3squared

3squared extended my existing body of place based performance work whilst also involving me in a large scale collaborative art work involving staff and students from Melbourne's 3 largest art school's across three distinct but linked exhibitions. The other artists involved were both highly respected: Lou Hubbard and Terri Bird. Across the three phases of the exhibition there was a requirement that each artist and each group of artists create work responded to the collaborative premise of the project.

I was required to select two students from our school and work with them in some way. I chose to collaborate directly with them using Conical as a site of accumulation, a space which is re-invented and inhabited month after month by new projects and artists, creating an ever growing back catalogue. Our work dealt with this accumulation both as a material motif but also as a critique or reflection upon the potential redundancy of arts practice.

The resultant work utilised the ideas of relational aesthetics whislt also functioning as a critique of them. In particular the failed quasi-political objective of relational aesthetics for making art relevant and engaged whilst actually creating a potentially more insular, inward and anti-aesthetic art movement.

In this way our work contributed to a critical reflection on recent art movements and broader questions regarding the relevancy of arts practice, an unwelcome but nonetheless real problem confronted by artists.

The work was funded by Arts Victoria peer review funding process though its support of Concial's program as evidenced in the attachment Arts Victoria 2011.