Contemporary Art 101

How did a urinal become one of the most influential artworks in art history?
Learn about what makes contemporary art so controversial and valuable, and why a five-year old couldn’t make that. This six-week course led by College of Fine Arts lecturer Tim Gregory, equips you with the knowledge and skills to explore, interpret and appreciate contemporary art.


Course Outline Overview:
Contemporary Art 101 assumes no prior knowledge of art. The goal of the course is to show you that contemporary art is simply a creative way of engaging politically, socially and emotionally with the world. It’s exciting, dangerous, and at times heartbreakingly beautiful, but most of all it makes us think. It will present contemporary art by contextualising it in the world that produced it – only then can we appreciate its power. Contemporary art forces us not to accept the way things appear, it encourages us to be open, have fun and play with new ideas. This course will be taught in the same spirit, where the goal is not to find answers but to experience as many different and challenging ideas as possible.


Week One: Thursday 28 June
Modernist Zombies: Sunflowers that just never die.
This week will start with an introduction and overview of the course structure. It will be a chance for the group to get to know the lecturer and each other. After an informal introduction we will examine some of the key ideas of Modernism. Modernism (circa. 1850–1950) continues to have a large impact on contemporary art. This lecture will give an overview to some of the main Modernist beliefs in beauty, truth, technology, originality and universalism which are making a comeback in contemporary art. We will examine art from China, Russia, Iran and Australia to see how Modernism has been reborn far away from its original roots in Paris. Why has Modernism returned? What does it tell us about the shape of contemporary art in the 21st century? Is it just history repeating itself?


Week Two: Thursday 5 July
Postmodern Legacies: How many postmodernists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Blaming Post-Modernism for the world’s ills has become de rigueur in contemporary politics. Everyone seems to hate Post-Modernism yet few can offer a definition of it; this lecture will try and revive Post-Modernism and demonstrate its massive influence on contemporary art. Far from being dry and dense, Post-Modernism was a vibrant attempt to come to grips with a Western world overrun by consumerism. In a world where we wanted fast food and fast cars how could art compete? Postmodern artists came up with a variety of strategies to question whether television, malls and 2.3 children were the only pathway to happiness. Along the way, via urinals, Marilyn Monroe and giant hamburgers, Post-Modernism radically shifted the boundaries of art. Contemporary art could not exist without the battles Postmodernists fought and won. This week we will go through some of these battles, showing how Pop Art, conceptual art, feminist and post-colonial art stood up to power and showed a very different truth about the world we lived in.


Week Three: Thursday 12 July
Globalisation: The story of the present absentee.
We tend to think of globalisation in economic and political terms, however it has also been the primary force shaping the art world since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Globalisation has led to the explosion of the art market. Art fairs and biennales spread like swine flu around the globe. Artists have become pop stars. We expect artists to be hip, rebellious and fashionable. Culture seemed to be moving towards a model of similarities rather than differences and contemporary art started to smell a lot like fast food. However this is far from the complete story. Art’s pop stars are merely the most visible effect of the globalisation of art. Under this façade there are artists producing works that challenge the myths of total community and total connectivity that globalisation promises. This lecture will focus on artists who have cut through the spin of globalisation and revealed the true nature of the world we live in. At its best, globalisation has allowed new, marginalised and unusual voices to infiltrate our comfortable lives. This lecture will tune into some of these new voices.


Week Four: Thursday 19 July
New Media Art: Is the best contemporary art on YouTube?
Can you leave the house without your mobile phone? How long can you go without checking your email before you start to get anxious? To be alive today means to be plugged into the digital world. Life without our iPhone seems like life without an arm. Contemporary art has been quick to respond with a new genre popping up — new media art. New media art evolves, morphs, samples, hacks and reacts to the audience and environment around it. It has opened up new possibilities of interaction and speed that allows art to respond in real time. New audiences and artists, who have never seen the inside of a gallery, are creatively tinkering with the limits of technology to produce this new face of culture. Artist can be found producing works in Second Life, or creating new versions of Super Mario. Some artists have traded the artist’s studio for the science lab and are tinkering with DNA to produce art that lives and breathes. New media art is not just a new toolbox for artists, it has specific moral, theoretical and philosophical implications. This lecture will unpack some of these issues seeing if new media art really is a vision of a coming post-human world.


Week Five: Thursday 26 July
The Return of the Body: piss, blood and brutal confessions.
The internet has meant that the graphic display of mutilated bodies is only ever a click away. Shows like CSI and movies like Hostel explode with gore. Despite this do we really understand what it means to be human? Or do we just view such images as entertainment? The body remains a very mysterious and powerful entity. This lecture will examine post-feminist, abject, shock and body art as a strategy to break through the surface of our everyday, mediated lives. This art deliberately tries to unveil the prejudices of ‘civil’ society. For example feminist art uses the female body to confront a society that is still afraid of female sexuality. Artists living in totalitarian states use their body as the ultimate form of protest. By risking their life these artists raise the stakes of art. It is art that cannot be ignored and cannot be censored. If the artist turns their body into an artwork then their body becomes a permanent metaphor, idea or protest. It is permanently on display for as long as the artist lives. It is the ultimate sacrifice for the belief that art can change the world.


Week Six: Thursday 2 August
Art in the Age of Terror: Relational Aesthetics, post-documentary and ideology.
The art world responded to the ‘war on terror’ with a multitude of voices that undermined the simplicity of being ‘for us or against us’. 9/11 fuelled the emergence of documentary, political and activist art forms. Controversial exhibitions challenged the assumed neutrality of the gallery and the debate raged as to whether art should be openly political. Does art have to be ambiguous and beautiful? Or can art document the real world and tell stories which journalists and historians aren’t interested in? Contemporary art became less focused on the artwork itself and more focused on the discussions and meaning it generated. Galleries became places of argument, community and contestation rather than sites of quiet contemplation. Artists created work that deliberately invited dissent and welcomed confrontation. Art, visual culture and politics merged in a cacophonous outpouring of creativity proving that art still had a role in challenging and pushing society forward.

 
About Dr Tim Gregory PhD. BFA (hons)
Tim Gregory is a Sydney-based theorist and artist. He has published widely on spatial and sexual politics. His recent research focus has been on the political potentiality of pornography to disrupt our conservative relationship with the image. Tim Gregory’s praxis involves antagonistic actions, usually generated collaboratively, to test and hopefully break the assumptions and rituals of our daily lives. If art is to transcend being a mere tool for visualising and sanctioning power then it should take a destructive rather than productive stance towards itself. Tim’s work breaks, steals and drags his personal and institutional life.
Tim Gregory is a researcher at the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, he lectures at UNSW and ACU and is represented by Chalk Horse Gallery in Sydney. He is a founding member of the collective the Artist Liberation Army.


Image:
Image courtesy and © the Museum of Contemporary Art Limited Photograph: Belinda Rolland