Research and notes on Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum
In bringing academics, curators, conservators and artists from diverse institutions together, Precarious Movements stages an open dialogue between dance artists and art organizations.
‘This is a highly significant research project that brings together academics and major arts sector partnerships to interrogate and explore how to document and map embodied practices across cultural institutions,’ said Professor Michael Balfour, Head of UNSW School of the Arts & Media.
‘The outcomes of this project will undoubtedly impact international cultural policy, as well as Australian protocols and practices,’ Balfour continued.
By addressing the difficulties performance-based works can pose to museums and collecting institution, the team behind the project will use the grant to continue to develop protocols, policies and methodologies for both artists and museums to exhibit.
‘As contemporary artists increasingly turn to performance to realise their creative vision, the ways in which institutions collect and preserve ephemeral work is an issue of international significance,’ said Tony Ellwood, Director of National Gallery of Victoria.
‘The NGV is committed to preserving the legacy of temporal works, like choreographic performance art, for future generations and is proud to be among these major cultural and educational institutions taking on this important project,’ Ellwood added.
‘As we improve our practices in commissioning, collecting and conserving works of a choreographic nature we can in turn better support artists working in this area, now and into the future.’
- Charlotte Day, Director of the Monash University Museum of Art.
Notes from reading about the Club-Museum Ecosystem
Curator Lu Jie made the comparison of curatorial practices then and now: “In the past, every curator had their own method that they invented; people could tell at a glance whose style it was. Exhibitions now may be good, but they all look the same…”
Lu’s words resonate with what the late theorist Mark Fisher said about club music: “Culture in the 21st century is to have 20th-century culture on higher definition screens (…) or distributed by high-speed internet.”
Contemporary art and clubs share a common concern with people no longer having the capacity to create totally new things that break with the past or represent an era; this kind of imagination has simply vanished… a style that has not even happened yet is already obsolete.
A platform in the middle of an installation space may be called ‘a dance floor’, the sounds of kinetic sculptures may be reminiscent of the bass in a club.
Songs / playlists for major creative projects