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8/11/2005

Justin Clemens

Centre for Contemporary Photography - CCP, Fitzroy

2005 CCP Lecture Series

Justin Clemens discusses an advertising poster, which he describes as the most graffitied image in Paris over the New Year period 2003–4. The advertisement is a photograph of a couple on a couch, the woman in lingerie, the man reclining with a camera; a familiar and perhaps even innocuous image these days. If some Parisians still seem to believe that daubing “Down with ads!” has some kind of beneficial political significance, the mutilations inflicted on this poster differed from the usual sorts of defacement in their focus and intensity. “Leave this guy,” the graffiti-artists advised, “this ad is sexist”.

The anthropologist Michael Taussig has noted that public monuments are often only noticed after they’ve been defaced; otherwise, they simply disappear into their environment, subject to Walter Benjamin’s dictum that architecture is the epitome of “an art experienced by the mass in a state of distraction”. A number of questions follow: why bother defacing this stuff at all? Who really cares that much about an advertising image? And, perhaps: are some images precisely designed to encourage their own destruction?

Justin Clemens has written extensively on psychoanalysis, philosophy and art. His recent books include The Mundiad (Black Inc, 2004) and, with Dominic Pettman, Avoiding the Subject (Amsterdam UP, 2004). He teaches at Deakin University, and is the art critic for The Monthly.

CCP is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of The Australian, State and Territory Governments. CCP is supported by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria and the Community Support Fund, and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. CCP is a member of CAOS, Contemporary Arts Organisations of Australia.

Wednesday 9 november 5005, 6:30PM

CCP - Centre for Contemporary Photography
404 George St, Fitzroy Vic - Australia

Gallery hours: Wednesday - Saturday 11am–6pm
Cost $8 and $6 CCP members and concession.

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