Books by Wes Hill
Evoking a level of animosity from a bygone cultural moment, the hipster
belongs to a time when th... more Evoking a level of animosity from a bygone cultural moment, the hipster
belongs to a time when the economic advantages of cultural innovation in
the arts were seriously believed. What that time was, and where we are
now, is this book’s subject, examined through the lens of art history and
the creativity hype of neoliberalism. Having been associated with post-
World War Two bebop and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in
the early 2000s as a form of generic individualism that was easily identifiable even if endlessly mutable. However, in recent years “hipster” has become increasingly impotent as an accusation, shifting in its meaning to refer less to an external identity than to a mode of deflection in which
authenticity and discernment are challenged only to be surreptitiously
reinforced. Marking a transition from a period in Western art when irony
and high-minded nonchalance reigned, the hipster appears in the context
of contemporary art not as a critical standpoint in itself but as the continually deferred subject position of creative practice. Today, ethical considerations of identity overshadow discerning proclamations of cultural taste, making palpable an uncertainty about our capacity to untangle capitalism’s thirst for reinvention from the artist’s thirst for subverting norms.
Although the title Speech Acts evokes postmodern debates about linguistics – specifically the Ame... more Although the title Speech Acts evokes postmodern debates about linguistics – specifically the American philosopher John Searle’s 1969 publication of the same name – this exhibition was conceived with a more basic ambition: to consider the ways in which the British artist Richard Grayson and the American artist Matt Mullican connect speech and action in their selected video works. While Mullican and Grayson have very different practices, they have shared backgrounds in performance and text-based art, as well as a tendency to juxtapose speech and vernacular tropes against universalist frames of reference. Whereas Mullican explores language systems in relation to the human psyche, Grayson often draws
from vernacular culture, with which he contrasts the impersonal and esoteric aspects of religious, scientific and capitalist paradigms. In this exhibition, Mullican and Grayson speak, sing, scream and animate words to highlight linguistic connections between physical bodies, psyches and socio-political contexts, underscoring the liveliness of the video medium and leaving mysterious the artists’ precise relation to the ideas in their works.
Since the 1990s, artists and art writers around the world have increasingly undermined the essent... more Since the 1990s, artists and art writers around the world have increasingly undermined the essentialism associated with notions of "critical practice." We can see this manifesting in the renewed relevance of what were previously considered "outsider" art practices, the emphasis on first-person accounts of identity over critical theory, and the proliferation of exhibitions that refuse to distinguish between art and the productions of culture more generally. How Folklore Shaped Modern Art: A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics underscores how the cultural traditions, belief systems and performed exchanges that were once integral to the folklore discipline are now central to contemporary art’s "post-critical turn." This shift is considered here as less a direct confrontation of critical procedures than a symptom of art’s inclusive ideals, overturning the historical separation of fine art from those "uncritical" forms located in material and commercial culture. In a global context, aesthetics is now just one of numerous traditions informing our encounters with visual culture today, symptomatic of the pull towards an impossibly pluralistic image of art that reflects the irreducible conditions of identity.
Catalogue publication from an exhibition featuring Christopher LG Hill and Matt Dabrowski. Curate... more Catalogue publication from an exhibition featuring Christopher LG Hill and Matt Dabrowski. Curated and edited by Wes Hill. published by Lismore Regional Gallery, NSW.
This is What I Do, 2012
Catalogue publication from an exhibition at Contemporary Art Space Tasmania, Hobart. 2012. Curate... more Catalogue publication from an exhibition at Contemporary Art Space Tasmania, Hobart. 2012. Curated and edited by Wes Hill
Book Chapters by Wes Hill
Hipster Culture: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives, 2021
The hipster invites analysis across many different fields of research, spanning issues of race, c... more The hipster invites analysis across many different fields of research, spanning issues of race, class, gender, gentrification, consumerism, globalization, irony, subcultures, and the political Left. Despite this promiscuity, the trope is primarily an aesthetic one, functioning, by and large, as an embodiment of discerning yet defective taste. As an aesthetic trope, the hipster has close affiliations with visual art, amalgamating a range of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century "sensitive-to-beauty" archetypes. Specifically, the hipster distorts the Western avant-gardist legacy of flâneurs, aesthetes, connoisseurs, and dandies by transplanting them to the sphere of post-Warholian practice, within the ever-shifting parameters of neoliberal global capitalism. Of course, "art hipsters" might want what hipsters everywhere want: to not be identified as hipsters. Therefore, to name a hipster is to enter into its rhetorical displays of perspicacious appearance. This is essentially what Rob Horning calls the hipster's "taint," whereby "if you are concerned enough about the [hipster] phenomenon to analyze it and discuss it, you are already somewhere on the continuum of hipster and are in the process of trying to rid yourself of [it]" (80). In contemporary art, which notoriously waivers between "hip" and "politically progressive" signaling, the story of hipsters is the story of visually literate creatives who do not think of themselves as hipsters until being named as such by someone assumed to be even more visually literate than them. This one-upmanship is key to understanding the hipster: it is a circular dispute about critical complexity performed through over-determinations of aesthetic taste.
Shapes of Knowledge, 2019
What does it mean for art to be pedagogical? Since the early 2000s, a number of terms such as ‘ar... more What does it mean for art to be pedagogical? Since the early 2000s, a number of terms such as ‘artist educator’, ‘artist activist’, ‘socially engaged artist’, ‘artist researcher’ and ‘curator artist’ have emerged to signal a shift in the direction of critical art practice, revolving around the common question: ‘How are we shaped by what we know?’ This turn towards what I will call ‘socio-pedagogic art’ is the focus of Shapes of Knowledge, an exhibition that reflects on, and stages, the various ways in which artists around the globe produce and impart knowledge. What this exhibition ultimately showcases is the ambitious deployment of hybrid methodologies in art today, involving artists and cultural producers more interested in education than transgression, in productive dialogue rather than denunciation.
The Pedagogical Principles of Emily Floyd, 2014, National Gallery of Victoria
Emily Floyd: The Dawn, 2014
Journal Articles (edited C1) by Wes Hill
Artlink, 2022
As soon as it was published, ‘Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings’ seemed a vital resource for anyo... more As soon as it was published, ‘Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings’ seemed a vital resource for anyone interested in Australian postcolonial art history, or simply good art. Since his death in 2014, Gordon Bennett has become a legendary figure whose reputation is likely only to grow; ‘the first artist to explore our Indigenous past using conceptual art techniques’ according to his gallerist, the incisive Josh Milani. Foregrounding his critical voice, Bennett was a driving force behind Brisbane becoming what used to be called the ‘urban Aboriginal art capital of Australia.’ He inspired a generation of artists after him to speak back to the art-historical discourses and art-institutional divisions limiting Indigenous representation, embodying what Terry Smith calls ‘a shout from the silenced.’
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2021
The American philosopher Graham Harman is one of the more lucid writers associated with the 'mate... more The American philosopher Graham Harman is one of the more lucid writers associated with the 'material turn' in humanities scholarship over the last twenty years. Identified with Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and Speculative Realism-distant cousins of the likes of New Materialism, Thing Theory and New Realism-Harman is part of a broader movement of theorists who, in the words of Steven Shaviro, are interested in how 'things are active and interactive far beyond any measure of their presence to us'. While their common ground is much disputed, if there is such a thing as 'theorists of the material turn' the de-privileging of human-world relations is key; they advocate not critical modes of debunking, to discover 'where subjectivity begins and ends', but more speculative inquiries into non-human agency and the nature of things independent of thought. Like the French sociologist Bruno Latour (whose 2005 slogan 'Back to Things!' anticipated this ontological flattening of subjects and objects, turning all into actors), Harman thinks that art plays a valuable role in the contemporary rethinking of things. He states that, when it comes to OOO, 'aesthetics is first philosophy'.
Artlink, 2021
Thanks to Erik Jensen’s 2014 book, Acute Misfortune, and its film adaptation of the same name—dir... more Thanks to Erik Jensen’s 2014 book, Acute Misfortune, and its film adaptation of the same name—directed by Thomas M. Wright and released in 2018—the legacy of Adam Cullen, and his Gen‑X revanchism, have crept back into the Australian artworld of late. Both Jensen’s biography and Wright’s biopic are ambiguous, even ambivalent, about Cullen’s actual work. They don’t so much re‑examine his practice as situate it in the background of his embittered, self‑dramatized life, illuminating secrets rather than talents. Jensen concludes that Cullen was likely a closet bisexual with severe mummy and daddy issues; his complicated neediness communicated through lies, innuendos and between bouts of grievous bodily harm caused to himself and those around him.
Art Monthly Australasia, 2021
In Max Weber’s assessment, twentieth-century modern
life was confronted by the spread of ‘disench... more In Max Weber’s assessment, twentieth-century modern
life was confronted by the spread of ‘disenchantment’
– from the German Entzauberung, which literally
translates to ‘de-magic-ation’. Borrowed from Friedrich
Schiller, disenchantment describes the negative effects
of scientific reason and bureaucratic regulation,
which fail to bring about superior knowledge of the
conditions under which one lives. In contrast to Marx,
Weber held that modernity could be an ‘iron cage’
precisely because of its success. This has less to do
with class inequality or alienation than with how the
processes that allow the human intellect to soar are the
same ones that produce meaninglessness; rationalisation
dispirits as it uplifts. The specialised self-regulating
structures of twentieth-century life were, Weber
thought, ill-equipped to handle older human needs
for spiritual closure, for taking positions on rhetorical
unrationalisable questions of self-worth. Morality, myth
and happiness are tempered by the calculability of everything,
which may not be a completely bad thing for
those whose public duty is to represent heterogenous
moral and political ends. In a pithy iconoclastic tone
redolent of Marshall McLuhan, Weber states: ‘Today the
routines of everyday life challenge religion.’
Artlink, 2020
Strange to think of Gordon Bennett as an almost classical figure in contemporary Australian art. ... more Strange to think of Gordon Bennett as an almost classical figure in contemporary Australian art. After years of critiquing art-historical standards, Bennett has himself become the standard bearer. Six years after his death at the age of 58, his practice represents a canon that future generations of artists will be both motivated and shadowed by. In this, his first homegrown retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), some of Bennett’s most well-known series are framed by seriality itself. At the centre of "Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett" – its beating heart – is a freestanding display of numerous works on paper, establishing how the Queensland-born artist obsessed over his ideas in multiple drawings, watercolours and revisions, in constant dialogue with his own visual vocabulary as much as he was with those whose works he appropriated.
M/C Journal, 2020
In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated... more In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism's transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: "a work needs only to be interesting".
Artlink, 2020
Untitled (Clock) (2014) by the Perth‑born, Melbourne‑based artist Stuart Ringholt is modelled on ... more Untitled (Clock) (2014) by the Perth‑born, Melbourne‑based artist Stuart Ringholt is modelled on an antique mantelpiece clock, stands three metres high, and completes a minute in forty‑five seconds. I’ve only ever experienced the work as part of Today Tomorrow Yesterday: the almost absurdly lazy four‑year‑long exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, running from September 2016 to July 2020. Because of the sculpture’s prominence in a show catering mostly to drop‑by tourists wandering around Circular Quay, I usually see the work incidentally, on my way to other shows in the same building. In my mind, at least until the exhibition closes later this year, Ringholt’s clock is a permanent public‑art object, heavy with everyday context yet recurrently passing its 18‑hour days as if in a zone of its own.
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2018
Since the late 1990s, the work of the New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson has centred on reconst... more Since the late 1990s, the work of the New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson has centred on reconstructed historical objects that resemble artefacts from archaeology, anthropology and material culture disciplines. As part of a broader sensibility of twenty-first-century ‘archival,’ ‘archaeological’ and ‘historiographic’ art, Stevenson and his peers have prompted much discussion about the legacy of 1970s institutional critique on post-1990s practice-based treatments of history and museology. What makes Stevenson so interesting within this lineage is his inclination to research relatively overlooked past events in order to problematise a clear line between historical perspective and aesthetic experience. Although Stevenson's work conjures the empiricism of the social sciences and the reflexivity of institutional critique, its nostalgic, fragmented, and multi-temporal characteristics hint at a contemporary treatment of the romantic ruin. Fascinated with the intersections of cultural and economic histories yet sceptical of periodisation, his locating of nostalgia within critical practice reveals the struggle to grasp one's present, endowing viewers with the capacity to reconstruct for themselves the significance of his own reconstructions.
Media Culture Journal, 2018
The American artist Ryan Trecartin makes digital videos that centre on the self-presentations com... more The American artist Ryan Trecartin makes digital videos that centre on the self-presentations common to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Named by New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s” (84), Trecartin’s works are like high-octane domestic dramas told in the first-person, blending carnivalesque and horror sensibilities through multi-layered imagery, fast-paced editing, sprawling mise-en-scène installations and heavy-handed digital effects. Featuring narcissistic young-adult characters (many of whom are played by the artist and his friends), Trecartin’s scripted videos portray the self as fundamentally performed and kaleidoscopically mediated. His approach is therefore exemplary of some of the key concepts of automediality, which, although originating in literary studies, address concerns relevant to contemporary art, such as the blurring of life-story, self-performance, identity, persona and technological mediation. I argue that Trecartin’s work is a form of automedial art that combines camp personas with what Sianne Ngai calls the “zany” aesthetics of neoliberalism—the 24/7 production of affects, subjectivity and sociability which complicate distinctions between public and private life.
The 2009 American film Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine, was released at a time when the... more The 2009 American film Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine, was released at a time when the hipster had become a ubiquitous concept, entering into the common vernacular of numerous cultures throughout the world, and gaining significant press, social media and academic attention (see Žižek; Arsel and Thompson; Greif et al.; Stahl; Ouellette; Reeve; Schiermer; Maly and Varis). Trash Humpers emerged soon after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis triggered Occupy movements in numerous cities, aided by social media platforms, reported on by blogs such as Gawker, and stylized by multi-national youth-subculture brands such as Vice, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and a plethora of localised variants.
Electronic Melbourne Art Journal
What is a hipster, and why has this cultural trope become so resonant of a particular mode of art... more What is a hipster, and why has this cultural trope become so resonant of a particular mode of artistic and connoisseurial expression in recent times? Evolving from its beatnik origins, the stereotypical hipster today is likely to be a globally aware " creative " who nonetheless fails in their endeavour to be an exemplar of progressive cultural taste in an era when cultural value is heavily politicised. Today, artist memes and hipster memes are almost interchangeable, associated with people who are desperate to be fashionably distinctive, culturally literate or as having discovered some obscure cultural phenomenon before anyone else. But how did we arrive at this situation where elitist and generically " arty " connotations are perceived in so many cultural forms? This article will attempt to provide an historical context to the rise of the contemporary, post-1990s, hipster, who emerged out of the creative and entrepreneurial ideologies of the digital age – a time when artistic creations lose their alternative credence in the markets of the creative industries. Towards the end of the article " hipster hate " will be examined in relation to post-critical practice, in which the critical, exclusive, and in-the-know stances of cultural connoisseurs are thought to be in conflict with pluralist ideology. Hipster Aesthetics: Creatives with no alternative Although the hipster trope is immediately recognisable, it has been allied with a remarkable diversity of styles, objects and activities over the last two decades, warranting definition more in terms of the attempt to promote counter-mainstream sensibilities than pertaining to a specific aesthetic as such. People rarely identify themselves as hipsters, and the term itself has long been contested, a generic signifier for those who embody both a generic brand of artiness and a pluralist cultural ideal. While more specific terms such as " twee " , " health goth " , " normcore " , " lumbersexual " and " yuccies " (young urban creative yuppies) describe a range of hipster subgroups, the currency of the term " hipster " has hardly diminished, remaining relevant, perhaps, by virtue of its totalizing sensibility – a shorthand term for people we can easily identify but also find difficult to define without implicating our own tastes. Fundamental to the hipster trope then is the very perception of what a hipster is, as if entailing the processes by which displays of progressive outlooks are denounced in the name of even more progressive outlooks. But why has the hipster become such a dominant marker of twenty-first-century life in the first place? Where did it come from and where is it going? Writing for the New York Times in 2013, Steven Kurutz has observed that there no longer appears to be any clothes or hobbies that one could wear or participate in to avoid the hipster label, asking: 'has there ever been a subculture this broadly defined?' 1 He writes: 1 Kurutz, 2013:
Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty
The pejorative term 'hipster' has been prominent in popular culture since the early 2000s, typica... more The pejorative term 'hipster' has been prominent in popular culture since the early 2000s, typically used in reference to connoisseurs, elites, poseurs, or anyone who is unaware of their own pretentiousness. As cultural stereotypes, hipsters have been allied with a striking diversity of aesthetic forms over the last twenty years, so much so that the trope has less to do with a specific aesthetic style and more to do with the attempt to foster a counter-mainstream sensibility. In this article, I provide an historical backdrop to the rise of the post-postmodern hipster, locating its emergence in the global spread of culture in the 1990s. I argue that the current pervasiveness of so-called 'hipster hate' – visible on the Internet and on social media platforms such as Twitter – is exemplary of a post-critical perspective, where the hipster stereotype serves as a point of distinction that reinforces the ideologies of cultural pluralism.
Keywords: hipster post-critical aesthetics pluralism post-postmodern connoisseurship
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Books by Wes Hill
belongs to a time when the economic advantages of cultural innovation in
the arts were seriously believed. What that time was, and where we are
now, is this book’s subject, examined through the lens of art history and
the creativity hype of neoliberalism. Having been associated with post-
World War Two bebop and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in
the early 2000s as a form of generic individualism that was easily identifiable even if endlessly mutable. However, in recent years “hipster” has become increasingly impotent as an accusation, shifting in its meaning to refer less to an external identity than to a mode of deflection in which
authenticity and discernment are challenged only to be surreptitiously
reinforced. Marking a transition from a period in Western art when irony
and high-minded nonchalance reigned, the hipster appears in the context
of contemporary art not as a critical standpoint in itself but as the continually deferred subject position of creative practice. Today, ethical considerations of identity overshadow discerning proclamations of cultural taste, making palpable an uncertainty about our capacity to untangle capitalism’s thirst for reinvention from the artist’s thirst for subverting norms.
from vernacular culture, with which he contrasts the impersonal and esoteric aspects of religious, scientific and capitalist paradigms. In this exhibition, Mullican and Grayson speak, sing, scream and animate words to highlight linguistic connections between physical bodies, psyches and socio-political contexts, underscoring the liveliness of the video medium and leaving mysterious the artists’ precise relation to the ideas in their works.
Book Chapters by Wes Hill
Journal Articles (edited C1) by Wes Hill
life was confronted by the spread of ‘disenchantment’
– from the German Entzauberung, which literally
translates to ‘de-magic-ation’. Borrowed from Friedrich
Schiller, disenchantment describes the negative effects
of scientific reason and bureaucratic regulation,
which fail to bring about superior knowledge of the
conditions under which one lives. In contrast to Marx,
Weber held that modernity could be an ‘iron cage’
precisely because of its success. This has less to do
with class inequality or alienation than with how the
processes that allow the human intellect to soar are the
same ones that produce meaninglessness; rationalisation
dispirits as it uplifts. The specialised self-regulating
structures of twentieth-century life were, Weber
thought, ill-equipped to handle older human needs
for spiritual closure, for taking positions on rhetorical
unrationalisable questions of self-worth. Morality, myth
and happiness are tempered by the calculability of everything,
which may not be a completely bad thing for
those whose public duty is to represent heterogenous
moral and political ends. In a pithy iconoclastic tone
redolent of Marshall McLuhan, Weber states: ‘Today the
routines of everyday life challenge religion.’
Keywords: hipster post-critical aesthetics pluralism post-postmodern connoisseurship
belongs to a time when the economic advantages of cultural innovation in
the arts were seriously believed. What that time was, and where we are
now, is this book’s subject, examined through the lens of art history and
the creativity hype of neoliberalism. Having been associated with post-
World War Two bebop and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in
the early 2000s as a form of generic individualism that was easily identifiable even if endlessly mutable. However, in recent years “hipster” has become increasingly impotent as an accusation, shifting in its meaning to refer less to an external identity than to a mode of deflection in which
authenticity and discernment are challenged only to be surreptitiously
reinforced. Marking a transition from a period in Western art when irony
and high-minded nonchalance reigned, the hipster appears in the context
of contemporary art not as a critical standpoint in itself but as the continually deferred subject position of creative practice. Today, ethical considerations of identity overshadow discerning proclamations of cultural taste, making palpable an uncertainty about our capacity to untangle capitalism’s thirst for reinvention from the artist’s thirst for subverting norms.
from vernacular culture, with which he contrasts the impersonal and esoteric aspects of religious, scientific and capitalist paradigms. In this exhibition, Mullican and Grayson speak, sing, scream and animate words to highlight linguistic connections between physical bodies, psyches and socio-political contexts, underscoring the liveliness of the video medium and leaving mysterious the artists’ precise relation to the ideas in their works.
life was confronted by the spread of ‘disenchantment’
– from the German Entzauberung, which literally
translates to ‘de-magic-ation’. Borrowed from Friedrich
Schiller, disenchantment describes the negative effects
of scientific reason and bureaucratic regulation,
which fail to bring about superior knowledge of the
conditions under which one lives. In contrast to Marx,
Weber held that modernity could be an ‘iron cage’
precisely because of its success. This has less to do
with class inequality or alienation than with how the
processes that allow the human intellect to soar are the
same ones that produce meaninglessness; rationalisation
dispirits as it uplifts. The specialised self-regulating
structures of twentieth-century life were, Weber
thought, ill-equipped to handle older human needs
for spiritual closure, for taking positions on rhetorical
unrationalisable questions of self-worth. Morality, myth
and happiness are tempered by the calculability of everything,
which may not be a completely bad thing for
those whose public duty is to represent heterogenous
moral and political ends. In a pithy iconoclastic tone
redolent of Marshall McLuhan, Weber states: ‘Today the
routines of everyday life challenge religion.’
Keywords: hipster post-critical aesthetics pluralism post-postmodern connoisseurship
It’s for these reasons that an alternative term, ‘outlier’, has gained traction in recent years. In his 2008 book 'Outliers: The Story of Success,' the New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell used the term to conceptualise the variables underpinning atypical individuals and events. In short, Gladwell’s ‘outlier’ stories about Bill Gates, the Beatles and mathematical geniuses are not triumphant sui generis narratives about talent but look instead to the data behind the anomalies, seeing his subjects through the lens of the unpredictable, coincidental and entangled effects of culture, geography, community, family and genetic lineage.