Love[f]Art #03 | Elizabeth Pulie

Hosted by Amanda Love, the LoveArt podcast brings listeners into direct conversation with contemporary artists, extending the work of the independent art advisory, LoveArt, based in Sydney, New York and Athens.

The series draws from Love[f]Art, LoveArt’s ongoing program of intimate, in-conversation recordings with artists, originally conceived in 2020. Filmed in the most unlikely of settings—the guest powder room at the Love residence—the project strips things back to a one-to-one exchange, focusing on ideas, process and the conditions that shape contemporary practice.

This episode features Elizabeth Pulie, discussing her site-responsive work #110 (Crisis of the Contemporary) (2020). Developed as a written and audio-based work in collaboration with Tina Havelock Stevens, the piece takes the form of a speculative conference paper, reflecting on the proposition of an “end of art.”

Recorded in November 2020, at the time of the work’s installation, the conversation offers a direct insight into the thinking behind the piece, and the broader concerns that underpin her practice.

Further information on Elizabeth Pulie's practice can be found here.

Additional information, including the video version of this podcast, is available here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello and welcome to the third, and I have to report much less in ISO iteration of Love Arts Nano Project Space, Love Hurrah. Things seem to be finally opening up a little, virus-wise, and I'm pleased to say politically as well. I very soon might be able to come out of this bathroom. But there's always a need for some constraints, and here we multitask this tiny guest powder room into our very own white de boulees in the bathroom. We're aiming to counter the trend towards increasingly large and complex gallery and museum spaces by exploring the very small and one-to-one as a means of showcasing and experiencing the strength of current artistic expression and ideas, which are by necessity innovative and ingenious. I'm Amanda Love, and it's my great pleasure to introduce the latest site-specific installation of Sydney-based conceptual artist and intellectual, Elizabeth Pooley. It's titled 110 Crisis of the Contemporary, and as you can hear, comprises both sound text and a little volume. Elizabeth. Thank you. How are you? Very well, thanks. Great pleasure to um have you with us in the little bathroom again. Now, you've been exhibiting as an artist by conceptu by a practice of conceptual painting since I think 1988. But early on in your career, you've also co-directed front room, which was an artist-run space in the front room of your house. Very appropriate terms like this. And you you edited and published the magazine Lives of Artists, Lives of the Artists, before then establishing the Sydney Ladies Artists Club, which was around 2005. I thought maybe you could talk about this early period of your practice for a little bit before we then move on to the next phase.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Yeah, sure. Um I suppose from 1988 to around 2000, I I refer to that period as my decorative painting project, which was a conceptual painting project, where I was trying to make the statement that I was trying to make paintings that were purely decorative, both in content and in um function, to decorate a room, say that was their final um outcome. But I also uh tried to make the them look as decorative as possible within themselves to make the subject matter decoration, say.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

I actually have a tiny work of yours that I bought at an auction 4A when it was King Street. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Oh, okay. So was that a fundraiser work, perhaps?

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Yeah, it was it was it was years and years ago.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Yeah, it would be, yeah. Um so yeah, when that project came to a kind of a close in around around the year 2000, um, that's when I began what I refer to as my relational project, which was running the gallery, as you mentioned, um publishing and um editing an art magazine, Lives of the Artists, and having a artists' group, Sydney Ladies Artists Club. And with the relational projects, like many other artists before me, both in the current moment and say in the conceptual moment prior, I was trying to kind of frame artists' practices uh as their relations, say, or frame my practice as a kind of an organizational one that highlighted artists' networks and activities and relationships over the production of art objects.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

And was that that was at the time of the Palais de Tokyo, really, wasn't it? Um where it was uh that they were sort of very involved in that same kind of uh that relational aesthetics actually wasn't it.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Yeah, I think so. I might have done it a bit later than them. I'm not sure exactly when I it was Nicolas Bouriot theorized um relational aesthetics. Yeah, Rome sands, yeah. Yeah, I I can't remember when that was um written, but yeah, it I guess it was fairly uh simultaneous with that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

I have to say I remember being there at a um at a um when they were giving a a talk and um sort of kind of get infuriated where they were well because they were saying, well, you know, we're just more interested in like we're not interested in the artist's work, we're interested if they want to play the guitar, they can come and play the guitar. You know, it's how we close the exhibition, not how we act as curating, you know, what we do in locking up and everything. I could think, well, actually I've come to see the Right.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

You didn't appreciate that.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

Anyway, but we spent that's um a long time ago. But um, you know, but they were bold moves and um they've obviously, as we'll find out later in this in this discussion, we'll see how they've stood you in good stead. Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah. Um, and then um, of course, um you you did your PhD in 2016. Yes. Um which was, I mean, as someone who who always wants to do a PhD but hasn't yet done it, I I can only imagine what a watershed that must be in your classes.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Yeah, it really was um I did it at a at a time when I really needed to do it, I think. That's kind of the key to a PhD is um having a real question that actually exists for you already in relation to, especially with a practice-based PhD. So I I had it, I was at a sort of a fork in the road moment once my relational project was over because I had a I had my son in 2006, which was kind of a natural end to the relational work just because a lot of time is required for organizing people and as you know, so patients themselves and they no longer seem even mildly artistic. Right. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

As involved.

SPEAKER_01 6:33

Yeah, yeah. And so I was kind of searching for where to go next with my practice at that point, and so I suppose um the PhD coincided with that moment, and it made me ask questions that had kind of existed within my practice since the beginning about what art is or what it can be in the current moment. They're the kind of driving questions that I practice around. And so the PhD was a good experience to research that in theory and in practice.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

And um, we're going to take um a look at a couple of you know recent exhibitions in a minute, but how would you actually describe the PhD, you know, innocence? How did it affect your practice at the time and and you're just moving directly on from that?

SPEAKER_01 7:20

Um it freed my practice up because my um PhD project was to I I aimed to embody what I thought contemporary art is within the objects of my practice or my activities. And so I within my so my earlier uh decorative painting project was very narrow in that I wanted to just paint decoration. They had to be paintings and I copied the motifs usually. Whereas with my um PhD project, I wanted to expand my studio practice to include any media, just in order to reflect the fact that in the current moment art is open to all form, all media, or even a lack of form, like we described in relational projects where there's no actual object as such. So that, yeah, doing the PhD and having that as my very open objective in relation to the work just helped me to be make more sculptural works and start to use fibre and even video work and sound work like I've got installed there.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

I loved your work um on in um, you know, called On in the work on Hessian um at Sarah Cotius just recently. Um I think we might have some an image of that.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

Um I mean Hessian itself is a very everyday material. Um, but I mean, was there a political imperative to your use of fabric as well?

SPEAKER_01 8:55

There was initially. So the work on the right on the screen now is called Um The Female Form. It's one of three images that were a series called The Female Form 2. And I made them for a conference exhibition at Sydney College of the Arts while I was undertaking my PhD. And the theme of the conference was feminism and contemporary art. And so I wanted to I wanted to make work that I'd always resisted being seen to be making work that was concerned with feminism as a theme in any direct way. But I decided because I was opening my project up, I I wanted to allow themes like that in. And so I was just really wondering how to address feminism via art in a way that felt real to me. And so I decided to um settle on second-wave feminism as a movement that has had quite concrete outcomes for my generation. Umly because that that was something I could identify as a real thing. Or uh it's just clear in retrospect to look back at a movement and see what it is with hindsight, as opposed to being in third-wave feminism now and that having a lot of questions around what defines feminism today. So um yeah, the female form was just a homage to second wave feminism, and it didn't quite hit the mark of what I'd intended it to turn out, as it was still very much like painting on a surface. Whereas I'd wanted something a bit more like we're seeing here this um cape work with the daisies on it is more sculptural and enters the space more. And so that that's where this work started. And the Hessian was just a useful, very cheap material that seemed to me to refer to second-wave feminism in that it uh had a craft aesthetic that we might associate with that time.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

And then um, and then you there was also the much I would say more conceptual exhibition, which was Bauhouse Now, which I think was curated by Anne Stevenson at the Buxton Contemporary. Um, a very exhaust, it wasn't a show that included, well, pretty well everything. And uh there you um did a collaboration.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Um, it was a it was just uh it was it wasn't a collaboration, it was just my own work. This these five works I made, um, I researched bow uh weavers that migrated, women that migrated to Australia after the war who were weavers and they'd either been trained at the Bauhaus or were influenced by Bauhaus principles from the weaving department in the Bauhaus. And then I um, having researched those women's work at various archives, I um, with the help of an Australia Council grant, I made these four weavings um as a response, I suppose, and tried to capture a kind of everyday idea of weaving as because what I was looking at when I was researching the archives were a lot of swatches or designs for weavings or sections of weavings. And so I wanted to reproduce that kind of idea of the swatch, I suppose, or the sample of a of a piece of weaving that might go on to be a much bigger piece of uh fabric.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

And and are these prototypes in essence for you? I mean, have you got the idea that they might go on for you to be much bigger works?

SPEAKER_01 12:40

Yeah, I initially wanted actually a really big work and it didn't tend it didn't eventuate. So I guess they could be a prototype for a much bigger weaving. And I also was reusing old fibre that I had around the house. Um, like I ripped up sheets into strips and tablecloths and other things. I wanted to have a kind of an ecological idea, which is another, I think, Bauhaus principle, perhaps. So, but the the one in the front, uh, which it remains on the loom. Um, I left that I used that same loom. It's a clothes rack I found at Artspace, whereas uh I was a resident of their one-year studio program.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Oh, yeah, for Artspace. We love Artspace, and again, we love my studio program. Good.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

Very instrumental, very supportive program. So that's where all these works were made, as well as quite a lot more. But um, this one that stayed on the loom seemed to uh achieve the kind of sculptural effect that I'd been looking for for quite a a while. Since make painting those big Hessian banners, I finally felt that I had a sculptural form that was freestanding and not on the wall anymore. So um this it was it took a few years to get here, but this felt like the most successful attempt at opening my practice up away from painting.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

So yeah, brilliant. I mean, it's it must have been terribly hard to open your practice away from painting because it was such a brilliant painter. I mean, you know, just naturally a brilliant painter. And um, so I can understand the quest in a way to to or act maybe you should call it actively forget that so you can discover other things that you obviously will were helping you. But then of course, you had um you were in the NCA for the national, which is arguably New South Wales' most important biennial survey exhibition. Um that was a pretty big undertaking. Were you what what what what did you feel about your work there?

SPEAKER_01 14:42

So initially I was only going to include the cape, which is on the right hand side, that black kind of triangular work. I made that, I was gonna make that a lot larger. It was meant to drape along the floor. So again, so I think this was around 2013. I'm not sure. Or no, it was later than later. No, no, later, yeah. So even here, still, this is pr prior, pre-the bauhouse work. Even here, I still wasn't able to um make a cape that a three-dimensional work, it was still on the wall, despite having texture and textural elements in it.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Um just because you didn't think about it, you didn't think of it, or because you couldn't physically do it?

SPEAKER_01 15:29

I mean, couldn't physically do it. It was so infuriating. I thought it would be a simple matter to make sculptural works, but it's amazing, like you were saying, how ingrained painting was within my whole mindset. So, you know, it was really it's been very frustrating, but as a result of that not turning out to be as big and monumental as I'd planned it to be, we included these other two works from um other shows that I'd done. So this was more like a mini sort of review of my fibre works, I suppose, which um yeah, it was different to the original intention.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

I mean, of course, um all of this was developing in in parallel with that now the much more uh less sculpturable, but much more discursive in theoretical practice, which has ultimately led to your latest work here, 110 Crisis of Contemporary Art, the Crisis of the Contemporary, 2020, uh, which refers directly to the challenge uh of conducting a critical practice as an artist in the current moment, as well as the difficulties encountered in defining or theorizing that which is known as contemporary art. And just for people who can't see it that well because the way it's positioned here, um we do we have a clip, I think, that we'll play either now or a bit later. Um, can you just describe the work um as it is here and how you came to make it in the course of um because at the core I feel that the the way you came to make it itself speaks to the contemporary moment very much, which is essential in your work itself.

SPEAKER_01 17:17

So I suppose with the PhD I developed a discursive or theoretical practice alongside my studio practice, and I and I considered them of equal weight. I wanted the papers that I wrote and presented at conferences to be viewed as my art as much as the objects of my studio production. And I continue that double practice today of writing and presenting papers and hopefully publishing papers while I have a uh studio practice alongside it. So I'm trying to come uh bring both those things together increasingly, which is what the work in your bathroom is attempting to do. So, what I've made for you is it's a sound work. So when you enter the space, you don't see anything in particular. Um, but it's it develops from a work I made for an exhibition at Sarah Cotia's last year called Contemporary Recalcitrance, which was curated by James Gatt, where I showed um a video of footage I made on my I'd just been collecting footage on my mobile phone when I went to the bathroom at various public toilets at say opening events or parking. I don't know. I just it just occurred to me to make that. So I was filming not myself, I'd filmed what I was looking at as I was urinating on these toilets. So it was basically the floor and the stall door or whatever corner I was looking at, just a still image with the audio of whatever was around. Obviously, sound of urinating plus other ambient noise. And that's what I presented for contemporary recalcitrance. And as a conceptual sort of a work, the idea was that it would only be shown there and it was it's not recorded anywhere else. So if you didn't see that exhibition, then you don't no one sees that work, it's gone now. Um, but James was keen that I developed that work, I suppose. So I decided for your show to um rather I I didn't want to re-show that work just for the very reason that the idea was that it disappeared once it was over. So I thought I'd use the sound element, which seemed to suit the context of the, you know. I think Love Part is is is the perfect venue for this work. It is, yeah, yeah. It seemed to make sense. But then at the same time, um I wanted to present a kind of a scholarly paper to sort of contrast, I guess to sort of in a way um create a bit of a paradox of a serious take on contemporary art, like analysing it in a very theoretical way, but to kind of contradict that with a degraded soundtrack, I suppose, or of a private moment that shouldn't be heard by other people, perhaps. Um so I in the other sound element going over the top of the sound of me going to the bathroom is me reading this paper out, which is called Crisis of the Contemporary, The End of Art. And I wrote this paper for a conference that was cancelled this year in Belgium due to the pandemic. Um, and I I also thought it just felt appropriate to, I don't know, sort of not make fun of, but somehow yeah, criticize art's theorization itself by comparing theory with a light-hearted say sound work.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

So I mean, I don't know if it's great. We may have to pause, mind you, if we keep the sound on and I'm sitting here and I'm literally I oh yeah. Does it have a certain effect? It's trying to have a long penalty, and I mean it is but um well I mean and I think you have achieved that in the text. I mean, I I feel from reading the text, which I have to say is is a it's a riotous and deadly uh it was deadly serious, you know, and sometimes humor can be deadly serious. Um but through the his the canons of sort of modern and contemporary art theory, I did when I did my master's, Terry Smith was my um supervisor. And I felt like I was kind of backing the Power Institute. I mean delightful so it was great mental gymnastics. And I mean, I I feel from reading the text that while your work actively kind of contemplates the the crisis and attempts and to embody art, what art is right now, you Really believe that perhaps sort of the defining characteristics of artwork in the post-conceptual era is that they can't, in fact, embody their definition. I don't want to skip to the end, um, too much I just sort of in terms of but so just so we can get our heads around this sort of seeming non sequitur, can you I mean expand on this a bit? I mean, is it the depth of art long live art or more or long live art, art is dead, or you know, what can we expect as we just wove it we're weighed with it and we work through the paper? I guess it's a big thing to explain, but I I suppose the end of art happen is a we don't have to explain it fully because we can work through it and unpick it, and it does need unpicking. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Yeah, yeah. It's um so I I came up with the feeling, it was when I was proposing my PhD um thesis or research that I felt within my practice that we were at a certain end of art, and that I felt that it was impossible as a result. So my decorative painting project was meant to be a kind of a critique of art because I was saying art was decoration. I was trying to locate art in what is not art, supposedly. But it kind of failed that project because it turns out decoration can be art because everyone was happy to show my decorative paintings in serious high art contexts.

SPEAKER_00 23:25

So if I had people get the ironic distance that you were assuming.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

Yeah, I suppose so. So it was yeah, it was disappointing to me that I wasn't able to make a radical questioning practice. There was no radicality to that project at all. So it I just felt this kind of dead end, you know, like, well, what do you make? What do you do? What is this feeling that I have that of a kind of a nihilism of like there's nowhere else to go? The modernist progression of art that criticized art through art. So, say the monochrome was a criticism of the idea that we need an image in an artwork. And then, as I say in the paper, ending with the conceptual moment where they tried to locate art within real life or the everyday, which is not art, but then now we are ready to accept in the contemporary moment that everyday situations can be art or objects. So um that's the feeling I had like where do we go from here? What are we doing? And when I started to look into it, I saw that the idea I just I suppose I um I wanted to embody the idea of the end of art with my work. And so I theorized that in all my papers that the theme, the common theme is this end of art idea. So this crisis of the contemporary, I was trying to outline contemporary art as a crisis, which is kind of a critique in a way.

SPEAKER_00 24:52

I don't want to get to the end of art too quickly because we've got the end of the end to go to. But I want to unpick a bit of the paper first because it is fascinating and it is a, you know, it is a a great um encapsulation of art theory of the last, you know, 40 or 50 years, right up to now, I I think. Um but and so you do um make the point in in the paper that your thesis is made only in relation to the Western art historical view that sees contemporary art as coming after the modern. So just so I can uh understand and explain, like to the extent that Western art and even Western art's history has now incorporated so many elements that its nascent and modern period excluded, including, you know, other than male genders, race, non-Western, and even non-contemporary art, is that not a contemporary mode that is it that itself overcomes or circumvents the crisis as it's defined? Or is it is it that in the face of this in the face of this definition, all these inclusions you see is the very devolution of the modern that robs the contemporary art of the status of its status as art that in its crisis mode?

SPEAKER_01 26:21

I I suppose I see this opening out of art from being saying exclusively Western male-dominated, I suppose, concern. So that at the moment there's uh the idea that there isn't just Western modernism, there are multiple modernisms. Um there's kind of I I suppose this all these um inclusions within art of the current moment to me seem like a logical outcome of I I I feel like I can only talk about Western modernism because that's my tradition and I don't feel um at all authorized to speak for other cultures. So that's why I tend to rev restrict my argument to say a European um American Western modernism. So, but to me, modern that even that modernism itself, so say Picasso looking to African sculpture as an inspiration, or many modern artists uh, you know, you could even say they appropriated or stole art forms from other cultures, I don't know, woodblock prints or a variety of non-Western cultural forms that the current moments embrace of that multitude of art forms and the voices of of the other women or non-Western artists just seems like a logical outcome to me of that modern development. And so it's it is a bit risky then to speak about contemporary art as the end of art because it's it could be seen as a critique of that opening up.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

That's what I yeah, yeah, exactly. You do deal with that later on in the paper. I mean, but and that's the thing about modernism, isn't it? I mean, especially if you're constructing yourself against it and and defining art in modernist terms. I mean, like it's only Greenberg and Danto that say they got it right and modernist, you know, and half of, you know, a lot of contemporary, a lot of art history and art historians. But yeah, I mean it's it's kind of like arguing about your imaginary friend, isn't it? Whether the you know only essential art is art, and that I mean, you could simply define this crisis as a modernist construct which keeps modernism alive, which contemporary practice has kind of rendered irrelevant just by being ongoing in the face of all the definitions, including that of the modern.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

So are you you are you talking about contemporary art as a separate concern to the modern then?

SPEAKER_00 29:05

Or just the fact of art as it plays out in the moment is being carried on, and you it it is going on thinking quite happily it's art, and we'll get back to other reasons that you propose why, you know, what might be the problems with that, but just the fact that it's not self-critic, it doesn't have those three, it's not self-critical, doesn't embody its own form in a reductionist sense. Yeah. And I can't remember what it's like. You know, you've got that historical period, um, as you say, bookended by Hegel and and and Arthur Danto, and you know, that is just uh one very narrow view by two very similar men of art. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:56

That's true. I suppose, well, I as a practitioner, the way I view it, I know it is problematic that it's such a Western male-dominated uh story, perhaps. Um, but in a simple way, I I can see a very clear historical development that did take place in the sense that when Hegel was writing in the late 19th century, art pretty much had to be a picture of something or a sculpture of a a recognizable form. Yeah. Whereas now it can be anything. And so there has been a change from pre-modern to post-modern times in terms of form, you know, in terms of what's allowed within the definition of art. So now this is allowed, you know, of all of whatever is allowed. At one point that would not, it would have been rejected. I mean, obviously it's uh it would have been laughed at. So what is that? That's the development, that actual concrete change in what is allowed as art is is my tradition, I suppose, and it's what I'm trying to grapple with.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

That's right, because that is predicated, that is predicated, isn't it, on institutional acceptance. I mean, one of the terms I was always taught, even at school, was you know, well, art is something made by artists and shown in an art museum. And um, and you know, who was it? Was it Alpine Capro who said that um a cow in a museum is a work of art, you know, a cow in a paddock's a cow? I mean I think it was yeah, I think it was him. Um that that and and again you refer to that a bit later as sort of the contemporary trap. Um but yeah, but I suppose how do you explain art not existing if it's in all these art museums, you know, happily?

SPEAKER_01 31:55

Oh, okay. In the current moment, how do I explain a sense that it's modern. Yeah. So art continues to exist, definitely, and I suppose there is a sense that the end of art actually, and this is what I try to embody in my practice, is that the end of art paradoxically is actually a burgeoning of art. I think it's safe to say there's perhaps more art now than there ever has been, or inst art institutions. It's not a threaten. Yeah. So that's a contradiction for sure within the whole end of art thesis. And and there is a sense, uh a wider idea, say, philosophical idea that at that ends represent beginnings, in fact, that it's something kind of has to end for it for a new thing to um emerge. So I don't think it counters the end of art thesis as such to point out to to s to realise that that that art still exists. It's more that it's more interesting to me to be able to somehow inhabit that paradox or that contradiction. Of course, the dematerialization of art is a big is core to that. Yeah, it is in the conceptual moment. Yeah. Yeah. It's that's important. Sorry. Keep going, sorry. Uh yeah, the dematerialization of art, what in the conceptual moment was I guess there was an an anti-ashetic view of art, which is is what I view the modernist progression as having been is an a series of attacks on what art is. It's you know no longer a gilded frame around a landscape or a portrait. It's that was an attack by the modern artist that questioned that. So it's an anti and a negative thing. And and art's dematerialization in conceptual art was another negative thing in a way, because it tried to take art away from the institution, out of the galleries, into the world. So it was a set a movement towards freeing art from the institution. And now we're back into a rematerialized state in a way where art, even non-material artworks, are read in terms of their materiality often. So in the current moment, that's kind of a, I don't know if it's a dilemma. For me, it's kind of a dilemma.

SPEAKER_00 34:21

Well, I have to say, um, you know, even with the text works and uh describing the works here, it's it's the text of Liz's um presentation that we've put um just on the bathroom cabinet here. Um and I must say we were very careful to put that in a perfect rectangle.

unknown 34:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:42

So it had a kind of sculptural form that you could also read as an object. Sorry, Liz. Yeah, it's I know it had you right. I get happy to leave it as formless. But uh we, you know, and so it even it has a form because you do make the point that that um modernist concept of of of embodying the concept in the art can now only be done by text. Um you you say that is really the purest form of that. To embody sorry, what did what did you say? He says that it you know, in the philosophical in the modernist era, um, I think it was something like the philosophical definition of art was the project of modern artists via them body that concept in their in the form of their artwork, whereas now that can only be done by text.

SPEAKER_01 35:30

In words, yeah. So a discursive, which that emerged in the conceptual era as well, was the idea of art as philosophy or art as discursive, say, with um well, many artists of that time. And so that's how I'm, I guess, that's that's the only place I can see it's possible for me to embody within my work a sense of reflection on what art is or critique of what art is is through my words, so which is why it's so important that I have that discursive practice alongside the um physical practice.

SPEAKER_00 36:03

So yeah, what do you say of like a practice of say Tina Sigal, for instance?

SPEAKER_01 36:09

I just say it's a really conceptual practice, you know, a lot of practices today that appear dematerialized of are kind of oh I think all practices today, even mine, it's that we're rehashing often conceptual style style, the style of conceptual art. So we're kind of going back into conceptual art and looking at all the um forms and possibilities of that and un and rehashing it.

SPEAKER_00 36:40

I think it's almost like what was taken for granted in conceptual art. It's almost looking at what was taken for granted and glossed over in the original frawl concept. You know, say, oh hey, but we didn't miss it, but um, it was actually that in those forms.

SPEAKER_01 36:57

And yeah, because sometimes people argue that, well, what about internet art or digital art? Isn't that a new form or isn't that a critical form of what art was? But I still see that as having those forms as having arisen in the conceptual moment. I mean, the conceptual moment is a huge moment and could be seen to accommodate lots of different practices, like even pattern and decoration movement or or um electronic art. So, you know, it's all names and it's hard to rein things in. But to me, conceptual art has accounted for internet art in a way as a form.

SPEAKER_00 37:39

Totally. And um I I want to move on now to sort of the positive and prescriptive part of your presentation. But first, maybe because we haven't sort of just we we've been talking about modernism, we haven't actually discussed your definition or you know, a definition of contemporary, that slippery, slippery term. Um so for the purposes of this discussion as it we're talking about your presentation, what is the idea of the contemporary that you've settled on, if any?

SPEAKER_01 38:10

Oh, okay. So this, yeah, if I so with my thesis, my PhD thesis, I argue for a definition of contemporary art as the end of art. Um, in contrast to multiple other definitions that have been reached for by theorists such as Terry Smith, who you mentioned, and Peter Osborne and Ivan Burio with his relational art thesis or how Foster, how Foster's questionnaire on the contemporary, where they're aiming to sort of narrow contemporary art down to one definition in order to give it a sense of significance or gravity or theory. But where I critique those attempts at defining contemporary art is that they, by trying to remain faithful to the openness of contemporary art, to its multitude of forms and instances and voices, that they they don't want to lose that um within their definition, so they almost can't narrow it down G1 things. So they end up kind of with a description of it, in my view.

unknown 39:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:15

And yeah, it is was it, I was just going to say, it is what it is. Um institutional and curatorial affirmation.

SPEAKER_01 39:24

It is what it is.

SPEAKER_00 39:26

Anyway, yeah. But um, now yeah, yeah, after the positive, we're going the pocket here. So there is the positive, because then I think it's the positive. Um, because then you go on to outline how this very situation offers hope and how the sense of crisis itself may prove to be the saviour of contemporary art, and in fact, not the end of art, but the end of the end of art. Well, in the sense that it's the end of the very modernist project, which as we've said was bookended by Hegel and Danto, which is now over, leaving what leaving to remain only art.

SPEAKER_01 40:05

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and I suppose that's that's a that's the popular view, perhaps, is that we're released from the modern. It seemed to be a kind of a freedom now that art can be anything or and practiced by anybody. But I suppose I value the critical project of Western modernism, and I, as a practitioner, want to grapple with that end and see where it went and see just to try to practice in relation to it rather than to a sense of it having ended. It just feels like it it's a bit of a brain twister. Certainly is. To me, that's really interesting. Sorry? Yeah, it's it is not right, yeah. It's a brain twister. So, and that's what attracts me to it is like how do we how do we practice in relation to that? When I feel that the objects of my practice had no real radical significance at all, when that feels impossible now, what are we doing? Are we is it just a lot of instances of self-expression? Or and and but then why do we value certain people's self-expression over others? Why don't we look at the production of work that's submitted to the Royal Easter show in Sydney every year? Why is that not valued by major cultural institutions? I mean, in that if we're going to really open up art in the way that the current moment tends to prescribe or describe or aim for, to me, it should be, it should go all the way, like how in the way the manner the conceptual artists strove to achieve, that art is literally in the everyday, that we we value um housekeeping as art, you know, and any activity, say. And it we haven't, that hasn't eventuated. That's the failure of the conceptual moment. So it does leave a question mark for me over what is art now? Why do we value certain instances of self-expression over others and revere them and build these massive uh, you know, galleries that are like sorry, global, the global art world that is totally um, you know, in in bigger than ever and now and all whatever, and they're forming case.

SPEAKER_00 42:23

I mean, that's why Royal Easter show exhibits aren't regarded as high art. And I mean, I think there are many, I can I can make arguments for other reasons. I don't think I think intent has a lot to um has a lot to do with it as well as you know, the criticality and the different kind of and it's different forms that are set as what are even though we say art to be anything, it actually can't be anything because it's not everything yet. Um and it could that you know that is sort of your radical, um, extreme modernist um.

SPEAKER_01 42:57

It's only only because I want to remain faithful to the conceptual project, you know, I don't want it to be brushed over and forgotten. I'm a bit like, oh, that's annoying, you know. I mean, I know we can't go back there.

SPEAKER_00 43:09

I know it failed, but I you want that idolatry, that excitement and that engagement with I the idea of something that is not the institution and not automatically institutionally sanctioned. So I feel that I'm sort of reminded of that um Baldacino quote, um, which which I think went along the lines of something like um for art to realize itself, for art to realize itself, it must talk itself out of existence. Um so I don't think we've quite done that now, but it's probably a moment to to to finish on. But look, it's in a re it's a riveting essay and presentation, right? And it is a total mind, mind um, you know, I'm not gonna say the word on being a but uh it's a wonderful one and and And um and it's been a blast to have it in this space, I have to say. And um, I just want to say thank you very much and good night, and you know, forward to seeing you soon. We'll look forward to seeing the next iteration of what we'll afford watching this space, literally.

SPEAKER_01 44:20

Thanks, Samantha. Thanks for the opportunity to make the work as well. It was really satisfying. Great pleasure. I think soon. Bye.