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The Underground

The term 'underground' has a set of historical uses in various spheres of culture - comics, film, art and music. It maintains a symbiotic relationship with the mainstream, trading street-level and institutional in a continual cycle of unearthing and the risk of not being marginal any more. Guest Editor Lucas Ihlein casts a critical eye on what it was and is now including: copy culture, web-based and email art, comix, animation, zine and fan culture, activism, totally disappeared artists of the 1960s and 70s, marginal and experimental art, guerilla gardening, mining, rubbish dumps, living underground and archiving the underground. About the launch of this issue Prints of Lucas Ihlein's design Under Ground that was used for the cover of this issue are available from Big Fag Press Big Fag Press

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Articles in vol 30 no 2, 2010
Editorial Full article available
Editorial by Lucas Ihlein

What we talk about when we talk about 'the underground' — More »

1. Muffled sounds 2. The ear trumpet of the artworld has been struck by lightning
Feature by Donald Brook

Emeritus Flinders University Professor and philosopher Donald Brook writes about his 'new theory' and why it has never been taken up. He wonders: 'Could it be that he is wrong?' — More »

Adapt or die
Feature by Ian Milliss

Artist-activist Ian Milliss writes about maintaining the rage of art and creativity as immensely important to the future of the world and having nothing to do with what is seen in biennales and the art world. — More »

Conquest for country: Rockhole or mine
Feature by Eve Vincent

Anthropologist Eve Vincent has done fieldwork in mining towns in South Australia. She writes about Ali Russell's documentary Keeper about mining on Kokatha land near Ceduna. — More »

Dig it! The Hole in Australian Contemporary Art
Feature by Glenn Barkley

Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney Glenn Barkley surveys the hole in contemporary Australian art starting at the 1973 Mildura Sculpturescape. — More »

Hiding in plain sight: regionalism and the underground Full article available
Feature by Margie Borschke

Margie Borschke was in Canada in the mid 1980s when she discovered the Underground. — More »

Scene, Not Herd: The evanescent underground Full article available
Feature by Chris Fleming

Chris Fleming, Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of Western Sydney and author of a book on Rene Girard, explores the evanescence of the underground. "Once the cultural products generated by the underground enter broader circulation (once scene becomes herd) the underground empties itself and is forced to regenerate." — More »

Seed bomb
Feature by Kirsten Bradley

Farmer, artist, writer Kirsten Bradley who works from Milkwood Permaculture Farm near Mudgee in the high country of NSW spills the beans on how to make a seedball or seedbomb to revegetate or vegetate urban spaces around you. Like guerilla gardening, it's quick, it's quiet and it creeps up on you. — More »

Steampunk: gunpowder and cups of tea
Feature by Melinda Rackham

Between 13 October 2009 and 21 February 2010, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford held the world's first museum exhibition of Steampunk art. Writer, artist, emerging, networked and distributed culture geek Melinda Rackham was there. — More »

Stop the press: the allure of ink
Feature by Caren Florance

Caren Florance is Ampersand Duck, a blog and nom de press for activities including letterpress printing. Florance has breathed the ink and describes the history of moveable type focusing on the recent past and the present and how something magical happens to text when it is printed. — More »

Street dreams Full article available
Feature by Peter Drew

Peter Drew knows the street art of Adelaide like you know the back of your hand. — More »

The arse-end of public art
Feature by Tony Birch

Poet, writer and lecturer in the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne Tony Birch lives near the grand enigmatic Melbourne Gateway usually seen form the airport road. He writes about its underbelly where odour and mess show it to be both fucked and beautiful. — More »

Thirteen paragraphs on the underground
Feature by Teri Hoskin

Artist/ writer, curator/designer at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation Teri Hoskin's thirteen paragraphs sum up facts, apprehensions and suspicions about the underground. — More »

Underground film in Australia
Feature by Danni Zuvela

Writer and curator of the moving image Danni Zuvela examines underground film in Australia to draw out its spirit it from the pre-Seventies to now - 'profane, collective, improvised, transgressive, convivial, illegitimate'. — More »

Underground networks in the age of web2.0
Feature by Geert Lovink

Media Theorist, nethead, activist and founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures Geert Lovink reports on the erotica of touching between 'weak links' and the importance of experimenting with new forms of organisation both on and offline. — More »

When zines meet archives: above- and below-ground collections
Feature by Jessie Lymn

Marmalade-maker and Phd candidate at the University of Technology in Sydney Jessie Lymn's writing focuses on her research into unconventional archival spaces that hold collections of zines, those idiosyncratic sites of memory. — More »

How to make trouble and influence people: Pranks, hoaxes, graffiti and political mischef-making from across Australia
Interview by Shane McGrath

Iain McIntyre's book How To Make Trouble And Influence People describes the secret ludic history of creative troublemaking in Australia over two centuries. It began as a series of zines and is now published by Breakdown Press to impress new readers and inspire new acts of defiance. — More »

Remembering Judith Hoffberg 1934-2009 Full article available
Obituary by Pamela J Zeplin

Expert on Len Lye, editor of Umbrella Magazine Judith Hoffberg died on January 16, 2009. Tributes to her life and work continue with a memorial exhibition planned for late 2010. Judith Hoffberg wrote of her last visit to Adelaide in 2002 as one of ''Paradise regained’... — More »

Tim Burton, Filmmaker and artist
Preview by Artlink

'Tim Burton: The Exhibition' is showing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image from 24 June to 10 October, 2010. The accompanying free Polaroid exhibit runs until 26 September. The program also includes live events featuring talks, gallery tours, film screenings and kids' workshops. Special guest Glenn D Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art, will give a Keynote Address for the first time in Australia on the future of museums followed by a panel discussion on 24 June from 2pm. The Keynote Address is free but bookings are essential. See: www.acmi.net.au — More »

Renew Adelaide pilot: 2 wheels good
Profile by Ianto Ware

Zine publisher and educator Dr Ianto Ware is the Project Manager of Renew Adelaide, an urban renewal clone of Marcus Westbury's Renew Newcastle, in which the 'definition of creativity has to be broad enough to encompass the wide fields of socially innovative activity that simply doesn't fit elsewhere.' — More »


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