Flatness Packed

While the idea of modern and contemporary art are located in a fairly nebulous discursive realm, the notion of modern or contemporary lifestyle (the two seem, in fact, interchangeable) are very much a part of the familiar rhetoric of consumer spending. No Nonsense Return Policy (2003), Pat Foster and Jen Bereans installation at BUS Gallery, documented six miss-assembled items of IKEA furniture and dissect the curious aesthetic cycles that drive the commercial products in both realms. Taylor looks at this work and others which are focused on drawing attention to the formal and ideological intersections between modernism and the stuff of homes and home decoration.

More from this Issue

News from the Front

Its less than a centimetre long, but the weapon of mass distraction on Artlinks March cover was deemed unacceptable for US audiences. For those who missed the media frenzy, our US distributors refused to put the Adelaide & Beyond issue of Artlink on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. The reason given was the completely nude male on the cover (would a hat have rendered it incompletely nude? Would it have mattered if it was a female nude, neatly packaged away?).

Tory Shepherd

Group Material

Ben Booth, Neil Haddon, Anthony johnson, Anna Phillips, Lucia Usmiani and Kit Wise The Queen's Warehouse Gallery Tasmanaian museum and Art Gallery, Hobart 18 March - 2 May 2004

Phillip Watkins

Artrave

Artlink

Artlink on the Road: a China Diary

March saw a little bit of history being made in Sino-Australian cultural relations with Artlink being the first Australian art magazine to be launched as well as offered for sale in China. Perversely we were not offering the Chinese an issue of the magazine about Australia, our normal subject area, but about China, a subject area we have only visited occasionally. In the manner of all human vanities that may have been one of the reasons we received such a warm reception. Imagining the reverse - reading an issue of a Chinese art magazine about Australian art is in the current state of art writing in China unlikely.

Stephanie Britton

Songs of Australia: Volume 16

Aleks Danko The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia Melbourne (and touring) 7 February - 18 April 2004

Adrian Montana

Tokyo Shopping Mix: An Email Saga*

It is not hard to shop given the entire city of Tokyo seems to be premised on the activity. Tokyo is a space as complex and flowing as the most convoluted natural system. One may be in a train station but it is filled with shops. Above ground, below ground, on the ground - shops. Haley documents his activities over a period of a couple of months in what is most likely the worlds largest consumer oriented city. He discusses the somewhat surreal and absurdist nature of this environment and paints a picture of the plethora of advertisements, signs, extreme fashion trends and other visual paraphernalia that consume the city.

Stephen Haley

One or Two Things about Art and Shopping

This article explores the relationship between art and shopping, in particular the contemporary alignment of the two as one and the way feminist identity is largely constructed through the media and consumption. Wilson looks at the work of Barbara Kruger and her critique of Western consumer habits, in particular the way Kruger explores the different shopping patterns of men and women to reflect some inherent gender traits.

Josephine Wilson

Food Slut > Manifesto

Food increasingly became alienated from the body over the latter half of the twentieth century. Its material, its preparation, its distribution and its consumption became hostage to the banal aesthetics of the food stylist, the aridity of cultural studies and the repressive partnership of the public health zealot and the liability lawyer. Paul van Reyk here presents a manifesto on the food slut, a model for the examination of current food consumption trends in our society. As he states, a food slut is never indifferent to food, any more than a sex slut is indifferent to sex.

Paul Van Ryke

Pornography and Photography

A series of three exhibitions which appeared to erase or at least redraw the boundaries between art photography and pornography was seen at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 2003. Helen Grace talked to Alasdair Foster, Director of the ACP and curator of one of the exhibitions, about this timely and challenging project.

Helen Grace

Joan Kerr, Art Historian: February 1938 - February 2004

Joan Kerr, Art Historian, February 1938 - February 2004

Craig Judd

New Home for University Art Museum

Mayne Centre, University of Queensland Opened 15 April 2004

Susan Cochrane

How Much is that Artwork in the Window? Notes on Shops and Art

Through reference to Walter Benjamin's writings, Peers suggests that it has become commonplace to describe the city in terms of the progress of the flaneur, the middle class bohemian who strolled through the city, moving in the ephemeral sphere of impressions and images. This article looks at shopping as a central feature to the manner in which Australian art and culture has developed. The artist is a shopper and collector, moving through the materiality of things. Australian culture has itself become flaneur-ised over the past decade in the expansion of new museums and cultural precincts inviting discovery and added pleasure to the experiences of viewing and consuming art.

Juliette Peers

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