At the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart Marina Abramović’s long awaited exhibition Private Archaeology (13 June–5 October 2015) showcases video documentation of her early works alongside more recent projects.

In Selected Works by Eugenia Raskopoulos. The experience of being outside of the language of the social sphere whilst simultaneously being inside the familial language has long haunted and inspired the work of Greek-Australian artist Eugenia Raskopoulos.

Rosalind Krauss has termed the current era the ‘the post-medium age’ where the boundaries between disciplines is so blurred that the aesthetic qualities of the medium have been annihilated.

I imagine grace / though I’m not / versed in scriptures / I hear you calling out names / one after another / saint or sinner / disciple one way or another . . .

In the late 1990s scholars in the USA warned against the convergence of art and theory where practice appears to pitch itself to critical discourse or seeks to engage in that discourse. Rosalind Krauss has termed the current era the “the post-medium age in which the aesthetic option of the medium has been declared outmoded, cashiered, washed-up, finished”.

In this paper I consider recent critical positions on performance art and its documentation. The experience of a live event. Jill Orr’s She had long golden hair (1980) is then used as a case study to explore the debates. I was present at the performance and I have subsequently tried to reconstruct this experience for students and the art public with the aid of photographs and video. My purpose here is to think through the issues concerning the document of the event, the event itself and the re-make for the camera. I have asked Jill Orr to respond to my interpretation and to the issues concerning documentation. In this way I hope to generate a paper that is both critical and reflective.

Pat Brassington's photographs began to receive critical attention in the 1980s when photographic theory and criticism was experiencing a renaissance. Her work spoke loudly in a postmodern culture that deconstructed notions of the original and authenticity, interrogated the epistemology of the gaze and the stereotypes of feminine sexuality....

In the year 2000 Bernard Smith published two articles in Art Monthly, In Defence of Art History (I and II), which raised important issues that had been brewing within the discipline for decades. These essays put forward a strong case to preserve the tradition of art history and to resist the push to subsume the discipline within cultural studies.

Walter Benjamin's thesis 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' originally published in 1936 was an important modernist text which was cited throughout the postmodern era and continues to be referred to by critics who are analysing the end of postmodernism (Krauss 1999a).

The end of this century is before us like an empty beach. The grand picture of the bad future unfolds. Boundary riders of the cosmos inscribe imperialistic lines of force across the universe and biocompatible technology colonizes the body's surface and interior. Before us is the impinging doom of a society of surveillance, monitored and controlled electronically and biologically; the prospects of a society without subjectivity; an inhuman world populated by robots and cyborgs. Another image of the future pictures a catastrophic end which leaves a fiery damnation on earth and sees man revert to an animalistic state. Many of these representations duplicate the major paradigms of the present. Fears about social disintegration are fed by 'bad future' representations set after the apocalypse.