Brad Buckley spent his childhood years in Sydney. His father, Jim Buckley, owned the Newcastle Hotel in Lower George Street, Sydney. The Newcastle was one of the Sydney Push 'hotels' and was frequented by artists, poets, underworld figures and philosophers for almost 20 years during the 1960s and 1970s. He was educated at Saint Martins School of Art, London, and the Rhode Island School of Design, where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1982.
Works
Buckley's works operate within an overarching schema entitled The Slaughterhouse Project, which is an aesthetic armature, a strategy used for aesthetic infiltration, or infection. As the name implies, the Project is a conceptual device of cauterisation, a way of exploring taboos, for investigating political anomalies, for venting dissatisfaction with social injustice. Operating at the intersection of installation, theatre and performance, investigates questions of cultural control, democracy, freedom and social responsibility, Buckley's work has been included in:
His work has been cited in New Observations, Art + Text, Flash Art and Artforum International. Between 2001 and 2006, Buckley was the chair of the board of Artspace Visual Arts Centre in Sydney. Buckley exhibited The Slaughterhouse Project: Alignment and Boundaries at the Australian Centre for Photography in 2013.
Curatorial work
Buckley has a longstanding interest in curating and has undertaken projects at the Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design and the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. His most recent project, Reading and Writing Rooms, was a major survey of 30 years of the work of New Zealand-born, Canada-based artist Bruce Barber, and was held in 2008 at Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney. The project was developed in conjunction with Manukau Institute of Technology and Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts in Auckland, where a partner component of the exhibition opened in December of the same year.
Academia
As a lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts since 1989, Buckley has taught several generations of contemporary Australian artists working within installation, performance and new media art, including Sean Lowry, Kyle Jenkins, Alex Gawronski, Tony Schwensen, Sarah Newall, David Haines, Mark Shorter, Rowan Conroy, Sylvia Schwenk, Shaun Gladwell, Ben Quilty, Koji Ryui, Justene Williams, and Bijana Jancic. Since 2003, Buckley has lectured and written widely on higher degrees and research in the art school context. In 2003, Buckley was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Visual Arts PhD Programs seminar at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He was also a keynote speaker in 2007 at the International Symposium on Art and Design: University Art Practice and Research Funding, at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. He also developed and convened, with senior faculty, a conference on higher degrees and research in the art and design school context, entitled Evolution: Art and Design Research and the PhD, at The New School in October 2010. Buckley and Su Baker, Director of the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne, received in 2008–09 an Australian Learning and Teaching Council grant to undertake research into the impact of the PhD in visual arts in Australian universities over the past decade. His commitment and contribution to graduate supervision was recognised in 2004 with the awarding of the first College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of Sydney, Award for Excellence in Research, Higher Degree Supervision. He has been a visiting artist and professor at numerous institutions throughout Asia, Europe and North America including the University of Tsukuba, National College of Art and Design, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University and at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. During 2009, Buckley was a Visiting Scholar at Parsons The New School for Design.
Publishing projects
He is the editor, with John Conomos, of Republics of Ideas: Republicanism Culture Visual Arts ; Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD and the Academy, and Ecologies of Invention. Buckley has also developed and chaired a number of conference sessions for the College Art Association, including 'America: The Divine Empire’, ‘The Contemporary Collaborator in an Interdisciplinary World’, ‘The Erasure of Contemporary Memory’ and Co-Chaired, with John Conomos, the session 'The Delinquent Curator: has the curator failed contemporary art?, 101st College Art Association conference in New York City, 2013.
