More from this Issue
Image Bank
Collection of images with artists statements. Artists featured: Katanya Shanzy, Anne Graham, Geoffrey Seelander, Simon Duncan, Pierre Cavalan, Stefan Szonyi, Cliff Burt, Andrea McNamara, Karen Ferguson, Constanze Zikos, Jandee Amar Leddar, Leon Pericles, Meryn Jones, Annie Taylor, Ex de Medici and Ian Mowbray.
If Aquarium Gravel Is So Bad For You, How Come It Tastes So Good?
In the trading card world there are collectors, dealers, curators, critics, interested observers, and of course various magazines. Does this world sound familiar? Looks at the role of collecting...
Kitschoprenia
Our affection for kitsch is a benign form of aesthetic hypocrisy. My generation, give or take 15 years, adores kitsch. We want to have some badness; it's fun: you laugh both at your dismay for an object and your perplexity over the delight that it brings. In a broad cultural sense, my generation is kitschophilic; and this means, I suppose, not that we love the kitschy object with innocence but that we love the contempt which the kitschy object arouses.
Boys and Girls: Pierre et Gilles' Sydney Mardi Gras Poster
Examines the 1995 poster for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. How appropriate though, at the moment when Mardi Gras had successfully commodified itself as a cultural event, that its key representation should be through international glamour product photography.
Monstrous Change Observed
Exhibition review Forrest Place During the Time of the Fly Plague and Other Paintings 1993-1995
Thomas Horeau
Perth Western Australia
The Taste Factor
When I was an art critic, I quickly grew to dislike the word 'taste'. It was a convenient tool used to dismiss reviews by people who didn't like what I had to say. Whenever I delivered a negative crit upon a widely revered artist, or a positive crit on a very minor figure, they complained that I was allowing my taste to undermine my professionalism.
Pretty Baby
Collecting and making dolls grows in popularity in Australia, but members of Australia's arts industry are relatively under-represented in the ranks of doll collectors. Original dolls speak of the culture that produces them.
Kitschville - The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras
...But the Mardi Gras will always be a child of the seventies. Remember that mantra 'the personal is political'. In spite of the co-option and mainstreaming of Lesbian and Gay culture this wonderful spectacularly amateurish display (of difference) cannot help but be a politicised intervention.
Motor-Cross Dressing
Issues of stereo-typing, conforming behaviour and fun and practicality are looked at in an observation of an MG driver.
Kings of Kitsch: Big Things
Big things have the power to make real the stuff of dreams. They have the power to make us stop at places we would never have dreamed of visiting. Grand kitsch is both art and beyond.
Made in WA: A Sculptor's Alternative Practice
Although well known in regional art histories, Western Australian sculptor Edward Kohler has a far wider importance. Economic survival led him to blend popular and high art long before it was standard practice. With the Piccadilly Theatre reliefs of 1938, the sheer exuberance and infectious quality of a positive (if unconscious) kitsch aesthetic entered professional Australian art 60 years ago: Hollywood meets Olympia.