ARTS@ADC EXHIBITION
I have just returned from Canberra where I have a small group of my paintings exhibited at the Australian Defence College (ADC) as part of their new ARTS@ADC Program. I am one of three artists, and the only civilian. The other two artists are COL Richard Barrett and MAJ Anne Goyne. This quote from the ADC explains some of the premise for the ARTS@ADC Program:
Self-expression communicates individual and collective experience in a way that others can interpret and find meaning. In the ADF, the means to express ourselves is often limited to verbal and written orders, briefs and demonstrations. Arts@ADC is a new program for ADC staff, students, alumni and members of the community to engage with contemporary Defence issues in a creative way.
I am really buoyed by the open-minded and inquisitive responses to my paintings at ARTS@ADC. As readers know, my work is provocative, speculative, and open for multiple interpretations. Exhibiting my work to a specific military/defence audience is a new experience for me. In conversations and at my artist's talk, I was thrilled that the ADC audience articulated how my paintings prompted thoughts about their own knowledge and experiences. It was clear that raising questions about the relationship between accelerating developments in technology and war was welcomed. And, interestingly, apart from the actual paintings, people were keen to hear how I include painting as a process to work through academic and technical research, to generate new ideas, pose critiques and offer speculations about the future.
I am aware that ARTS@ADC plans a diverse range of exhibitions, performances and experiences for their staff and students to engage with. The aim to engage with contemporary Defence issues in a creative way situates the program within international and burgeoning realisations that cross-disciplinary research and activities provide new ways to ask or trigger questions, to prompt often difficult conversations, to reflect upon the status quo, to understand the importance of culture and to think about the future.
ARTIST-RICHARD BARRETT
I was thrilled to be asked to exhibit by COL Barrett, Director of the Centre for Defence Leadership and Ethics at the ADC, founder of ARTS@ADC, and fellow artist. COL Barrett's creative practice is sculpture. He has two of his works exhibited in the ADC courtyard. This is a brief introduction to his two sculptures, as written in information about the ARTS@ADC Program:
The first piece "Homo ex Machina" is a recycled steel cube mounted on its vertex. Plasma-cut into its panels are the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – depicted in morse code. The work signifies the need to ensure that science, artificial intelligence and computing power serve human needs, and that when we design these systems we need to ensure individual rights are represented. The second sculpture, "Redacted", engages with allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan. The black squares of the internal pattern recall the blacked-out redactions within the Brereton Report, and the repetitive motif within the cube samples the aniconic geometric patterns in Islamic art.
The photo below shows COL Barrett speaking about his work to people who attended the ARTS@ADC launch. This piece is "Redacted". His two pieces Homo ex Machina and Redacted looked like wise sentinels watching over the campus, giving permission to question.
You can find more of Richard Barrett's thought provoking, thoughtful and arresting work at Richard Barrett-Sculptor
Photo-Courtesy ADC
Australian Defence College
Richard Barrett Sculpture
Cate Carter PhD examined civilian-military relationships
ART - MILITARY RELATIONSHIPS
Analogue artforms, such as hands-on painting, sculpture and drawing, have a long historical association with war, the military and defence. Indeed there are multiple intersections - recording military battles and their aftermaths, visualising heroism and suffering, used as propaganda and grandiose political displays, created as resistance and more. The art historical development of one-point perspective in painting and drawing during the Renaissance is shared with the historical development of mathematical means to assist military targeting, scoping, surveillance and cartography. Here, I urge you to read Antoine Bousquet's excellent book The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone .
My experiences, recent and over many years, tells me that painting in the 21st century has an agency that provides a critical distance from the electronic, digital and cyber technologies militaries, and societies, now rely upon. This distance, provides another kind of perspective, creating a space for critique and reflection on the development and use of these kinds of technologies. I remind the reader, painting does not rely upon electronic, digital or cyber technology for creation, exhibition or storage. It is, therefore, independent from the system that largely operates beyond humanly accessible domains of time and speed. Looking at a painting and creating a painting offer ways to re-enter the dimensions of humanly experienced time, speed and space. Here, imagination has time to roam, to fly.
In my talk at the ADC I offered my paintings as invitations to fly, in imagination, into cosmic realms. In doing so, I suggested that scrutiny can be turned back upon the systems and hardware of surveillance and war. I call this an act of imaginational metaveillance. As cosmologist and astronomer, Martin Rees, points out a “cosmic perspective strengthens the imperative to cherish this ‘pale blue dot’ in the cosmos. It should also motivate a circumspect attitude towards technical innovations that pose even a small threat of catastrophic downside.” Our Final Century (London: Arrow Books, 2004), 188.
When I briefly explained my ideas of imaginational metaveillance to the audience at ADC, I saw a number of smiles and nodding heads. Such great feedback!
Cheers,
Kathryn
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