Art Action

Case studies on Australian performance art with notes on the remediation of live art on screen.

Women’s Art Register 50th Anniversary
Opening Speech 6 March 2025.

Darcey Bella Arnold
. . . a page presents a painting that trembles on a line.

Notes to Vag Dens (2024) is a painting, a concrete poem and an historical narrative created through a visual dialogue. A canvas that pays homage to the page presents letters not words that speak to the feminine and salute the central core imagery of second wave feminism.

r e a:
belonging and becoming

Native, 2013/24, and Native (yugal/song), 2024, are complex and multilayered installations by r e a that invite and perform ideas of belonging and becoming in a poetic critique that prioritises the voice over the sign.

Hayley Arjona:
The F⊙⊙L.

Hayley Arjona presents a series of paintings and small sculptures that relate with one another within a looping narrative. The sculptures appear as characters that have stepped out of the paintings into a performative drama where fantasy, neurosis and horror reign.

Body of Opportunity:
Tania Ferrier

Tania Ferrier became famous for her designer range Angry Underwear in the late 1980s; shark bras and pant sets displaying teeth like an emblazoned vagina dentata ready to strike any intruder.

Lisa Anderson:
Dancing the end of days

Lisa Anderson’s exhibition Beguiling presents a poetic and performative investigation into the current climate catastrophe that humankind faces right here, right now.

Some Ancient
Wisdom

For Wendy Stavrianos, exploring a psychological connection between nature, body and mind has sometimes been political, but mostly philosophical.

Plural
Selves

In a time of cultural anxiety, David Rosetzky creates entrusted spaces by establishing relationships between himself and others, initiated through conversations he has with the people who appear in his works. He does this with a professional eye that speaks to art history and concepts such as modernism/post-modernism, gender difference and performativity while maintaining a minimal aesthetic that is inclusive and multi-dimensional, often involving collaborations with other artists and professionals. A Rosetzky performance, video, installation work might include dancers, choreographers, dramaturges, designers and actors, as well as people who have no experience in the arts at all.

Know
My Name

Know My Name opened during COVID-19 in the wake of the effective #MeToo movement inspired by the testimony of Chanel Miller, in which she began: “You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me...”

Art &
Feminism

Generations and Practice

Provocations

I have always been convinced that Australians don’t take their own art as seriously as they do art from elsewhere, from older, more established cultures and civilisations, the Greeks, Romans, Europeans and, more recently, North Americans.

MIKE PARR
Performance Ontology Revolt

First premise: For over two decades art criticism celebrated second-degree representation as the new cool. From the ‘anything goes’ decade of the 1980s to the conceptual remakes of the 2000s the incubator of the art world has remained clean, preserving the white cube of the modernist museum.

BODY
TIME

Rethinking the Radical Edge in Video Performance by Australian Women Artists.

MP STRIKES
HEART OF A NATION

Mike Parr: Foreign Looking strikes deep at the heart of the nation. Here, surrounded by parliament and government bureaucracies that have fashioned our detention centres and offshore processing procedures, the artist installs himself and a vast collection of his work in the National Gallery of Australia.

Marina Abramović:
Mindful Immateriality

At the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart Marina Abramović’s long awaited exhibition Private Archaeology (13 June–5 October 2015) showcases video documentation of her early works alongside more recent projects.

Photo/Video Language
and the Feminine

In Selected Works by Eugenia Raskopoulos. The experience of being outside of the language of the social sphere whilst simultaneously being inside the familial language has long haunted and inspired the work of Greek-Australian artist Eugenia Raskopoulos.

A Digital
Menace

Rosalind Krauss has termed the current era the ‘the post-medium age’ where the boundaries between disciplines is so blurred that the aesthetic qualities of the medium have been annihilated.

Ritual in Performance Art:
An Australian Context

I imagine grace / though I’m not / versed in scriptures / I hear you calling out names / one after another / saint or sinner / disciple one way or another . . .

Politics and Poetics:
The Medium as a Ghost

In the late 1990s scholars in the USA warned against the convergence of art and theory where practice appears to pitch itself to critical discourse or seeks to engage in that discourse. Rosalind Krauss has termed the current era the “the post-medium age in which the aesthetic option of the medium has been declared outmoded, cashiered, washed-up, finished”.

The Performance Art Document:
A Contextualized Study

In this paper I consider recent critical positions on performance art and its documentation. The experience of a live event. Jill Orr’s She had long golden hair (1980) is then used as a case study to explore the debates.

A Surrealist Impulse
In Contemporary Australian Photography

Pat Brassington's photographs began to receive critical attention in the 1980s when photographic theory and criticism was experiencing a renaissance. Her work spoke loudly in a postmodern culture that deconstructed notions of the original and authenticity, interrogated the epistemology of the gaze and the stereotypes of feminine sexuality....

Art History
in a Post Medium Age

In the year 2000 Bernard Smith published two articles in Art Monthly, In Defence of Art History (I and II), which raised important issues that had been brewing within the discipline for decades. These essays put forward a strong case to preserve the tradition of art history and to resist the push to subsume the discipline within cultural studies.

A Photographic Virus
in Contemporary Art

Walter Benjamin's thesis 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' originally published in 1936 was an important modernist text which was cited throughout the postmodern era and continues to be referred to by critics who are analysing the end of postmodernism (Krauss 1999a).

Bad Futures:
Performing The Obsolete Body

The end of this century is before us like an empty beach. The grand picture of the bad future unfolds. Boundary riders of the cosmos inscribe imperialistic lines of force across the universe and biocompatible technology colonizes the body's surface and interior.