NAS Art Forum Series
Artists and anti-art are the subject of these two talks in support of a Korean-Australian exhibition.
Overview
John Kaldor's long running Public Art Project lit up your name in lights as part of this year's Sydney Festival. It's been producing odd things in public for quite some time now. In 1976, it brought pioneering video artist Nam June Paik to Sydney from Korea, who shocked the city with the variety of ways he could get Charlotte Moorman to play the cello. Drawing inspiration from this earlier Korean-Australian art exchange, the MCA is hosting a show of local and Korean art in conjunction with the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, called Tell Me Tell Me. Using the National Art School's sandstone digs as venue, the MCA is sending artists from the exhibition in to talk about their art in situ.
In the gallery itself, you'll hear from spectacle-making artists the Brown Council, triple-cultured Newell Harry, and get a rare chance to get close to Ken Unsworth's words and work at the same time. Piggybacking on the Art School's ongoing Artforum series, environmentally-themed artist and COFA lecturer Bonita Ely will explain the importance of the Fluxus movement — a latter-day Dada-like art movement from the sixties which had adherents like Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik himself. Like the movement, Ely's talk will shun the gallery and take place in the School's Cell Block Theatre.
Bonita Ely's talk is on July 20 at 1pm; Brown Council, Harry and Unsworth talk in the Gallery on July 23 at 2pm.
Image: Yeesookyung, While Our Tryst Has Been Delayed, 2010