NUCA Readings
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009A few NUCA related articles have emerged recently.
One by Julia Gwendolyn Schneider, called “Un-Collectable Art: The Australian network »un-collectable artists« and a critical urban development project in Sydney” in the Austrian magazine springerin.
Here’s how her article starts:
We are all familiar with the art league tables published every year, those canonisations, which seem to be unfair, arbitrary, and to a large extent fictitious and which are primarily about fame, along with money. The »Australian Art Collector Magazine«[1] also publishes one of these rankings once a year; a kind of art market speculation, for which the Do-It-Yourself utopias of some Australian artists were always an irritant.
You can read it online here.
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Also, Royce Smith, who was in Sydney during the NUCA heyday (2004, when the bubblegum cards were launched) wrote an article called “Cultural Development? Cultural Unilateralism? An Analysis of Contemporary Festival and Biennale Programs” in The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society Vol. 36, No. 4. The article is available here.
Here is a small quote from the article. We should note (although these are minor points) that NUCA was not really a group of “students”. And the bubblegum cards were presented guerrilla style at the Sydney Biennale only because it happened to coincide with the project, not as a particular pointed critique of that large arts festival, which can come and go as it likes, it doesn’t really bother us either way. However, with those small points in mind, bravo Royce!…
As a result of the perceived breach between practice and institutionalization, these students, along with other like-minded artists, created a loose collective known as The Network of Uncollectable Artists, or NUCA. Their mission was to provide a forum for local artists whose works, performances, acts, or interventions were ill-suited to the Sydney Biennale’s structured frameworks of documentation and display. Allowing anyone to submit works for consideration, the NUCA collective judged submissions on a numerical scale that concomitantly adopted and mocked the conventional, binary thinking that tends to pervade institutional aesthetic judgments and established new systems of valuation that acknowledged the works’ overall connectedness to culture and to both conventional and nonconventional paradigms.
Their “1–5” scale — examining anonymity / authorship, site difficulty / easiness, done-for-love / done-for-money, do-it-yourself / reliance on funding—allowed works to be numerically referenced using baseball card-style ratings (see figure 3). The fifty projects with the highest total scores were documented on cards, packaged in groups of five with a piece of peculiarly flavored orange bubble gum, and sold for three dollars by students carrying the cards inside trench coats.
