Art Monthly Australasia issue 323: Oscar Capezio essay

With our 2020 Lecture Series temporarily postponed, we hope to alleviate some of your disappointment by presenting you with an eclectic series of essays and excerpts on art and artists by our 2020 series lecturers.

Drill Hall Gallery team member Oscar Capezio is the ANU Art Collection Curator (acting), and a regular contributor Art Monthly Australasia magazine. He was the 2018 Critic in Residence at Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA) in partnership with Art Monthly Australasia. His essay Simon Deny: Remote control in Art Monthly‘s current issue, 323, reviews Deny’s recent exhibition at MONA. Oscar is also a scheduled lecturer in the Drill Hall’s 2020 Lecture series and Art Monthly Australasia‘s editor Michael Fitzgerald has kindly allowed us to reproduce the essay for you here:

Simon Deny: Remote control 

Mine’, Simon Denny’s current exhibition project at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, attempts to represent the mostly unseen, planetary-scale processes of extraction – the plundering, accumulation, enclosure, and colonial expropriation of natural resources which are fundamental to the interests of modern capitalism. In our increasingly decentred and dematerialised world, it is difficult to comprehend the scale and specificity of these processes, let alone grasp the ways in which they are naturalised and licensed to cut through patterns of human cooperation and social activity. Compared to our little lives and devices, the seemingly disparate networks of extraction are so immensely huge, and their combined impact so vast and abstract, that they resist easy representation. The unrelenting dynamic of these anthropogenic processes has led us to the climatic mess we are currently in. Yet glimmering in the corner of Denny’s ‘Mine’ is the faint insistence that such complex systems-thinking now empowers us to begin reckoning with the devastation caused through this voracious process of extracting value from the natural world…

Read the full article in PDF here: Simon Denny by Oscar Capezio

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