Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

Slavoj Žižek in his study of the event begins by describing it as an act of re-framing. While going on to examine the event from a diversity of perspectives including the idea that an event is an effect that exceeds its causes, this idea of re-framing is a useful one in considering place-responsive temporary public art. In creating an event whereby audience members are drawn to a specific place to consider it in dialogue with a series of artworks, a juxtaposition is established between the specificity of a place, its geographical features, use value, culture, and the ways in which artists have chosen to re-frame these contexts. For the artists in the ongoing socially-engaged art project Treatment based in Melbourne, Australia’s Western Sewerage Treatment Plant, Žižek’s rhetorical question, is an event a change in the way reality appears to us, or, is it a shattering transformation of reality itself? could be seen as a useful provocation. This paper will examine how Treatment has sought to establish new understandings of embedded socially engaged practice over successive iterations. In seeking to respond to the Western Treatment Plant, an extraordinary 11,000 hectare civic works, engineering and world listed wildlife site, while re-framing its assorted contexts for an audience mostly unaware of any of the sites features, the artists sought to build a new accord between capturing the lived stories of the people that built and maintained the site and their interest in eliding narratives and conjunctions that speak to present day concerns.