A conversation with Philip Brophy, Helen Hughes and Ivan Cerecina to mark the publication of a new anthology of Brophy's art writing.
Screenic is an anthology of Philip Brophy’s writing on art, published from 2000 onwards. The focus of the selection is on art that involves screens: projected as film in museums, digitised for installations in galleries, curated as documents within exhibitions, presented as outdoor illuminations on buildings, utilised for the production of VR and AI-generated content, & even wall murals derived from televisual screens. Together, the articles reinforce the view that ongoing changes taking place in the mediascape over the last two decades create challenges for artists, producers, curators, viewers, and critics—sometimes resulting in a rejuvenation of how media art can be imagined and presented, other times evidencing an anaemic grasp of the contemporary mediascape that whorls outside the white cube.
The book is edited by Helen Hughes and Olga Bennett, with an introduction by Emile Zile. Designed by James Vinciguerra and Duncan Blachford.
Co-presented by the Power Institute, Film Studies at the University of Sydney, and Verge Gallery.
People
Philip Brophy
Philip Brophy has written regularly for Wire and Frieze (London) and Film Comment (New York). He has had two books published by the British Film Institute, and chapters published in anthologies for Bloomsbury; Palgrave/McMillan; Routledge; Sage; Continuum; MIT Press; Oxford University Press; University of California Press; Edinburgh University Press; and University of Hawaii Press. He has edited exhibition catalogues for MCA, Sydney and NGV, Melbourne. He has had long-running columns in Real Time and Empire, Sydney, and has contributed regularly to Memo Review, Melbourne. Many of his recent Memo reviews (on exhibitions at ACCA, ACMI, NGV, MUMA, Sutton Gallery, Buxton Contemporary) are included in the anthology of his writing on film-art and video-art, entitled SCREENIC. The anthology also includes essays originally published in Artforum, New York; Kill Your Darlings, Melbourne; Photofile, Sydney; and Oberon, Coppenhagen. The centre piece for SCREENIC is the Discipline slide-talk he presented at the Wheeler Centre in 2015.
Helen Hughes
Helen Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in Art History, Theory and Curatorial Practice and Deputy Head of the Fine Art department at Monash University.
Ivan Cerecina
Ivan Cerecina teaches Film Studies at The University of Sydney. He has been a research fellow at the Cité Internationale des Arts and the City of Paris’s International Artists and Writers Residency Program. His work has been published in Screen, Camera Obscura, and Framework. His first book, Assembly Lines: Montage in Post-war French Film, is forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press.