My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Interview with Bruce McLean
On curating My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia, opening at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane on 1 June 2013.
More from this Issue
The limits of criticism
Anthropologist John Carty casts his eyes over the last ten years of writing on Desert art, mostly in newspapers, and finds many cliches and inconsistencies. He asks: "Where are the fine-grained localised art histories, the rich biographies of our most interesting and important individual artists? Where are their voices?" And replies: "They are still waiting in the Desert."
The (white) elephant in the room: Criticising Aboriginal art
Does Aboriginal art exist in a critical vacuum?
Louise Bourgeois: Late Works
Curator: Jason Smith Heide Museum of Modern Art 21 November 2012 – 11 March 2013
Sculpture@Bathers
Curators: Tony Jones, Joanna Robertson Kidogo Arthouse and Bathers Beach Arts Precinct, Fremantle 16 March – 1 April 2013
Gulumbu Yunupingu (1943–2012)
People in Nhulunbuy still talk wonderingly about the last days of Gulumbu Yunupingu’s life. Something happened. Something changed. For nine days the monolithic concrete hospital in the sterile mining town threw open its doors and for nine days the Yolngu ceremony ground flowed in.
Let's be polite
Editor Daniel Browning interviews artist Vernon Ah Kee who discusses the lack of criticism of Aboriginal art and the abundance of 'mass production' Aboriginal art emanating from remote communities seen by some as 'real Aboriginal art' but in the eyes of Ah Kee simply and uncritically playing into false romantic notions of the lives of Aboriginal people.
Ghostnets go global, and local
Ghost nets are fishing nets that have been abandoned at sea, lost accidentally, or deliberately discarded. The GhostNet Project, which began on islands and in communities around the top of Australia, uses the nets to make artworks, to raise awareness of marine pollution, to be creative. Awareness of Ghostnets is on the rise both nationally and internationally.
Rekospective
Yorta Yorta and Wiradjuri curator and lecturer Jirra Harvey traces the career of self-taught graffiti and studio artist Reko Rennie. He uses a traditional Kamilaroi patterning in neon and in graffiti as a contemporary statement of sovereignity. Harvey says: "The subtext to such works is a running narrative on government practices that work to control and restrain Aboriginal communities and the subsequent rebellion of the people."
String theory: Karen Mills
Michelle Culpitt examines the work practice of Northern Territory artist Karen Mills whose paintings are inspired by the string bags made by the women weavers of Arnhem Land. Culpitt writes: "The articulation of her painterly vision is only possible at the nexus of her experience and influences as an Aboriginal woman in contemporary Australia, a place of both deep connection and belonging to country, and also disjuncture and dislocation from a nation in denial of its own history."
The archive in the contemporary
The artworks of Danie Mellor, Brian Robinson and Christian Thompson each draw on archival material for subject matter, for inspiration, and to develop new work that harks back and forward at the same time.