Biographies of Writers on Gordon’s Art
Dr. Steven C. Dubin
Author of the Foreword in Sun Shining-Blood Everywhere: The art of Victor Gordon 2012
Dr. Steven C. Dubin is Professor and Director of the Arts Administration Program at Columbia University, New York ,where he is also a Research Affiliate at the Columbia Institute of African Studies. In addition, he is an Associate at the Research Centre, Visual Identities in Art and Design, at the University of Johannesburg.
He is the author of Bureaucratizing the Muse (1987); Arresting Images (1992, cited as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times); Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum (1999); Mounting Queen Victoria: Curating Social Change (2009); and the forthcoming Past Imperfect/Future Conditional, about the culture wars in South Africa.
Professor Dubin’s awards include the Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship to South Africa, Fulbright Senior Specialist award to the University of Iceland, The Lady Davis Visiting Professorship at Hebrew University (Jerusalem), Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, and writing residencies at Bellagio (Italy), The Ragdale Foundation (Illinois), and The Ucross Foundation (Wyoming).
He has written and lectured widely on controversial art, museums, censorship, popular culture, and art in politics in South Africa, and is a frequent contributor to publications such as Art in America, African Arts and Art South Africa. He has been working and traveling throughout Southern Africa for the past twelve years.
Dr Andrew Flatau
Author of the Introductory Essay in Sun Shining-Blood Everywhere: The art of Victor Gordon 2012
Andrew Flatau studied Dentistry and Arts at The University of Sydney, graduating with First Class Honours and the University Medal in both degrees. He was awarded a PhD in 2001 for his doctoral thesis, entitled The anatomy of the infratemporal fossa: dissections and historical representations, an interdisciplinary study involving not only original anatomical investigations, but also research into the history of anatomy and anatomical art. He has coauthored chapters on anatomy for surgical textbooks and taught in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anatomy and pre-clinical sciences to clinical dentistry at the University of Sydney, where he also briefly taught Old Icelandic. In 1988 he taught in the dental faculty at the University of Iceland. Currently he is Associate Professor in Clinical Dentistry at Charles Sturt University in Orange.
Dr Flatau has had a long association with Orange Regional Gallery and is a member of Orange City Council’s Gallery Community Committee. In 2009 he curated for ORG a survey exhibition of the paintings of Neil Cuthbert, together with a monograph entitled Cuthbert: the painter’s progress.
Dr Christian Messham-Muir
Author of the catalogue essay “VIBGYOR” on the art of Victor Gordon 2003
Dr Kit Messham-Muir is a Lecturer in art history at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Since the late 1990s, he has researched on affect and emotion in museums and the visual arts. Dr Messham-Muir frequently writes exhibition catalogue essays, art reviews and feature articles for contemporary art magazines. His forthcoming book explores the role of images in contemporary warfare through the video installation practice of Shaun Gladwell as Australia’s Official War Artist for Afghanistan and the Middle East. The book, which is the first of its kind on Gladwell’s work, will be published in 2013. Dr Messham-Muir received an Australian national citation for outstanding contribution to student learning in 2011.
Qualifications
• PhD, University of New South Wales, 2000
• Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts ) Honours, University of Sydney, 1995
… like to read the essay VIBGYOR
Dr Michael Goldberg BFA(Hons)Capetown, GradDipHEd Johannesburg, MFA(Hons) UNSW, COFA PhD
Author of the catalogue essay in Behold the Lands Where Satan Reigns”Anti Apartheid Artwork by Victor Gordon 1990
Michael Goldberg is an artist, curator and academic, born in South Africa, and living in Sydney Australia since 1988. Projects between 1995-2000 examined Australia’s colonial period with site-specific installations in historic locations. These included the Royal Botanic Gardens and Elizabeth Bay House, 1830s residence of the Colonial Secretary. The projects presented alternative views of political and historical issues, those often ignored by conventional museology. From 2001 projects explored global financial markets and speculation as neo-colonial constructs. Produced for the sesqui-centenary of the discovery of gold in Australia, the performance/installation ‘NCM open/high/low/close’ reflected the international commodity market, turning the walls of the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery into huge graphs representing the price of gold and the share price of Australia’’s major gold producer, the Newcrest Mining Company. In 2003, $50,000 was borrowed from a group of financial speculators to trade on the stock market. In the performance/installation, ‘catchingafallingknife.com’, shares were bought and sold in global media giant, News Corporation. Precognition and psychic divination of the stock market became the focus in ‘Remote Predictive Viewing’ (2008), a performance staged for the Art of Management and Organization Conference at the Banff Centre, Canada. More recent installation projects explored anxieties emerging from the media distribution of images of global terrorism. Avatar (2005), used an off-the-shelf Microsoft flight simulation computer program to depict a ‘9/11’ scenario for downtown Sydney. The restriction on global mobility in the era of the ‘‘War on Terror’’ was addressed in ‘STRONG LANGUAGE, SOME VIOLENCE, ADULT THEMES’ (2008). Curatorial projects such as ‘Artists in the House!’ (1997), produced for the Historic Houses Trust of NSW and ‘Swelter’ (1999/2000) at the Royal Botanic Gardens, featured installations by a number of prominent Australian artists. ‘The Butterfly Effect’ (2005), also included installations interpreting and interacting with the displays of the Australian Museum, the country’s oldest museum of natural history. Financial markets were again in focus with ‘The Force of Desire/The Force of Necessity’, a project for the 10th Havana Biennial in 2009. The installation and performance incorporating two Havana artists considered the isolation of the Cuban economy from speculative U.S. capital.
Michael Goldberg is a Senior Lecturer and Chair of the Sculpture, Performance and Installation studio at The University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts.
… like to read the essay Behold The Lands Where Satan Reigns
… visit the website www.michaelgoldberg.info