Whyalla Art Prize
Growing up the visual culture
More from this Issue
Octopus 5
Raafat Ishak, Horst Kiechle, Kaji Ryui, Grant Stevens. Curator: Nicholas Chambers Gertrude Street Contemporary Art Spaces 9 July - 21 August 2004
Peter Timms' 'What's wrong with contemporary art'
Blak Insights Queensland Art Gallery 3 July - 30 October 2004
The Poetics of Agoraphobia
Polish/Australian artist Gosia Wlodarczak draws obsessively, as a means of engaging with a biological cognitive bedrock. By drawing out the duration of her being she avoids the burden of memories and hope. This, she thinks, will lighten the weight of ideology that oppresses her with its exaggerated claims of authenticity...Ideology is already manifest in her sence of self, freedom and individual consciousness. It is even there in the languages she lives between; in her name, in her history, a graduate of the Poznan Academy of Fine Arts in Poland, now living in inner-city Perth.
MFC's and Gunter Christmann
Gunter Christmann was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1936. After two years in Canada, he arrived in Australia in 1959 and studied, somewhat casually, at the National Art School, Sydney, from 1962 to 1965. This article looks at the life and work of Christmann, that shambolic figure who, even as he is approaching his seventieth year, shows something of the perpetual youthful student. From his dress and demeanour to his his sloping walk and willingness to talk to the people he knows. A self taught artist, Christmann once saw his work as Geometric Abstraction and now states that the only major difference in style is the lack of intellectual order imposed on the work.
On Your (Motor)bike - REVIEW: Reason and Emotion, Biennale of Sydney, 2004, and 2004: Australian Culture Now, Melbourne
Sydney Biennale bad, 2004 in Melbourne good. The artworld's consensus locked in quick and hard. Fair? Of course not. Why compare the two, anyway? Because the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) seemed to set it up that way, by the timing of their show. They certainly took as 2004's model the nationally bound Whitney Biennial and, in particular, the Art Gallery of New South Wales's Perspecta exhibitions (last one 1999) - in turn established to counter the perceived internationalism of the Sydney Biennale.
Jacky Redgate: Survey 1980-2003 [Three Exhibitions]
III, V, VI of Contemporary Art Projects SA 2004 Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Curator, Alan Cruickshank 23 April - 23 August 2004
Raw and Cooked Margins
A series of journeys and pilgrimages characterise Paul Hobans life, his account of which is spotted with significant exhibitions, readings, people, music and events. It wasnt until 1993, when he was 39, that Hoban first had a one man exhibition at Greenaway Art Gallery. Radok here paints a clear picture of his work - A sense of surfaces and layers; words - intelligible, unintelligible, back-to-front, upside-down; wrinkles and transparency; colour and pattern; modernism and archaism, and so on. A myriad of conceptual and stylistic devises that exist largely within the margins of art conventions.