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Screen Deep

Julianne Pierce

OzAsia Festival: Adelaide Festival Centre 2007

Maggie Fletcher

Unlock the Gates: New and Unprecedented Tools for More People

Sean Cubitt

Entering the Screen

New interactive screen spaces of the web, games and virtual worlds act as portals allowing us to become a part of the media image rather than just watching it. No longer content to just watch the action, were creating our own online identities and becoming our own screen heroes acting out our own virtual adventures. This article focuses on the new virtual world of Second Life and discusses the idea of avatar (virtual pictorial) identities via the works of a selection of new media artists: Neal Stephenson, Eva and Franco Mattes, Emil Goh, Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis, Adam Nash, Christopher Dodd, Kyal TripodiGazira Babeli and Pierre Proske.

Kathy Cleland

More Video Art Please

Brendan Lee

Memoirs of a Videophile: Video Cannibalism, A Personal View

In this article David Broker looks selectively at the brief history and development of video art, a trying medium voluntarily lost to him around 1985. Broker uses three examples of the video grande- Francesco Vezzolis Comizi di Non Amore, Emmanuelle Antilles Angels Camp and a work by Miguel Calderon featured in the 2004 Sao Paulo Biennale. Each work exists in its own way as a continuum upon which the trajectory of the technologies they have absorbed is not only clear but also fundamental to the work. As Broker declares the video revival has in itself been a spectacle, with digital video driving its acolytes to ever-greater heights of excess.

David Broker

Black Box/White Cube: Cinema in the Gallery

Historically, the relation between art institutions and film has been fraught with every imaginable problem and inequality. How to truly bring cinema and art into dialogue, to create real interpenetrations and hybrid forms that move well beyond the ephemeral fireworks of yesteryears between-images? Martin proposes that the gallery needs to take its filmic pedagogy outside its lecture rooms and onto the gallery and film works need to be fully valued in themselves by curators, audiences and the entire, increasingly dominant promotional machine attached to our major galleries for their history, their value, their power and (yes) their art.

Adrian Martin

Look Into My Eyes: Behind the Screens with ACMI

This article looks at the current state of screen culture in Australia, focusing on the program architecture of ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) in particular. For screen culture in Australia, the market-driven economy has provided a great number of challenges in the kind of content it can exhibit and the ways in which it can be exhibited in a sustainable and meaningful way. For ACMI one of the key points is in providing the discussion platform by which screen artists or even mathematicians, writers and psychologists can participate it is through this approach, applying the filmic principles and content concepts to broader social issues and discussions that the greatest power amongst audiences arrises.

Richard Sowada

Databases: Recombinant Interactives

Ann Finegan looks at the world of interactive media arts, in particular database content interactivity. One example Finegan uses in her discussion is Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewskis Seeker, winner of an Award for Distinction for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica 2007. Seeker belongs to an emergent genre of database works which draw from the broader media, putting the viewer into the web of connections through which the forces of politics and economics determine the fate of peoples and of persons. Other artists discussed are Josh On, Lev Manovich, Linda Dement, Troy Innocent, Doll Yoko (aka Francesca da Rimini aka Gash Girl), Stephen Honegger, Rachel Baker, John Tonkin and Barbara Campbell. Finegan proclaims that at present the future of interactives is weighed in a choice between the seductive action of computer gaming as sites for artistic intervention, and data-mapping with its deep and active connections in realworld events.

Ann Finegan

A Detour Off the Art-Path

Whilst in Europe this year, Julianne Pierce made a detour and visited the small city of Wolfsburg in central north Germany where she visited the privately run contemporary art museum Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. A delightful discovery was made in the retrospective exhibition of Douglas Gordon, an artist who works with the time-based foundation of cinema and transforms it into stripped back experience of time and motion. He is interested in the epic nature of cinema the big screen, the close-up, the majestic soundtrack but is concerned more with an extended experience of time and memory. Viewing several works together projected large in a darkened monolithic space brought Gordons fusing of cinema and visual arts into a mesmeric articulation of his vision and practice.

Julianne Pierce

The Space of Presence: Leigh Hobba

This article examines Australian video and performance artist Leigh Hobbas recent retrospective The Space of Presence at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. The exhibition presented a precise slice of Hobbas electronic oeuvre including twelve works which highlight the materiality and texture of video as a medium. Together they convey a sense of awe, a pre-verbal ambiguity, recontextualising Hobbas recurrent and connected themes. This article also raises issues of space, infrastructure and technical facilities when considering the ways in which new media art is to be viewed.

Melinda Rackham

New Media at the Venice Biennale and Documenta 12

Jasmin Stephens presents a personal recollection of this years Venice Biennale and documenta 12. As Stephens states, Venice reflected the worldwide trend of artists reappraising iconic moments from Conceptual Art from the early seventies and in so doing taking up the low-tech equipment associated with them. Artists here discussed are Aernout Milk, Willie Doherty, Paolo Canevari, Sophie Whettnall, Shaun Gladwell, Yang Zhenzhong, Emily PrinceSusan Norrie, Joshua Mosley and Tabaimo, Nedko Solakov, Mario Garcia, Felix Gmelin, Steve McQueen, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Ines Doujak, Lili Dujourie, Zofia Kulik, John McCracken, Harun Farocki and Artur Zmijewski.

Jasmin Stephens

Phoenix Halle: Model for a Media Centre

The privately funded centre of the PHOENIX Halle, which grew out of a small media arts organization called HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein), stands alone in a derelict steel mill in Dortmund, Germany. Established in 1996 by German curators Iris Dressler and Hans D. Christ, HMKV is dedicated to curatorial research and practice in the media arts field. HMKV and PHOENIX Halle are fundamentally exploring how artists create meaning and interpret the rapid states of change in our contemporary post-industrial society. Julianne Pierce briefly examines the work of HMKV and the PHOENIX Halle during her travels in Germany.

Julianne Pierce

Playing Biennially: Experimenta Playground

Experimenta Playground, an international biennial exhibition of media art, marks Experimentas 21-year commitment to innovation in both production and in promoting and exhibiting new media art throughout Australia and abroad. With artworks that engage with the creative possibilities emerging from a dynamic interaction between the moving image, art and new technologies, each artist in the exhibition creatively expands the definition of play, performance and ritual. Here the revelation of technology and spatial features create new ways of appreciating the construction of fantasy. Participating artists include : June Bum Park, Guillaume Reymond, Shu Lea Cheang, Hiraki Sawa and Tomoyuki Washio, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey and Jesse Stevens, Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, Philip Worthington, Gavin Sade, Priscilla Bracks and Matthew Dwyer, Stelarc, Marina Abramovic, Kuang-Yu Tsui, Eugenio Ampudia and Robert Hughes.

Wendy Haslem

BEAP 07: A Meditation

This examination of the 2007 Biennale of Electronic Art Perth (BEAP), lead Marshall to an ultimate abandonment of its underlying theme of stillness, instead choosing to look at the profusion of Australian and international art on offer. This article details key works by artists Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau, Bill Viola, Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa, Orlan, George Khut, Hannah Matthews, Boris Ledagsen and Natascha Stellmach and Ulf Langheinrich.

Jonathan Marshall

Crossing Over: Digital Media at the Adelaide Film Festival 2007

The Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) is an event that has always had an eye on technological innovation and evolution and it is a tenet of AFF to celebrate screen culture in all its genres and formats. This years AFF was the host of a suite of symposiums, exhibitions, thinktanks, and screenings that spotlight the popularity and possibilities of content outside the linear feature film. This article details three of these events in particular Crossover, the Broadcast Summit and one focused on machinima. The evidence of AFFs Digital Media strategy, focusing on seminars that invite audience interaction and discussion, means that Adelaide audiences will be part of this exciting artistic and technological discussion.

Sandy Cameron

Taipei 101: Video at the National Palace Museum

Discovering the Other National Palace Museum, Taipei, July 7 to August 19, 2007

Merilyn Fairskye briefly discusses her journey to Taipei where she took part in an exhibition of video installations Discovering the Other, the first ever contemporary art exhibition to be held at the National Palace Museum. Curator Gertjan Zuilhofs discription of this exhibition can be seen as a metaphor for his world view shadows, spirits and ghosts seemed to be everywhere, while at the same time the works engaged with the world of people and place, and the precarious struggle to maintain individual and cultural identities. Featured artists included: Deborah Stratman, Ella Raidel and Lin Hongjohn, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Merilyn Fairskye.

Merilyn Fairskye

Lynette Walworth

Lynette Wallworth is driven by a passion to explore the natural world, to capture human stories, to explore the past and evoke memory and experience. As a media artist, she strives and succeeds to achieve an emotional and powerful connection between her images and her viewer.

Julianne Pierce

Daniel Crooks

Daniel Crooks is a digital media artist interested in distorting what is familiar to us and offering it back as a study in how we experience time and place. His digital manipulation of everyday materials and landscapes such as trains, trams and the passages of pedestrians across public spaces transform the work into a vibrant palette of colours and textures. Crooks is an artist who creates moving images that engage the viewer beyond and beneath the surface of the screen.

Julianne Pierce

Anne and Gordon Samstag, Museum of Art

This article previews the new Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, opened on 11 October 2007, which is discussed as a significant addition to art exhibition spaces in Adelaide in terms of scale, capacity and technology. This museum, designed by multi-award winning Melbourne architect John Wardle, is a public space in which artwork, in its selection, hanging, and experience, cannot ignore the active engagement of visitors. The Samstag Museum of Art plays a part in extending the role of museums into new categories of cultural industries, and the complicated relations between leisure, knowledge and libidinal economies.

Stephen Loo

Pippin Drysdale; Design, Craft and the Smart Syndrome

Pippin Drysdale Lines of Site By Ted Snell Fremantle Arts Centre Press 2007 174pp rrp $45 Recently published in Perth with support from Arts WA is an incisive monograph on West Australian ceramist Pippin Drysdale by Ted Snell. Snell has written a substantial book of five chapters, dividing Drysdales artistic evolution into four eras. Through in-depth engagement with particular vessels or series Snell traces her increasing mastery of the allusive and abstract power of the ceramic medium. Smart Works Design and the Handmade Edited by Grace Cochrane Powerhouse Publishing 192pp rrp $35.95 This publication is in many respects an exemplary book of an exemplary exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum and is about design that reflects the values of the handmade. With 40 individuals and groups represented across the categories of jewellery and metalwork, ceramics, glass and resin, fashion and textiles, and furniture this publication encompasses a truly diverse range of approaches from totally hand-crafted to high-tech manufacture.

Margot Osborne

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TOGart

TOGart Contemporary Art Award 2007 Parliament House, Darwin 12 July - 30 July 2007

Sarah Scott

Thresholds of Tolerance

Thresholds of Tolerance ANU School of Art Gallery, Canberra 10 May - 5 June 2007

Anne Kirker

Freestyle: New Australian Design

Freestyle: new Australian design for living Curator: Brian Parkes QUT Art Museum, Brisbane 1 June - 22 July 2007

Robyn Daw

Unsettled: 10 Posters

Unsettled: 10 Posters Inkahoots RAW Space Galleries, Brisbane June 2007

Ben Eltham

A Constructed World

Increase Your Uncertainty A Constructed World Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2 June - 26 July 2007

Dylan Rainforth

The Rules of Engagement

Rules of Engagement Curator: Mark Feary West Space 25 May - 16 June 2007

Andrea Bell

Eternal Beautiful Now

Eternal Beautiful Now Curator: Tania Doropoulos Sherman Galleries, Sydney 10 - 26 May 2007

Tracey Clement

New Deities

New Deities: art and the cult of celebrity Curator: Catherine Wolfhagen Devonport Regional Art Gallery, Tasmania 30 June - 29 July 2007

Briony Downes

Snap Freeze

Snap Freeze Curator: Jenna Blyth Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria 20 May - 11 November 2007

Sophie Knezic

Room

Room Curator: Derek Hart CAST Gallery, Hobart 26 May - 17 June 2007

Sean Kelly

Hatched

Hatched 07 Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts 20 April - 24 June 2007

Nyanda Smith

Emma Northey

Lucent Drones Emma Northey Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide 16 May - 24 June 2007

Niki Sperou

Ms & Mr

Heavy Sentimental Ms & Mr Kaliman Gallery, Sydney 1 - 30 June 2007

Joanna Mendelssohn

Bridget Currie, James Dodd, Louise Haselton, Laura Wills

parkside nomadic group moves inland 4 winter : Laura Wills Project Space, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia 1 June - 8 July 2007 Years without Magic: Louise Haselton & Bridget Currie SASA Gallery, UNISA, Adelaide 12 June - 6 July 2007 Speakeasy: James Dodd Experimental Art Foundation 13 July - 18 August 2007

Stephanie Radok

Matt Hunt

Cause I see the Light Surrounding You, so Dont Be Afraid Matthew Hunt Turner Galleries, Perth 1 - 30 June 2007

Paola Anselmi

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.

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

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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

Frank Watters: Sydney art gallery owner

Bronwyn Watson

Sydney: The Big Shift

Gaytime in Sydney: Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Arts Festival

Once a very marginalised group, the gay and lesbian communities have now become a part of mainstream Sydney culture.

Elizabeth Ashburn

Sydney: The Big Shift

Men

What boys give up to become men is all contained in this photograph...

Robert Nelson

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Masculinities Reflected

Guest editors of 'Masculinities Reflected' Noel Sanders and Kurt Brereton reflect on the nature of masculinity.

Noel Sanders

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Observing Father's Day in a Good Weekend

Analysis of maleness from a semiotic approach in the context of the lifestyle magazine 'Good Weekend' published as a supplement to both The Age in Melbourne and The Sydney Morning Herald.

John Tebbutt

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Fathers and/or Sons

Musings on the man who was the author's father from a multicultural perspective.

George Alexander

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

I've Written a Letter to Daddy

Social documenter Maxx Image is obsessed with the colour purple. Black leather is the costume of rebellion and the thrill and valour expounded by such an ideal could be seen as enticing accessories to the passion and zeal of leather sexuality.

Dominic Chang

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Art and Masculinity after Auschwitz after Bosnia: The work of Dennis Del Favero, 1995

Masculinity continues its argument with itself, quizzical at its self-propelled self-assertion. But in asserting aggression the pain is not just experienced in the victim. For even in the crudest acts of coitus, for a moment, the raper becomes the raped, he is tied by his penis and his balls into an abomination.

Adam Geczy

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Men and Mettle: Recent Portraits by Rox De Luca

Rox de Luca's exhibition of 19 men portrayed in 'All Meat No Veg' were all of men known to her. What did the portraits reveal about the sitters?

Paul Allatson

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Demystifying Masculinity: The Photography of Krystyna Petryk

Polish born Krystyna Petryk has long been fascinated with portraiture and representations of the nude in photography. Her own investigations began in Warsaw by photographing her pregnant friends and continued after her arrival in Western Australia in 1982. Once here she broadened her explorations to include both male and female subjects before shifting to photograph and research representations of men exclusively.

Allison Archer

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Exquisite Corpses

We collage, genderbend, cross dress and polymorph exquisite corpses out of media and advertising personalities, then use them as fantasy aids in the cause of our mundane desires.

Kurt Brereton

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Image Bank: Works by Various Artists

Series of works by Tyrone Townsend, Victoria Straub, Polixeni Papapetrou, Phil George and Simon Cardwell. Large format and mainly colour images.

Noel Sanders

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

They Are Not Photographs: Natalie Lowrie

The images are selections from a body of work called flamingharlots@trashed, created by Sydney based photographer Natalie Lowrie. The images, digitally retouched photos of Natalie's circle of friends and acquaintances were exhibited at the Polymorph Gallery at Newtown.

Jad McAdam

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Figures of Elongation

Using illustrations from a technical manual of the 1940s `the author examines the working male figure in popular iconography focusing on masculine representation in the visual arts and its link to the means of production.

Daniel Grafton

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Saviour and Sportsman

Vigilantly looking out to sea, the two manifestations of the life saver, the saviour and the sportsman, are combined in this 'gay greeting card' in such a way as to draw on the history of surf club masculinity and create an erotic pose.

Tony McGowan

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Symbolic Identities: Masculinity and the Motor Cycle

Since 1927, the idea that the motor cycle is synonymous with assertive and unmediated masculinity has been enlarged and expanded through a broad range of visual, literal and cinematic imagery to the point where a machine which was once acclaimed as a means of transport has been transformed into a gendered cultural icon, an object of and for masculine display.

John Pigot

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Sorely Tried Men: The Male Body in World War Two Australia

During World War Two, the Australian government's Department of Information represented the male body in at least two distinct ways. The photographer Edward Cranstone photographed a heroically active, phallicised body and the cameraman Damien Parer filmed a heroically suffering abject body.

Martyn Jolly

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Unwanted Shadow Man

Photos and essay by the author on a relationship between men.

John Grech

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Public Objects and Private Parts in Harry Hummerston's Recent Assemblages

Harry's work immediately identifies the object as a site of meaning. It is fair to say that Harry is strongly opposed to any restriction or taboo upon what he may represent, particularly from the arena of representing the female object or gender.

Anna Herriman

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Men Without Toilets

Let's speak about nomads and farmers... The acrid vapours that fill the cast iron nooks and crannies by day: the trickles on metal that appear in my black and white slides each night like blood from a more visible crime: this evidence of the distillation of men: these signs are signs enough of the collapsing consequences of 'farming'.

Neil Roberts

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Soap: A Letter to Sam Schoenbaum on Not Writing an Essay on a Show Called Phallus and its Funtions

What is the phallus?

George Alexander

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Blokes and Sheds

Images and text by Mark Thomson from his recent book 'Blokes and Sheds'.

Mark Thomson

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

The Back Yard Shed

In 1992, Helen Moyes made a documentary 'The Back Yard Shed' which set out to look at the lives of a cross-section of Australian households through the phenomenon of the back-yard shed.

Helen Moyes

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Like a Chant

Exhibition review Recent Work: Hossein Valamanesh 4-29 October 1995, Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide SA

Robert Crocker

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

Perverse Desire?

Exhibition review Mail Order (for Women): Di Barrett 14 Sept - 8 October 1995, EAF [Experimental Art Foundation] Adelaide, South Australia

Kay Schaffer

Men's Business: Masculinities Reflected

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