"Writing Billy Apple"
November 7, 2019, 6pm
Join us for Writing Billy Apple, presented by New Zealand based curator Christina Barton—for the Monash University Margaret Plant Annual Lecture in Art History.
Christina Barton has recently completed the book Billy Apple: Life/Work for the Auckland University Press. Its subject is the New Zealand-born Conceptual artist Billy Apple, who lived and exhibited in London and New York between 1960 and 1984, and who, since 1990, has returned to live in Auckland where he continues to work. This lecture will consider some of the challenges posed by this artist for the discipline of art history, either in its local incarnation—the history of New Zealand art—or in relation to “world” and newer global art histories. What does his story offer in our rethinking of the discipline? And how might his work be understood in terms that are relevant to art practice now?
Christina Barton has been the Director of the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University of Wellington, since 2007. Here, she has devised a programme that provides meaningful opportunities for artists to develop major new work (including Joseph Kosuth, Simon Denny, Ruth Buchanan, Luke Willis Thompson, Joyce Campbell), surveys under-recognised artists (such as Anthony McCall, Vivian Lynn, Kim Pieters, Edith Amituanai), and offers new ways of thinking about art and art history. She is also a writer, editor and teacher who has made a substantial contribution to art history in New Zealand, including co-editing Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture, and founding and editing the first series of the Gordon H. Brown Lecture, New Zealand’s national Art History lecture, which is now in its 18th year.
Margaret Plant, for whom the Annual Lecture in Art History series is named, is Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at Monash University. Plant began her teaching career at the University of Melbourne in 1962, as a tutor in the Department of Fine Arts. She then accepted an appointment to RMIT in 1968 as senior Lecturer in the History of Art—the first academic appointment of an art historian within an Australian art school. With Monash University, Plant has a long and distinguished association, as Professor of Visual Arts (1982-1996) and Emeritus Professor from 1996 onward.
Free event, please RSVP here
