Symposium | Mining Value: Art and the Extraction of Resources (4 of 5)

The Power Institute together with the Terra Foundation and the Sydney Environment Institute presented the two-day conference 'Mining Value: Art and the Extraction of Resources'. This conference was free and open to the public, and we welcomed everyone who is interested to join us for a series of papers from both Australian and international academics.

ABOUT

Questions the conference asks include: What does it mean to conceptualize the value of art objects as something hidden beneath the surface, or like as a substance dug out of the ground? What kinds of relations do such terms suggest between art objects and other kinds of valuable resources? How might artworks materialize labour and production, or engage with the realities of resource depletion or environmental scarcity?

The Conference is convened by Mark Ledbury, Director of the Power Institute, in conjunction with Maggie Cao (University of North Carolina), Alex J Taylor (University of Pittsburgh) and Sophie Cras (University of Paris 1).

Speakers include Anne Dunlop (University of Melbourne), Amy Ogata (University of Southern California), Anna Arabindian-Kesson (Princeton University); Matthew Hunter (McGill University), Iain McCalman (University of Sydney), Ann Elias (University of Sydney), Ian McLean (University of Melbourne) and Maggie Cao.

Respondents include Jennifer Ferng (University of Sydney), Ute Eickelcamp (University of Sydney), Sophie Cras and Alex J Taylor.


PAPERS

'Mining Sydney Harbour'
Ann Elias

'The Return of the Repressed.
A poet, a painter and a forester won a 1960’s war to save the Great Barrier Reef from oil mining but feared that mining threats might one day resume.'
Iain McCalman

'Rusting Giant: U.S. Steel and the Promotional Material of Sculpture'
Alex J Taylor

'Mining, Metallurgy and Manufacture in Second Empire France'
Amy F. Ogata

'Surface and Surfeit: African gold and Italian gold-ground painting'
Anne Dunlop

'Licentious Gold'
Maggie Cao

'An Engine, Not a Camera: Photography and Combustion in the Early Anthropocene'
Matthew C. Hunter

'Mining Vision: Ingrid Pollard’s Photographic Formations'
Anna Arabindan-Kesson

'Mining, metaphysics, metaphor and making art'
Ian McLean

DETAILS

9:30am – 5pm
Thursday 9 August, 2018
1:30pm – 6:30pm
Friday 10 August, 2018

The Sibyl Centre
The Women’s College
University of Sydney
Newtown NSW 2042


The conference is the third in a series dedicated to economic encounters of and with artworks, following events held in New York and Paris. The event is supported by the Power Institute’s “Art in Action” grant and a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art.