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David Smerdon: Duchamp’s Opposition

David Smerdon and Rex Butler

On hold in hard times

Eve Sullivan

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Sometime on from this provocative trueism attributed to Fredric Jameson or Slavoj Žižek, attempting to capture the momentum of the climate crisis and an associated distrust of the ability of governing bodies to tackle the systemic imbalances has proved to be a growth industry for die-hard aesthetes. This is the new normal, a contagious meme, signalling the putative end times.

Eve Sullivan

2019: The year of our cyberpunk future

Darren Jorgensen

Crafty prepping

Sera Waters

Stuart Ringholt: Time pressures

Wes Hill

Living rocks: A fragment of the universe

James Darling

The Brazilian moment: A picture gallery in transformation

John Mateer

Time and transition in the work of Lee Harrop

Mandy Treagus

Duchamp and Australia: In opposition

Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson

Geological pit stops: Kate Hill and Isadora Vaughan

Abbra Kotlarczyk

Art in the time of the burning

As Samuel Johnson said to Boswell, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

I thought of this definitive comment on time as I was writing this article in late December 2019 in the Blue Mountains, in forty degrees temperatures as smoke swirled around outside from fire storms only kilometres away. We had been told to evacuate but we didn’t, we’d been through this before. The car was loaded up, the cats locked in the house and their cages ready to pack and run. But immanent immolation did not concentrate my mind, or only in the wrong way as I compulsively checked FiresNearMe and messaged friends to check they were okay. They often weren’t: several were burnt out, many had life-threatening escapes, and evacuations were commonplace. My friend Ronnie Ayliffe was posting videos of burning trees falling onto the road as she fled her farm and headed for Cobargo, itself already on fire.

Ian Milliss

Editorial: It's Time

Eve Sullivan

Editorial

Margot Osborne

The romantic spirit

In 2007 Jennifer A. McMahon, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Adelaide, published a book called Aesthetics and material beauty: aesthetics naturalized. (See book review by Michael Newall, this issue of Artlink.) In the late 1970s McMahon was an art student looking for truth. Her move to philosophy to find truth makes use of Kant's doctrine of aesthetic ideas and argues that our perceptual and cognitive orientation to the world is reaffirmed through finding forms that seem to draw us to them for their own sake. When this occurs it unleashes ideas like immortality, infinity and freedom for which there are no perceptual counterparts. She argues that Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but what constitutes the eye of the beholder is determined by culture.

Jennifer A. McMahon

On sunsets

A voyage across sunsets in recent Australian art from Jim Thalassoudis to Anne Zahalka, Tim Storrier to Philip Hanson. While at the outset Ted Snell quotes with approval Oscar Wilde's statement that 'nobody of any real culture ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunsets' he goes on to show the enduring and meaningful presence of the sunset in both paintings and photography. Thus he demonstrates that art involving repossession and reinvention can, in spite of having to deal with accusations of kitsch, parochialism and provincialism, turn old themes into pure gold, both actual and emotional.

Ted Snell

Australian Beauty

Beauty is problematic for contemporary art theory at least in part because it affords a pleasurable, life-affirming, yet ineffable experience. Yet Margot Osborne finds many examples to show that it has never really gone away. As Peter Schjeldahl observed in 1996: Beauty will be what it has always been and, despite everything, is now in furtive and inarticulate ways: an irrepressible, anarchic, healing human response without which life is a mistake.' Osborne writes: Embodiment, the synthesis of sensibility, skill and material form, is at the heart of beauty...The perception of beauty is an integrative sensual and cerebral experience, dissolving dualities of mind/body and repudiating outmoded art form hierarchies.

Margot Osborne

Shimmering fields

An essay on Indigenous aesthetics in the paintings of John Mawurndjul and Gulumbu Yunupingu from Arnhem Land, and Doreen Reid Nakamarra form the Central Desert as their work appears in the exhibition Culture Warriors, the first Indigenous Triennial, curated by Brenda Croft and reviewed in Artlink (Vol 27 #4) by Daniel Thomas. 'Their works are site-specific, alive with meaning and essentially metaphysical and religious in conception. For these artists beauty equals power, the power of the creation stories that underpin their art.'

Cath Bowdler

Gatecrashing the sublime

In his youth as a regional gallery director Peter Timms imagined an exhibition called Flat Earth that would show all country artists that where they actually lived was, like anywhere else, able to be transformed into art. This article looks at the different approaches to landscape taken by the work of Tasmanian artists David Keeling, David Stephenson, Philip Wolfhagen and Richard Wastell, and how they transcend social, moral or political point-scoring to achieve their own kind of beauty, a clear-eyed, unsentimental appreciation of the environment as it really is, which frankly acknowledges the harm, both physical and conceptual, that has been inflicted upon it.

Peter Timms

Some digressions on ornament, abstraction and the stowaway

An erudite elaboration of the concept that a certain amount of ornamentalism in art rather than being the opposite to minimalism is present within it as a secret stowaway. Wendy Walker muses on this topic with particular reference to the 2001 exhibition Ornament and Abstraction at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, and its curator Markus Bruederlin's premise that ornamentation has played a more integral role in the development of abstract art than has previously been supposed. Walker illustrates her thesis with works by Christian Lock, Stieg Persson and Timothy Horn.

Wendy Walker

Karl Wiebke

Karl Wiebke has been making art for thirty years. Margaret Moore selectively reviews his oeuvre and concludes that though 'Beauty as an ideal is not a platform for his practice it is a consequence. His works are profoundly and atmospherically evocative of mood, weather, or nature like a bed of lichen or a sense of saturation. He has adopted a programmatic approach to his practice, setting schema and working toward attainment. That schema might incorporate an obligation of time, of mark-making, of palette or the allowance for interventions other than by his hand.

Margaret Moore

Cobi Cockburn

Cobi Cockburn is a glass artist whose work reflects her journey through the world, first in response to the country around Canberra and more recently the Shoalhaven district. It is her personal response to the landscape in which she lives (as opposed to a larger environmental message) which drives her to continue to push herself with a medium not typically used for landscape. Cockburns working methods of fusing, slumping, rolling, hot forming and cold working glass demonstrate clear connections from one piece of work to the next. Central to her motivation is the desire to create works of subtlety and grace. Cockburns working methods demonstrate clear connections from one piece to the next, yet each piece is a self-contained process in itself. A self-confessed addict of her book (her journal), Cockburn says that when she reviews her collection of journals, she can trace progress and a sense of continuous narrative. But she feels, on the whole, that her work is evolving more as a natural process as she herself develops both as an artist and a person. Each piece has its own essence, or presence, and comes together with others as collections which reflect part of the greater experience. Central to her motivation is the desire to create works of subtlety and grace, pieces that will stand for themselves but not shout at the viewer.

Karen Finch

Robin Best

Robin Bests ceramics reflect her attention to the importance of location. Her forms are classical, meditative and reflective, and has ranged from marine forms to works decorated by Ernabella artist Nyukuna Baker. Her most recent body of work undertaken during and after a number of residencies in China reflects the complexity of the cultural, commercial and political history of China. Her snuff bottles are a picture gallery of images related to trade, culture and commerce, while others contain designs taken from each of the countries that blue and white porcelain passed through on its way from China to Europe via India and the Middle East.

Stephen Bowers

Tina Gonsalves: Unleashing emotion

Tina Gonsalves is currently honorary artist in residence at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience and visiting artist at the MIT Media Lab in the US. Her recent work is interested in adaptive, rather than expressive approaches to mental and emotional states. Gonsalves situates emotional states as rhizomorphic and emergent. In her new works, she has given the media art world a new concept, the emotional algorithm. Feel: Chameleon (2007/2008) introduces multiple subjects, both projected images and people, into a panoramic installation. It is a complex exploration of ideas drawn from the emerging discipline of social neuroscience which is interested in the ways in which people connect with the emotional state of others.

Darren Tofts

Ellen Dissanyake: homo aestheticus

In this phone interview conducted by Margot Osborne with North American ethologist Ellen Dissanyake in her home in Seattle her case for a species-centric approach to art is explored through the ideas in her books Homo Aestheticus (1992) and Art and Intimacy (2000). She states that some form of art as an activity has existed in all societies across all times and is innate in human nature. The core of this innate activity is making special, or elaboration. From this species-centric perspective, many recent developments in art are seen by Dissanayake as unfortunate aberrations and a denial of the positive life-enhancing qualities of art.

Margot Osborne

Blubberland: the dangers of happiness, Elizabeth Farrelly

University of New South Wales Press, 2007 RRP $29.95

Alan Saunders

The Formalesque: a guide to modern art and its history, Bernard Smith

Macmillan Australia 2007, RRP $135.

Ihab Hassan

Visual Animals, Edited by Ian North

Contemporary Art Centre of SA 2007, RRP $35.

Kevin Murray

Aesthetics and material beauty: aesthetics naturalized, Jennifer A. McMahon

New York and London, Routledge 2007, RRP US$135

Michael Newall

Artrave

Truth and beauty entangled

Sian Ede is Arts Director for the Uk branch of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation where she initiated an Arts and Science program to encourage artists to engage with new thinking and practice in science and technology. She is editor and co-author of Strange and Charmed: science and the contemporary visual arts (2000) and author of Art and Science (2005). In this article Sian discusses the entanglement of truth and beauty by referring to John Keats famous 1820 poem Ode on a Grecian Urn and its statement that Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know. and shows how relevant it is today in the fields of both art and science.

Siân Ede

The realities of power

This is the third chapter of an unpublished autobiography by art theorist and national treasure Donald Brook. Previous chapters were published in 2005 in Artlink Vol 25#3 and in 2006 in Vol 26#4. In The Realities of Power Brook recapitulates what happened in terms of teaching and policy at the Power Institute, University of Sydney, in the late sixties when he first arrived in Australia from the UK. His long and detailed account explores why, in his opinion, the early Power Institute had so little impact on Australian visual culture. The rest of Brooks autobiography waits in the wings.

Donald Brook

A new global art history: CIHA 2008 (Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art)

Caroline Turner

The 32nd congress of the international committee of the history of art (CIHA)

A brief description on the 32nd CIHA and its relevance in relation to art history and practices.

Stephanie Radok

Insights and a conversation

A brief but notable account of the 2008 CIHA from the perspective of Anne Kirker describing the key speakers and their topical lectures in relation to art history. Kirker further elaborates on her experiences at the CIHA and what she deemed intellectually stimulating and intriguing. Kirker also summarises the general relevance and opportunities the CIHA provides.

Anne Kirker

Handle with care

Curator: Felicity Fenner Art Gallery of South Australia 1 March - 4 May 2008

John Neylon

Chris Pease

Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth 8 February - 5 April 2008

Darren Jorgensen

One night only project

Curators: Kate Kelly and Pip Stafford Artists: Lindsay Arnold, Braddock, Lisa Campbell-Smith, Lachlan Conn, Moira Corby, Scot Cotterell, Lindsay Cox, Empire, Ghostpatrol, Andrew Harper, Jamin, Kate Kelly, Kirsty Madden, Noble, Michael Prior, Pip Stafford, Andy Vagg. Sound Artists: Chrysalis, Cycle, Global Ethnic, Matt Neidra. 29 March 2008

Bec Tudor

Chaos and revelry: Neo-Baroque and camp aesthetics

Curator: Edwina Bartlem 18 January 10 February 2008 Counihan Gallery, Brunswick

Saige Walton

Papunya Painting: out of the desert

Curator: Vivien Johnson National Museum of Australia 28 November 2007 3 February 2008

Stephanie Radok

The Ship of fools: recent paintings, Bill Brown

Wilson Street Gallery, Newtown 29 March - 20 April 2008

Grace Hughes

Now that I am a man I can go to war: Angela Lynkushka

Monash Gallery of Art 29 February - 27 April 2008

Ulanda Blair

In response to conversations with a therapist as a narrative device: Martin Smith

Ryan Renshaw Gallery April 22 - May 10, 2008

Ben Eltham

Handle me gently: Olga Cironis

Olga Cironis Turner Galleries, Perth 11 April - 10 May 2008

Paola Anselmi

Liminal

Curator: Colin Langridge Thomas Bachler, Andrew Dewhurst, Richard Giblett, David Martin, Todd McMillan, Ali Sanderson, Richard Wastell Carnegie Gallery, Hobart March 6 April 13 2008

Yvette Watt

Letting Go: Lee Salomone

Prospect Gallery 2 - 23 March 2008

Lauren Sutter

Annie Hogan: A Survey

Curator: Frank McBride Museum of Brisbane 4 April - 6 July 2008

Tim Walsh

I am a good boy

Curator: Elise Routledge Firstdraft, Sydney 9 - 26 January 2008

Sarah Hetherington

Contemporary beauty

Pictorial section.

Margot Osborne

Parables of Criticism

Looks at the current issues in the art versus craft debate and the impact of post modern theories.

Sue Rowley

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Toward a Typology of Small Objects

With increasing anxiety, we face searching questions of the viability, the integrity, the destiny of craft. In themselves, the questions are salutory and point to an intellectual vitality in craft culture, a vigour and toughness which have not existed since the Arts and Crafts Movement. Responses to the challenge vary from relish in the contradictions of craft practice to the old-fashioned despair for any debate whatsoever.

Robert Nelson

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

The Floating Web

For centuries now, textiles and the skills required in their creation - spinning, weaving, embroidery, sewing, quilting - have been considered women's work, occupying them indoors while men engaged in more serious activities like warfare.

Dorothy Jones

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Why Craftwork Does Not Compute

Will the computers, mobile or immobile, take over craft work in the near or medium future? Are craftspeople doomed to the fate of the Indian hand loom weavers of the last century-- will their bones bleach the plains? The answer is........

Alan Roberts

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Craft, Science and the Natural: An Introduction

There seems to be a consensus that craft is in a state of crisis. But consensus or not, the observation of this alleged crisis is sterile if we do not place it against its background. Is this crisis unique to craft, or is it a manifestation of a more general crisis which extends across other cognate areas? If it is more general, does it nevertheless have special implications for craft?

Jim Falk

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

The Watch, the Pen and the Biro

To demonstrate the extent to which our relationship to the objects we possess has changed, Kevin Murray recently gave a short impromptu performance during a recent lecture, systematically removing a number of possessions and apparel from his person.

Pat Hoffie

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

The Archaeological Metaphor: A Personal Excavation

Now as a much older woman with another career as an artist I have been reconsidering my experience in Museums, reconsidering the structures of archaeology which grid and measure the chaotic site.

Diana Wood Conroy

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Distant Lives/ Shared Voices

Written with Janis Jefferies. Discusses the 1992 artist initiated and organised international forum for tapestry weavers in Lodz Poland.

Kay Lawrence

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

The Reflections of a Taxidermist

I view my memories as a fragmented collage of life, constantly in review and abstracted through the shifting of time and place. Taking and putting together some of these fragments I recall how I became a taxidermist.

Tim Ralph

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

After the Art/Craft debate: Critical Writing into the 1990s

Most writers and researchers in the visual arts and crafts would now consider the debate about the difference between art and craft to be an old chestnut whose day has well and truly gone. Refers to the debates between David Bromfield and Anne Brennan.

Noris Ioannou

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Touching Things Lightly: The Furniture of Kevin Perkins

Kevin Perkins and the Parish Church of St Thomas Acquinas, Charnwood ACT. A model for collaborative design. Consummate technical skills, the continuance of long-established traditions which focus on excellence and a fundamental reverence for the qualities of the materials are discussion points that are, at times, given minimal attention when the products of today's craftspeople and designer/makers are discussed.

Glenda King

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Design Visions: International Exchange: Time for a Stocktake

Design Visions; The second Australian International Crafts Triennial on show at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in August September 1992 provided a chance for local viewers, historians, critics, artists, designers and 'craftspeople' to discuss and possibly take stock of our place in the international arena.

Dorothy Erickson

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Jill Smith: Artist/ Designer in Industry

Looks at the ceramic practice of Jill Smith. It often happens when people with different views and areas of expertise are brought together to solve a problem that something new emerges.

Jenny Armstrong

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

NSW Tafe: A Different Approach to Ceramics

It turned out that 95% of the symposiasts were blissfully unaware that, starting with the TAFEs, they are already in the era of funding allocation on the basis of conceptually incoherent doctrines of an 'arts industry' with about as much relevance to their interests as atonal music has to the board of BHP.

Christine Lewis

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

The Crafts Come of Age

Book review The Crafts Movement in Australia: a history University of NSW Press $79.95

Sylvia Kleinert

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

The Problem of Orthodoxy in Contemporary Glass

In her introductory notes to the exhibition 'Glass: Material in the service of meaning' the artist Ginny Ruffner comments on the current field of glass art as "being awash in objects, some beautiful, some ugly, most about glass itself - material as content."

Geoffrey Edwards

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Making a Living: The Jam Factory

In May 1992, Stephanie Radok spoke to Frank McBride, Peter Tysoe, Stephen Bowers, David Adderton and Greg Healey about recent developments at the Jam Factory Craft and Design Centre in Adelaide, South Australia.

Stephanie Radok

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Two Countries, One Weave?

Written with Phillip (Piri) Everett Over the last year Tandanya (National Aboriginal Cutural Institute) has received much bad publicity but is carrying on and slowly and steadily making history. It opened in 1989 with celebrations featuring Ernabella Inma and Yothu Yindi. Includes photographs of indigenous women at weaving workshops in the South East of South Australia at Camp Coorong Cultural Centre.

Kerry Giles Kurwingie

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Marketing from the Top End

Representatives from seven screenprint workshops in remote and indigenous Australia came together in March 1992 to attend a textile marketing forum in Darwin organised by Steve Anderson, co-ordinator of ANCAA (Association of Northern and Central Australian Aboriginal Artists).

Felicity Wright

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

From Italowie to Chambers Gorge - A New Tapestry

When travelling by car over long distances the landscape outside the window endlessly unfolds as a field of subtly carying colour and texture punctuated by the irregular rhythm of straggling trees and bushes.

Kay Lawrence

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Futurology...Crafts...

Margaret Kirkwood, craft practitioner from NSW and active in the Craft Council within her State, writes her prediction for the future of crafts in Australia.

Margaret Kirkwood

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Futurology...Crafts...

David Walker, craft practitioner from Western Australia and active in the Craft Council within his State, writes his prediction for the future of crafts in Australia.

David Walker

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Futurology...Crafts...

Marion Marshall,craft practitioner from Victoria, and active in the Craft Council within her State, writes her prediction for the future of crafts in Australia.

Marion Marshall

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

4 Jewellery Co-operatives: On Staying in the Black: Fluxus

Looks at the workshop Fluxus in Dunedin in New Zealand, formed by Kobi Bosshard and Stephen Mulqueen in 1983.

Stephanie Britton

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Futurology...Crafts...

Helmut Lueckenhausen, craft practitioner from NSW and active in the Craft Council within his State, writes his prediction for the future of crafts in Australia.

Helmut Lueckenhausen

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

4 Jewellery Co-operatives: On Staying in the Black: Fingers

Looks at the Jewellery Co-operative Fingers formed in 1976 in Auckland New Zealand. Fingers sells the work of 30 New Zealand jewellers with a managment partnership of 6 to 8 practising jewellers. The rest sell on consignment basis.

Stephanie Britton

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

4 Jewellery Co-operatives: Ipso Factory Company

Ipso Facto Company formed in 1984 by 5 ex-students from the Sydney College of the Arts.

Carolyn Meloy

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

4 Jewellery Co-operatives: Gray Street Workshop

Looks at the workshop Gray Street, Adelaide, South Australia.

Sue Lorraine

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

The Western Way - Linney's, Argenta and Others

Western Australia has a tradition of artist/craftspeople with studio - gallery -shops.

Dorothy Erickson

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Yurundiali - Reasons for Optimism

The predominant group in Moree (outback New South Wales) are the Gomilleroi people who are considered the most cohesive moiety group in Australia. Looks at the indigenous artists co-operative Yurundiali which is marketing its screen print designs.

Janelle Boyd

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Screenprinting the Tiwi Way: An Element of Spontaneity

It is not accidentatl that amongst the Tiwis of Bathurst and Melville Islands, fabric printing has become such a significant craft form. Of all indigenous Australian cultures the Tiwis historically have perhaps the richest tradition of body painting.

James Bennett

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

The Hermannsburg Potters

The Arrernte people from Hermannsburg a former Lutheran mission about 130 km west of Alice Springs in Central Australia are generally known for their Namatjira style watercolour paintings. Now they are making ceramics.

Beverly Knight

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Semiotically Speaking: A Craftperson's View

One need not restrict this semiotic approach to an analysis of the objects of fashion given that the major role adopted by craftspeople in contemporary times is that of drawing attention to otherwise ordinary objects and processes by remaking them in a mode other than mass production.

Jenni Dudley

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Tim Burns - Paintings and Drawings

Exhibition review Cape Bruny Winter 1990 - 1991 Paintings and Drawings by Tim Burns Dick Bett Gallery Hobart Tasmania 7 - 26 May 1992

Peter Hill

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Tasdance in Silk

Exhibition review Greg Leong Launceston Country Club Tasmania

Jane Deeth

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Anne Newmarch - Superimpositions

Exhibition review Superimposition Ann Newmarch Prospect Gallery Adelaide South Australia 23 February - 22 March 1992

John Neylon

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

...But Never by Chance..., Skin and From Women

Exhibition review ...but never by chance (eroticism) editor/curator Linda Marie Walker Exhibitors Jennifer Hamilton, Melanie Howard, Bronia Iwanczak, Sheridan Kennedy, Rosemary Laing, Rosslund Piggott, Carol Rudyard Skin Curators Annette Bezor, Julianne Pierce, Exhibitors Maria Kozic, Jan Nelson, Sally Smart, Josie Starrs Contemporary Art Centre Adelaide South Australia May 1 - 31 1992 From Women Curator Vivonne Thwaites Exhibitors Maria Cruz, Michele Elliot, Nicole Page-Smith, Lucia Tancredi Artspace Adelaide Festival Centre 10 April - 23 May 1992

Jude Adams

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Hossein Valamanesh Recent Work

Exhibition review Hossein Valamanesh: Recent Work Greenaway Gallery Adelaide South Australia 3 May - 3 June 1992

Leon Marvell

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

Contemporary Gipsland Artists

Exhibition review Contemporary Gippsland Artists A touring exhibition initiated by the LaTrobe Valley Arts Centre Morwell Victoria University of South Australia Art Museum 9 April - 8 May 1992

Louise Dauth

Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought

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