Two years of lectures to define Australian art moments

The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) is launching a two-year lecture series focused on the defining moments of Australian art.

Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968-1999 will have eight guest speakers per year – artists, curators, critics and historians – delivering hour-long lectures and conversations on pivotal moments in our art history.

“Ambitious, contested, polemical, genre-defining and genre-defying, contemporary art exhibitions have shaped and transformed the cultural landscape, along with our understanding of what constitutes art itself,” ACCA’s artistic director, Max Delany, said.

John Kaldor will give the first lecture on April 15 with respondent Rebecca Coates discussing Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast 1968-69.

Fifty years ago, John Kaldor invited the French artists to Australia to wrap two-and-a-half kilometres of coast at Sydney’s Little Bay.

It was the first major installation for Kaldor Public Art Projects, the now internationally renowned art organisation. Mr Kaldor will discuss the monumental event that started it all.

“Beginning with an in-depth discussion around Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast – One Square Million Feet, the 2019 program will take us to a series of sites beyond the museum, with a focus on exhibitions and projects that took place outside of conventional institutional frameworks,” Mr Delany said.

The 2019 series will focus on the period from 1968 to 1981:

Monday, April 15: Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Coast 1968-69

Lecture by John Kaldor, with respondent Rebecca Coates;

Monday, April 29: Digging for Honey Ants: the Papunya mural project

Lecture by John Kean, with respondent Hannah Presley;

Monday, June 3: Object and Idea

Lecture by Ian Milliss;

Monday, July 8: Inhibodress, multimedia interference

Lecture by Peter Kennedy, with respondent Sue Cramer;

Monday, August 5: Clifton Hill Community Music Centre 1976-83

Lecture by David Chesworth;

Monday, September 3: Almost Anything Goes: Sculpturescape 1975 at Mildura

Lecture Julie Ewington;

Monday, October 7: A room of their own creating a space for the feminist collective

Lecture by Janine Burke, with respondent Helen Hughes;

Monday, November 4: Post Object Art in Australia and New Zealand

Lecture by Anne Marsh .

Bookings: eventbrite.com.au/e/defining-moments-australian-exhibition-histories-1968-1999-tickets-58349257199