Where ‘Art Meets Life’: Assessing the Impact of Dark Mofo, a New Mid- Winter Festival in Australia - Adrian Franklin
Date: Thursday 6 June 2019
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EA.1.31, Western Sydney University Parramatta South campus
Where “Art Meets Life”: Assessing the Impact of Dark Mofo, A New Mid-Winter Festival in Australia
Professor Adrian Franklin (University of South Australia)
Discussant: Dr Kylie Budge
Abstract
In Hobart, a litany of winter festivals flopped and failed until the arrival of Mona (Museum of Old and New Art), a private museum owned by mathematician, successful on-line gambler and autodidact, David Walsh. Since 2013, its new festival, Dark Mofo, has not only reignited long-somnolent traditions of midwinter festival imaginaries among its post-colonial society, it has also proved to be an effective vehicle for galvanising an all-of-community form of urban activation, engagement and regeneration. It has also completely overwhelmed the city with visitors keen to participate in a ritual week with no holds barred and with major global artists and musicians keen to be on its midwinter carnivalesque platforms. While Mona has explored grotesque realism, themes of sex, death and the body in its darkened, labyrinthine and subterranean levels, Dark Mofo has permitted their mix of carnivalesque and Dionysian metaphors and embodied practices/politics to take over the entire city in a week of programmatic mischief and misrule at midwinter (Franklin 2014; McGarry 2018). Research by an Australian Research Council funded study of Mona and its festive register will be used to account for its origins and innovation as well as its social, cultural and economic composition and impacts.
Biography
Adrian Franklin trained as a social anthropologist in the UK and has held Professorial positions in the UK, Europe and Australia. His research interests include cultural ecology, art museums, urban studies; art publics; design; the sociology of travel and tourism; the social bond; posthumanism and human-animal studies. Recent books include The Making of MONA (Penguin); City Life (Sage). New books include Animal Theory (for 2020) and Anti-Museum for 2019. Recent research includes a major study of Mona; a global study of private art museums; a study of the cultural economy of the nightime; a study of the declining flea markets in Australian cities and another study of English Cathedrals as centres of cultural revival.