Playing around with some friends in the Art Gallery of NSW, I encounter an impersonator of Ross Gibson in: ConversationsII:
Ross Gibson, Conversations II, 2008
Throughout the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, the public is invited to book a conversation lasting up to 45 minutes with artist and writer Ross Gibson. These conversations take place in the lobby at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Five conversations are available each day and Gibson will keep an online log, of the clustered topics that emerge during the three months.
Using the most basic elements – time, language, attitude, attentiveness – the project seeks some humble revolutions: the back-and-forth rhythm of courteous argument, the turn of thinking that can excite a generous exchange, daily cycles of diligence accumulating into weeks and months of intellectual commitment, the spiralling feedback loop of themes evolving as participants argue over the accumulating topics.
Gibson will start with a naive impulse: to grow a world of thinking and feeling and talking, a turning world that, with each uttered transaction, grows richer than the sum of its individual speakers. In the long run, the project will revolve around conviviality – examining how civil ideas and sentiments can spin out from shared investigation. Sydney Biennale 2008
On 20 august Ross wrote The pocket definition of art:
Again and again the perfectly valid question: how is this art?
After ten weeks, I’ve got the definition polished now: you know you’re encountering art when you are engaging with an intentional act that causes surprising transformations in matter or in the moment.
Then there’s the criticism definition. What is good criticism? Here’s my pocket definition of something I’ve been banging away at for thirty years: you are thinking, talking and writing well about art when you bear witness to it, and then engage with it in the terms that it offers to you, and then describe it thoroughly and provocatively and accountably to yourself and to an audience, and then analyse how it hangs together and how it works, and then evaluate it in relation to other works of art and tendencies in culture.