Our Day Will Come
Halo Nightclub, Hobart, Tasmania, Saturday October 15, 2011.
A free-school art project by Paul O’Neill with Fiona Lee, Mick Wilson, Sarah Pierce, Annie Fletcher, Garrett Phelan, Jem Noble, Rhona Byrne, Gareth Long, Liam Gillick, David Blamey and others.
Our Day Will Come: Death of a Discourse Dancer is a school disco like no other. Taking place throughout a nightclub venue during the normal working hours of the club, it brings together two ‘publics’ to experience a simultaneous symposium and disco—all at once and at the same time—where overlapping zones of discursivity co-exist and interrupt each other. Two rooms of self-organized discourse co-mingle, with DJs playing disco in one, and school participants and guests providing formal lectures and presentations in the other.
Death of a Discourse Dancer is the final event of the project Our Day Will Come—a co-operative art project initiated by Paul O’Neill, a month-long free school in Tasmania. The school takes place in the central courtyard of the University of Tasmania School of Art in Hobart and is housed within a converted labourer’s tearoom. It is a school within a school as much as a school of schools. It employs the free-school as a construct under interrogation and as an engine of production. Each week artists take up residence within the school and contribute towards the school’s programme with performances, screenings, broadcasts, and objects engaging diverse ‘publics’.
Over the space of a month, the project looks at four questions: 1. What is a School? 2. What is Remoteness? 3. What is Autonomy? and 4. What is Usefulness? Each week the school begins with a question and closes with the publication of an issue of the school zine with its contents formed from contributions by school members during that week. Under the conceptual and curatorial frame of Iteration:Again, the project explores the conviviality of emergent and iterative practice and the nature and value of extant educational formulas. Our Day Will Come explores the implications of encroaching upon educational, academic and other formal structures, by intervening within them and re-framing them: from class to curriculum; from workshop to school dinner; from zine to school radio; from formal lecture to the end-of-year school disco. These are some of the discursive spaces that are being rethought and reconfigured as a means of enabling and supporting emergent forms of co-operative production.
Iteration:Again
www.iterationagain.com
Iteration:Again is a series of thirteen public art commissions by Australian and international artists taking place across Tasmania from September 18–October 15, 2011. Produced by Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania and Curatorial Director David Cross, in conjunction with seven partner curators, Iteration:Again works to transform our experience of place, with each commission seeking to address how temporary interventions or responses by artists to public sites, environments and buildings, can serve to open up new ways of understanding Tasmania as a place with very complex cultural, social and spatial resonances. Iteration:Again examines how it might be possible to introduce transformative elements that challenge the notion of a fixed or definitive artwork grounded in one location. By asking the artists to make four different chapters or ‘iterations’ over the course of a four week period, Cross has challenged each practitioner to think through how change or processes of transition may function to make the art experience an unstable and contingent one.
Artists: Lucy Bleach, David Blamey, Rhona Byrne, David Clegg, Marley Dawson, Bethany J Fellowes, Annie Fletcher, Liam Gillick, Christopher Hanrahan, Toby Huddlestone, Anthony Johnson, Maddie Leach, Gareth Long, James Newitt, Jem Noble, Paul O’Neill, Raquel Ormella, Garrett Phelan, Sarah Pierce, Ruben Santiago, John Vella, Mick Wilson, Voice Theatre Lab
Curatorial Director: David Cross
Curators: Fernando do Campo, Nicole Durling, Sarah Jones, Fiona Lee, Damien Quilliam, Paula Silva, Jane Stewart
Iteration:Again is a Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania (CAST) project.