Contributors
Juliette Peers
Juliette Peers is an art historian and Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT, Melbourne.
Articles
Slipstitch: Contemporary Embroidery
Ararat Regional Art Gallery, Victoria
27 March – 17 May 2015
Indigenous Global
27 March – 17 May 2015
Melbourne Now: The defining moment for a century of art schools?
Juliette Peers looks at the big picture of the NGV homegrown blockbuster Melbourne Now and finds its origins reach back in time.
Wall to Wall: Graffiti Art
Chiharu Shiota: State of Being Sue Saxon and Jane Becker: All that is solid melts into air
TarraWarra Museum of Art 25 February - 27 May 2012
Indigenous: Indignation
Remembering Bernard Smith
Phenomena
Writer and academic Juliette Peers remembers Bernard Smith and queries the hagiography that sometimes surrounds him.
The White Wedding Dress: 200 years of Wedding Fashions
Bendigo Art Gallery 1 August - 6 November 2011
Phenomena
Up Close
Up Close Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang Curator: Natalie King Heide Museum of Modern Art 31 July - 31 October 2010
Stirring II
Street Talk with Mary Lou Pavlovic
Juliette Peers interviews Mary Lou Pavlovic Mary Lou Pavlovic to find out how one becomes a de facto public institution? MLP: Just do it. Don’t worry so much about acceptance into a very institutionalised dysfunctional system...Worry about being creative and alive on your own terms. Put yourself in any exhibition you feel you should be in. You may not get the institutional rewards but lets face it – they ain’t that great here in Aussie land anyway.
Art in the Public Arena
Hall of Mirrors: Anne Zahalka Portraits 1987-2007; Aehee Park: Caring for Aehee
Hall of Mirrors: Anne Zahalka Portraits 1987 – 2007 Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale Curator: Karra Rees 30 January - 28 February 2010 Aehee Park: Caring for Aehee Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale 6 February - 14 March 2010
The Underground
Rosalie Gascoigne
Rosalie Gascoigne The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia 19 December 2008 15 March 2009 Curator: Kelly Gelatly
Time
I've looked at love from both sides now: reflections on freelance / independent / guest curating
Juliette Peers, art historian and lecturer at RMIT, surveyed a number of freelance curators to find out how they work and why they embrace this insecure, interstitial existence. Hannah Mathews, Elizabeth Gertzakis, Vivonne Thwaites and Anne Kirker are among the freelance curators to whom she spoke.
Curating : Creating
Perils of the studio: inside the artistic affairs of bohemian Melbourne, Alex Taylor
Perils of the Studio: Inside the artistic affairs of bohemian Melbourne by Alex Taylor, Australian Scholarly Publishing in association with the State Library of Victoria, 2007, hardcover, 212 pages RRP $59.95
Currents III
The whistleblower of Discovery Bay
Carmel Wallace makes artworks with flotsam and jetsam. They comment on the immense amount of human debris she finds on the shoreline as well as on the scarred ecologies of the sea and the land. She also instigated the Great Southern West Walk project (a NETS Victoria exhibition touring throughout 2008) that brought a diverse range of artists to the chain of beaches, national parks and state forests located to the west of Portland near the Victoria-South Australian border. The project was driven by her need to develop her own knowledge and affinity for the land, to explore how art might contribute to environmental solutions and to explore walking as an all-encompassing method of experiencing the environment.
Fuel for Thought
Glory, glory, glory curated by Elizabeth Gertsakis
Melbourne public culture, curator/artist Elizabeth Gertsakis assembled a visual arts project around the life and work of early twentieth century Melbourne entrepreneur, sports and entertainment manager John Wren1871-1953. Artmaking, curating, presentation and display in a broad not narrowly discipline-centric definition are explored and unpicked. His world is, as Gertsakis argues, a constructed, directed one of effect and presentation within which Wren emerges as exemplar and victim in a process of image creation and narrative spinning that is central to social life in a media age.
The Word As Art
Joan Kerr: Unfinished Business
Art historian critic, essayist, heritage consultant, the late Joan Kerr was writing of the Irish-Australian women who passed though the Hyde Park Barracks wondering whether their presence was effectively mediated into the Irish Famine sculpture. Furthermore she added we dont want to remember them solely in piety as what has melted away in dismemberment and loss. Ironically Joan could be prophetically setting out the appropriate moodscape for her own memorialising. In the words of her husband who has compiled a partisan and intimate memoir of this distinguished artworld figure, Joan had a natural capacity to prick pretension and kick against the pricks of perceived injustice
Elders: The Old Magic
Festival Melbourne 2006
Visual arts at the Commonwealth Games March - April 2006
New Zealand Contemporary Art Turangawaewae A Place to Stand
Missing in the History Wars
This text presents thoughts on the near-death state of the public presentation of historical Australian art and art history missing in action in the history wars? Key figures discussed are Eugene von Guerard, Louis Buvelot, Judith Brett, John Howard, Desmond and Bettina MacCaulay, Frederick McCubbin, Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs. Links to Your Gallery and My Virtual Gallery are provided. http://abc.net.au/rn/arts/deepend/features/gallery/gallery2005/gallery/default.htm http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/ed
Art History: Go Figure
Artlink and Museums, Past and Present
The issues raised by revisiting in some degree the past within Artlink touch upon a more general invocation to the authority and precedent of history in an Australian context. Some of these issues are here discussed with reference to key figures such as the Papunya Tula movement, David Kerr, Jude Adams, Drusilla Modjeska, Joan Kerr, Anne McClintock, Louise Dauth, Penny White, Zara Stanhope, Stuart Hall, Nicholas Rothwell, Paul Carter and Donald Brook.
Reflection: 20th Anniversary Issue
Unchain my Art: Notes on the role of myths and preconceptions in shaping perceptions of women's art
This article notes the role of myths and preconceptions in shaping perceptions of womens art. In framing art reputations in Australia, the most disputed and uneasy component is gender. Peers looks at the 1970s feminist art movement which was important for providing the blueprint for an ongoing understanding of art as an interrogative gesture and the works of women artists such as Grace Cossington-Smith, Stella Bowen, Joy Hester, Clarice Beckett, Janine Burke, Kiffy Rubbo, Margaret Preston, Hilda Rix Nicholas, A.M.E. Bale, Margaret Olley, Meg Benwell, Judy Perrey and Anne Marie Graham.
Sculpture and Cities
My Country and Nocturne Images of Night and Darkness from Colonial to Contemporary
My Country: Abstract Interpretations of the Australian Landscape
La Trobe University Art Museum 3 May -6 June 2002
Curated by Vincent Alessi
Nocturne Images of Night and Darkness from Colonial to Contemporary
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery 23 April - 16 June 2002 and touring throughout 2002-2003
Curated by John Buckley
Art & Enterprise
La Trobe University Art Museum 3 May -6 June 2002
Curated by Vincent Alessi
Nocturne Images of Night and Darkness from Colonial to Contemporary
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery 23 April - 16 June 2002 and touring throughout 2002-2003
Curated by John Buckley
Allure: The Feminine in Print and Memoryware
Allure: the Feminine in Print: Wendy Hutchison, Deborah Klein, Marion Manifold, Heather Shimmen
Memoryware: Ceramics by Pamela Irving Maroondah Art Gallery, Ringwood, Vic 29 March - 13 May 2001
E-volution of New Media
Memoryware: Ceramics by Pamela Irving Maroondah Art Gallery, Ringwood, Vic 29 March - 13 May 2001
Rosslynd Piggott: Perfect/Sense
In the context of Melbourne art, Rosslynd Piggott could be linked to a significant movement of young artists who emerged in the 1980's. Her earlier works were figurative compositions which presented painterly/philosophical essays upon the nature of water, clouds and impermanence through surrealistic juxtapositions. This article follows her career from the early painting days through to her current concerns with mediums such as sculpture, installation and more recently performance.
Best Practice: Export Quality
Animal Magnetism: Sharon Goodwin and the Eternal Romance of the Bestial
The work of Sharon Goodwin is directly influenced by the Coles Funny Picture Books which create a bizarre Victorian world where human and animal promiscuously cross over. Here people are frequently turned into animals, and the qualities of animals emerge in humans through vices of personality. Goodwin's exhibition which was held at Uplands Gallery in Melbourne, Victoria in November 2001 presented a series of portraits of bestial humans or humanised animals repainted from Cole's woodcuts. Goodwin has introduced crude lines and stitching and patching in the images to represent the frequent actualisation of plastic surgery in contemporary society.
The Improved Body
Little Rippers: Australian Fringe Pop
Outre Gallery, Melbourne to July 15 Fluxus in Germany 1962-1994: A Long Story With Many Knots RMIT Gallery to July 15th
Reflection: 20th Anniversary Issue
Celebrating The Exquisite Corpse
Bendigo Art Gallery 10 June - 3 September 2000 and touring other public artspaces in Victoria throughout 2001
Sculpture and Cities
Another Look: Six Women Artists of the 1950s
Inge King, Erica McGilchrist, Helen Maudsley, Mirka Mora, Norma Redpath, Dawn Sime Heide Museum of Modern Art 18 November -7 January 2001
Taking in Water
Mightier than the Sword: Arabic Script, Beauty and Meaning
Arabic Script, Beauty and Meaning Ian Potter Museum of Art University of Melbourne 22 March - 23 May 2003 A touring exhibition from the British Museum in association with the Aitajir World of Islam Trust Guest Curator, Venetia Porter
Critical Mass: The New Brisbane
Carpet Wars by Christopher Kremmer
Fallout
The Carpet Wars by Christopher Kremmer by Harper Collins Sydney 2002
Good Vibrations: The Legacy of Op Art in Australia
Good Vibrations: The Legacy of Op Art in Australia Curated by Zara Stanhope Heide Museum of Modern Art 5 October - 24 November 2002
Fallout
Sideways Glances: South Africa, Australia and Intersections
With the showing of the BHP-Billiton collection of South African art at the RMIT Gallery in late 2002 early 2003, Australians not only saw convincing artworks, but also contemplated a culture that is both akin and alien. Synchronicities and differences in these two cultures and specific artistic experiences played out through the Intersections exhibition, with a recognition of the two nations being joined by mediating a white culture, looking upwards to Europe for inspiration and validation. Peers explores these and other parallels drawn between Australian and South African art and culture and addresses some of our own countries ongoing inequalities and historical misfortunes.
Rich & Strange
Living the Lie (of the land)
Due to the concentric nature of its revelations the exhibition The Lie of the Land deserved particular consideration in terms of the resonances that placement, grounding and the physical experience of the Australian landscape and environment can have on the issue of current art practice. Curator Carmen Grostal felt a personal and philosophical urgency behind the idea for the exhibition, with the title of the show responding to Paul Carter's text of the same name and was used as a way to enter into dialogue with the ideas raised in it.
Place
How Much is that Artwork in the Window? Notes on Shops and Art
Through reference to Walter Benjamin's writings, Peers suggests that it has become commonplace to describe the city in terms of the progress of the flaneur, the middle class bohemian who strolled through the city, moving in the ephemeral sphere of impressions and images. This article looks at shopping as a central feature to the manner in which Australian art and culture has developed. The artist is a shopper and collector, moving through the materiality of things. Australian culture has itself become flaneur-ised over the past decade in the expansion of new museums and cultural precincts inviting discovery and added pleasure to the experiences of viewing and consuming art.
Shopping & Extreme Pleasures
The 14th Annual Linden Postcard Show
Linden St Kilda Centre for Contempory Arts 5 February - 19 March 2005
Remote
Red Shoe Delivery Service
Melbourne International Arts Festival George Adams Gallery, the Arts Centre and various locations around Melbourne 7 - 22 October 2005
Ecology: Everyone's Business
Three Colours: Gordon Bennett and Peter Robinson
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne 8 April - 4 July Travelling to Victoria, Tasmanaia, Queensland, NZ July 2004 - July 2006
Currents I
This was the Future, the McClelland Sculpture award and Sculpture at RMIT during the Jomantas Years 1961-1987
RMIT Gallery, Storey Hall, Melbourne 21 July - 13 September 2003 McClelland Art Gallery, Langwarrin 4 November 2003 - 8 March 2004 Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 4 October - 7 December 2003
Adelaide and Beyond
Hothouse
Keith Murdoch Gallery State Library of Victoria 6 June - 24 August 2003
The China Phenomenon
Pitch Your Own Tent
Curated by Max Delany Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 23 June - 27 August 2005
Stirring
Exchange Value # 1. If It's Tuesday it Must be a Conference on Art and Globalism
As with Feminism in the 1970s certain ideas are in the air and finding widespread expression amongst artists and art institutions. Globalism impacts upon artists options and this phenomenon of artists and curators on the move is the result of the explosion of communication around art. Peers looks at the influx in globalism and its various influences in the Australian and international art scene.
Hybrid World
Fashion Infiltrates the Galleries
Even if one's first reaction upon hearing the sound of the words 'Melbourne Fashion Festival' is not to reach for one's gun, but to condemn the dumbing down of 'culture' into Madonna or Barbie 101, bemoan the melting of the abstract expressionist/tachiste snows of yesteryear, it has unquestionably enriched the city's art experience.
New Museums, New Agendas
Nourishment for Tough Times: Bring A Plate Conference
Review Conference Bring a Plate: Feminist Cultural Studies Conference University of Melbourne
10-12 December 1993
Art & the Feminist Project
HER-ESIES Ancient and Modern
"Women in art must look to the future as they have no past" said Mary Cecil Allen at an opening of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1935. A critical examination of the current art practices of women in Australia.
Art & the Feminist Project
Husbandry and the Coporate Collection
Making taste? Making money? Melbourne historian Juliet Peers scrutinises a group of books and catalogues on corporate art collections to see whether boardroom fancies and their lavish publications reflect a wider role in shaping popular visions of Australian painting.
Culture/Agriculture
The Other Big F-Word
Monash University Gallery presented Fashion, Decor, Interiors, curated by Natalie King 7 June - 15 July 1995, high-lighting aspects of advertising, mass production and architectural design through the work of Lyndal Walker, Tony Clark and Stephen Bram -- extracts from the exhibition catalogue.
Taste Meets Kitsch
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.
Taste Meets Kitsch
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.
Taste Meets Kitsch
Wer ist Unschuldig?
This issue of Artlink meanders (with kitschy loucheness rather than formalist stringency) around 'taste' bad and good, the workings of taste and various permutations of cultural expression in present day Australia. Kitsch is scrutinised.
Taste Meets Kitsch
A Magic Toyshop: an interview with John Bird
John Bird is Associate Professor at the Centre for Animation and Interactive Multi Media at RMIT Melbourne Victoria. Looks at developing technologies and entertainment from a background of this centre for the new media arts.
Art in the Electronic Landscape
Spots n' Dots n' Stars n' Bars
Australian Textile design from an RMIT perspective surveying current and future initiatives - practice based issues of developing guidelines for copyright in an industry that is known for - in polite terms-recycling and reworking proven designs, to the more speculative concept of creating a dialogue in textiles between Australian and other countries via the internet.
Australian Design
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
Book review Letters and Liars: Norman Lindsay and the Lindsay Family by Joanna Mendelssohn
Angus and Robertson
RRP $19.95
Art & Medicine
Three Fragments of an Aberrant Narrative of Australian Identity
Post colonialism provides a chimerical hope of a different means of shaping and ordering public representation of Australia, bu the institutional discourse around post-colonial arworks tends to uphold the status quo by using race/ethnicity as another means of directing scorn towards the lower reaches of Australian society.
Looking at the Republic
Beyond the Bleeding Heart...
Rosemary Crumlin discusses the sacred and the secular in contemporary art, starting with the exhibition she curated at the National Gallery of Victoria
Art & the Spirit
The Public Interest: Is There Any?
"Living a few hundred metres away from a community arts project has clarified my doubts about the standard and the value of such projects and what they achieve for their supposed audience." Peers explores the current issues facing the production of community and public art looking at 'The Bridge, Construction in Process' an event and exhibition which took place in Melbourne over March- April 1998.
Public Art in Australia
In a Barbie World
Fictional Barbies (Mattel trademarked doll) are presented in the dark side of suburbia spinning a queer identity for Ken and Barbie.
Art, Pornography & Censorship
The Wild(e) Colonial Boy
Leigh Bowery
edited Robert Violette
published Editions Violette/distributed by Thames and Hudson
$89.00 238 pp colour and b&w illustrations
The Big Pond: Australian Artists Overseas
One Pole Too Many? Learning to Speak the Language of a Successful Australian Arts Practitioner
Discusses the exhibition 'Diaphanous' at Span Galleries curated by Kirsten Rann, deconstructing and challenging the notion of multicultural artist.
The Future of Art
Faites Vos Jeux: Aesthetics and Dis/Order in Kennett's Victoria
Explores the idea that basic qualitative aesthetic lifestyle values in Australia are by no means neutral but highly coloured by political judgements. The mood and style of the governance of Victoria can be read as an issue of taste and lifestyle as well as political ability/responsibility.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure