AustLit

'Sean Lowry, founder and executive director of Project Anywhere and convener of creative and performing arts at the University of Newcastle, Australia, was in New York City in December 2014 for Project Anywhere's inaugural biennial conference, hosted by the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons School for Design. Project Anywhere: Art at the Outer Limits of Location Specificity is an attempt to create a context in which one might host artistic research and in which the entire globe might be regarded as potential exhibition or performance space. After two years, and with a number of key institutions around the world involved-all of whom have representatives on the editorial committee-ten of the twelve projects that successfully navigated into the proposal stage were able to come along to our first conference event, which ironically is staged far from the outermost limits of location specificity, in New York City [laughter]. To me, something significant happened to the course of Australian art at that point where it realized-I think through the writings of the late Paul Taylor, an Australian expat who moved to New York, and others such as Rex Butler-and recognized that Australian artists possessed an understanding of art that was built through reproduction, as you pointed out, but also that there might be some paradoxical advantage in taking stock of this original/unoriginal status.'  (Publication abstract)