Focus Fest 2009
Making it personal... Friday 4 & Saturday 5 December 2009 Please note: the full program will be published in Term 4, with a brochure sent to all NSW High School Visual Art Departments Where does the subjective fit in art? Is it real, or knowable or even capable of being evaluated? Despite the chokehold that cheesy confessions have in the popular media, the personal has a different exchange value at the so-called high end of culture, especially after the moral alibi of objectivity in academia, and evaluation in schools generally. We know making it personal can be tricky, over and beyond assigning grades. But can art be an emotional no-fly zone? There’s a lot of denial these days: the mechanisms of dissociation and lack of affect are in the ascendant. Alienation has become the essential ingredient of contemporary experience. There’s a New Yorker cartoon in which a man in a suit is lying on a couch telling his shrink: “Look, call it denial if you like, but I think what goes on in my personal life is frankly none of my business.” It’s almost a part of what it means to be postmodern and the levels of irony involved in decoding popular culture. Looking at the world behind designer sunglasses everything advertises a kind of disaffected nonchalance, a glacial “cool”. The way we feel simultaneously hip, embarrassed, depressed and ironic about feeling itself. Think Jeff Koons, even Adam Cullen or TV Moore. Can we adopt a woman or man-from-Mars attitude in encountering art and culture? Think Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man with the round-eyed look of a robot puzzled by newfound emotions: “I-I can feel love!” With society turning all experience into a form of consumption, is it still possible to be moved? Emotions to do with love and death may not be absolute necessities to much contemporary art, but they’re not passing fads either, and it’s a safe bet they will last as long as we do. Take a look at the loads of personal electricity there in the bruised bodies and frightened souls of Doris Salcedo, or Willem de Kooning, or Francis Bacon, or any work by Marina Abramovich. Looking at a work of art, what subjective sources are we bringing readymade to the experience? Why am I moved by an image? Why do I find it ‘sick’ or ‘dumb’, intense or pleasurable? What are the psychic mechanisms behind the signs? Are all our interpretations arbitrary? Are they all subjective? And what kind of bridge can we build between us and the world’s primal objectivity? Is there an intelligence behind the world and is art a way of making our consciousness continuous with it? These are big picture questions with no single page answers. But as every teacher knows, enlightened discussion in the classroom is never misdirected so long as no one forgets that art does not only exist to be argued about, but to be perceived, experienced and assimilated into who we are or could be. The world and the self are like two sides of a single sheet of paper. Any discussion about the world is partly autobiographical; while statements about the self tell us something about the world. George Alexander, Coordinator of Contemporary Art Programs, AGNSW | 
