Art & the Public Sphere - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2019

Recent feminist critiques of neo-liberalism have argued for care as an alternative structuring principle for political systems in crisis and have proposed that the transformation of the existing capitalist order demands the abolition of the (gendered) hierarchy between ‘care’ – the activities of social reproduction that nurture individuals and sustain social bonds – and economic production. Key to answering what it might mean for care to become the central concern or core process of politics is imagining alternatives outside deeply ingrained and guarded conventions. It is in this imagining that artists have much to contribute, more so still because for many artists, maintaining a practice in neo-liberal contexts demands nurturing collectivities, sensitivities and resourcefulness – essential aspects of care. By focusing on recent Australian examples, this article examines what role artists can play in engaging with, interpreting or enacting care in practices – such as works of self-care, care for country and the environment, care for material culture and heritage, care for institutions and processes, and care for others – which might help forge an alternative ethics in the age of neo-liberalism. This exploration is driven by the need for a contemporary values revolution as we – as a species, as a planet – face existential threats including climate emergency and terminal inequality. Can art be a generative site to work towards alternative ethics that privilege trans-subjective relations predicated on attentiveness and tending, on spending time, on holding space?

Walking the Talk is a participatory artist residency that aimed to provide an alternative position in an academic conference. Artists Maree Clarke, wãni LeFrère and Dr Megan Evans were commissioned to create work in response to the themes of the 2018 AAANZ conference. Through performance, video, installation and exhibition, they disrupted the spaces of the conference and explored collapsed histories of the site at RMIT where the conference was held. Maree Clarke and Megan Evans created performance works that interrupted the conference workshops and lectures, and wãni LeFrère created work titled Investigation into Memory that activated a lecture/meeting room to dispel the notion that black bodies are only ever supposed to be in these spaces to be explored, studied, investigated, invisibilized and silenced.

The Bureau for the Organisation of Origins (BOO) is an ongoing, multidisciplinary and collaborative artistic project. It assumes the framework of a bureaucratic entity to provide a relational context for a range of creative gestures. The breadth of contributions facilitated by The BOO span crucial sociopolitical works of protest to banal expressions of an opaque bureaucracy. These are arranged in dialogue surrounding issues of group identity, race politics and socio-institutional policy in Australia with a global outlook. The BOO is a flexible and accommodating entity that incorporates individuated practices that traverse nations, institutions, disciplines, identities and genders. It serves to remind us that nation states are evolving, malleable governance projects that require constant consideration and critique. This critical scrutiny has ramifications for associated identities and is all part of our public service.

Ramble was a method for conference attendees to use mop-like-paintbrushes to write reactions to the conference on the pavement with water, making their ideas public.

Operating in contested fields often requires agile and lateral actions to keep a project moving. Pattern Interrupt was an autonomous, discursive mobile artwork, located outside and between the institutional surroundings of RMIT University. It speculated on the tactical actions needed to work creatively within Melbourne’s public realm via a playful discussion series, augmented through a card game that stimulated the sharing of experiences between AAANZ Conference delegates, drawing on their various roles in the field. The cards distilled my accumulated insights from provisional experiments, workarounds and shortfalls as a transdisciplinary practitioner working in public art. They harnessed the language and format of artist instructions such as Oblique Strategies (1975) by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt and early management games, such as Distant Early Warning (1969) by Marshall McLuhan. Operating at the intersection of publication and game, the deck of cards specifically challenged the linear format of a book or presentation as a way to distil findings from the field. Instead, it was a dynamic set of chance operations that could be reapplied within practice while remaining open to multiple interpretations. As a live laboratory, it articulated and activated knowledge/s drawn from the public realm. It offered participants an opportunity to find play in bureaucratic systems, and to work around intractable public art predicaments together.

In January 2017, settler Australian artist, Amy Spiers, launched a creative campaign to contest habitual associations at the site of Hanging Rock in Central Victoria with a white vanishing myth. Entitled #MirandaMustGo, the campaign’s objective was to provoke thought and unease about why the missing white schoolgirls of Joan Lindsay’s fictional novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock, prompted more attention and feeling in the general public than the actual losses of lives, land and culture experienced by Indigenous people in the region as a consequence of rapid and violent colonial occupation. The campaign incited significant media attention, substantial public debate and some reconsideration of the stories told at Hanging Rock. In this article, Spiers will describe how she conceptualized the artwork/campaign as a propositional counter-memorial action that attempted to conceive ways in which non-Indigenous Australians can acknowledge, and take responsibility for, the denial of colonization’s impact on Indigenous people. She will do so by discussing the critical methodology that underpinned this socially engaged artwork and continue by analysing the public reception and dissensus the campaign provoked. She will conclude in presenting some thoughts about what #MirandaMustGo produced: a rupture of the public secret of Australia’s violent colonial past, a marked shift to the discourse concerning Hanging Rock and an ongoing, unresolved agitation stimulated by Picnic at Hanging Rock’s persistent reproducibility.

In the wake of multiple global crises, fears of terrorism, rising nationalistic sentiments globally and the pervasive impacts of gender-based violence in public spaces, contemporary urban cities are permeated with surveillance, anxiety, fear and division. In this context, what role can (and should) public art be playing? This article explores this question in the context of Melbourne, a major metropolitan centre in Australia, which has been ruptured by the multiplying effects of highly publicized episodes of street violence, isolated terrorist attacks, high-profile murders and politically driven narratives about youth gangs. Looking at the work of female artists Maryann Talia Pau, Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan, and artists from African Australian communities including Ez Deng, Atong Atem and Asia Hassan, the article addresses questions about agency and marginalization for artists working in public space, and considers how marginalized community groups may face barriers to creating artworks that engage directly in mainstream public spaces.

Review of: Leap into Action: Critical Performative Pedagogies in Art and Design Education, Lee Campbell (ed.) (2020)

New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 290 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-4331-6640-2, h/bk, £64