The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
SHIFT: Critical Strategies was a two-day conference initiated by the Institute of Modern Art and held during April, 1992, to discuss the role, present and future of art criticism in Australia.
One of the most valuable things to come out of SHIFT was the correlation drawn between art criticism and critical art. This alignment was pointed to by the Institute of Modern Art's selection of speakers, most of whom are active across several of the fields of academia, art history, art practice, art education, freelance criticism and writing. There was a constant overlapping between issues which criticism must take into account and that which art practice must also foreground (such as gender, class, racial and cultural differences). Artist/writer Elizabeth Gertsakis problematised these admirable, issue-orientated, practices by stating that in adopting a critical stance upon a given issue (say that of multi-culturalism) one validates and legitimates the issue (and its associated vocabulary) no matter what the adopted position. The written and visual strategies of postmodernism—irony, parody, pastiche—are forms of mimicry which characterise the language of the colonised rather than that of the postcolonial. Her paper ended with a startling theory of “refusal” and “silence” originating from the power of “the inability to speak” which was a great slap in the face for Enlightenment Reason.
Sunil Gupta's keynote address described a bleak political climate for the black movement in the newly unified Europe. However, his definition of the artist as cultural activist was offered as a viable ethical position. "Cultural activist" is a term which could be applied to other artsworkers (including critics) who adopt the agendas of the black and gay movements (and presumably other politics of the margins). Once again... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline