ACCA Podcast · ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)

Artist Talks: Andy Butler and Nicholas Smith

·23 min·1 clip

Andy Butler identifies Henry Otley Beyer as the American who founded an anthropology department in Manila after a 1904 human zoo.

The talk opens ceremonially. A curator acknowledges Wurundjeri Wurundjeri land, names the site as a gathering place, and places the room inside a living history. Future Remains gives the conversation its frame. The exhibition is the fourth Macfarlane commission, built around inheritance and the strange pressure of working with what gets handed down. Don Macfarlane's memory sits beside Helen and Melissa Macfarlane's commission, so family, art, and material afterlife are never far apart. The artist's process is all hands and surfaces. Materials from houses, wood, roadside logs, Catholic imagery, and repeated gestures become ways to test what happens when a form gets inverted, touched, or taken out of hierarchy. Touch does real work here. Fingerprints, beeswax, polish, residue, and the viewer's urge to reach toward the object are treated as part of the meaning, not extra atmosphere. The body gets there before the theory does. Sensuality is not dressing; it is how the work pulls people in through surface and desire. Andy Butler is introduced next, with writing, curating, film, archive work, Collective Unease, the University of Melbourne, and multi-channel video installation all in view. Then the scale jumps. Butler's closing remarks connect moving-image scenes to American imperialism through America, the Philippines, and Australia. He carries that into American empire in the Middle East, leaving the political weight in the room. The public-program texture stays intact too: thanks, pauses, acknowledgements, and the final wrap.

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