Novelist, freelance writer and contributor to Inside Story website www.inside.org.au Jane Goodall writes about the recent floods in Queensland in relation to climate change and art and how "we need the merging energies of many artists to shift the consciousness of an era mesmerised by determination to perpetuate a way of life that may well be no longer viable."

Novelist and former Director of Research and Postgraduate Studies in the College of Arts at the University of Western Sydney Jane Goodall responds to the new collection of essays edited by Brad Buckley and John Conomos called 'Rethinking the Contemporary Art School'. Goodall analyses the complexity and often dire times engendered by the incorporation of art schools into universities. However she is optimistic and suggests a first step to be a well-designed retreat system.

Jane Goodall explores the notion of text and the word as a kind of virus, something William Burroughs considers a parasitic organism, especially as is the case in contemporary visual and semantic culture. Words act as signifiers for semioticians, but their visual presence in art makes them work as spatial indicators, suggesting that they contain directions or instructions. Here Goodall poses the potential of words in revealing something else about themselves: a secret yearning not to give orders but rather to be oracles, channelling strange truths from who knows what sources. Artists discussed include: Suzann Victor, Susie Lingham, Joseph Ng, Tony Schwensen, Samuel Beckett, Cheo Chai-Hiang, Redza Piyadasa, Heather Ellyard, Barbara Campbell.

How does the notion of experiment translate from the realms of scientific medicine to the realms of art? We are forced to examine how legal and ethical liabilities of behaviour are encoded. Looks at the work of Stelarc and Orlan.

Who would have expected that Piss Christ would spark off a major public row in Australia, eight years after it was originally made notorious in the United States?