Gift to the City VIII:
the half-frozen fishers waiting for a fish

Scott Woods

‘The Heroes of [Olga] Chernysheva’s art almost always exist in a mode of expectation – of waiting for a chance, a surprise, a miracle. Her photographs show the half-frozen fishers waiting for a fish or bored bodyguards waiting for a crime. Trashman shows a man who is obviously waiting for “the gift” but only gets trash.’
Boris Groys, Olga Chernysheva – Looking for the Great Sunday. 2013.

Studio Outline:

Gift to the City promotes experimental, speculative and gestural forms of resistance to the hegemony of the white-walled Art Gallery and Art Museum. How to be ‘more White Cube than White Cube’?

Gift to the City INTERVIEW ARCHIVE is an ongoing project to develop and record a body of knowledge around the contemporary ART MUSEUM. Each semester students interview artists, curators and architects of art institutions to direct their projects. Students also explore past interviews from the ARCHIVE which include: Odile Decq (Paris), Tatiana Bilbao (Mexico City), Liam Gillick (NY), Javier Peres (Berlin), Marja Sakari (Helsinki), Assume Vivid Astro Focus (São Paulo)…

Studio Leaders

SCOTT WOODS is an Academic Fellow in Architecture at the Melbourne School of Design and has taught at USyd, UTS, RMIT and Monash. He has practiced architecture in London, LA and NY and worked in architecture, design and art publishing in London and Sydney. He has curated international exhibitions and is interested in architecture theory and design methodology.

Learning Outcomes:

Gift to the City VIII

< 1 World >< 2 Museums >< 2 Galleries >

Gift to the City VIII asks how long can the ART MUSEUM & ART GALLERY endure™ its own rhetoric once it is intensified, replicated, expanded, redistributed or rewired? Each student will deploy abstract or figurative ‘constructions’ via modes of their choosing: fictional bodies, machines, narratives…as model, drawing or spatial installation… to “make some kind of intervention into the real space of architecture” (Krauss, 1979).

Phase A: 2 Galleries for 2 artworks.
Phase B: 2 Art Museums for 2 Galleries
Phase C: 1 World… for 2 Art Museums and 2 Art Galleries

ST1/08 Monday 6:15pm - 9:15pm, MSD Room 141
ST2/08 Thursday 6:15am - 9:15pm, MSD Room 141

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