Difficult art

What is experienced as difficult in the creative arts changes dramatically over time and according to context. What was once considered acceptable might now be considered problematic and similarly what was once censored might now be normative. This session will consider the theme of difficulty and the changing nature of aesthetic reception in the era of cancel culture and #MeToo. The papers will examine difficult topics (like feminist investigations of rape) that are now regarded as triggering; recent cancellations of art projects that hinge on ethnic identity; and the challenges of writing about writers or artists whose lives do not follow current moral codes.  

Speakers

Professor Brigitta Olubas FAHA (Chair)

Brigitta Olubas is Professor of English in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales Sydney. Her research is in Australian Literature, with a particular focus on expatriate, diasporic, migrant and refugee writing and more recently in literary biography. Her 2022 biography of Shirley Hazzard was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Nonfiction (2023), the Nib Literary Award (2023), the Magarey Award for Biography (2024) and the National Biography Award (2024). She is a former president of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and editor of the Association’s journal. She has also made a major contribution to the field of Australian Literary studies through her work as editor of scholarly editions and collections, including most recently two volumes of literary correspondence funded by ARC DP Reading Writing Lives.

Professor Sue Best FAHA

Trigger Warning: Rape, performance and the feminist avant-garde

This paper examines the changing reception of feminist avant-garde art practices from the 1970s about rape, violence and trauma. While in that era of consciousness raising groups, thinking and working through were the guiding principles for the engagement with such work, current reception emphasises the need for trigger warnings to limit the presumed uncontrollability of feeling. While one might argue that the confronting nature of the material was ignored in the 1970s, with little or no attention paid to the audience’s emotional reactions, the pendulum has now fully swung the other way with the presumption that difficult material is deeply affecting, if not traumatising to victims. Is this latest incarnation of the thinking/feeling split useful for thinking about difficult art? Surely the aesthetic realm should be where thinking and feeling can be conducted simultaneously? Examining the work of artists such as Ana Mendieta and performances associated with Womanhouse, the paper examines the framing of difficult art and difficult women in the age of the trigger warning.

Susan Best is Professor of Art History and Theory at Queensland College of Art and Design, Griffith University. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is the author of Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde (2011), which won the Australian and New Zealand Art Association prize for best book in 2012.  Her second book, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing and Contemporary Art Photography (2016), was the joint winner of the Australian and New Zealand Art Association prize for best book in 2017. Her most recent book is It’s not personal: Post 60s body art and performance (2021). She is currently working on a book on aesthetic reception in the era of #MeToo and cancel culture.

Emeritus Professor Andrew McNamara FAHA

Andrew McNamara is an art historian and writer, whose work largely focuses on the modernist legacy for contemporary art and culture. He treats this legacy as contradictory or paradoxical rather than a purely negative or positive phenomenon. His work also seeks to articulate the connections (and differences) between modernist and contemporary practices. Key works include: Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917-1967 (2006), Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (2008), Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond (2019), all with Ann Stephen and Philip Goad; Undesign (2018); An Apprehensive Aesthetic? The Legacy of Modernist Culture (2009); Surpassing Modernity (2018/19); the exhibition Bauhaus Now (2020-2021). Forthcoming studies include On Dispossession: Ernst Kitzinger, the Dunera and Injustice with Kate Garrett and Seumas Spark; as well as a collection, A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in Oceania, edited with Ann Stephen; as well as a study of the avant-garde in Weimar Germany.

Professor Nicole Moore

Nicole Moore is Professor in English and Media Studies at UNSW Canberra. Her main research interests include Australian literature, comparative literature, the cultural Cold War, and print censorship in Australia and internationally. Her research pursues issues at stake in the political cultures of reading and writing, and the complex relations of literature, governance and history within and across national boundaries. Professor Moore’s 2012 book The Censor’s Library: Uncovering the Lost History of Australia’s Banned Books won the Walter McCrae Russell award from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and was shortlisted for a number of other awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in Australian History.  From September 2022 to July 2023 she was the Visiting Professor of Australian Studies in the Centre for American and Pacific Studies at the University of Tokyo. Prof. Moore edits the Studies in Australian Literature and Culture book series at Anthem Press (London) and is a member of the editorial boards of Australian Literary Studies, Hecate: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies, the Journal of Australian Studies, the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) and Studies in Australasian Cinema.

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