Nationality Australian Employer University of Sydney Role Writer | Name John Conomos Years active 1967–present | |
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Born 28 January 1947 (age 77) ( 1947-01-28 ) Grafton, NSW, Australia Alma mater University of New South Wales, University of Technology, Sydney Occupation Artist, critic, writer, academic Education University of New South Wales Books Mutant Media: Essays on Cinema, Video Art and New Media | ||
John Conomos (born 28 January 1947) is an artist, critic and writer based in Sydney, Australia and an Associate Professor in film and media studies at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. Conomos is also a New Media Fellow of the Australia Council for the Arts, having received the Fellowship in 2000.
Contents
- Background
- Works
- Context
- Major video works
- Writing and publishing projects
- Curatorial work
- Academia
- Selected videography
- Radiophonic works
- References
His books, essays and artworks are framed within four traditions of contemporary art: Anglo–American and Australian cultural studies, critical theory and post-structuralism.
Conomos has been an active participant in Australian film and small magazine culture since the mid-1960s, when he was affiliated with the Sydney Push.
Background
Conomos was born in Grafton, New South Wales. He studied at the University of New South Wales after receiving a Commonwealth Scholarship and also studied at the University of Technology, Sydney, during the 1990s. As an academic, he has lectured at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, and University of Technology, Sydney.
Works
Conomos works across a number of art forms – video, new media, installation art, radiophonic art and photo-performance – and his written oeuvre includes cultural and film aesthetics, art criticism and theory, new media and critical theory.
Context
Conomos' work is a collaborative synthesis between video, new media, media theory, performance, installation and photography, presented in a broad context of the literary, visual and cinematic arts, a style that represents a cross-disciplinary mode of 'image-sound writing' evident in the films of Jean Cocteau, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda and Orson Welles.
Conomos received a New Media Arts Board Fellowship in 2000 and developed two major projects during this time, Aura and Cyborg Ned.
Major video works
Aura (2002) is a meditative landscape video installation combined with a soundtrack composed by Robert Lloyd. The work draws upon the ideas of Jean-Francois Lyotard concerning the sublime as the 'unpresentable' in avant-garde art and landscape, and from recent debates about techno-culture and its emerging anti-sublime digital representations.
Conomos' work is an expression of Raymond Bellour's unspeakable 'in-between' concepts – forms, gestures and spaces that emanate via the computer, traversing the camera-based artforms of cinema, photography and video.
Cyborg Ned (2003) is a collaborative digital sculpture that directly reworks Nam June Paik's famous TV Buddha. The underlying thematic core of the piece is the poetic potency of Ned Kelly in the Australian popular imagination.
Conomos' earlier work, Autumn Song (1998) is an 'auto-biofictional' video and suite of digital stills that evokes themes of conflict and bi-cultural memory. The fragmented and poetic narrative of the work articulates childhood memories of the Greek-Australian milk bar run by Conomos' father and is contrasted with footage of the artist performing on the rocky landscape of the Greek island Kythera, his spiritual home.
Autumn Song has been exhibited in Australia and internationally, including at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (1996). It received an honourable merit award at Berlin's Transmediale Videofest in 1998 and was exhibited at ZKM's International Award for Video Art (Germany, 1998) and screened on German television.
During 1999, Conomos produced a video-photo-neon installation Album Leaves for the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Writing and publishing projects
Since the 1970s, Conomos has been an art, film and media essayist, both in Australia and overseas, as well as a critic and writer responsible for many articles, book chapters, reviews, critiques and commentary for local and international journals, anthologies and magazines. He was a co-founding editor (with Brian Langer and Eddy Jokovich) of the arts journal Scan+. In 1995, Conomos spoke on interactive art at Sydney's Biennale of Ideas Symposium. He was a new media critic for the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1990s, and in 1999 was appointed the Sydney editor for the London-based journal Contemporary.
His main books include: Mutant Media: Essays on Cinema, Video Art and New Media (2008), a collection of essays; Anti-Kythera Conversations (2010) and Kythera Conversations (2010); and two anthologies co-edited with Brad Buckley; Republics of Ideas: Republicanism Culture Visual Arts (2001);, Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD and the Academy (2009), and Ecologies of Invention (2013). He has been a contributor to periodicals, journals and newspapers around the world since the 1970s, including the now defunct Filmnews, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture and RealTime.
Also, with Brad Buckley, Conomos has published a major illustrated monograph, Brad Buckley/John Conomos, published by The Australian Centre for Photography in 2013.
Other contributions include chapter articles in Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska and Anthony Lambert's Diasporas of Australian Cinema (2009) published by Intellect; James Elkins' What Do Artists Know? (2012) published by Penn State University Press; Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas' collection Relive: Media Art Histories (2013) published by The MIT Press; and the foreword to Video Void (2014), published by Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Curatorial work
Conomos in the 1980s was a film curator, programmer and researcher for the Australian Film Institute, Paddington. There, Conomos was responsible for the film programs: Cahiers Du Cinema in the Fifties, Early German Expressionist Cinema, The Evil Eye (Religion in the Cinema), Cinematheque Series: Ken Russell, Francois Truffaut, Horror Film (a retrospective), Through Other People’s Eyes (Multicultural Cinema) and Archetypes (with Mark Jackson and Mark Stiles).
Conomos towards the late 1980s was also a video art and new media curator/consultant and researcher for the Australian International Video Festival and Electronic Media Arts (Australia). He was a director of both organisations and, was also media artist-in-residence for Electronic Media Arts (Australia).
Since the 1970s, Conomos has also been a film program consultant and researcher for the Sydney Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival and the Adelaide Film Festival and for local and international academic and cultural institutions and organisations, galleries and museums in Australia, England, Greece, France, Canada, Germany and the United States of America.
Academia
Conomos has worked as an academic since 1985, including College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales; the University of Technology, Sydney; and the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. He has taught several generations of academics, artists, curators, filmmakers and new media producers including Alex Davis, Mari Velonaki, Russell Storer, Kent Buchanan, Allan Gidney, Sean Lowry, Salvatori Panaterri, Ruben Keenan, Alex Wadsbrough, Nathan Dunn, Tara Moss, John Buckmaster, Wade Maranowsky, Melissa Laing, Ruth Watson, Alana Hunt, Sam Doctor, Jo Meares, Jasper Knight, Stephen Greenwood, Emma Varker, Ann Davis, Mel O'Callaghan, Jack McGrath, and Andrew Robards.
During the 1980s, Conomos was one of the early adopters of video art and new media courses at Australian universities (College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales; Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney), combining the multifaceted narrative of avant-garde/experimental cinema, essay film, video art into new media studies, as well as exploring the shifting intertextual links between art, cinema, culture, literature, and philosophy.
Selected videography
Conomos' videos and installations have been exhibited throughout Australia, France, England, the United States of America, Canada, China, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and New Zealand, and reviewed in cited in Artforum International, Art and Australia, Screen, Senses of Cinema, Cantrill Filmnotes, Art Monthly, Photofile, Broadsheet, Eyeline, Metro Magazine, Vertigo (London), Variant (Liverpool, UK), The Times Higher Education Supplement, Heat, Tate Modern Catalogue and Art Survey, RealTime, Continuum and Scanlines.