Peter Turner Memorial Lecture
‘The Photographic Medium in a Post Medium Age’

You are invited to attend the Peter Turner Memorial Lecture presented by Professor Anne Marsh, Professor Theory and Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University, Melbourne.

The lecture will be followed by questions from the audience and refreshments.

Details
Saturday 21 November 2009, 5pm, Theatrette (10A02), Museum Building, Massey University, Buckle Street, Wellington, Entrance D, (access theatrette from east side of building).

RSVP
Contact Maree Buutveld by Wednesday 18 November 2009: email m.buutveld@massey.ac.nz or phone (04) 801 5799 Extn 62300

Abstract
Rosalind Krauss has termed the current era the ‘the post-medium age’ in which “the aesthetic option of the medium has been declared outmoded, cashiered, washed-up, finished”. Krauss is concerned that ‘post-medium’ art is blurring the boundaries between disciplines too much. She argues that photography plays a major role in postmodernism because it “restructures the conditions of the other arts”,1 however, she laments the loss of the aesthetic medium. How has this post-medium condition come to now threaten or destabilize the arts? What is it that makes art historians so concerned? Hal Foster is worried about how design and fashion have infiltrated the arts. Krauss sees trouble in the arena of the medium itself. At face value these comments appear reactive and conservative. Surely inter-disciplinary experiments are the backbone of research in our times. Writing about Krauss and Foster’s recent work, George Baker argues that: “their breaking of a postmodernist and interdisciplinary taboo has let loose a series of much more conservative appeals to medium-specificity, a return to traditional artistic objects and practices and discourses that we must resist.”

Drawing on research for her recent book LOOK! Contemporary Australian Photography, Anne Marsh will explore some of the issues that concern photography in the 21C. She will address critiques of the post medium condition and explore the influence of digital technologies and photo-installation through the works of several Australian art photographers who engage with the medium of photography in various ways.