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Esteemed Japanese architect Momoyo Kaijima is giving a lecture at the IMA, on Friday 20 June at 6pm. She and her partner Yoshiharu Tsukamoto founded Atelier Bow-Wow, the Tokyo-based architecture practice. Atelier Bow-Wow has been described as 'one of the most unique practices of its generation, embracing a kind of accidental urban vernacular, using their research and work to chronicle the complex and often unforgiving logic of the city'. Acting as urban detectives, they have catalogued the agility of Tokyo's fabric to produce radical programmatic collisions and nuanced microarchitectures. These observations have figured heavily in their own work, as documented in recent publications such as Made In Tokyo, Post-Bubble City, Graphic Anatomy and Pet Architecture Guidebook. Armed with the understanding of architecture's maneuverability in Tokyo, Atelier Bow-Wow posits a practice engaged in 'lively space', space willingly infected with the accidents of site and program. Atelier Bow-Wow practice, teach and publish, as well as exhibiting in art contexts. They have participated in numerous art and architecture biennales and triennales. Momoyo Kaijima is currently an Assistant Professor at Tsukuba University. She was Visiting Faculty at Havard in 2003 and was Guest Professor at the ETH in Zurich from 2005 to 2007. She is being brought to Brisbane by the ATCH Research Group, School of Geography, Planning and Architecture, University of Queensland.

For the second forum in our Taboo Topics series, The Water Closet, on Thursday 12 June at 6pm, Dr Alison Moore and Mark Taylor will address our engagement with excretion and toilets. Moore will speak on their appearance in 20th Century art to critique the art object as commodity and challenge middle-class propriety, focusing on the work of Piero Manzoni, Wim Delvoye and Stuart Brisley. Taylor will tackle the way public conveniences actively produce and reproduce social relations and identities, and how aspects of displayed sexuality inform design.

Moore teaches in the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. Her research concerns the history of excretory taboos in 19th Century Europe and their relationship to visions of progress, bourgeois class conformity and colonial identification. Her essay 'Kakao And Kaka: Chocolate And The Excretory Imagination In 19th Century Europe' was published in the collection Cultures Of The Abdomen: Diet, Digestion And Fat In The Modern World. She is working on a book entitled The Anal Imagination: Psychoanalysis, Capitalism And Excretion.

Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Interior Design in the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering and the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology. His research concerns 19th Century writing on decoration and the home, and the spatial and social construction of 'interior' in turn-of-the-century amateur writing. It draws on philosophy, feminism, cultural and gender studies.

Much of the writing on Mark Rothko's later serial work has used psychoanalytical approaches and the art-historical trope of the 'endgame' to read the paintings as a series of negations reflecting the failure of the modernist project. Looking at Rothko's turn toward seriality in his later work and the role of darkness and indistinctness in his paintings of the 1960s, Thomas argues for a different approach to his painting in the wake of abstract expressionism. Here – investigating Rothko's later work alongside the painting of contemporaries like Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, and Barnett Newman and, more broadly, in the context of radical shifts in late 20th century visual culture – she suggests that the radical 'turn' in Rothko's late work propels its into a visual terrain that is distinctively, and errantly, cinematic.

What would it mean to believe, to know, that you were a great artist, but that you happened to live and work in faraway and provincial New Zealand in the 1950s, '60s and '70s? Nothing would more condemn you to irrelevance and being forgotten after you died. The great New Zealand painter Colin McCahon faced this situation and deliberately organised his life and work so that it would live on after his death. In fact, Buter suggests, we might say that McCahon does not so much have a life as an artist as an afterlife, that his afterlife precedes and makes possible his life.

At our AGM on Thursday 8 May, two new board members were appointed, both young artists, Dirk Yates and Peter Alwast. Yates was formerly involved in the artist-run space The Farm. Longstanding board members Angela Goddard and Sarah Blanck stood down. We wish them well and thank them for their years of service. The new board is: Peter Alwast, Tom Burke, Gary Carsley, Richard Fidler (President and Acting Treasurer), Timothy Hill, Crow Hirst, John Kotzas (Vice President), Andrew McNamara, Kim Machan, Douglas Quayle, Eliza Tee, Richard Martin, Dirk Yates, Jay Younger and Ian Were.

There is a lot of talk about design at the moment. It is linked with ideas like 'the creative industries', 'creative cities' and 'the creative class'. But what is 'design'? The term can be used to brand a diversity of activities from engineering bridges to engineering taste. In recent years many projects have emerged which intertwine art and design, some to exploit the connection, others to probe it. On Thursday 10 April at 6pm, Katherine Moline and Toni Ross present papers addressing this.

These days designers often produce exhibition pieces – a practice known as 'critical design'. But since fine art and design are distinct fields, are claims for the legitimacy of design as art unfounded? Do they reduce avant-gardism to a marketing strategy? Katherine Moline's paper will ask: Does exhibiting design make it art? Toni Ross is also ambivalent about the newly enhanced status of design as art and the recent 'massification' of design production and consumption. Drawing on the formulations of French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, her paper will explore how modern art and design resemble and contradict each other. Ian Woodward and Kathleen Cattoni will respond.

This discussion will also provide the setting for the launch of the IMA's first issue of the Journal Of Art, which features an essay on Andrea Zittel by Toni Ross and an interview with Jacques Ranciere by Ross and Andrew McNamara. [image: Marc Newson]

Our Visions-funded touring exhibition Supercharged is almost at the end of its epic run. It cruises close to Brisbane soon. Curated by Vanessa McRae, this cars-in-art show, with its line-up of prominent Australian artists – including Patricia Piccinini, Scott Redford, Anne Zahalka, Tracey Moffatt and Bill Henson – opens at Logan Art Gallery, Corner Wembley Road and Jacaranda Avenue, Logan Central, on Friday 15 February at 6pm. Join us for the party, but remember to bring a designated driver.

It's a great thrill for us to be hosting two lectures by renowned art historian Alexander Alberro early in the New Year.

Associate Professor of Art History at the School of Art and Art History, University of Florida, Alberro is best known for his 2003 book Conceptual Art And The Politics Of Publicity, in which he turns the conventional view of conceptual art – as resistant to the commodity form of the art object – on its head. In Alberro's account, conceptual art reappears as the avant-garde precursor of a new historical form of commodification. Alberro's essays have appeared in a wide array of journals and exhibition catalogues. He has also edited and co-edited a number of books, including Museum Highlights (2005), Recording Conceptual Art (2001), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (2000) and Two-Way Mirror Power (1999).

Alberro's first lecture 'Robert Smithson's Mirror Games’ (Monday 21 January at 6pm) will argue that Smithson’s intensity is characterised by a peculiarly mordant version of the psychedelic sensibility of the period. In Smithson’s work, the existential and visionary sides of the 1960s mingle with notions of impending catastrophe and the return of nature to a crystalline state.

'Neo-Concrete Art And The Legacy Of The Non-Object' (Tuesday 22 January at 6pm) takes as its starting point one of the more provocative artworks in 2002's Documenta 11, Cildo Meireles's Disappearing Element / Disappeared Element. To understand the underpinnings of Meireles's at once fully egalitarian, participatory and yet ultimately disposable proposal, Alberro considers the relationship between this work and the legacies of Brazilian neo-concrete art, that sought to transcend the traditional limitations of the aesthetic object and the institutional framework.

Last Sunday night the IMA was the place to be. Those attending the OtherFilm Festival event Looking Backwards Looking Forwards were witness to Nethergate, a remarkable expanded-cinema performance by New York artist Bruce McClure. McClure superimposed projections from three 16mm film projectors. Each ran an identical film loop – opaque, except for every sixth frame, which was clear. McClure had installed metal cutouts inside each projector, between the film plane and the lens plane, so they projected flickering shapes: a vertical bar, a horizontal bar and a full frame rectangle. With each projector, McClure could control the focus, the speed (and thus the relative strobing), and the intensity and colour of the light. With an obvious penchant for long-haul exegesis, McClure explored these parameters for the best part of an hour, conjuring a dizzying diversity of optical effects. A pulsing soundtrack was generated by the projector, which interpreted the clear frames as an optical soundtrack, with McClure modifying that input through various guitar effects boxes. The experience was overwhelming. Messing with our vision – and even driving some poor souls to the bathroom – the work looked back to the phenomenological inquiries of flicker filmmakers like Paul Sharits and Tony Conrad, but extended this into an exploration of the expressive potentials of the film projector in live performance. McClure presents once more in Brisbane, on Friday 23 November at the old Museum, as part of the OtherFilm Festival's Indecent Exposures night. He then heads to Melbourne for a show at Tapespace.

At the end of October IMA Exhibition Manager Vanessa McRae heads to Hong Kong to undertake a two month Asialink residency at Videotage. Founded in 1985, Videotage is a non-profit interdisciplinary artist collective which focuses on the development of video and new media art. As part of the residency, McRae is working on a project featuring Australasian and Hong Kong artists who draw inspiration from obsolescent technologies. Featuring Stella Brennan, Lawrence English, Francis Lam, Ellen Pau and Eric Siu, Lo<->No Tech opens at the Cattle Depot on 4 October with a special performance by Melbourne's Robin Fox. At Videotage the exhibition runs until 9 November. [image: Stella Brennan]

On Friday 17 and Saturday 18 August we host the colloquium Architecture, Disciplinarity And The Arts. It is being presented by the Architecture Theory, Criticism and History Research Group of the University of Queensland. Here's the abstract:

'It was common practice among 18th century writers on the arts to compile a system under which the various arts were ranked. From ancient times to the Renaissance the status of all kinds of knowledge had been systematised, but in the 18th century a new realm of the fine arts became the principal subject to this ordering, and the modern category of "Art" its ultimate foundation. The criteria for ranking the arts ranged from ancient ideas of the menial nature of manual work, to new aesthetic concepts that distinguished sense from utility. Philosophers used the new concepts to judge the aesthetic potential of the various arts, while the rising academies of the different arts used a mixture of aesthetic and traditional criteria to rank genres and degrees of nobility among their practitioners. In this process the materials and techniques of trades such as building and painting, themselves become aestheticised and a modern concept of artistic media arises.

'In the early 19th and early 20th centuries the Arts and Crafts movement and the constructivist avant-garde attacked both the division of the arts and the distinction of art from other cultural activities. The effect of these critiques was contradictory: the weakening of the disciplines leading to a practices of making based on aesthetic precepts, while elsewhere the critique of art-as-such led to a re-assertion of the disciplines and their autochthonous problematics. In the most constructivist art and architecture, this contradiction was pronounced. Architecture limited its claims to be an art to the armature of thought and of practice. While proposing that architectural productions were buildings and hence not artworks, all building could then instance the art of architecture. Modern architecture's strong claims to disciplinary autonomy and artistic status were thus on the basis of a kind of meta-utility, an accountability for the design of life in its totality which equalled the uselessness of the autonomous arts.

'It is interesting, then, for architects to observe the current debate over intermediality in the visual arts and new constellations emerging there of medium, discipline and object condition. Over the 20th century, the relationship between arts and their media has changed considerably, to the point where intellectual content of an art need not look to its traditional media for historical continuities. The various productive antagonisms between the visual arts and architecture in constructivism, minimalism, land art, installation art, seem ready to go through another twist. It seems almost as if the visual arts have reached the point that architecture arrived at in the early 20th century, and now an auteurist concept of the architect genius has grabbed the public imagination so that we speak with few cautions of buildings as "art-works". How much are these matters necessarily linked? To what extent is there an implicit "system" of the arts, a "differential specificity" of which Rosalind Krauss writes with regard to media in the visual arts? And how much should we understand the dynamics of such a system historically? This colloquium asks: what is architecture, now, among the "system of the arts"?'

Presentations will be given by Antony Moulis, Daniel Barber, John Macarthur, Mark Dorrian, Peter Kohane, Deborah van der Plaat, Darren Jorgensen, Gevork Hartoonian, Andrew McNamara, Naomi Stead, Rosemary Hawker, Andrew Leach, Bart Verschaffel, Charles Rice, Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, Nicole Sully and Craig Johnson. The organisers welcome expressions of interest from those who wish to attend. Please email: andrew.leach@uq.edu.au [image: Callum Morton]

Della Churchill has just joined the IMA team in the new position of Business Partnership Manager. She will be creating and developing relationships with a new family of business partners. Business partnerships will deliver an array of benefits, including special events, networking opportunities, use of the gallery for entertaining, and corporate collection advice. Churchill comes from the film industry, where she has worked in a variety of capacities on projects that range from major feature films to small independent productions. Her latest project is producing eight short films with emerging filmmakers. Wes Hill also joins us for six months as Editorial Assistant on the Australian And New Zealand Journal Of Art, a position made possible through a Strengthening The Sector grant from Arts Queensland. Hill is half of the art-duo Wilkins Hill.

Last Thursday we were privileged to host a lecture by visiting American curator and scholar Anne Rorimer, a leading authority on minimalism and conceptual art. Rorimer has been involved in such pivotal shows as Forest Of Signs: Art In The Crisis Of Representation (1989), Reconsidering The Object Of Art: 1965-1975 (1995) and A Minimal Future: Art As Object 1958–1968 (2004), and is the author of several books including New Art In The 1960s And 1970s: Redefining Reality (2002). Her lecture 'Envisioning Reality In Conceptual And Installation Art' addressed the Conceptual Art generation, and their redefinition of the art object in relation to ideas of documentary, ethnography and enactment. We presented her lecture in partnership with the Arts Media, Design and Modernity Research Group, Queensland University of Technology.

We have shown some great single-channel video works by Queensland artists recently. It’s nice to share, so we are sending a selection on the road. The first stop: Umbrella Studios, Townsville (6 July – 5 August). Greatest Hits / Previously Unreleased Tracks features works by Peter Alwast, Christopher Bennie, Daniel McKewen, Tracey Moffatt, Archie Moore, Paul Mumme, Scott Redford, Sandra Selig, Van Sowerwine, Grant Stevens and Jemima Wyman. Wyman deserves special mention. In her half-appealing half-annoying video Lady In Red, she amplifies traditional tools of female seduction – red lippy, red dress, red heels, big eyes, cleavage, up-skirt angles. Holding the camera overhead looking down or strapping it to her leg looking up, she becomes grotesquely forshortened, while dancing solo and singing the Chris De Burgh romantic standard. [image: Jemima Wyman]

Our 2007 regional resident is Arthur Pambagen Jr. He was born in 1936 and lives in Aurukun on the Cape York Peninsula. He is an elder of the Wik-Mungkan people and a member of the Winchanam ceremonial group. His main traditional lands lie between the Small Archer River (Tompaten Creek) and the Watson River. Pambegan grew up under the strict reign of the Presbyterian Mission Superintendent William MacKenzie, and was separated from his parents and raised in the boys' dormitory until he was old enough to work. He first collaborated with his father on ceremonial carvings of the Bonefish Story Place and Flying Fox Story Place in 1962 (these works are now in the National Museum of Australia). Pambagen has in turn passed on these two traditional stories (which convey customary laws and beliefs) and the carving techniques for ceremonial sculpture to his son, Alair. Pambegan's works are in public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. He undertakes his three week residency in October. We have three other artists-in-residence for this year. Melbourne's Philip Brophy will be here in July and October preparing his show with us, which opens in October, and working on its accompanying publication. We also host two international artists in conjunction with the exhibition Grey Water. Bill Culbert comes out from Britain in early August to install his work Flotsam and Teresa Margolles comes from Mexico in September to talk on her work.

On Sunday 3 June we presented Generationext, a free event for highschoolers. They took in the show by internationally acclaimed Australian sculptor James Angus, met local artists, and enjoyed live music by local sensation Shiver Like Timber and an appearance by The Lampshade Ladies (courtesy The Brides of Frank). However the biggest hit was the collective graffiti wall. Generationext is a youth initiative of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, presented in partnership with the IMA, and supported by the Balnaves Foundation. [image: Daniel Wallwork]

We had our AGM on 18 March. Longstanding board member Julie Ewington, head of Australian art at Queensland Art Gallery, stood down; as did artist Grant Stevens (now in Los Angeles) and academic Theodor Wyeld (who has moved back to Adelaide). They will be sorely missed. New board members are artist Gary Carsley; artist Jay Younger, associate professor at Queensland College of Art; and Ian Were, publications manager at Queensland Art Gallery. The full line up then: Sarah Blanck (Treasurer), Tom Burke, Gary Carsley, Richard Fidler (President), Angela Goddard, Timothy Hill, Crow Hirst, John Kotzas (Vice President), Andrew McNamara, Kim Machan, Douglas Quayle, Eliza Tee, Richard Martin, Jay Younger and Ian Were.

The Australian And New Zealand Journal Of Art, the refereed art history journal, has come to Queensland. The IMA will publish the next three issues in association with the Art Association, Australasia's professional body for art historians. They will be edited by a team of Queensland art historians: Rex Butler and Sally Butler from the University of Queensland, Andrew McNamara and Mark Pennings from Queensland University of Technology, Rosemary Hawker from Queensland College of Art, and Robert Leonard from the IMA. Angela Goddard from Queensland Art Gallery and Courtney Pedersen from Queensland University of Technology are reviews editors.

We note with sadness the passing of Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher. He died on 6 March aged 77. A thinker of verve and originality, Baudrillard did more than anyone to reflect on the dislocating realities of modern consumer culture. Identified with postmodernism, he was best known for his concept of 'hyperreality': the thought that people today are lost in a world of 'simulacra', images and signs created and presented as 'real' by the mass media. Baudrillard's nihilist outlook led to startling conclusions. For instance his 1991 book The Gulf War Did Not Happen argued that that War was conducted as a media spectacle, a simulation, a news event, a videogame. Baudrillard was influential in the international art scene, particularly on pop-inspired artists of the 1980s. But he was singularly influential on Australian art and cultural sciences. As Rex Butler observes, his work 'spoke to a generation of young scholars in the humanities, allowing them to escape the stifling ideology critique or political correctness of their 1960s-era teachers. He opened up wider conceptions of feminism, the visual arts and of cultural practice in general.' Baudrillard visited Australia on several occasions. His 1984 Sydney lecture was sold out, and acolytes were forced to watch via closed-circuit television. (His cult status here was epitomised in the title of Andre Frankovits' book Seduced And Abandoned: The Baudrillard Scene.) Baudrillard returned in 1994, to contribute to the IMA's symposium Baudrillard In The Nineties: The Art Of Theory and to attend our exhibition of his photos The Ecstacy Of Photography. We subsequently published Jean Baudrillard: Art And Artefact, a volume of writings by Baudrillard, Rex Butler, Nicholas Zurbrugg and others.

We are touring exhibitions this year, and not just our petrol-head show Supercharged. Mirror Worlds (a joint project with Sydney's Australian Centre for Photography) will be on at Auckland gallery Two Rooms in March and April, coinciding with the Auckland Triennial and Auckland Festival. Our Olaf Breuning show Home (another joint project with ACP) will be on at ACP in March and April; a cut-down version goes on to Melbourne's Gertrude Street soon after. Hany Armanious’ show Morphic Resonance – a joint project with City Gallery Wellington – opens at City Gallery mid year. Plus we have collaborated with Canberra Contemporary Art Spaces and Asialink on Streetworks. Curated by outgoing deputy director David Broker, it features two leading Australian video artists, Sydney’s Shaun Gladwell and Brisbane’s Craig Walsh, whose works were highlights of the 2005 Yokohama International Triennale. Streetworks opens at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University Gallery in February, before moving on to venues in Malaysia and Singapore. It has been supported by the Australia Council and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

At the beginning of December, the spotlight was on the Queensland Art Gallery, when its new Gallery of Modern Art opened with the Fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial. Seizing the moment, we teamed up with Artworkers to stage a Writers Workshop over two weeks. Eight writers – four from Brisbane (Holly Arden, Ellie Buttrose, Jessica Campbell and Kris Carlon), two from interstate (Ulanda Blair and Lily Hibberd) and two from New Zealand (Stella Brennan and Jon Bywater) – wrote responses to the space and the show, and interviewed artists and curators. The results were published as a free newspaper, The Artreader: APT5 Companion, under the direction of editor Lee Weng Choy, co-director of Singapore's The Substation. Copies of The Artreader are available throughout Brisbane, including from the GOMA bookstore.

We were devastated by the death of our friend Jeremy Hynes on Tuesday. Hynes was a key figure in the Brisbane art scene. His performances at the IMA, at the artist-run space ISNT and in the 1990s were anarchic yet precise. In I Am Genius. I Am God, he regarded himself in mirrors, then turfed them down a stairwell, shattering his image. The audience watched via closed-circuit television, sharing his viewpoint. In The Water Piece, he swam down a 20 metre transparent plastic tube full of water wearing a suit, freeing himself at the far end, only to be washed down the street by the torrent released. We had been planning a Hynes one-night performance retrospective to take place early next year, which Hynes had entitled UNInsured, a nod to the fact that his risky works were now nearly impossible to stage given occupational health and safety requirements. While this can no longer happen, we do plan to produce a publication on his performance work. Hynes was also known as a video artist. His music clip for Regurgitator’s Polyester Girl was nominated for an Aria. He stars in the video Inhaling Kurt, which he made with his friends Scott Redford and Ben Wickes, which will debut in Redford’s show Bricks Are Heavy at the IMA in December. A wake was held at the IMA on Friday 10 November. Our condolences to friends and family.

We organise at least three artist residencies each year: an international, a national and a regional residency. This year’s international resident is New-York-based Swiss artist Olaf Breuning (visiting in July), the national resident is Sydney sculptor Hany Armanious (October), and the regional resident is Abe Muriata from far north Queensland (also October).

Abe Muriata, a Girramay man of the Cardwell Range area, currently lives in Tully. He weaves jawun, the traditional basket of the rainforest people of North Queensland. He learnt weaving techniques from watching his grandmother. His baskets are crafted from lawyer cane, which is collected, split and woven into the distinctive bicornal shape. He is also skilled in making wooden shields. Traditionally wooden swords and shields were used in ceremonies and to sort out disputes. Muriata's shields are carved and painted with local ochres in traditionally derived Girramay designs.

We have additional residency projects with Japan's Lieko Shiga (August/September) and New Zealand's Yvonne Todd (October).

A photographer and video artist, Lieko Shiga will be producing a show for Melbourne's Seventh Gallery in October as part of RAPT! 20 Contemporary Artists from Japan. It will investigate Brisbanites' unconscious views of their city and will be based on replies she receives to an anonymous questionaire.

When Harald Szeemann awarded Yvonne Todd the 2002 Walters Prize, he said it was because it was 'the work that irritated me the most'. Two years later New Zealand Listener critic Anthony Byrt described her as the 'the best New Zealand artist of her generation'. Todd trained in commercial photography before doing art school, and her work draws heavily on its genres, including product, wedding, industrial and portrait photographies. While commercial photographers are trained to make things look perfect, to perfect a fantasy-of-reality, Todd’s images deliberately fall short of the ideal — they are not quite right. Or, as an early review put it: 'Todd avoids the hackneyed sentiments of the fantasist and the drudgery of the unmitigated realist, instead amalgamating the two to form a unique oeuvre at once erotic, nostalgic and deeply effecting.' Todd will be producing Dead Starlets Assoc., an artist's book. Her residency is funded by Creative New Zealand.