Publicity – art show

In its original usage during the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere, the term ‘publicity’ described a general public-ness, a state of being public – publicly known, publicly owned or publicly available. Only later, with the development of reproductive technologies and systems of mass dissemination, did it come to refer to the mechanisms of marketing and promotion, and to denote strategies for the use of such media for the formation and communication of identity. With this etymology in mind, Artspace presents the work of five artists whose practices traverse performance, installation, video, archiving and action research to explore the role that art, considered as creative and aesthetic experience, can play in the construction of a ‘public’. It seeks to raise questions of agency and autonomy in a culture of media saturation, and to posit the studio and the gallery not as hermetic spaces but as discursive fields, sites of social transaction, public spaces that are, as with the public itself, constantly under negotiation.

Publicity BRIDGET CURRIE, ASTRA HOWARD, LUCAS IHLEIN, ASH KEATING, MATTHEW TUMBERS Curator: Reuben Keehan

http://www.artspace.org.au/gallery/gallery_exhibition.php?e=68