Guest Speaker: Lia Dewey Morgan
Art is Antidisciplinary
Lia Dewey Morgan
Abstract: In this presentation, I intend to do my best to chase a rather slippery question: What is art? Is art really a discipline? Do disciplines even exist? Art is defined by its capacity to shirk tradition, and inspire masses to proclaim, “That’s not art!” It is because of this I believe art is inherently antidisciplinary, and currently offers a tentative opportunity for disciplines to travel away from their more rigid frameworks, toward something more intuitive. From this generative space, we see new proto-disciplines in formation. How then do we go about defining what art is? What are the effects of how we define art, and who might benefit or lose out from these definitions? The somewhat recent academisation of art raises critical questions about how knowledge is transformed when entering the university. How do we resist the university’s more conservative impulses, while still embracing the potential available? Gathering from my years of experience in the field, I’ve collated a few works and examples to try and pry open these questions a little.
With this expansion has come the opportunity to use and distribute digital archival images in the process of curating exhibitions and researching art historical publications. Some notable developments in recent years have been the inclusion of Margaret Tuckson’s photographs of Indigenous artists at work in a survey of the art and curatorial career of her husband Tony Tuckson [AGNSW 2018], the opportunity to reconsider historical art exhibitions, using newly uncovered installation shots, in publications like Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening Our Eyes [Thames & Hudson 2018] and exhibitions like The Field Revisited [NGV 2018], and even inspire new artworks, like the installation by Ian Milliss in Making Art Public: 50 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects [AGNSW 2019].
About: Lia Dewey Morgan is a poet and writer living on stolen land in Narrm. She grapples with the continuity and chaos present in contemporary living, using poetry as an intermediary to engage with our information environment. She graduated with first-class honours from VCA in 2020, currently works as a freelance arts writer and copywriter, and volunteers as a library technician at ACER. Her first book, ‘Bath Songs’, was published earlier this year with local press nomorepoetry.