Contributors
Robert Nelson
Robert Nelson is Associate Director, Student Experience, at Monash University and art critic for The Age.
Articles
Video and performance: Many chronic returns
Robert Nelson on the death and rebirth of performance in the video loop
Performative
The artworld and the paradox of sustainability
Robert Nelson proposes poetic solutions to overcoming our carbon plinth print
Sustainable?
Woomera: Juan Davila
Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art at Fortyfivedownstairs Gallery Melbourne March 26 - 10 April 2002
Place
Predicaments of Furniture Design
No matter what we say about furniture, it seems to have been said before. Small wonder that painting and installation attracts our writers more than furniture, when discourse about tables and chairs is confined to the rehearsal of so many grim platitudes. But if banality beleaguers the objects themselves, it is still more oppressively unavoidable in discussion of the unfortunate Australian industries of furniture design and manufacture.
Art and the Economy
New Books on Richard Goodwin and Ari Purhonen
Review of new series of critical monographs
Edited by Christopher Allen
Ari Purhonen
Richard Goodwin
Australian Artists Series
Oliver Freeman Editions 1992
RRP $49.95
Dimensions: Sculpture in Australia
Toward a Typology of Small Objects
With increasing anxiety, we face searching questions of the viability, the integrity, the destiny of craft. In themselves, the questions are salutory and point to an intellectual vitality in craft culture, a vigour and toughness which have not existed since the Arts and Crafts Movement. Responses to the challenge vary from relish in the contradictions of craft practice to the old-fashioned despair for any debate whatsoever.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Portraiture and Faciality
Each age has apparently had some theory of the face. Article links to the exhibition 'Faciality' curated by Zara Stanhope at the Monash University Gallery. Includes the work of artists Geoffrey Dupree, Chris Barry, Maria Kozic, Gordon Bennett, Peter Kennedy and others.
The Face
Kitschoprenia
Our affection for kitsch is a benign form of aesthetic hypocrisy. My generation, give or take 15 years, adores kitsch. We want to have some badness; it's fun: you laugh both at your dismay for an object and your perplexity over the delight that it brings. In a broad cultural sense, my generation is kitschophilic; and this means, I suppose, not that we love the kitschy object with innocence but that we love the contempt which the kitschy object arouses.
Taste Meets Kitsch
Men
What boys give up to become men is all contained in this photograph...
Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected
Post-mortem: Farrell and Parkin
For a number of years the collaboration of Farrell and Parkin has produced photographic imagery dealing with medical history. Their photographic work involves the almost archaeological reconstruction of medical contraptions together with bandaging and stirrups and so on which are described in medical texts.
Art & Medicine
Riding on the Edge: Art, Identity and the Motorcycle
Exhibition review Riding on the edge: Art Identity and the Motorcycle
7 February- 11 April 1999
Waverley City Gallery
Curated by John Pigot
The Future of Art
Signs of Life
Melbourne International Biennial 1999
Telecom Building Russell St and other venues in Melbourne
11 May - 27 June
Disintegration