Author Archives: brogan

I’m on the editorial panel for an upcoming conference, The Second International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art, Science and Culture (22-23 June 2012, Victorian College of the Arts (http://blogs.unsw.edu.au/tiic/), which aims to explore “the theme of … Continue reading →

Social Intersections is a new subject running this session exploring notions of art as social practice. Practical creative work is informed by an examination of contemporary relational aesthetic practice and a broad survey of various traditions informing contemporary efforts to … Continue reading →

So let’s begin with a very meagerly annotated reading list. Some of the annotations, I’m afraid, will be very brief indeed. I will make no effort to distinguish between different disciplines or even between critical and literary sources. Bakhtin, Mikhail … Continue reading →

Let’s also begin by listing four key issues and points of access: questioning the autonomy of art: this relates to the tradition of avant-garde efforts to re-integrate art within life, to question its notional autonomy (as theorised, for instance, within, … Continue reading →

So what is the everyday? Leaving aside the long tradition of theoretical inquiry into the nature of the everyday, there would seem to be a need for some simple effort at definition, whilst also, of course, acknowledging the notion’s resistance … Continue reading →

The theme of human ignorance and illusion: In his cosmological account of the universe and the Greek gods, Theogony (circa 700 BC), Hesiod writes of living as a shepherd in the mountains and learning the story of the world from … Continue reading →

I have already mentioned Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics.1 Strategies depend upon a sense of macro-level perspective – they are clearly delineated plans for action. On the contrary, tactics relate to the sphere of ground and micro-level decisions – … Continue reading →

Ridiculously humid tonight. No possibility for thought, but may manage some typing. Not really very pertinent, but I recall that Truman Capote once famously said of Jack Kerouac that he was not a writer but a typist. Here really just … Continue reading →

At the center of his short ‘story’, The Madness of the Day, Maurice Blanchot describes a minor occurrence: Outdoors, I had a brief vision: a few steps away from me, just at the corner of the street I was about … Continue reading →

Art is inevitably social. If traditional art revealed its social dimension through its integration within the social life of the community, modernist art reveals a more perverse social relation. In Adorno’s terms, the more that modernist art insists upon its … Continue reading →

The European avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the … Continue reading →

I recently spent a week walking in Southern New Zealand. I did two of the popular “Great Walks” – the Kepler and Routeburn tracks. They are fairly gentle, well-trodden tracks, involving 4 to 6 hours of walking each day and … Continue reading →

I draw a diagram of the notion of autonomous art, but not in clinical, neatly delineated manner. Instead, I depict ‘genius’ and the various enclosed spaces of canvas, frame, studio and gallery in messy, sketched terms. In this manner, I … Continue reading →

Some years ago I spent a couple of weeks driving around the South Island of New Zealand in a rented car. I was following the fictional journey of three ghosts. I won’t say anymore about the underlying concept since I … Continue reading →

I returned to go walking in the South Island recently. This time I made no effort to provide an aesthetic alibi for my actions. I was going to do the Kepler and Routeburn tracks. I bought myself a waterproof pack, … Continue reading →

And then, of course, I can’t resist taking the images into one of my old software drawing programs, Um, and seeing what happens – how pixel based abstraction mediates my already distanced meditation on the real.

Walk somewhere dull as though it were it interesting. Walk without any rules whatsoever. At the end of the walk have you discovered, despite yourself, a set of rules? Walk only uphill, or only downhill, or only on the flat. … Continue reading →

Run around a local field nine times early in the morning. Take a photo of the field from the same place at the end of each lap. The aim was to position my activity (running) as an ellipsis, as an … Continue reading →

Art → The Social Getting closer by: dumping the studio; dumping standard techniques and materials; shifting from observation to participation, from representation to event, from the rarefied space of autonomous art to the realm of lived experience. Yet this is … Continue reading →

ART PRODUCTIVE RELATIONS VERSION 1.0 PRODUCTION The artist ventures out into the world They observe or imagine They come up with an idea (or are invited to come up with or implement an existing idea) (They may apply for an … Continue reading →

Come rain or shine, come fair weather or foul, whether the wind gusts or nary a leaf stirs in the trees, still you keep walking; whether dawn switches out the streetlamps or dusk turns them on again, whether you are … Continue reading →

And Florent gazed at the vast markets now gradually emerging from the gloom, from the dreamland in which he had beheld them, stretching out their ranges of open palaces. Greenish-grey in hue, they looked more solid now, and even more … Continue reading →

No need to restrict our focus to contemporary art when thinking through art’s relation to the broader world. It is not only through rejecting mimesis, embracing the ephemeral event and modeling exemplary forms of social interaction that art comes to … Continue reading →

In my recent post “Run_1” (8th March 2012), I went on a nine lap run around a local field, taking a photo at the end of each lap. An obvious difficulty with this approach was that it interrupted the running … Continue reading →

Another moon interval sequence. Friday morning. Mown lawn. Much easier.