s limitations. Taylor facilitated a new theoretical framework for the discussion of Australian art, one that continues to dominate the internationalist aspirations of
Australian art writers. He produced temporarily convincing solutions to problems that earlier critics had wrestled with unsuccessfully, in particular the twin problems of provincialism, and the relationship of Australian to international art.
Australian art writers. He produced temporarily convincing solutions to problems that earlier critics had wrestled with unsuccessfully, in particular the twin problems of provincialism, and the relationship of Australian to international art.
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This essay explains how and why three contemporary artists took on a commission from the Australian War Memorial. In doing so, it will examine how art that deals with conflict during the contemporary period has expanded and altered. It... more
This essay explains how and why three contemporary artists took on a commission from the Australian War Memorial. In doing so, it will examine how art that deals with conflict during the contemporary period has expanded and altered. It surveys the increasing preoccupation with conflict art and war photography in the West during the twenty-first century due to Western
enmeshment in ongoing conflicts since Vietnam and up to Iraq, Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, Libya, and Syria. It argues that different types of war image have emerged that blur the edges of art, document, and technology; in engaging with contemporaneity and contemporary art, war images have turned away from the traditional rhetoric of war art – both pro- and anti-war – and therefore challenge the public’s investment in evolving national stories that, it has been far too easily assumed, would be made manifest in official war art and photography.
enmeshment in ongoing conflicts since Vietnam and up to Iraq, Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, Libya, and Syria. It argues that different types of war image have emerged that blur the edges of art, document, and technology; in engaging with contemporaneity and contemporary art, war images have turned away from the traditional rhetoric of war art – both pro- and anti-war – and therefore challenge the public’s investment in evolving national stories that, it has been far too easily assumed, would be made manifest in official war art and photography.
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Throughout the twentieth century, artists and theorists have converted the methodologies of art museum curatorship into artistic tropes to be activated and yet concealed. This chapter is composed of two related texts that confront the... more
Throughout the twentieth century, artists and theorists have converted the methodologies of art museum curatorship into artistic tropes to be activated and yet concealed. This chapter is composed of two related texts that confront the notion of theory at the museum with reference to artists’ ideas of their works as model “museums in hiding.” However, the present chapter is not concerned with a survey of the many well‐known instances of artists who have mined museum archives (for instance, Mark Dion, Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, Martha Rosler) but with a particular instance of museological representation: the atlas. In the first part of the chapter, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green identify what they call the “memory effect” of the artistic atlas through which
many artists and theorists – from the early twentieth century until now – have constructed and thus rethought the effect of memory, describing this effect from the point of view of working artists. In the second part, Amelia Barikin presents a case study of Brown and Green’s work – and a specific type of museum – with particular attention to the mnemonic function of the Australian
War Memorial. The curatorial synthesis of a modern memory effect is seen both as foundational to the formation of such museums and as a significant driver for the contemporary enactment of memory, in this case within Brown and Green’s art.
many artists and theorists – from the early twentieth century until now – have constructed and thus rethought the effect of memory, describing this effect from the point of view of working artists. In the second part, Amelia Barikin presents a case study of Brown and Green’s work – and a specific type of museum – with particular attention to the mnemonic function of the Australian
War Memorial. The curatorial synthesis of a modern memory effect is seen both as foundational to the formation of such museums and as a significant driver for the contemporary enactment of memory, in this case within Brown and Green’s art.