The Paradox of Autistic Art

Certain autistic children whose linguistic ability is virtually non-existent can draw natural scenes from memory with astonishing accuracy. In particular their drawings display convincing perspective. In contrast, normal children of the same preschool age group and even untrained adults draw primitive schematics or symbols of objects which they can verbally identify.

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Primary Non-Producers: The Arts in Crisis in Public Education

In this article Orchard is looking at the nature of art teaching in primary schools rather than focusing on the debate surrounding the value of arts learning and education. Although art has in the past decade become a formal part of the curriculum across Australia there is still a huge dearth of support material for teachers, particularly those in isolated areas. Orchard introduces some of the support programs which have been implemented in various schools, including the Department of Education & Training & Employment (DETE) and South Australian Living Artists (SALA) programs.

Julie Orchard

Children Who Hurt: A Film Made by Young People

Not a documentary, but an eloquent testimony, Hurt was made by 250 kids from five New South Whales country towns. After a series of workshops they shot, recorded, wrote and performed in this collage of vignettes, dramatised scenes, songs and memories, aided by writers and directors Philip Crawford and Matthew Priestly. Their stories are often unbelievably sad - what they make of them is intense, lyrical, stoic and heartbreaking. Hurt was made by the award-winning arts company BIGhART, whose brief is to pilot arts based projects designed to re-engage 'outsiders' or marginalised people with their community.

Phillip Crawford

The Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award

Werribee Park, Victoria 21 March - 13 May 2001

Maria Bilske

Lace - Contemporary Perspectives

Anne Farren (Aus), Suzumi Noda (Japan), Pam Gaunt (Aus), Michael Brennand-Wood (UK), Pilar Rojas (Spain) CRAFTWEST Centre for Contemporary Craft Perth International Arts Festival event. 7 February - 24 March

Touring to Kalgoorlie Art Centre July 2001 Interstate and regionally in 2002

Kate McMillan

Art of the Sacred Heart

Arts Project Australia Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide 31 January - 25 February 2001

Paul Hoban

Male Nude: A Private View

Curator: Eugene Barilo von Reisberg Charles Nodrum Gallery Jan/Feb 2001

Sam Schoenbaum

Children and Art

Felicity Fenner

Polemic: Two Myths about Blue Poles

By now - fifty years after the painting was made and thirty years after if was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia - there are two well-established myths about Jackson Pollack's Blue Poles. Brook here outlines and discusses these, but draws particular attention to the myth that the celebrated museum exhibit called Blue Poles is intrinsically, and not merely by fleeting reputation, a great work of art.

Donald Brook

Remembering Jesus: The Child in Australian Aboriginal Art

Andrew discusses the work of various Australian artists under a generic theme of the blakborg, a term he uses with regards to the re-creation of the blak body. A fleshy cyborg, much like the Star Trek Borg family, the blakborgacts as a symbol: alluding to the Western preoccupation with aliens and simultaneously reminding Europeans of their own alien status in the Australian landscape. The works of Julie Gough, Tracey Moffatt, Destiny Deacon, Bianca Beetson, John Packham, Les Midikuria, James Gleeson, Richard Billingham and Marc Quinn are here examined.

Brook Andrew

Anatomy of a Metaphor

Madeleine Kelly Modus Gallery Fortitude Valley, Brisbane 6 - 22 April 2001

Pat Hoffie

The Child in Photography

In the century and a half since photography allowed humanity an historical moment of self-consciousness - a way to see ourselves as never before - photographers have been drawn to recording youth, especially children. A child standing before the photographer's lens provided a dual perspective on humanity - at once eternally young and yet, clad in clothes to be soon outgrown, ephemeral. McFarlane looks to the work of Bill Henson, Tracey Moffatt, Ian Dodd, Sebastio Salgado, Deborah Paauwe, Anne Ferran, Sandy Edwards, Jon Rhodes and Roger Scott.

Robert McFarlane

Teenage Riot: Representations of Adolescence in Contemporary Art

The child has always been a favoured subject for artists. Recent exhibitions both in Australia and internationally address the shift from a sanguine vision of childhood to alternative representations, where children are presented as desirable and desirous, menacing yet vulnerable, widely unpredictable and ultimately mysterious. Artistic works by Robert Gober, Ronnie Van Hout, Larry Clark, Katie Siegel, Justine Kurland, Anna Gaskell, Diane Arbus, Di Barrett, Mark McDean, Anne Ferran, Polixeni Papapetrou, Bill Henson, Pat Brissington, Tracey Moffatt, Deborah Paauwe, Mona Hatoum and Nic Nicosia all help to illuminate the complexities of adolescence, a subject of ambivalence wedged between contradictory discourses and spaces of transition.

K.P. Hall

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