2022 Daphne Mayo Public Lecture
Event Details
- Date:
- Thursday, 12 May 2022
- Time:
- 5:30 pm - 8:30 pm
- Room:
- Terrace Room
- UQ Location:
- Sir Llew Edwards Building (St Lucia)
- URL:
- https://communication-arts.uq.edu.au/event/6439/2022-daphne-mayo-public-lecture
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Miss Olivia Brown
- Phone:
- 52609
- Email:
- o.dennis@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Humanities and Social Sciences
Event Description
- Full Description:
- About
To honour and commemorate the life of one of Queensland’s most prominent artists and arts educators, the School of Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland, has established the Daphne Mayo Visiting Professorship in Visual Culture. Each year, a major world figure will visit Brisbane to speak about the latest trends, influences, and theories in their area of visual culture. In 2022 Professor Rex Butler will be presenting a talk entitled: I AM GORDON BENNETT.
Abstract
In a very intelligent act of curation, the final wall of the 2020 Queensland Art Gallery exhibition Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett ended with a blown-up and slightly abbreviated version of a notebook entry Bennett had originally made on 25 August 1990. Down the wall ran the statements “I am Gordon Bennett”, “I am Australian”, “I am Aboriginal”, “I am Human Being” and “I am Spirit”, all crossed out with a line through them, followed by a final “I am” uncrossed out and the artist’s initials again crossed out and the date of the original notebook entry.
In a sense, of course, the wall operated as the artist’s signature authenticating the show we had just seen before we left it, but how is it also an explanation of Bennett’s artistic practice altogether? Does that final “I am” stand outside of the failure of those previous attempted statements of identity or is it inseparable from it? Is Bennett suggesting that the subject is always this crossing-out or correction, indeed, this self-crossing out and -correction? Are we not all made up of opposites that we must attempt to reconcile, like “Aboriginal” and “Australian” and “Human Being” and “Spirit”? Are we not all divided in that way Bennett points out? And is it not perhaps in this self-division that we are all ultimately the same?
Rex Butler
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
-
- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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