Launch: Discipline no.5 / Más Allá del Fin no.3
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When
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Address
Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd, Paddington NSW 2021
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Hours
2–4PM
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Phone
+61 2 8936 0888
UNSW Art & Design Research Forum and UNSW Galleries launch the new issue of Discipline, Más Allá del Fin. To celebrate the launch, co-founder and contributing author Nick Croggon provides a lecture, introduced by Editor Helen Hughes and Verónica Tello.
Discipline, Más allá del fin represents an effort to map a South–South relationship between Chile and Australia, and even more specifically, between its southernmost island tips: Tierra del Fuego and Tasmania. For centuries the Northern imagination conceived of these places as the very personification of distance itself, whereas the editors of Más allá del fin refer to Tierra del Fuego as ‘the centre of the known universe’. In addition to publishing a range of essays on modern and contemporary art, this joint issue recentres and forges new connections between Southern perspectives, generating a dynamic and relational art history of the contemporary.
Nick Croggon: Three Images of Environmental Crisis
This paper tests one of the central stakes of Discipline, Más Allá del Fin: the aesthetics and politics of limits. It does so by drawing on one of this issue's galvanising nodes: the Chilean, New York-based artist and architect, Juan Downey. In the early 1970s, not long after Downey had first moved to New York, there emerged in the US a disturbing awareness of the earth's limits, couched in the language of environmental crisis. First heralded in the environment and countercultural movements of the 1960s, this language reached the mainstream with the global think-tank Club of Rome's 1972 report, The Limits to Growth. Using projections derived from a complex computer model, the report warned that the unfettered growth that had underpinned industrial capitalism since the 19th century was reaching a crisis point, as pollution and overconsumption of resources bumped up against the very limits of the biosphere. This paper considers three images that illuminate, even as they obscure, this moment of crisis: two from the pages of Time Magazine, and one by Downey himself. It explores the differing strategies and techniques employed to envisage a new, post-industrial society – beyond the end of the world.
Nick Croggon is an art historian whose work focuses on the intersection of art, media and politics in the US Cold War period. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Columbia University in New York. He is the co-founder, with Helen Hughes, of Discipline.