Phillip Mar

Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest?

The field of cultural diplomacy, which looms large in present-day cultural policy and discourse, has been insufficiently analysed by the cultural disciplines. This special issue engages with the task of filling the gap. The present essay sets out the terms in which the authors have taken up this engagement, focusing principally on Australia and Asia. Distinguishing between cultural diplomacy that is essentially interest-driven governmental practice and cultural relations, which is ideals-driven and practiced largely by non-state actors, the authors pursue a twofold aim. First, to demystify the field, especially when it is yoked to the notion of ‘soft power’; second, to better understand how actually-existing discourses of cultural diplomacy and/or cultural relations operate in different national contexts. The essay seeks in particular to scrutinize the current confusion surrounding cultural diplomacy and, in the context of the changing role of the nation-state, to explore its possibilities as an instrument for going beyond the national interest.

THE CREATIVE ASSEMBLAGE: Theorizing contemporary forms of arts-based collaboration

This paper contributes to theorizing contemporary art collaborations in the context of the mediatory labour required of artists, and the complexity of the collaborative contexts in which aesthetic production is now enmeshed. In order to account for this complexity without reducing its analysis to ‘structured fields’ or ‘systems’, we use elements of assemblage theory in a quite specific way: drawing on DeLandas work on social and organizational forms; and Laws ‘method assemblage’ to analyse the specificity of working interfaces that craft new boundaries and working relations. We develop a case study of C3West, an Australian initiative encompassing arts institutions, businesses, and communities. The analysis traces assemblage processes that generate dispersed working arrangements (partnerships, intersectoral, and interdisciplinary working interfaces) across apparently incommensurable domains, yet without forming overarching structures or requiring common rationales for cooperation. To demonstrate the work of assemblage, we discuss the practices of French artist Sylvie Blocher and the multidisciplinary collective, Campement Urbain, who employ aesthetic and performative means to forge new institutional practices and alliances for intervening in urban planning processes in regional Sydney.

Urban curating : the "interspaces" of art collaboration in Western Sydney

This article examines the modes of emergence of “the local” in particular collaborative art projects in suburban Sydney (Australia) as outflows of singular interfaces between artists, institutions, audiences, and administrators. We begin analytically with the circulations that variously draw on and craft notions of locality and community in two projects staged in western Sydney, both involving nonlocal artists collaborating with business entities and arts institutions. In each case, specific circulations worked to produce a differently spatialized interplay of artists’ processes, aesthetic objects, events, performances and dialogues. The article develops a working conception of “interspatiality” that draws on actor network and assemblage concepts to elicit how creative labor entangles people, places, communities, and ways of working and thinking.