1,721,053 research outputs found
Introduction
Full text linkThis Special Issue of the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art follows a year
after the symposium titled War, Art and Visual Culture: Sydney. The symposium
held at the SH Ervin Gallery in Sydney on Monday 25 February 2019 set out to
explore current international thinking on the art and visual culture of war, conflict,
terror and political violence. Both this special issue, the Sydney symposium, and
the symposia in London and Los Angeles that followed later in the year, are an
important part of Art in Conflict, a three-year ARC Linkage project led by Curtin
University, collaborating with University of Melbourne, UNSW Art & Design and
University of Manchester, and partnering with the Australian War Memorial and
the National Trust (NSW). The project aims to consider the politics of addressing
war in contemporary art and visual culture, particularly the potential for conflicts,
compromises and complicity. One of the major outcomes is an exhibition of recent
contemporary war art, with curation led by the Australian War Memorial’s
Anthea Gunn. We (Messham-Muir and Cvoro) are co authoring a book on art and
war, scheduled for publication in 2021, twenty years after 9/11
Crossing the Wire: Western Contemporary War Art in the Interbellum
Full text linkThis article for the popular print and online arts magazine, Di'Van reflects on the current state of Western contemporary war art, nearing the conclusion of the Art in Conflict ARC Linkage led by the author, Kit Messham-Muir. It particularly reflects upon two decades of western war art surrounding the conflicts in the American-led 'War on Terror', which effectively came to its conclusion with America's abandonment of Afghanistan on 30 August 2021. Western contemporary war art has a long tradition of making creative works that comment on conflicts, largely conveying the perspectives of the western troops. Indeed, this is the primary remit of most official war artist schemes in nations such as Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. This article considers the conspicuous absence of local voices, from within those war zones, in the sub-genre of contemporary war art. This article responds to criticisms by Muhub Esmat in an earlier issue of Di'Van, that western war art aims to only evoke a “facile compassion”. It takes up Esmat's analysis of the Afghan artist Aziz Hazara, who works between Kabul and Ghent, particularly discussing his five-channel video installation Bow Echo (2019), which was shown at John Curtin Gallery, Perth, shortly following the publication of this article. This article argues that sometimes western war artists do succeeding in 'crossing the wire' of the protected western bubble of military, which tends to skew our perspectives of how we view and understand the conflicts our troops engage in. It ends with a consideration of the fresh and raw war art currently coming out of the war in Ukraine, in works such as those by the Ukrainian artist who goes by the pseudonym 'Ave'
Impossible Empathy: The Non-Documentary War Art of Shaun Gladwell
No full textShaun Gladwell is an Australian video installation artist whose practice is concerned with the bodily gesture and motion. In 2009, Gladwell was appointed an Official War Artist by the Australian War Memorial, and was sent to Afghanistan and the Middle East to create a body of work about the frontline experiences of Australian Defence Force personnel. This article examines the particular approach of Gladwell’s Official War Artist works. Other contemporary Australian artists dealing with war, such as Ben Quilty, George Gittoes and Wendy Sharp, tend to adopt a subjective documentary approach to war’s narratives of trauma, concentrating on weighty themes such as death, loss, and post-traumatic stress. In contrast,Gladwell’s war art actively resists both subjectivity and documentary. Unlike Quilty’s “humanist approach”, Gladwell avoids the political and emotional baggage inherent in images of war. Drawing from theorists Charles Green, Nicholas Croggon and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who argue that Gladwell’s video works actively resist the narrative tendencies of the moving image, this paper suggests that Gladwell consciously resists the documentary inclinations of photographic and video media. His work also avoids narrative and, ultimately, resists articulating any subjective positionality, either his own or that of the soldiers he portrays
Kit Messham-Muir: ’Claudia Parducci: The Space Between Us’, 2015
No full textContemporary artist Claudia Parducci spent two years developing a body of work for an exhibition called The Space Between Us, which opens in Ochi Projects, Los Angeles in January 2016. This documentary looks at the development of her ideas and work leading up to the exhibition. Dr Kit Messham-Muir The University of Newcastl
Interview with Ian Burns, artist, New York, 3 October 2012
No full textIan Burns is an Australian-American artist, who went from Newcastle in Australia to New York to study, and ended up staying. He now has a significant international art practice. Much of his work has a particular humour to it as well as a more serious social and political dimension. I met with Ian in his studio in Long Island City, New York, where we discussed his practice and the impact of media and technology on contemporary visual culture
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