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During his tenure as director of the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Robert Leonard has worked hard to lift the international profile of the organisation with a series of exhibitions which have showcased the sharper exponents of contemporary art practice. At the same time he has not entirely neglected Brisbane’s vibrant art scene, for has collaborated with local talent on a number of shows and recently co-curated the two-part exhibition ‘The Same River Twice’ with young Queensland Art Gallery curator Angela Goddard.
As the title suggests, ‘The Same River Twice’ was about revisiting and replaying the past, and the participating artists used various media to explore such activities. They raised questions about how the media records and recreates history, and how the individual understands the past with an imprecise instrument known as memory. This approach is especially pertinent today given the rise of a new Y generation that understands history as the evolution of commodity styles in a timeless consumer paradise. However, now that neo-Liberalism has been revealed as a scam, the concomitant collapse of the markets has left the masses without a guiding ideology to get them through the next quarter century. In this time one may well ask: how do we build a new ethics without state sponsored greed, corporate irresponsibility, and tax-free havens?
Such crises of confidence not only make for a fearful future but also inspire pressing re-examinations of the past. This may include a search for the causes of a contemporary malaise, recourse to nostalgia and escapist fantasy, or interrogations into the processes and nature of history itself. A rash of recent art exhibitions has focussed on the latter by reappraising our understanding of history... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline