Utopics and dystopia within the iconomy
A lecture on world picturing by contemporary artists. Part Four of Professor Terry Smith's lecture series, "Visions, bodies, shadows, worlds".
Archie Moore, kith and kin, 2024, Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024. Photographer Andrea Rossetti, © the artist. Images courtesy of the artist and The Commercial.
The drive to picture aspects of the multiplicity of our contemporary world is widespread among artists today, as is the desire to suggest positive pathways through the polycrisis in which we are engulfed. A cosmographic impulse increasingly drives artworks made in traditional mediums as well as installation, video, digital, performance, and participatory art. It inspires artists of all kinds, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, throughout the world today.
Which visual frameworks are they deploying to create their cosmographies? Does their imagery get us closer to the constructive world picturing that we need today? How does it compare to the world being pictured by the “machine vision” of digital platforms? In the political sphere, how might visual artists intervene critically against the worldwide rising tide of authoritarianism?
The lecture will explore several strategies, including direct action, public interventions, introversion, and proposing coeval world pictures.
Presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of NSW.
People
Terry Smith
Terry Smith is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney and Andrew W Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh.
He is the author of numerous books on contemporary art and curatorial practice, most recently Curating the complex and the open strike (2021), Iconomy: towards a political economy of images (2022), Fred R Myers, Six paintings from Papunya: a conversation (2024) and the edited volume Okwui Enwezor: selected writings (2025).
A founding board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, he has served on the board of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and is Board Member Emeritus of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
Photograph: Filip Wolak
Related
Tue, 4 August 2026
11:00AM
Visual allegories of seeing as knowing
Terry Smith
Tue, 11 August 2026
11:00AM
Bodies as mediums of modernity
Terry Smith
