The Artlink Archive Project [Preview]: Inside the 'Outsider' Issue

In 1992–93, Artlink’s Naïve & Outsider Art for all its curious conflations (garden art, tattooing), which to later generations may seem random or even ‘tone deaf’, was an issue centring on a broad range of themes linked by a shared invisibility in the mainstream discussions of the time. Incipient and untracked—but cogent and live—ideas, especially those that were side-lined by the academy, have been central to Artlink throughout much of its four decades. Yet if some animals are more equal than other animals, then some art practices have turned out to be more robust in public intellectual life than others. Some ideas such as Indigenous resistance, sovereignty and agency, definable shifts in feminist practice, and advocacy for a vulnerable global ecology, that Artlink consistently centred and platformed from the late 1980s onwards, (well before they registered with the slower moving and more self-serving institutional cultural and political leaders) are now the foundations of intellectual and creative life in Australia.

Buy   or   Subscribe   or   Login