Published 01 June 2014
Published March 2014
Published December 2013
Published 01 September 2013
Published June 2013
Published March 2013
Published September 2012
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.
Published June 2004
Guy Benfield, Nadine Christensen, Stephen Honegger & Anthony Hunt, Tom Nicholson, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Parekohai Whakomoe Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 23 March - 16 May 2004
7 February - 21 March 2004 The Gold Coast City Regional Art Gallery 14 February - 9 May 2004
John Curtin Gallery Curtin University of Technology, Perth 14 - 17 April 2004
Museum of Brisbane 11 March - 23 May 2004
This essay looks at the work of Jose Da Silva, a young Brisbane artist whose work explores the way pornographic images and acts of violence shape gay male subjectivity. Da Silva underscores the way sexual violence is repeatedly fetishised and performed in gay porn, and by extension queer culture. Da Silvas work is bait, designed to lure an audience with its amateur porn pull. Once captive, an audience finds itself figuratively trapped in a seedy backroom where sexual violence is not simply patterned on recognisable social problems like homo hate crimes and/or gay male domestic violence.
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.
National Gallery of Australia 2 - 4 April 2004
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.
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
Through reference to Walter Benjamins 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.
Nam June Palik Sydney Opera House Forecourt 8 -26 January 2004 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 26 February - April 2004
