Issue 3: Critical Risk will be launched on Saturday 10th September, 3pm – 5:30pm at Griffith University Main Lecture Theatre (next to Griffith University Art Gallery), 226 Grey Street, South Bank.
Let us start with a familiar observation: our lives today are saturated in communications. So replete is our contemporary existence with mediated experiences - not only as users, but also as creators - that today, we live less with media, than in media. In terms of the discussion of contemporary art, the proliferation of voices in the era of digital abundance has been seen as a diluting, threatening, destabilising or remodelling force.
Bruno Latour, for one, expressed alarm at some of the dynamic developments in Criticalland over the Noughts. ‘Maybe’, he mused, ‘it is that critique has been miniaturized like computers have’. What once ‘took great effort, occupied huge rooms, cost a lot of sweat and money, for people like Nietzsche and Benjamin, can be had for nothing, much like the supercomputers of the 1950s’, which, Latour notes, ‘used to fill large halls and expend a vast amount of electricity and heat, but now are no bigger than a fingernail’.
What is the logic in bringing out a new publication when there is so much to read, view, consume… and to make? If criticism now is miniaturized, expanded, or both, what can we achieve by joining the conversation?
A second observation: for all of the supposed ‘freedoms’ of the time, ours seems an increasingly administered, conformist and managed existence. For all the rhetoric around emancipation and connectedness, circuses remain the order of the political day. At an individual level, technologically intensified personalised universes, an evisceration of serendipity, a ‘filter bubble’ of ‘likes’ and ‘algorhythmically likely to likes’. Little wonder, then, the apparently escalating allure of activities of voluntary risk: drugs, extreme sports, riots and criminal mayhem. In behavioural psychology, these practices are known as ‘edgework’, delivering primary pleasures described as self-actualizing or self-determining, authentically real and creatively satisfying. While putting together the thoughts collected in this issue, it was this desire to explore self-determination, authentic experience, and creative satisfaction that overcame, for us, the inherent dangers of oversaturation, failure to achieve objectives, superfluity, etc. Some of the pieces in this edition speak directly to the notion of ‘risk’. Simon Degroot’s essay locates the work of the self-employed artist in the business of entrepreneurialism, and explores the risks and gains that a mechanism of creative practice brings. Danni Zuvela draws attention to the creative climate for artists working in the repressive autocracy of the Republic of Iran. Taking the temperature of art in Brisbane today, Sarah Werkmeister talks to Sebastian Moody for some insight into the life of the artist-curator, whilst Anna Zammit considers implications for creative collaborations.
Others take us inside the inner workings of the mix of reward and risk that is the artist-run initiative: Alice Lang, sheds light on the dimensions of establishing a women-only artspace; Emily Lush reviews the Boxcopy success story; and, separately, Jugglers’ Peter Breen, and the collective Andthology, detail their respective approaches to group models challenging value systems. We celebrate The Wandering Room Art Prize with a profile of inaugural winner Erin Dunne.
Musicians offer their critical thoughts: Producer Lawrence English, provides wisdom for survival; Tim Fitzpatrick discusses the relational and residual praxis of cassette remixing; and Andrew McLellan shares conversations with key Indonesian contemporaries. Video practice surfaces in Julia Rodwell’s discussion of Project 103, and Liam O’Brien’s personal account of the state of society, an image of which graces this issue’s cover.
Other artists contribute creatively – Robin Fox offers visual sound representations, and Alex Cuffe gives us a diagrammatic explication of his conception of ‘New Primitivism’; David Nixon and Pope Alice with thoughtful poetics; and Dhana Merritt, with the first installment of an ongoing series of deep and meaningful conversations with other artists who share her initials. Presenting critical as creative, Akiko Yamasaki responds to the work of Lincoln Austin by asking questions about universal language; and Tess Maunder and Laura Brown discuss the multivalent possibilities of what it means to be critical in the cut-and-thrust of curatorial practice today.
For Latour, ‘the critical mind, if it is to renew itself and be relevant again…must turn to matters of concern’. For us, these ‘matters of concern’ amount to an embedded engagement with art as it transpires today; a ‘living things out’, as Irit Rogoff (2004) has described it. We feel, as Rogoff does - that ‘it is not possible to stand outside of the problematic and objectify it as a disinterested mode of learning’. Criticality is, therefore ‘a recognition that we may be fully armed with theoretical knowledge, we may be capable of the most sophisticated modes of analysis but we nevertheless are also living out the very conditions we are trying to analyse and come to terms with’.
We are all acutely aware of the superabundant media lives we all lead, and that there is more than enough to consume, digest and experience in all of our readers’ lives. Nonetheless, we hope that this collection of voices discussing, reviewing, analysing and expressing ideas about contemporary art, could help to co-create a space, however temporary, with you, the reader, in which to access different modes of inhabitation, different structures of feeling. It is in this spirit of shared discovery that we offer you our third edition.
