CAST

BACKGROUND CAST 2011 is based on the situational performance by Kosloff during the Vernissage of the 54th Biennale de Venezia in 2011. Contemporary art practice has sought to examine concepts of authorship and the social dimensions of art. Kosloff turned a live situational performance that she produced for the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) Pop-Up Project in Venice in 2011 into a series of 22 photographic images and a kinetic sculpture. These document and interpret her live, uninvited performance at the Vernissage event in Italy and enable the project to be interpreted within a gallery context. CONTRIBUTION The images, presented at Monash University Museum of Art, tell the story of Kosloff in Venice collecting the signatures of well-known artists on a plaster cast that encased her right leg. Once covered in signatures, she removed the cast and took it home as a sculptural object. In the exhibition, the plaster artefact was displayed on a motorized plinth that rotated the signed cast. Ideas of authorship, spectatorship and value in art were humourously addressed through this iteration of the project. SIGNIFICANCE The significance of this research is that the artefacts from Kosloff's situational performance in Venice were used to reference and create new artworks that elaborate on concepts of authorship and the social basis of art. The importance of the project is attested to in part by the invitation to exhibit at MUMA and the large public audience that attended the exhibition and accompanying lecture presented by Kosloff on the 6th March 2013. The first part of the project in Venice, commissioned by the ACCA Pop Up Program with support from the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria, gained an immediate following and large online readership; the idea was an informal showcase, at the world's most important art event, of the performance-based trend in contemporary Australian art and the breadth of talent in Australian art generally.