My artistic practice focuses on an attempt to intervene in the construction and maintenance of the 'aesthetic regime' that orders everyday life through the regulation of power and free thought. Through performance, public installation and sculpture I seek to utilise art as a provocative intervention in the sensible arrangement of social relations. As such my work hinges predominantly on the critique of institutions and theories of the public sphere, and often takes place within these loaded spaces. My work involves the participation of others through group actions such as recitation and singing, theatrical performance and the formation of interest groups. Bio: Jack Poppert is an emerging artist and writer. He completed a Fine Arts/Arts degree in philosophy, politics and artmaking with Honours, in 2020 at UNSW. His interests include critical participatory methodologies, public art and the public sphere, history of philosophy, critiquing and locating the Western edifice and institutional critique. Poppert served as the UNSW Art & Design Student Council President in 2019 and 2020. In this time he also worked in the student association, Arc @UNSW, as Editor and Coordinator of UNSWeetened Literary Journal and Arc Writer's Coordinator. He was recently involved in the StandWithTess campaign and Anti-Annual graduate show as a leading organiser.
ART & DESIGN PROJECT,
is video documentation of two artistic interventions: one a failed attempt to read a protest poem outside the UNSW Chancellery, the other a negotiation for permission to do the former between the myself - as artist - and UNSW security. The resulting documentary footage both achieves and then eclipses the aims of my initial attempt to read the poem. It not only provokes a dialogue from within the Chancellery, but demonstrates in real time the inability of the managerial university leadership to deal with the vestiges of industrial democracy and student unionism and activism. What emerges is a 'heightened sense of anxiety' in which the 'control room' must determine just what exactly the threat of this poetry reading and the person reading it is.
