Books by Amelia Barikin
Over the past two decades, French artist Pierre Huyghe has produced an extraordinary body of work... more Over the past two decades, French artist Pierre Huyghe has produced an extraordinary body of work in constant dialogue with temporality. Investigating the possibility of a hypothetical mode of timekeeping - “parallel presents” - Huyghe has researched the architecture of the incomplete, directed a puppet opera, founded a temporary school, established a pirate television station, staged celebrations, scripted scenarios, and journeyed to Antarctica in search of a mythological penguin. In this first book-length art historical examination of Huyghe and his work, Amelia Barikin traces the artist’s continual negotiation with the time codes of contemporary society. Offering detailed analyses of Huyghe’s works and drawing on extensive interviews with Huyghe and his associates, Barikin finds in Huyghe’s projects an alternate way of thinking about history--a “topological historicity” that deprograms (or reprograms) temporal formats. Huyghe once said, “It is through the montage, the way we combine and relate images, that we can create a representation of an event that is perhaps more precise than the event itself.”
Barikin offers pioneering analyses of Huyghe’s lesser-known early works as well as sustained readings of later, critically acclaimed projects, including No Ghost Just a Shell (2000), L’Expédition scintillante (2002), and A Journey That Wasn’t (2005). She emphasizes Huyghe’s concepts of “freed time” and “the open present,” in which anything might happen.
Bringing together an eclectic array of subjects and characters - from moon walking to situationist practices, from Snow White to Gilles Deleuze - Parallel Presents offers a highly original account of the driving forces behind Huyghe’s work.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-presents
Edited books by Amelia Barikin
Lines towards Another is the first anthology on the work of Australian contemporary artist Tom Ni... more Lines towards Another is the first anthology on the work of Australian contemporary artist Tom Nicholson. Spanning drawing, sculpture, public actions, sound, installation, video, and performance, Nicholson's work since the 1990s has engaged with critical questions around history, politics, narrative, and representation. Informed by the colonial history of Australia, and motivated by the work of Aboriginal Australian activists, his practice at its most fundamental level examines the role of images and monuments as both catalysts and potential barriers for the creation of histories, reimagining their forms through modes of commemoration. Presenting new research on the artist and providing an unprecedented overview of two decades of work, the book features eleven essays and two interviews, alongside richly illustrated project pages and texts by the artist.
Contributions by Tony Birch, Bridget Crone, Jacqueline Doughty, Anthony Gardner, Anneke Jaspers, Ryan Johnston, John Mateer, Shelley McSpedden, Mihnea Mircan, Grace Samboh, Ann Stephen. Copublished with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.
https://www.amazon.com/Tom-Nicholson-Lines-Towards-Another/dp/3956793978
Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction (anthology of collected essays on SF, Tarkvosky, Dick, Lem, Ballard, time travel, geophilosophy, speculative realism, dystopias, telepathy, Surrealism, Mercerism, and contemporary art) Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction is an anthology of new writings by artists, curators, art ... more Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction is an anthology of new writings by artists, curators, art historians and writers who are self-confessed science fiction fans. The linking point is the idea of science fiction as a platform for the building of alternate art histories. This collection is concerned with the ways in which science fiction might be performed, materialised or enacted within a contemporary context. Featuring essays on Stanislaw Lem, Robert Smithson, J.G. Ballard, Eduardo Paolozzi, H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, R.A. Lafferty, and Stanley Kubrick as well as texts on time travel, philology, geophilosophy, loops, speculative realism, dystopias, telepathy, surrealism, pop, Mercerism, and contemporary art.
Edited by Amelia Barikin and Helen Hughes with contributions by: Adrian Martin, Amelia Barikin, Andrew Frost, Anthony White, Arlo Mountford, Brendan Lee, Charles Green, Chris McAuliffe, Chronox, Damiano Bertoli, Darren Jorgensen, Dylan Martorell, Edward Colless, Helen Hughes, Helen Johnson, Justin Clemens, Lauren Bliss, Matthew Shannon, Nathan Gray, Nick Selenitsch, OSW, Patrick Pound, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler, Ryan Johnston, and Soda_Jerk.
Book chapters by Amelia Barikin
The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture (edited by Andrea Bubenik, Routledge), 2019
In considering the relationship between time and melancholy, this chapter offers a fascinating ac... more In considering the relationship between time and melancholy, this chapter offers a fascinating account of the temporal constitution of melancholia across a diverse variety of works, including by Albrecht Durer, Anselm Kiefer, and Hans Op de Beeck. Arguing for a positive understanding of the melancholic as a figure outside of time, it shows how the particular intensity of melancholia hinges on its capacity to bridge finitude and infinitude, with specific reference to motifs of suspension. The argument draws upon writings by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Georgio Agamben, providing key insights into melancholia as a form of radical temporal ambivalence.
Ebook at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429468469
Robert Smithson: Time Crystals (Monash University Publishing: Melbourne, 2018). , 2018
In offering an alternative to dominant readings of entropy in Robert Smithson's practice, Amelia ... more In offering an alternative to dominant readings of entropy in Robert Smithson's practice, Amelia Barikin and Chris McAuliffe show how the figure of the 'time crystal' in his works acts as a radical metaphor for endlessness, and as a visualisation of static, frozen time. Chapter from catalogue produced to accompany the exhibition 'Robert Smithson: Time Crystals' at the University of Queensland Art Museum and Monash University Museum of Art, Australia, in 2018. https://shop.monash.edu/robert-smithson-time-crystals.html
Animism in Art and Performance, ed. Christopher Braddock , 2017
An analysis of the ways in which contemporary art can challenge distinctions between animate and ... more An analysis of the ways in which contemporary art can challenge distinctions between animate and inanimate materials. The chapter uses the figure of the ‘sound fossil’—a term that refers to the audible traces of the Big Bang—as a provocation for addressing new materialisms in contemporary art. Drawing from art history and philosophy, Barikin’s ‘mineral ontology’ proposes an ethics of being in which the living–non-living binary may no longer apply. The argument primarily focuses on a long-duration project Making a Record (Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald) by Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson (2009–2014), and includes reference to Quentin Meillassoux’s theorization of arche-fossils, Roger Caillois’s work on the writing of stones and Jacques Derrida’s notion of the trace.
The idea that the work of art has the capacity to break temporal borders or create its own time z... more The idea that the work of art has the capacity to break temporal borders or create its own time zone is troubling to chronological models of history that rely on linear notions of causality, provenance and origins. The challenge is to generate a model of contemporary history capable of addressing the prismatic shapes of contemporary time. Fractured, anachronic time-zones are not easily reconciled with models of temporality that envisage the flow of time as a linear progression from the past through the present to the future. Neither is it possible to continue to base interpretations of the past on a unified temporal schematic. Do we instead need a 'science fictional' history of art, one that speaks to the unreality of time? This chapter proposes that temporal entanglements in the work of contemporary artist Laurent Grasso can be understood as a form of SF history writing.
Going Beyond: Art as Adventure, 2018
Tom Nicholson: Lines Towards Another, Sternberg Press, Berlin 2018, 2018
In this materialist analysis of prints and drawings by contemporary Australian artist Tom Nichols... more In this materialist analysis of prints and drawings by contemporary Australian artist Tom Nicholson, Amelia Barikin situates the artist’s practice in a longer art history that includes the late twentieth-century charcoal drawings of Georges Seurat and Robert Morris’s Blind Time Drawings from the early 1970s. In so doing, Barikin shows how even Nicholson’s figurative prints and drawings generate a type of abstraction or “blindness”, in their pursuit of what she calls “haptic historiography”.
https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/lines-towards-another/
Pierre Huyghe, 2013
In 1927, the British aeronautical engineer J.W. Dunne published a treatise in which he suggested ... more In 1927, the British aeronautical engineer J.W. Dunne published a treatise in which he suggested that dreams were comprised not only of images of the past, but also incorporated memories of the future. In developing this radical theory of pre-cognition, Dunne hit upon a major revision of the philosophy of time, offering a model temporality in which the past, present, and future were wholly conjoined. This chapter extrapolates on Dunne's research to discuss the emergence of science-fictional time zones in Pierre Huyghe's work.
Originally published in Nicole Schweizer (ed.), Julian Charrière Future Fossil Spaces, Musée cant... more Originally published in Nicole Schweizer (ed.), Julian Charrière Future Fossil Spaces, Musée cantonal des Beaux-arts, Lausanne & Mousse Publishing, 2014.
Essay by Amelia Barikin and Victoria Lynn for Pierre Huyghe solo exhibition at TarraWarra Museum ... more Essay by Amelia Barikin and Victoria Lynn for Pierre Huyghe solo exhibition at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Australia, 2015
The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, 2013
This chapter examines the interplay between new modes of cultural communication, transnational su... more This chapter examines the interplay between new modes of cultural communication, transnational subjectivity, and the forms through which museums seek to enhance public engagement. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne, Australia, is taken as a case study for the emergence of an alternative form of contemporary subjectivity within the new museum. The aim is to demonstrate how ACMI’s initial curatorial, architectural, and experiential directives were designed to produce, rather than classify or represent, emerging forms of cultural consciousness. ACMI’s willingness to experiment with innovative representational technology is, as such, framed as a strategic attempt to position itself as a pioneering new media institution and to engage in the production of alternative forms of cultural citizenship. The concept of “ambient aesthetics” is finally proposed as a key conceptual framework for evaluating how contemporary museums might articulate a new kind of “flexible” citizenship within a transnational public sphere.
"Theorist Nikos Papastergiadis and art historian Amelia Bairkin's contribution explores the notio... more "Theorist Nikos Papastergiadis and art historian Amelia Bairkin's contribution explores the notion of 'ambient perspective' and sensory awareness from the period of the Renaissance onward. In deconstructing the term perspective into its basic etymology - 'looking through' time and space at once - the authors reveal how the act of observing is in fact indissociable from movement. Far from being understood as a mathematical tool in the composition of works, perspective, here, is articulated as a 'metaphorical frame' that we bring to bear on a work through our modes of attention. Just as our contemporary reality, which steeps us in countless bits and tracks of information and data that cannot be comprehended from a single standpoint, immersive artworks can only be understood 'through a mode of ambient awareness'. They thus do away from hierarchical relationships between figure and ground. By privileging the space in-between, so as to redistribute agency between artwork and viewer, such projects 'enact a relationship that is at once temporary and situational, dispersed and contingent', and thus 'assemble a world' rather than merely point to it." [Hlavajova and Hoskote, editorial, 2015]
Throughout the twentieth century, artists and theorists have converted the methodologies of art m... 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.
The International Handbooks of Museum Studies: Museum Theory, 2015
This chapter examines the interplay between new modes of cultural communication, transnational su... more This chapter examines the interplay between new modes of cultural communication, transnational subjectivity, and the forms through which museums seek to enhance public engagement. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne, Australia, is taken as a case study for the emergence of an alternative form of contemporary subjectivity within the new museum. The aim is to demonstrate
how ACMI’s initial curatorial, architectural, and experiential directives were designed to produce, rather than classify or represent, emerging forms of cultural consciousness. ACMI’s willingness to experiment with innovative representational
technology is, as such, framed as a strategic attempt to position itself as a pioneering new media institution and to engage in the production of alternative forms of cultural citizenship. The concept of “ambient aesthetics” is finally proposed as a
key conceptual framework for evaluating how contemporary museums might articulate a new kind of “flexible” citizenship within a transnational public sphere.
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Books by Amelia Barikin
Barikin offers pioneering analyses of Huyghe’s lesser-known early works as well as sustained readings of later, critically acclaimed projects, including No Ghost Just a Shell (2000), L’Expédition scintillante (2002), and A Journey That Wasn’t (2005). She emphasizes Huyghe’s concepts of “freed time” and “the open present,” in which anything might happen.
Bringing together an eclectic array of subjects and characters - from moon walking to situationist practices, from Snow White to Gilles Deleuze - Parallel Presents offers a highly original account of the driving forces behind Huyghe’s work.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-presents
Edited books by Amelia Barikin
Contributions by Tony Birch, Bridget Crone, Jacqueline Doughty, Anthony Gardner, Anneke Jaspers, Ryan Johnston, John Mateer, Shelley McSpedden, Mihnea Mircan, Grace Samboh, Ann Stephen. Copublished with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.
https://www.amazon.com/Tom-Nicholson-Lines-Towards-Another/dp/3956793978
Edited by Amelia Barikin and Helen Hughes with contributions by: Adrian Martin, Amelia Barikin, Andrew Frost, Anthony White, Arlo Mountford, Brendan Lee, Charles Green, Chris McAuliffe, Chronox, Damiano Bertoli, Darren Jorgensen, Dylan Martorell, Edward Colless, Helen Hughes, Helen Johnson, Justin Clemens, Lauren Bliss, Matthew Shannon, Nathan Gray, Nick Selenitsch, OSW, Patrick Pound, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler, Ryan Johnston, and Soda_Jerk.
Book chapters by Amelia Barikin
Ebook at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429468469
https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/lines-towards-another/
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.
how ACMI’s initial curatorial, architectural, and experiential directives were designed to produce, rather than classify or represent, emerging forms of cultural consciousness. ACMI’s willingness to experiment with innovative representational
technology is, as such, framed as a strategic attempt to position itself as a pioneering new media institution and to engage in the production of alternative forms of cultural citizenship. The concept of “ambient aesthetics” is finally proposed as a
key conceptual framework for evaluating how contemporary museums might articulate a new kind of “flexible” citizenship within a transnational public sphere.
Barikin offers pioneering analyses of Huyghe’s lesser-known early works as well as sustained readings of later, critically acclaimed projects, including No Ghost Just a Shell (2000), L’Expédition scintillante (2002), and A Journey That Wasn’t (2005). She emphasizes Huyghe’s concepts of “freed time” and “the open present,” in which anything might happen.
Bringing together an eclectic array of subjects and characters - from moon walking to situationist practices, from Snow White to Gilles Deleuze - Parallel Presents offers a highly original account of the driving forces behind Huyghe’s work.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-presents
Contributions by Tony Birch, Bridget Crone, Jacqueline Doughty, Anthony Gardner, Anneke Jaspers, Ryan Johnston, John Mateer, Shelley McSpedden, Mihnea Mircan, Grace Samboh, Ann Stephen. Copublished with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.
https://www.amazon.com/Tom-Nicholson-Lines-Towards-Another/dp/3956793978
Edited by Amelia Barikin and Helen Hughes with contributions by: Adrian Martin, Amelia Barikin, Andrew Frost, Anthony White, Arlo Mountford, Brendan Lee, Charles Green, Chris McAuliffe, Chronox, Damiano Bertoli, Darren Jorgensen, Dylan Martorell, Edward Colless, Helen Hughes, Helen Johnson, Justin Clemens, Lauren Bliss, Matthew Shannon, Nathan Gray, Nick Selenitsch, OSW, Patrick Pound, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler, Ryan Johnston, and Soda_Jerk.
Ebook at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429468469
https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/lines-towards-another/
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.
how ACMI’s initial curatorial, architectural, and experiential directives were designed to produce, rather than classify or represent, emerging forms of cultural consciousness. ACMI’s willingness to experiment with innovative representational
technology is, as such, framed as a strategic attempt to position itself as a pioneering new media institution and to engage in the production of alternative forms of cultural citizenship. The concept of “ambient aesthetics” is finally proposed as a
key conceptual framework for evaluating how contemporary museums might articulate a new kind of “flexible” citizenship within a transnational public sphere.
The aim of this chapter is to examine the ways in which the networking of large public screens can serve as a space for transnational exchange, extending the frontiers of aesthetic and public participation. Focusing on a specific artistic and research collaboration that is being conducted via the networking of public screens in Seoul, South Korea, and Melbourne, Australia, our analysis combines historical detail on the development of public screen media, empirical data analysis from audience response surveys, and theoretical speculation on the emergence of a cosmopolitan imaginary. The classical polis was divided between the oikos, the privacy of the home; the agora, the commercial zone of exchange and a domain for speculative public/private interactions; and the ekklesia, in which the rules of governance and social organization were established. These categories are often blurred by the social and cultural practices of contemporary transnational exchange, requiring new modalities for representation.
There are time ripples on this island. Monstrous mutations spawned by the patterns of algorithmic codes. A simulation of a milieu, replicated from a copy and set to grow, begins to create its own anomalies. Exiting the simulation, they appear in three dimensions, in materials of wood, wax, silicone, sugar, metal, sponge, or salt. Images from the past exposed to artificial neural networks become alive again in the present, contaminated by differentials which are fed back through the system in real-time. A network of hidden sensors drives a living image at the center of the forest: an image that sees, rather than shows, the conditions of its own existence. Variants-already a plurality, already differing from itself and other iterations of itself. Its purpose is to replicate, mutate and survive. Like a virus.
https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/5029/queer-australian-art-history-kink-in-the-archive/
participation data, we discovered that the corporeality of the dance placed both the addresser and the addressee in the context of the social practice of translation. In this
context, we note that artistic projects can provide an embodied experience of the forms of heterolingual address and cross-cultural translation as analysed by Naoki Sakai. We
conclude that the fascination for engaging in transnational communication was stimulated by the cross-cultural process of translating gestures.
specific Australia-Korea cultural event that linked large screens in Melbourne and Incheon through the presentation of SMS-based interactive media art works. The article combines theoretical analyses of global citizenship, mobility, digital technologies, and networked public space with empirical
analyses of audience response research data collected during the screen event. The central argument is that large public screens can offer a strategic site for examining
transformations in the constitution of public agency in a digitized, globalized environment. The idea of ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ is finally proposed as a conceptual
framework for understanding how new forms of transnational public agency in mediated public spaces might operate.
Scenario One. After the apocalypse, those artists remaining on Earth have been forced to retreat into their studios to assemble quasi-functional structures out of the material detritus of super-modernity. Channelling a half-remembered litany of forms and contexts, they attempt to construct tool-kits for survival in a newly formed wild.