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The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights
Artist and curator Troy-Anthony Baylis reviews Jane Lydon's book The Flash of Recognition: and regards it as a "crucial text for visual communication, media, film, and photography scholars, who will learn to be more analytical of how images, particularly images of Aboriginal people, have been constructed through journalism, activism, and art."
Territory style: Salon des Refusés
Yanuwa/Larrakia/Bardi/Wardaman woman Franchesca Cubillo, Senior Curator/Advisor National Gallery of Australia, writes about the first Salon des Refusés (conceived and brought to fruition by gallerists Matt Ward and Paul Johnstone) held in Darwin in 2013 as a pendant to the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.
The South South Way
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
Turbulence: Third Auckland Triennial
Turbulence: Third Auckland Triennial Curator: Victoria Lynn 9 March - 4 June 2007
Visual Animals Symposium
Visual Animals: crossovers, evolution and new aesthetics Curator: Ian North Art Gallery of South Australia/CACSA 18 - 19 April 2007
Eyes Lies and Illusions
Eyes Lies and Illusions Australian Centre for the Moving Image Melbourne 2 November 2006 - 11 February 2007
The Weather Report: James Guppy
James Guppy: The Weather Reports Brenda May Gallery, Sydney 6 February 3 March 2007
Intimate Epics: Richard Woldendorp
Richard Woldendorp: Intimate Epics Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth 3 - 24 February 2007
The One and the Many
Curators: Holly Arden and Chris Handran Griffith University, DELL Gallery Queensland College of Art 17 February 14 April 2007
saltwaterfreshwater
saltwaterfreshwater Curator: Thelma John Central TAFE Gallery, Perth 10 - 28 April 2007
Sneakers: Classic to Customs
Sneakers: Classics to Customs Curator: Roger Leong National Gallery of Victoria 16 December 2006 - 8 July 2007
Part & Particle: Denise Ava Robinson
Part and particle Denise Ava Robinson Burnie Regional Art Gallery 2 February 11 March 2007
Blood Sweat & Fears: Penny Byrne
Penny Byrne: Blood Sweat and Fears Sullivan +Strumpf Fine Art Sydney 6 25 March 2007
Port Adelaide: Rites of Passage
Port Adelaide : Rites of Passage Curator: Margot Osborne Adelaide Central Gallery 30 March 21 April 2007
Project Belonging: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan
Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan Project Belonging: Another country Jan Manton Gallery, Brisbane 16 28 April 2007
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.
Polemic: Object and Text
"So the question raised for art theory is this....Is a physical autographic sculpture - a Brancusi woodcarving for example - only an 'instantiation'(albeit rather a privileged one) of some imperceptible, intentional object that is the 'real' sculpture? Are sculptures more literally than metaphorically - 'poetry in stone'? Are they in a word 'texts' whose proper reading (as we are told) had best be undertaken in French?"
Four Shoes Many Signs
Four artist's projects initiated by the National Gallery of Victoria engage contemporary art practices and the role of the museum and public galleries as mediators between the collections and the viewers. Impacts on policies regarding the moral rights of artists.
Artists and Collections: a working partnership
The notion of the artist working with the museum collection is not new. Historically, artists have drawn inspiration from museums and their diverse collections - archaeological, ethnographic, medical, botanical and zoological- as a basis for academic studies and finished works.
Is there an Artist in the Museum?
Examines two multi-site exhibitions Archives and the Everyday, Canberra Contemporary Art Space September/October 1997 curated by Trevor Smith: and Collected, Photographer's Gallery London June 1997 curated by Neil Cummings. The museological urge in artists has for some time been a part of contemporary practice...leading to the new museology.
The TMAG Commissions 1998
Here at the end of the twentieth century, the world is having to come to terms with the socio-political, economic and environmental legacies of nineteenth century imperialism. Contemporary art participates in this post colonial discourse: issues of ancestry and inheritance, relations between indigenous and settler peoples, national and imperial mythology, mapping and borders, migration and language, ecology and exploitation - these are increasingly familiar themes.
Mining the Archive
Fabricating Archives: Six New Zealand Artists confuse the system
In New Zealand, conceptual and post conceptual artists from the 1970s to the present have incorporated various references to the archive; its contents, classificatory systems and its institutional adjuncts, the library, the art gallery and the museum.
Mining the Archive
Wunderkammern: Actual and Virtual
The notion of the Wunderkammern is discussed in the work of Shiralee Saul (an on-line hypertextual essay for the World Wide Web WWW) and Luke Roberts ( a series of exhibitions from 1990 onwards).
Mining the Archive
Market Mark-Art: Forgotten Fruit
In the final stages of the demolition of the old Adelaide fruit and vegetable markets, Margaret Dodd and Jennifer Hughes collaborate to produce an installation which caught the echoes of the history displayed in situ at the markets.
Mining the Archive
Photosynthesis: Two approaches
The photograph as a source and subject for photographic practice iteself is characteristic of the work of a great many artists today. Tracey Moffatt and Margaret Dawson's works are considered. Each draws on photographs which precede their own, but work in markedly different ways.
Mining the Archive
Debra Phillips: List
'List' examines Phillips recent investigations into issues of memory, history and renown, and the structuring of such through systems of language representation and communication. The work traverses the worlds of royalty, theatre, film, science, politics, literature and fashion. The images range across a period of 150 years.
Mining the Archive
Elizabeth Gertsakis: Tampering with the Archive
Elizabeth Gertsakis has excavated her family histories and Greek/Slavic heritage as part of understanding difference as a critical space of knowing. It is not an attempt to 'position' or 'locate' herself in Anglo Australian culture or in the art world, but to understand the mechanisms that produce dominant cultural histories and resultant exclusions.
Mining the Archive
Psychology of Retrieval: Personal and Fictional Archives
How can (traumatic) memories be excavated? Many visual artists use records and material objects as documentation with which to resurrect their past experience and those of their families. Often using literary means, visual artists who archive their past employ text as well as images in poetic and haunting ways. Quotation and citation form the kernel of this pychology of retrieval and act of preservation.
Mining the Archive
Parallax Error
Working within the context of the Percy Grainger (1882-1961) collection, artists Louise Weaver and Carolyn Eskdale created an installationwithin the architecture and material culture of the building. In 1998 composer and sound artist Ros Bandt created an installation for the Museum's courtyard.
Mining the Archive
History and Memory
History and meaning are very much at the centre of an important exhibition in WA of Aboriginal art. Many of the artists draw on personal or family memory, while others use documentary evidence of the past. Parallel to these individual histories is the history of government policy and its impact on groups and individuals.
Mining the Archive
Time Traveller: An Interview with Kim Donaldson
Explores three exhibitions by Kim Donaldson. 'From the Lecture: A reminder of life', 'From the Museum: Supplementary files' and 'It's about time'. These exhibitions reflect the artist's continuing obsession with time, absence and mortality.
Mining the Archive
Archives After the Seventies and After
Brown and Green are well known for their meticulously produced paintings, often involving the layering and juxtaposition of competing forms and histories. They continue to paint though photography has now assumed a major position in their practice. These photographs function as archives without narrative: scrambled mythology.
Mining the Archive
Going Over Old Ground
The artist discusses the research for her exhibition entitled 'The Private Eye- a foreigner's power of observation'. Held in regional Victoria 1998.
Mining the Archive
A Dream of Earthly Organisation
Not only are artists fascinated with images and objects - it has been estimated that half the adult world population has been a collector at some point in their life. A number of different projects have been instigated by artists considering what it means to collect and archive.
Mining the Archive
Vault: A Collaborative Installation Cluster
Ian North and Helen Fuller
12 November - 6 December 1998
Experimental Art Foundation
Mining the Archive
Recollections of Memory: Akio Makigawa
Jewellery by Carlier Makigawa
Galerie Dusseldorf
October 1998
Mining the Archive
Juliet Stone Paintings and Pastels
Juliet Stone paintings and pastels
Gomboc Gallery
Perth
1-22 November 1998
Mining the Archive
