New Media - Search

How does the south appear to itself and how might south appear on the southern stage? The sweep of the south is broad and there are many ways to cross it. Kevin Murray considers the role of nature as a host of shared references for people and cultures of the southern hemisphere as well as ideas concerning indigenous and diasporic solidarity. Murray makes the point that it is on the political stage where the south seems particularly vocal, especially in relation to economic relations between north and south. The flow of traffic between north and south is also discussed, taking into consideration the infiltrating of modernism into Australia via its northern source and the shifting patterns in positioning the exotic gaze that is normally directed south. Murray concludes that, at this stage, the south remains a rare platform that welcomes both indigenous and non-indigenous, both tribes and individuals.

Kevin Murray

Juan Davila: Queering the South

Juan Davila's recent retrospectives, held in Sydney and Melbourne, affirmed the astonishing array of historical, political, artistic, and cultural references populating his oeuvre since his move from Chile to Australia in 1974. As Davila explains: The circumstance of living in two extremes of the world, in two peripheral cultures, slowly forced me to look at the materiality of the circumstances where artworks operate. This text examines the work of Davila as being, in libidinal and critical measure, queer, and the extent to which this provides a signifying key to the artists TransPacific vision. The term queer is not merely called upon as one bound by its sexual connotations but as one used to describe a generalised sense of deviation from normalcy, within which Davilas work is here positioned. Specific works examined are: The Arse End of the World, Fable of Australian Painting, Retablo and Our Own Death amongst other key pieces.

Paul Allatson

Defining Features: Africa

Cobi Labuscagne attempts to define some of the current definitions of self in Africas effort to introduce its answers to the world. Labuscagne sets up two important benchmarks for examination in this text. The first being a framework within which Jonathan Jones of the recent international exhibition Africa Remix sets up some definitions of Africa, art and contemporary, which Labuscagne sees as largely problematic and in need of renegotiation. The second benchmark is based on a volume of essays by Johannesburg-based cultural critic and academic Sarah Nuttal, which look at conduits of beauty and ugliness and the continual interaction with art and aesthetics.

Cobi Labuscagne

Jim Allen: Now

Being ourselves part of Oceania and enjoying a close and somewhat unique physical relationship with the natural environment I think we are especially receptive to an artform which makes use of simple tactile media; paper, stones, gravel, sand, cloth and water, employed with such finite sensibility and sophistication Jim Allen. To date, Jim Allen's contribution to the history of art in New Zealand has been discussed in terms of his achievements as a teacher, organiser and advocate for new dematerialised modes of practice. Recently Allen is being recognised for his role as the prime artistic mover behind the emergence of new multi-media, time-based, site-specific, performative, and installation modes of sculpture during the 1970s. Allens practice as an artist and his efforts as an arts organiser also helped prepare the ground for New Zealands growing involvement in the international arts arena. This article acts as a homage to one of the great figures in contemporary art, discussing key works such as Poetry for Chainsaws (1976) and O-AR Part 1 which are currently being re-staged/re-installed as part of a mini-survey show in Auckland.

Christina Barton

The Video Archive, Chile

The Video Archive project at the new Centro de Documentacion de las Artes is located on the once bombarded Chilean presidential palace grounds. The aim of the archive is to recover the history of the 'video arts' in Chile via the establishment of a dynamic and flexible platform intended to provoke new interpretations of the video medium. The task of collecting three decades of video footage from a time of social and economic critique and upheaval has been a laborious process. In addition to research, the Centre also receives material from artists who seek to add to the historical perspective of video as an accessible and common technology in current artistic practice. Key figures in the forging of Chile's video art scene included Juan Downey (1940-1992), the collective known as Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA), the Escena de Avanzada (The Vanguard Scene) artists, Eugenio Dittborn, Carlos Leppe, Magali Meneses, Sybil Bintrup, Gonzalo Mezza, Carlos Altamirano, Alfredo Jaar, Victor Hugo Codocedo, Carlos Flores and Juan Enrique Forch.

Isabel Garcia

CADA: art and life: Chile

In the wasteland of Chile, post- Military Coup of 1973, the Coectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA) arose in 1979, formed by the sociologist Fernando Balcells, the writer Diamela Eltit, the poet Raul Zurita and the visual artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo. The role of CADA was forged via a necessity for theoretical and practical renovation of the national artistic undertaking and the urgency to reset this task towards the fusion of art and life. This article follows the various movements of CADA, often formed on the basis of public protest and artistic dissemination and considered to be social sculpture which referred to art as a proposal for the social construction of reality. CADAs work attracted and affected many people and became a great challenge of collective creation.

Fernando Balcells

From an Island South: Tasmania to Pakistan

Sean Kelly reflects on the experience and the complexity of taking an exhibition initiated by Asialink called From an Island South of landscape work by Tasmanian artists, Bea Maddock, Richard Wastell, Julie Gough, David Stephenson, David Keeling, Philip Wolfhagen and Jonathan Kimberley with Jim Everett curated by Jane Stewart of the Devonport Gallery to Lahore in Pakistan. He found that the political side of the Tasmanian art and its use of traditional approaches to art combined with critical content had similarities with some art produced in Pakistan. He refers to the 2003-4 landmark show of contemporary Pakistan art seen in Playing with a loaded gun curated by Atteqa Ali.

Sean Kelly

Cape 07

Cape 07 was a large-scale contemporary African art event which took place in various locations across Cape Town, South Africa this year. Cape 07's main exhibition the Lions of Contemporary African Art featured the works of 45 African artists. The entire event was conceived as an attempt to establish creative dialogue between different artists and regions involved. This article briefly discusses some of the many venues and artists showcased as part of an event which was ultimately an edited version of the cancelled Trans Cape biennale. Cape 07 was curated by Gabi Ngcobo with Jonathan Garnham as project manager.

Thembinkosi Goniwe

Ventriloquism: On the commodification of masculinity in South African art

Khwezi Gule

Galeria Metropolitana

Galeria Metropolitana is an independent and self-sustaining art space, allocated at a working class and semi-peripheral commune in the Southwest side of Santiago of Chile. Working primarily from a domestic space, the curatorial, production and management tasks carried out entail a radical challenge between art space managers, artists and neighbours or organisations. Galeria Metropolitana has become a kind of local 'institution of the alternative' and as a gallery project is considered unfinished, a permanent work in progress. The gallery is described as a self-reflexive space, not to be separated from its context, and works with art history (local-international), neighbourhood history and city history as its key concepts.

Luis Alarcon and Ana Marie Saaverdra

Walks and Transmissions: Santiago

Tom Nicholson is led by Galeria Metropolitana's co-director Luis Alarcon through an area of Santiago, which exists for the most part as a wasteland brought down during Pinoche's dictatorship. In one of the neighbouring suburbs, La Victoria, Nicholson learns of some of the area's history - being inhabited by landless people in 1957 - and of the commemorative action that takes place annually to mark this occupation. In accordance with these activities, Galeria Metropolitana held an event which featured the work of Aotearoan/New Zealand artist Daniel Malone and which brought attention to the different - and often conflicting - claims to truth with which words and images articulate experiences and aspirations.

Tom Nicholson

Pat Hoffie: Cultural Servitude

This article looks at the work of Brisbane-based artist Pat Hoffie and the way she flirts with acceptability in her quasi-ironic method of cultural exploitation. In her art the inevitability of cultural servitude to capital flowers into something more complex and generative, and demonstrates how the local can make its mark on global frameworks. Hoffie's technique shows a layering of activity within the field of contemporary art, broadening into a complex visual concept of cross-cultural dynamics. Her artworks include material that signifies its history of cultural exploitation and commercialisation. Artworks directly referenced here include: 'No such thing as a level playing field', 'Blackbirding Series', 'Avatars (The Committee)' and 'Madame Illuminate Crack's Pictorial Guide to the Universe'.

Sally Butler

Gatekeeping Africa

Sharlene Khan

James Geurts: 90 degrees equatorial

James Guert's recent show at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide is described through this article to have induced an almost trance-like state from the arrangement of the four square light boxes, depicting scenes from four sites of interception to the four large digital projections humming with visual and auditory stimuli. The focus of this text is on Guerts remarkable journey to the four corners of the globe. The corners are literally represented by smallish triangle objects of inner lit plastic photographed and composed to construct a full form of the globe. The way they are presented, as foreign objects in the landscape, raise questions about the way the west relates to the wider world. In the particular settings Guerts has used, all being sites on or near the sea, the corners are impositions, objects at odds with the surrounding environments. This is enforced as a reminder about the extent that the West continues to impose its will on even the most remote communities.

Ian Hamilton

Matthew Ngui: public artist

Matthew Ngui is a Singaporean born, Australian artist who makes intriguing and engaging public artworks that embrace the history of a given site. Ngui is fascinated by the ways in which we interact with artworks and the individual nuances and understandings each person brings to the encounter. Ngui describes his work as often loose, and multifarious, sometimes tenuous and always fragile. Scale and ambition are other easily identifiable elements in Nguis practice, whether it be transforming a cityscape with lights or covering a Swiss Village in an avalanche of 350,000 bouncing balls, each emitting a light and a whispered message.

Ted Snell

Tributaries: South Africa

This article acts as a rough guide to recent art from South Africa. With galleries having multiplied during the early 2000s, the current state of contemporary art in South Africa is so that there are various major galleries, artist-run spaces, community arts centres, municipal galleries and museums and corporate collections helping to sow the seeds of what might in the near future become a more dynamic art circuit.

Khwezi Gule and Sharlene Khan

Trama 2000-2005

TRAMA was initiated in Argentina in 2000 by a group of artists. Rather than look for certainties, TRAMA created a context to share and confront questions, experiences and ideas. This article quotes various key figures involved in the collaborative practice of TRAMA, which, in 2006 became a network of artist led initiatives, formed by: La Agencia (Buenos Aires), El Levante (Rosario), La Baulera (Tucumán), Tallerh (Córdoba) and VOX (Bahía Blanca).

Trama ARI Argentina

TRANS VERSA: Santiago

Co-curators Zara Stanhope and Danae Mossman discuss TRANS VERSAa project by thirteen artists at three venues in Santiago as part of The South Project gathering. Through this conversation Stanhope and Mossman discuss some of the challenges and aims of the project - to avoid being the importers of pre-existing art and to create an interest in engendering collaboration, with the fundamental idea based on flow and movement across geography. This discussion engages notions of globalisation, communication, knowledge and various cross-cultural agendas.

Daena Mossman and Zara Stanhope

Indomite: a Chilean artist in Central Australia

I have always felt a deep fascination during the contemplation of what we call nature, its circular logic, its monumentality, its disorderly perfection - Ortega Through this text Leonardo Ortega documents his travels through the Australian desert where he lived out his curiosities about the Aboriginies who inhabit the lands, with their political and social situation becoming the central subject for his video-installation INDOMITE exhibited in Melbourne in 2006. This project continues on from Ortega's previous artwork The Ralco Model exhibited at Galeria Metropolitana, Santiago. As Oretega explains of the intention of these works and his practice at large I try to document diverse human subjectivities in a world that tends to homogenise those experiences. I try to rescue difference in a time when equality has stopped being a real humanistic value.

Leonardo Ortega

Selling Emily: confessions of a white advisor

In this article Philip Batty, a former art teacher at the Aboriginal community of Papunya offers some personal reflections on his involvements with the rise to fame of indigenous artist Emily Kngwarreye and other indigenous pieces and attempts to make sense of them. Batty discusses some of the problems associated with viewing these traditional works within the Western framework of modern art. He proceeds to offer some speculative answers as to how various political, economic, historical and aesthetic conventions transformed Aboriginal religious business into art. Batty uses the work of Emily Kngwarreye to exemplify how indigenous works can become merely a mirror image of European desires.

Philip Batty

Subject Matters: South Africa

In recent years the growing intellectual input of young art practitioners, supported by Africans in the diaspora, is successfully managing to extend and complicate South African critical art discourse. It is here contested that artists across the non-white spectrum are reclaiming a notion of blackness as a political discourse to deconstruct and reject a normative white gaze that has not yet fully come to terms with its colonial and apartheid past. Since the birth of South African democracy in 1994, a whole range of art exhibitions and research projects have been mounted in public arenas, which reflect on these ideas. This article examines this with direct reference to the works of Frantz Fanon, Thembinkosi Goniwe, Gabi Ngcobo, Stuart Hall, Thando Mama, Liese van der Watt and others.

Stina Edblom

New Contemporaries: Issues of Identity in Maldivian Art

Mamduh Waheed discusses the current state of the arts in the Maldives, a country for which the word art has no formal existence. Despite this fact, there is plenty of art to speak of. The opening of the countries National Art Gallery in 2005 saw the exhibition Maldives Contemporary 2005 which included a display of local and international art. Subsequent to this was the establishment of a National Centre for the Arts, which focused primarily on the facilitating of academic and technical education in the arts and crafts. This article also looks at the role of tourism and trade as avenues for art and discusses the role of a group of younger local artists Waheed has here termed the New Contemporaries.

Mamduh Waheed

Artrave

Artlink

Turbulence: Third Auckland Triennial

Turbulence: Third Auckland Triennial Curator: Victoria Lynn 9 March - 4 June 2007

Stella Brennan

Visual Animals Symposium

Visual Animals: crossovers, evolution and new aesthetics Curator: Ian North Art Gallery of South Australia/CACSA 18 - 19 April 2007

Alan Lee

Eyes Lies and Illusions

Eyes Lies and Illusions Australian Centre for the Moving Image Melbourne 2 November 2006 - 11 February 2007

Justine Khamara

The Weather Report: James Guppy

James Guppy: The Weather Reports Brenda May Gallery, Sydney 6 February 3 March 2007

Joanna Mendelssohn

Intimate Epics: Richard Woldendorp

Richard Woldendorp: Intimate Epics Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth 3 - 24 February 2007

Ric Spencer

The One and the Many

Curators: Holly Arden and Chris Handran Griffith University, DELL Gallery Queensland College of Art 17 February 14 April 2007

Ben Eltham

saltwaterfreshwater

saltwaterfreshwater Curator: Thelma John Central TAFE Gallery, Perth 10 - 28 April 2007

Ian McLean

Sneakers: Classic to Customs

Sneakers: Classics to Customs Curator: Roger Leong National Gallery of Victoria 16 December 2006 - 8 July 2007

Cliff Burtt

Part & Particle: Denise Ava Robinson

Part and particle Denise Ava Robinson Burnie Regional Art Gallery 2 February 11 March 2007

Jane Stewart

Blood Sweat & Fears: Penny Byrne

Penny Byrne: Blood Sweat and Fears Sullivan +Strumpf Fine Art Sydney 6 25 March 2007

Tracey Clement

Port Adelaide: Rites of Passage

Port Adelaide : Rites of Passage Curator: Margot Osborne Adelaide Central Gallery 30 March 21 April 2007

Vivonne Thwaites

Stranded: Neil Haddon

Neil Haddon: Stranded Criterion Gallery, Hobart 22 March 21 April 2007

Bec Tudor

Project Belonging: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan

Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan Project Belonging: Another country Jan Manton Gallery, Brisbane 16 28 April 2007

Nicholas Thompson

Indigenous Initiatives: PNG and South Australia

These two short pieces look at two Indigenous artistic collectives in Papua New Guinea and South Australia. The Omie people of the Oro Province in PNG and artists from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in remote South Australia and the events which have taken place to showcase their unique creations to the wider communities are briefly didcussed. Please visit www.holmesacourtgallery.com.au and www.betterworldarts.com.au for more information.

Carolyn Wilson

Editorial: South of my days

Stephanie Radok

Changing Identity: Culture and the City

Ian Hamilton

The New Brisbane

Brisbane's coming of age has been announced a number of times, most recently with millennial-expansiveness, in its claim to be the Creative City leading the Smart State. Over the past 15 years the city has spawned new enterprises, a new generation of artists, new cultural policies, new public buildings, and a new sense of grace. With an ugly past left largely unexplained, the focus is on the present and the ambitions for the city. While government and the mainstream media look to the future of the New Brisbane, it has been the role of writers, artists and a few historians to examine the past as part of the task of fully inhabiting the city. This article provides a discourse with Ross Fitzgerald about some of the above mentioned issues.

Stuart Glover and Stuart Cunningham

A History of Forgetting

Anderson looks at one of Brisbanes formative cultural events, The Demolition Show, an exhibition curated by John Stafford in 1986 to mark to demise of the relatively short lived Observatory artist run space and in the fact the whole city block that surrounded it. This notion of demolition is raised in this article not only in the context of this particular event but also as a way of exploring a past which has for the most part fallen through the cracks. As Anderson states: Long after the dust has settled, the perception that Brisbane has no past in visual art, no critical mass, still lingers. Yet it is far from a new issue.

Peter Anderson

Always Remember: there is no past

This article examines Brisbanes steeped conservative polical history and looks at the radical changes which occured as a result of the early 1990s shift to a Labour goverment. As an aftermath to the anti-climax that was the 1988 World Expo, the 90s was a decade which saw the Queensland Art Gallery embark on new avenues of experimentation and a new confidence was in the air. Furthermore Hoffie addresses the ongoing lack of substantial criticism in relation to arts and cultural development as many saw this as the single most pressing problem dogging the local scene.

Pat Hoffie

Great White Sharks

Holubizkys article deals with the ever present attitude that Brisbane is a city 20 years behind the times in the cultural sector and poses the question as to what this really means? Culture has become a business only within the relative scheme of things, and ahead may only be the false competitive edge and gamesmanship of regional-urban cultural ambition. Comparisons, therefore, should not be made lightly, nor benchmarks for the vitality of a cultural milieu. Discusses the works of Craig Walsh, Eugene Carchesio, Caitlin Reid and Vernon Ah Kee.

Robert Harrison

Parallel Precincts

Once depressed inner-city suburbs that were havens for students, migrants, artists and fringe communities, the high profile precincts of South Brisbane/West End and Fortitude Valley/New Farm have developed into fast-growing centres of urban residential and cultural development. The Millennium Arts Program now underway will see the expenditure of over $100 million on the development of a new Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) through the Queensland Art Gallery's Two Sites-One Visionstrategy. Heather locates the diversity of Brisbane's arts and culture scene through such new and existing precincts, establishments which mark an exciting transformation in the future of the cities art scene.

Robert Heather

Is Art Built-in Built-out? debating public art

In 1999 Art Built-in was declared public policy by the Queensland Government, mandating that two percent of all construction budgets over $250,000 across governments be allocated to the artworks equating to some $15m worth of arts projects annually. Recently the first in a series of formal debates took place to canvas opinion on results so far. The topic was that the role of the curator is essential to create great public art. Looks at the role of local artists such as Jay Younger and her collaborative partner, architect Michael Rayner as well as Wendy Mills and Jill Kinnear.

Ingrid Hoffmann

Next Wave Coming

A conversation between Jennifer Herd, artist, curator and convenor of the BOVACAIA program at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Richard Bell, artist and activist, Gloria Beckett, an artist who is currently completing her Masters candidature at the QCA, GU, and well known artist and lecturer, Pat Hoffie. Together they discuss some of the personal and artistic struggles of the Aboriginal Murri community and the role of performative and visual arts in recognising a history largely understood.

Pat Hoffie

The Campfire Group

The Campfire Group is an independent cultural enterprise where Indigenous and cross-cultural perspectives provide the organising principles. This article talks briefly of Balance 1990, the first exhibition held by The Campfire Group, open to Murris and whitefellas alike with curatorial efforst by Michael Eather, Marlene Hall and Marshall Bell. The diversity of Campfire Group's projects over the past few years is testimony to its members ability to transform and reinvent artistic practices and introduce those practices to new audiences. Carrolli looks at the various projects, both local and international, which have contributed to the success of the transitional authorial figure that the Campfire Group has come to be.

Linda Carroli

Hybrid Arts, Cultural Policy and Chinese Whispers

Recently some of the individual, performance and new media artists who have been collaborating across borders in Brisbane and Queensland have networked their way out of the city and into Europe and Asia. With cross commissions and research and development for contemporary performance work there is a new and vibrant creative export. This article explores some of these artists and their international work and looks at how such collaborated efforts are contributing to a new examination of what culture actually is for a country steeped in its European heritage. Follows the practice of local performance artist Lisa ONeil and her collaborations with Keith Armstrong as well as examining The Bonemap Project initiated by artists Russell Milledge and Rebecca Youdell.

Zane Trow

The Artists

Notable for their ability to conduct practices from Brisbane over recent years are Luke Roberts, Scott Redford, Eugene Carchesio, Leonard Brown, Sebastian de Mauro, Gordon Bennett, Joe Furlonger, and Jay Younger, who have all emerged since 1980 into the national (and several into the international) marketplace. These practice are here explored in all their diversity. Martin-Chew looks at the increase in available resources and some of the opportunities that Brisbane has to offer for young and emerging artists wanting to break into the local and international art scene. Other artists discussed include Jemima Wyman, Lisa Adams, Rod Bunter, Vernon Ah Kee, Sandra Selig, Andrea Higgins and Michael Zavros.

Louise Martin-Chew

New Media Art in Brisbane

The investigation of New Media Art is especially relevant in a city that is hyped with the rhetoric about critical mass in the New Media and Creative Industries. Machan here attempts to redraw some lines of definition in what the term New Media Art actually means, as it is often seen as a doomed and short-lived handle. She does this through examining some of the key New Media artists (including Craig Walsh, Keith Armstrong, Tim Plaisted, Bonemap, Trish Adams, Di Ball, Grant Stevens, Jenny Fraser, Simone Hine, Alex Gillespie, Jay Younger, Adam Donovan, Andrew Kettle and Molly Hankwitz) and the difference between New Media and other visual arts as well as looking at government support and initiatives in the line of New Media Arts.

Kim Machan

Fuelling Innovation: Starting Young

Over the last two decades, Queensland has generated an arts and innovation culture for children and youth. Brisbanes distinguished reputation in the arts for young audiences rests on several solid foundations, most developed with support from major civic organisations, cultural institutions and successive governments. To understand how critic mass for childrens participation in the arts has been achieved, this article looks at a few of the formative events such as Play and Prime held at the Queensland Art Gallery and the popularity of artists such as Yayoi Kusama and Cai Guo Qiang amongst young audiences.

Barbara Piscitelli

Prime Two

With the redevelopment of many inner-city dwellings which in the past were alternative hot spots for the local youth, Brisbane was left with very few arts venues catering for youth-specific programs, and limited opportunities for young artists to present their work. In 2001 the Queensland Art Gallery appointed an Access and Youth Program Officer and 2003 saw Prime Two, a six-hour long celebration of youth culture for National Youth Week. The intensity of Prime Two transformed the gallery into a festive and lively venue and created an experience that was reminiscent of an adventure rather than a visit to a state institution. Featured artists include Jemima Wyman, Arryn Snowball, Anne Wallace, Brett Whiteley and James Gleeson.

Renai Stoneley

Moving Beyond Pragmatism: filmmaking in Queensland

The local film production community in South-East Queensland has come a long way, and over the past decade it has been important for local filmmakers to lay claim to an authentic local production that has achieved commercial if not critical success in the box office. Ward looks at those feature films and documentaries (Blurred, Under The Radar, Getting Square and Feeling Sexy) which have contributed to the emerging critical mass of the local film industry and the current debate surrounding creative pragmatism within this fledgling sector.

Susan Ward

'Glocal' Government: Cross Cultural Understanding

David Hinchliffe has been a Councillor with Brisbane City for 15 years. He is also a photographer and exhibiting artist with 16 exhibitions to date. His background makes him a powerful supporter of Brisbanes art scene. Artlink asked him to tap into his experience and tell us how the new Brisbane came into being and where it is headed next.

Artlink

The Gay Museum – a history of lesbian and gay presence in Western Australia

A history of lesbian and gay presence in Western Australia 22 January - 31 May 2003

Josephine Wilson

Artrave

Artlink

The Possibility Forum - Institutional Change and Modest Proposals

This text takes up some of the broader concerns of Tony Bond's initial questions to an Australian panel at ARCO 2002 Madrid, particularly 'can there be a benign global capitalism?' and 'how do we address the value of exchanges between artists?'.

Charles Esche

Asia Pacific Triennial 2002 - Starry Night

When talking about non-Indo-European cultures, we are taking on board profound differences in how we arrange our worlds. The 2002 Asia Pacific Triennial endeavours to present art from these cultures through various treatments of time and space relations.

Alison Carroll

Breathing/Diving/Dreaming/Dancing to the BEAP in Perth (You Can't Buy These Emotions off the Hollywood Shelf)

Immersion was part of the Perth Biennale of Electronic Art (BEAP), a selection of some of the most important international immersive, interactive and virtual reality artworks from the last decade, created by Chris Malcolm and presented at the John Curtin Gallery.

Stephen Jones

The Generosity of a Light Touch

For the more than 15 years that the Australian organisation Experimenta Media Arts has metamorphosed through various ideological, aesthetic and technological identities, its one constant has been a passionate involvement with and championing of the new and experimental. Prototype, exhibited in Melbourne in 2002, carried on this tradition, more than living up to the title.

Shiralee Saul

I Wonder Where the Public Art Went?

During the first half of 2002 the Danish champion of pedestrians, Dr. Jan Gehl and his team from GEHL Architects were commissioned to analyse the City of Adelaide in terms of its viability as a pedestrian city.

Paul Downton

Museums For the 21st Century: Entertainments or Big Challenging Ideas?

Museums both reinforce one's views and challenge them, encouraging innovative connections we hadn't thought of before, driving us on to expanded understandings. Griffin addresses some of the controversies surrounding museums in the age of technology.

Des Griffin

Scaling Up at ACCA

Opening in mid October 2002, the new ACCA is a purpose built complex designed by Melbourne- based architects Wood Marsh. An architectural marvel and simultaneously a contemporary art space, at last the ACCA is moving to a building that lives up to the portent of its name. Haley spoke to the new Creative Director Juliana Engberg in August of 2002.

Stephen Haley

Documenta 11 Takes On Masters of the Universe

Every five years the sleepy little German town of Kassel is invaded by the international art world. The 2002 Documenta exhibition staged here, which have traditionally played second fiddle only to the Venice Biennale, was eagerly anticipated as the first genuinely postcolonial Documenta, due in large part to the appointment of the expatriate Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor as Artistic Director.

David McNeill

Cacophony + Cramp for the Sensory Bundle

Digital media provides intuitive contemporary ways for storytelling in our times. dLux media arts, based in Sydney, this year curated a selection of installation works derived from their annual d>art program, and for the first time showed it outside Sydney. The five works selected for the Adelaide exhibition were complex and esoteric: a gorgeous array of storytelling techniques which explore and exploit narrative and interactivity.

Amanda McDonald Crowley

A Stitch in Time

Peter Callas' show held at Stills Gallery in 2002 Vinculum + Orison resulted from his Asialink residency in Delhi, India and comprises of digital prints on photographic paper and an artist's book. Both the scale and choice of images in this exhibition are seductive and enthralling; deceptively innocent moments in daily and century-old rituals and routines.

Tempe MacGowan

Uncertain Terrain

Modern physics suggests we are living within an expanding universe. We are, it seems, still moving away from our point of origin (the singularity of the Big Bang). The intersection of new physics and Buddhism provides pathways into Julia Ciccarone's landscape paintings (exhibited at Niagara Galleries in Melbourne in early 2002), elucidating the narratives and suggesting relationships between the metaphors and symbols she uses.

Cassandra Laing

Small Deaths

Australian artist Kate Breakey, who now resides in Tucson, Arizona, caught up with Sarah Thomas to discuss the impact of growing up in the coastal town of Port Lincoln and the impact her childhood upbringing is having on her recent work. 'I think my childhood proximity to nature turned me into a naturalist...Growing up around animals you learn that life is complicated, survival is a struggle, death usually isn't quick or clean, and nature doesn't make any allowances for love and attachment'.

Sarah Thomas

Lawrence Daws: From Mandala to Full Circle

Australian artist Lawrence Daws speaks of seven phases of his work, based on specific themes that have guided his development as an artist. There has been a gradual trend in his work from themes of archetypal symbolism and exotic portent towards the more local and personal.

Timothy Morrell

Singapore Opens Up to the World - Site + Sight: First Major International Show

Using Singapore as the first 'site' for the exhibition, Site + Sight: Translating Cultures from 7 June to 26 July 2002 brought together 26 international artists from 11 countries to discuss and present artworks relating to the theme of globalisation and its cultural impact on the world.

Michelle Antoinette

Marine Nature in Porcelain: The Recent Work of Robin Best

Ceramic artist Robin Best became fascinated by a complex marine world which included sea-invertebrates/filter feeders like bryozoans, sea sponges and ascidians (sea squirts) during walks on the beach in her seaside suburn of Semaphore. Here Walker discusses some of Best's recent work and conceptual concerns.

Wendy Walker

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.

Juliette Peers

Jewel Mackenzie: Gemini Paintings

Jewel Mackenzie's practice explores both the understanding and experience of the world and the history and legacies of painting. Her background in both dressmaking and in public administration has informed her project to provoke and explore the positioning of the artist within contemporary bureaucratic culture.

Angela Goddard

Artrave

Artlink

A New Catch-Up: Report of the Contemporary Visual Arts and Craft Inquiry

Stephanie Britton

Artrave

Artlink and Belinda Daw

Modern Machine Art

Information processing technology influences our notions about creativity, perception, and the limits of art ... It is probably not the province of computers and other telecommunication devices to produce works of art as we know it; but they will, in fact be instrumental in redefining the entire area of esthetic awareness.

Simon Penny

Artlink - The Second Decade 1991-2000

Britton recaps on the decade that was and discusses some of the significant challenges she and her team at Artlink faced such as marketing, distributing, staffing, staying solvent and avoiding terminal burnout. Also looks at some of Artlinks major achievement over the past ten years.

Stephanie Britton

Screen Gallery

At the time of this article, Screen Gallery, the world's first gallery for the exhibition and research of digital media, was anticipated to open at Federation Square in Melbourne. Screen Gallery is located underground, on the site of a couple of old railway platforms 100 metres long, 15 metres wide and seven metres deep. Creative Director of the Screen Gallery, Ross Gibson spoke to Stephanie Radok over the internet.

Ross Gibson

Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery

The new Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery, the spearhead of the new and improved South Australian Museum development program, set out to unlocked one of the great ethnographic collections of the world and give insight into one of the worlds oldest, most continuous living cultures. Some of the artefacts on display included totem poles from Elcho Island, headdresses from Central Australia, Darwin area and Mornington Island and wooden shields from across Australia.

David Kerr

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.

Juliette Peers

The Link Exhibition

The Link Exhibitions were a series of contemporary art exhibitions run on a very low budget by the Art Gallery of South Australia between 1974-1979 to increase communication and understanding between Australian artists. This article is a retrospective account of the events and responses to the Link Exhibitions. Key figures discussed are Imants Tillers, Jim Cowley, Bob Ramsay, Brian Medlin, Terry Smith, John Baily, Noel Sheridan, Donald Brook, Hank Vischedyk, John Kaldor, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Ann Newmarch, Hossein Valamanesh, Aleks Danko, Tony Coleing, Marcus Beresford, Alison Carroll, Ian Maidment, Dick Richards and Barry Pearce.

Ian North

Craft Theory

The twentieth anniversary of Artlink has provided an occasion for an article on the current state of craft theory and its ramifications. This article gathers and presents a knowledge that eddies around craft and engages in the ontology of craft theory. Its aspirations: for craft theory to be not only approached from the point of view of the useful, instrumental or skilful but as offering new ways of moving and thinking. William Morris, Adolf Loos, David Walker, Sue Rowley, Grace Cochrane, Justin Clemens, Mark Pennings, Kevin Murray, Gilles Deleuze, Nicole Tomlinson, John Rajchman, Felix Guattari, Tony Fry, Frances Lindsay and Paul Carter are discussed through this text.

Suzi Attiwill

Design Practice: Trawling the Speculative Field

This article is a response to a renewed interest by design practice into the cultural and natural environment for inspiration, and a renewed focus of design education and practice on investigations in the field. The recent installation works of two architectural practices - Lyons: City of Fiction inspired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Shop:Dunescape by PSI New York - are here described.

Gini Lee

Art/Body the Liminal Experiences of Indigeneity

Art from an indigenous context cannot be transferred wholly into another context for reading. This denies the fact that indigenous contexts do have ways of seeing and making sense of their art. Mel presents a discourse for alternate ways of viewing such indigenous artwith reference to terms such as postmodern, objectivity and subjectivity. The Mogei people of Mt Hagen area in Papua New Guinea are examined through this text.

Michael A. Mel

Social Ecology

In March 2000, Stuart Hill attended the Mildura Palimpsest #3 Science and Art Symposium organised by Sunraysia TAFE and La Trobe University. One of the speakers was Stuart Hall, scientist and ecologist who, in his talk introduced the concept of social ecology, a cross-disciplinary field of which he is the inaugural professor at the University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury Campus. Here is Hill's interview with Stephanie Radok.

Stuart Hill

Regional Art: Theorising the regions

This article seeks to challenge regional communities away from the self-prophesying defeatism of whingers from the bush towards a concept of growing communities. The arts have an intrinsic contribution to make within the chosen future. Fettling discusses this with reference to globalisation, de-centred cultural and ethnic hybridization and individuality. Featured artists include Megan Jones, Andrew McDonald, Janet Gallagher, Vicki Reynolds, Danielle Hobbs, Chris Booth, Craig Christie, Rodney Spooner, Michael Doneman, Motoyuki Niwa and Lee Salomone.

Neil Fettling

Art for Social Change: Footsteps from the Past to the Future

We have arrived at a point where we are constantly experimenting with and experiencing a new understanding of diversity in Australia. Art discovers new directions through the development of strategies that enable it to penetrate and interpret the unknown other in a more profound way. This sets up the topical discussion for this article with references to exhibitions Boghcheh (Bundle), Defiling the Object, Embellishing the Family Photograph and The City which showed at the Gabriel Gallery in 2000. Featured artists include Karen Lunn, Mehmet Adil, Peter Bok, Alan Cruickshank, Helen Fuller, Catherine K, Pramod Kumar, Michelle Nikou, Deborah Paauwe, Bronwyn Platten, Hossein Valamanesh, Zita Weelius, Mei Wong, Anthony Figallo, Fassih Keiso, Samia Mikhail, Yatzek Szmuc and John Tsiavis.

Carmen Grostal

Unsentimental Experimental: The Experimental Art Foundation 25 years on

Bilske looks at the history of EAF: Experimental Art Foundation and some of the significant events which have contributed to its success since its inception in 1974. Discusses briefly Stephanie Brittons publication A Decade at the EAF written in 1984 and the role Donald Brook has played in tackling head-on the problem of just what the experimental in Experimental Art Foundation means. Some of the artists involved with EAF include Aleks Danko, Mike Parr, Michael Craig-Martin, John Barbour, George Popperwell, Shaun Kirby, Craige Andrae, Nic Folland, Hayley Arjona, Sam Wilde, Samantha Small, Jim Moss, Chris Chapman, Sally-Ann Rowland and Michael Newall.

Maria Bilske

Donald Brook's Art Theory

This text is a dedication to Donald Brooks literary contributions to Artlink magazine over the years. Different from his specifically theoretical writings on art, those featured in Artlink focus on temporal and local issues, and are often written in a wittily ironic style that leaves readers unsure whether they have understood his position.

Alan Lee

Culture Without Limits: a reflection of art, politics, and shabby nationalism

In this article Kapetopoulos reflects on the watersheds which reinforce her attachment to multiculturalism. The watersheds are the works of certain artists involved with Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV) and the rise of One Nation. The artists Kapetopoulos writes about are: Yumi Umiumare, Tina Yong and Sung Ping; Charito Saldana; Renato Cuocolo and his innovative theatre company IRAA; Emmanuel Santos and Sandor Matos.

Fotis Kapetopoulos

Adelaide Studios

This article celebrates the diversity of some of the groupings whichlink artists within the city that is Artlink's birthplace, Adelaide. Gray Street Workshop, Central Studios, Experimental Art Foundation (EAF), Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), Jam Factory Contemporary Craft and Design, Jamboree Ceramic Workshop, SAAW (South Australian Artists Workshop), Red Door Facing East, Butcher's Studio, Blythe Street Studios, Rice Art, Zu Design, SEAS Studios and the Electronic Writing Research Ensemble are all examined.

Lisa Harms

Taking the Pulse / Inserting the Probe

Stephanie Radok

Vis.Arts.Online

Kim Machan

Letters to the Editor

The tyranny of paradise or ... On being an emerging artist in Darwin

Cath Bowdler

Emerging Artists

The & of Art & Design

Tony Fry

Australian Design

The Future of Art

Editorial for the issue -- not the definitive answer but a series of clues as to what direction the visual arts might be following. The issue picks up ideas addressed in the forum 'Art of Sight, Art of Mind: Speculations on the Future of the Visual Arts and Crafts in Australia' organised by the National Association of Visual Arts. NAVA

Stephanie Britton

The Future of Art

Polemic: The End of Art Schools as we know them?

Art and sport both attempt to construct value and meaning within our lives. For art this is a likely outcome. For media sport it is a contrived ingredient. Artists and art schools have perpetuated a myth about the importance and value of art objects. Suggests possible answers to the issues of teaching art in art and design schools.

Ian Howard

The Future of Art

Polemic: Practice Makes Perfect: Art Museums, Audiences and the Future.

Examines how galleries, art spaces and arts infrastructure might evolve over the next 25 years to accommodate changes in interaction between artists and audiences. Focus is on the State Galleries and how we might present the multiplicity of view points from the last 30 + years. Resource issues are explored.

Trevor Smith

The Future of Art

Search

Contributors

Issues

Articles