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VICTORIA LYNN
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Victoria Lynn is an independent curator and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. The author of three books and over 70 articles and catalogues, Victoria is the Visual Arts Curator for the Adelaide Festival, where she curated the inaugural Adelaide International, Apart, we are together in 2010. She is also the curator of Double Take, the Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media, 2009, and was the curator of turbulence, 3rd Auckland Triennial; Julie Rrap: Body Double, and Regarding Fear and Hope, each in 2007. Most recently, she co-curated The Trickster with Hyun Jeung Kim at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea. |
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Michael Taussig. What Color is the Sacred? Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009 In this inquiry into colour, Michael Taussig charts a carefully-argued path through the colonial history of colour, and avoids the dizzy, kitsch, almost theological appeal of colour as a subject. Tracing colour in the work of Goethe, Burroughs, Proust, Benjamin, Joseph Conrad, the ethnographer Malinowski, Virginia Wolf, and many others, Taussig reveals chromophobia in western society, arguing that we have become colourblind. Colour is transgressive – it can provide an alternative knowledge, be it drug induced, cultural, or sexual. Taussig’s interest in colour began with global warming. Colour is given life by light, and Taussig finds numerous examples of what he calls our ‘bodily unconscious’, the ‘poetic messaging’ between body and environment through colour. He ends with the connection between coal tar and indigo, and the transition of colour as a product of nature to a product of the factory. This is a wondrous book, typical of the lyrical prose of this unique writer.
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T.J. Demos. The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press, 2007. Through the prism of ‘exile,’ T. J. Demos makes a convincing set of links between Duchamp’s self exile and the exilic metaphors in his work. For example, Duchamp’s La boîte-en-valise, 1935-41, is interpreted by Demos as a portable museum created through the necessity of exile from France during WWII. This portable photographic archive of Duchamp’s own work offers both a counter to the ‘precarious subjectivity’ of the period, while simultaneously being a sign of dispersed experience. Comparing Duchamp’s exhibition designs with the work of André Malraux, Walter Benjamin, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, and Frederick Kiesler, the author traces notions of displacement and nomadism in Duchamp. Demos situates these arguments within a larger frame that advances Duchamp’s work as an allegory for “a relationality that resisted the essentialism of identity,” and, as such, an important precursor for contemporary debates on these subjects.
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Ann Stephen. mirror mirror then and now. Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2010. This intelligent exhibition is inspired by the work of the late Ian Burn, an influential critic, conceptual artist, and member of Art & Language, who worked in Australia and the UK during the 1960s to the early 1990s. The catalogue includes essays by Ann Stephen, Keith Broadfoot, and Andrew McNamara. Stephen considers the historical and contemporary manifestation of the ‘tricky endgames’ in the conceptual history of the mirror. Broadfoot discusses Burn’s work in relation to Leo Steinberg’s essay ‘Other Criteria,’ while McNamara writes about Burn’s late reflective pieces. There is a useful set of quotes from major figures in the exhibition and a mirror timeline that commences in 1954 with Robert Rauschenberg and ends with Gerhard Richter in 1981. The exhibition includes 22 artists, including historical pieces by Pistoletto, Morris, Hamilton, Demarco, and Art & Language, along with contemporary Australian artists such as Callum Morton, Mikala Dwyer, and Eugenia Raskopoulos.
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