In black & white: text in Indigenous Queensland art

Emily Floyd is attracted to texts that focus on identity and place and that offer new ways of thinking about these issues in the light of globalisation and post-colonialism. She is interested in the malleability of language and its connection to knowledge and power. The process Floyd employs to produce her numerous large-scale wooden letters mirrors the anxiety and obsessions with the various novels they are referencing  Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment, Kafkas The Trial and Camus The Outsider. Sarah Tutton looks at Floyds practice, calling particular attention to her recent installation works its because I talk too much that I do nothing, Gen-existential Crisis and Compulsory for young intellectuals.

As a container of information in text form, the book is designed in a linear fashion to move the reader along line by line. Many artists seek to break this convention and direct the reader/viewer into a more exploratory realm, as is true of the work of Jan Davis. This article leads the reader (in a somewhat linear sense) through Davis seven-volume artist book simply titled SOLOMON  a journey developed out of the artists concern with the operation of space in visual imagery and her interest in writing.

On its own, a word points to both the sentence that it might end up in, and also to the thought that precedes it. This zone between thought and convention allows artists to foreground qualities that are normally ignored in linguistic acts. Alex Selenitsch looks at a number of post WW2 tendencies or art movements which have made use of words: Action Painting, Graffiti, Concrete Art, Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Pop Art. Selenitsch uses the examples of Mike Brown, Rose Nolan and Ruark Lewis to highlight specific functions of the word, whether it be the morphing of word and image into one, the iconic and formal aspects of words or the relationship between visual and aural language.

This brief article offers insight into a form of writing or drawing that Henri Michaux has termed asemic and which is the subject of interest for Tim Gaze, editor of Asemic magazine, published in Adelaide. As stated by Michaux Most people make asemic writing at some time, possibly when testing a new pen. They tend to have no fixed meaning. Their meaning is open. To explore the nature of asemic writing visit http://www. typisart.com.

Books hold a privileged place in our society as keepers of knowledge, spiritual truth and cultural heritage. Melinda Rankin examines the role of books in artistic practice and the robust relationship that exists between artist and book via a willingness to challenge some of the apparent conventions of structure and content. Simryn Gill, Ken Orchard, Alex Selenitsch and Gerard Genette are artists whose practice is deeply entrenched in the seemingly offensive act of fiddling with these sacred texts. For these artists, the slicing, tearing and unpicking of books is not an act of violence or irreverence. In subverting the original narrative to their own purpose, they reconsecrate the text into artworks creating contemporary objects of veneration and desire.

Fluxus is a phenomenon that defies ready classification. This article highlights some of the printed and published matter that Fluxus inspired, starting with Maciunas-directed productions, those of Dick Higgins and other examples of individuals working in Australia today. A common factor in the instances of all Fluxus activity is a passion for improvisation and experimentation, a conscious elevation of the mundane and over-looked, often an active zeal in the face of disturbing political events, and not least, a stress on producing unusual and visually arresting statements. Australian artists following the Fluxus tradition here discussed include Michael Phillips, Madonna Staunton, Alex Selenitsch and Richard Tipping.

James Stuart explores the spatial and interactive aspects of text-based artworks, leaping off the page and into the textual practices of Peter Lyssiotis and Franz Ehmann. Lyssiotis is a writer and photomedia/collage artist and creates books that generally combine his own artworks and writings in collaborations with others. Among the most impressive of his projects is the recent A Gardener at Midnight: Journey into the Holy Lands, developed as part of a Creative Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria in 2003 which is of particular focus in this text. Brisbane-based/Australian-born Ehmann is concerned with the physical reading environment of the gallery and in turn deploys a multi-disciplinary approach to the physical space and temporal duration of his exhibitions. Via the works of these two practitioners Staurt here wishes to posit the very real sense of bodily and not just intellectual interaction with language that reading entails.

A project coordinated by 24HR Art in Darwin brought artists of Chinese, European and Japanese origin to the township of Injalak in Gunbalanya, Western Arnhem Land. Ashley Crawford looks at the time Chinese-born, Sydney-based artist Guan Wei spent with three members of the local community and the stories he learnt to accompany the ancient rock art of this region. Subsequent to discovering the similarities between Indigenous Australian and Chinese visual narratives, Wei wanted to use the images as an alphabet to tell the story of his own encounters and experiences with the people and the landscape of Gunbalanya.

This article looks at the recent works of New Zealand artists Michael Parekowhai, John Pule and John Reynolds to explore notions of identity through text and image relations. Parekowhais sculptural piece The Indefinite Article spells out I AM HE in an ironic critique of Colin McCahon and goes further through wordplay to cement a link between the word, identity and the complexities of translation. Reynolds Cloud comprised of nearly 7,000 white canvases transcribed with words from Harry Orsmans Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English and acts to illuminate New Zealands separate identity and regional diversity within a worldwide community of English speakers. Stories of migration, of dispossession, of alienation characterise the work of John Pule. Similar to Parekowhai and Reynolds, Pule deploys words to multiply meanings and confound interpretation or translation.