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Speech Acts: Richard Grayson and Matt Mullican illuminates the video-based practices of these two internationally acclaimed artists, who use the format of the monologue to construct and narrate hypothetical worlds.
British artist Richard Grayson imbues vernacular culture with a sense of classicism, extracting layers of meaning from an array of subject matter, including scientific explanations, flash-mob videos, dinner party conversations and purposefully bad jokes.
By contrast, American artist Matt Mullican examines the circularities of language, conducting performances under hypnosis to vacillate between primal and public speech. Who is it we are watching as Mullican performs in an hypnotic state? How do we interrogate and categorise what is being created?
The book includes video excerpts of Mullican’s first ever performance under hypnosis in Australia (staged in collaboration with Sydney’s National Art School at the iconic Cell Block Theatre, a former nineteenth-century women’s prison) and a selection of Grayson’s scripted compositions, which combine political acuity with dry wit.
Author Wes Hill, having curated Grayson and Mullican in a 2015 exhibition at UTS Gallery, unpacks them further in a fascinating essay on both artists, examining their obsessions with language, performance and the nature of interpretation, which arise in their works to engage and sometimes unsettle viewers.
Book Details
An iBook version is available to read in iTunes
Voice/Presence/Absence collects international contributions from academic scholars and practitioners, together with recorded live performances of artists, writers, musicians and poets, creating the space for a discussion on the role of voice in contemporary humanities. Voice/Presence/Absence is conceived as a dialogue: between a variety of interpretive frameworks and definitions of voice; between different objects of study (from contemporary art to post-dramatic theatre, from radio-voices to recorded poetry and audio-books, from pop music to novels, from the voice of trees to the one of birds, etc.) and, most important, between artists, performers and the world of academia.
Book Details
An iBook version is available to read in iTunes
Live AV in Australia by Grayson Cooke documents the diverse emerging national community of practice involved in live audiovisual performance. In a series of video interviews with practitioners around the country a picture emerges of a vibrant performance scene that draws on the aesthetic traditions of music, cinema and new media art.
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