Visual Arts

Alongside Toonooba (the Fitzroy River) in central Queensland, Australia, a series of flood markers are embedded within the earth, commanding attention to the river that flows on one side and the colonial infrastructure of Rockhampton on the other. Honouring Land Connections is an artwork that asserts Indigenous voices, marks Indigenous spaces, and encourages visitors to engage in conversation with Indigenous culture and art. This paper considers Indigenous art as a form of social action. Firstly, it discusses the value of such art projects, and presents an Indigenous perspective of their meaning, addresses their role in creating and embodying culture and identity, how they express and share culture, along with collaborative approaches, and the importance of learning on and from Country. It concludes with a discussion of the political and cultural meaning created through art, suggesting that it is impossible for a public artwork like Honouring Land Connections to not be political. This article explores how art facilitates an interactive social space through which Aboriginal artists affirm, negotiate and share their identities while challenging preconceptions of place and identities reminding us that Aboriginal presence outlasts the moment of its production and imprints itself on the landscape and people's consciousness.

This article reveals different ways in which actors in the art market – both prominent collectors and high end galleries – manage to intervene in museum institutions' choices and, thus, strengthen their weight in the creation of art value. While in the 1960s and 1990s, the French sociologist Raymonde Moulin argued that the value of art is constituted at the junction of the market and the museum, but tended towards the pre-eminence of institutions, the market has considerably strengthened its role in the creation of artistic value since that time. The example of the French case, central in this article, illustrates a development where leading collectors – Bernard Arnault, CEO of the luxury group LVMH and François Pinault, CEO of the Kering group and owner of the auction house Christie's – compete with museums through the institutions that they control and can influence the choices of public institutions. A similar trend is examined in the context of high end galleries which now have the financial means and personnel to offer exhibitions capable of competing with museums.

In this paper I explore the significance of the breath in contemporary art. While breathing operates at the margins of perception, its symbolic possibilities are frequently visualized in photography, video and performance-based works. I catalyse Allan Kaprow's instructive breathing piece, Performing Life (1979), to open up a perspective on the corporeal, creative and inter-subjective dimension of the breath in the work of Australian artists Julie Rrap, Daniel Mudie Cunningham and the late Australian/Italian artist Katthy Cavaliere. These artists, via a diversity of means, perform breathing and inadvertently achieve Kaprow's intention of drawing attention to what is overlooked in everyday life. I examine how Rrap, Cunningham and Cavaliere's works induce a consciousness of the breath in the viewer. Further, I have undertaken this examination by reflecting on the unavoidable connection between breathing and death. This discussion brings important detail to embodied spectatorship whereby 'breath work' is viewed as engendering an awareness of embodied subjectivity, creativity and community.