Issues

Issue 36:1 | March 2016 | Big Ideas
Big Ideas
Issue 36:1 | March 2016
Issue 35:1 | March 2015 | Art & War: Badlands
Art & War: Badlands
Issue 35:1 | March 2015
Issue 26:3 | September 2006 | Currents II
Currents II
Issue 26:3 | September 2006
Issue 23:1 | March 2003 | Fallout
Fallout
Issue 23:1 | March 2003
Issue 14:4 | December 1994 | Art & Death: Facing Mortality
Art & Death: Facing Mortality
Issue 14:4 | December 1994

Articles

1.456
Return to the Wunderkammer

Eve Sullivan interviews Lisa Slade Curator of the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Magic Object 

0.676
The bicycle as dissident object

One of the centrepieces of Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei at the National Gallery of Victoria is a fresh iteration of Ai’s Forever sculpture. Located in the foyer, the sculpture consists of a towering arch of over 1,500 interconnected bicycles, all uniformly produced to a minimalist design. The Forever series is now among Ai’s most known works, having been exhibited in many configurations in museums and public spaces in London, Taiwan, Taipei, Venice and Toronto and elsewhere. The namesake is China’s Yong Jiu (which translates as“Forever”) brand of bicycle. Established in the 1940s, the prized Forever brand dominated China’s cycling culture for several decades before the car became more widely used. For Ai there is a tainted nostalgia about the Forever bicycle. In the remote village where he was raised after his father – an enlightened and popular poet – was exiled from Beijing, the bicycle was not only needed for travel but for transporting things. It was also out of reach to all but the well-off, a high status object of intense desire for a child like Ai living in poverty.

0.666
George Gittoes and the social turn in Afghanistan

Much of the discourse around contemporary art in the last twenty years has been about the social turn, a catch-all for collaborative, conversational and relational practices of one kind or another. Claire Bishop has argued that much of this discourse is not about art at all, but ethics. She says that social practices should not be mistaken for ethical practices, comparing the art gallery dinners of Rirkrit Tiravanija to Santiago Sierra’s tattooed Mexican junkies, and the community outreach of Oda Projesi to Jeremy Deller’s re-enactment of a miner’s strike protest in Britain. Here an ethical debate turns into a political one, as Bishop finds an analogy for social conflict in Deller and Sierra, in the way that their work does not carry a clear social message but enacts an ambivalence that suspends ethical judgement.

0.666
Material thinking and sustainability in contemporary ceramics

Ceramics has always been about the sticky materiality of clay. Unlike other mediums where the material is often the passage for the artistic idea or vision, the medium itself drives the concept. This gooey, organic substance has for thousands of years been crafted into a myriad of forms and textures. Recently, we’ve been hearing of a “revival” or “rediscovery” but potters and ceramicists have always engaged critically with their material – challenging form, pushing technical boundaries, experimenting with the baffling chemistry of glazes, subverting embodied narratives – in an attempt to understand their material. Over the last decade the field of ceramics has expanded to incorporate those that work with clay, rather than just those that were trained in clay, and along with it a flow of critical thinking and collaboration in art, craft and design is blossoming, driven by the possibilities of new artistic materials, and the need to find sustainable solutions for those already in use.

0.666
Icanhardlywaittilmorning

Sometimes my life as an artist feels a little fraudulent. For twenty years I worked and still work as a curator although I was trained as a painter. No art administration for me! I am an artist. So I always felt a little fraudulent as a curator as well. When I left university I wanted desperately to be an artist. Living and working in Wollongong did not present many options so we created them ourselves. In 1995, along with Lisa Havilah and Nathan Clarke, we opened Project Contemporary Art Space. About a year later I started working with Guy Warren at the University of Wollongong. Then that’s it for the artists’ life for nearly the next twenty years.

0.666
On First Nations agency in our European-based cultural institutions

Art, performance, and spoken or now written text, all belong to the same register of cultural practice in the First Nations I am familiar with or belong to: ceremony. This ceremonial register takes place in a set of spaces created to enact cultural responsibilities to place, people and balance. Galleries and museums, as sites of cultural production and presentation, have the potential to nurture new ceremonies and new working methods.

0.666
Lucy Bleach: Tectonic slowness

Lucy Bleach quietly moved mountains in 2015. Based in Hobart, for a number of years her work has used the language of geology to explore volatility, impact and resonance. By slowing down the experience of these forces, the slow flux of her artworks present opportunities for intimate encounter and reflection. Increasingly, her innate sculptural sensibility has also brought these concerns to an expanded field of sites, communities and histories, generating collaborative projects that engage people in deeply felt, transformative processes. Last year saw these concerns blossom in a series of five major projects, that collectively identify her as one of the most exciting, dynamic and significant artists operating in Tasmania today.

0.52
Artist-run initiative: Fontanelle moving to Port Adelaide

Eve Sullivan in conversation with Fontanelle directors Brigid Noone and Ben Leslie
 

0.666
The new National Gallery Singapore: A monument for intersecting histories

The founding father of independent Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, famously lectured his citizens that “Life is a marathon” (without a finish line), encouraging them to work towards long-term rather than to sprint to short-term goals, not only for the individual but more so for the state. His life’s achievement came to an end on the 23rd of March this year; but his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, subsequently realised one of the citystate’s long-term goals when he launched the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) on 23 November 2015.

0.786
Recalling history to duty: 100 years of Australian war art
Ryan Johnston on Australia's official war art scheme.
0.812
Currents II
People involved in the arts and education might have difficulty recognising the Australia that the Treasurer has been talking up recently: the one with the record 4% low unemployment. But the Treasurers spin fails to mention that to be counted as employed you only have to work one hour per week, which bears out the reality of a life in the arts.
0.722
ex de Medici: Symbols of Mortality
ex de Medicis self-named approach to her practice  Dogs Breakfastism  signals an idiosyncratic working method that has seen her embrace photocopy, sound, performance, photography and drawing across a three-decade career. Kelly Gellatly looks at the multifaceted creative occupations of de Medici as both a visual and tattoo artist and the inherent connection she makes in and between these two practices. This text looks at two of de Medicis most prominent series - Gals n Guns and Spectre - through which she explores pressing issues such as global capitalism, corporatisation, materialism and the ongoing war on nature.
0.56
Yvonne Boag: Mapping Place, Memory and Conversations
Yvonne Boag is a traveller, a wanderer and keen surveyor of her surroundings. Her concerns of language and place traverse a myriad of media such as paintings, prints and drawings in a career spanning three decades. As Boag commented in 1989 With every new work I start, it seems I am always at a beginning. Each work is an attempt to hold on to time. To make marks of that time, which will trace a pattern through my life& Through this text Donna Brett looks at Boags journeys to places such as Korea, Paris and the Lockhart River and her use of iconography and dense layering as a means of mapping her interaction with places, journeys and people. Some artistic influences here discussed include the works of Roger Hilton, William Scott, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Avis Newman. The Lockhart River, Urban Landscape and Conversations series are referred to in considerable detail.
1.322
Heather Ellyard: Inventories and Commentaries
Heather Ellyards valued objects are static, symbolic, juxtaposed rather than flowing. Ellyard asserts that she wants to speak the lyrics and sorrows of our time. As she has said, I am interested in the glimpses, held, remembered, aligned inclusively&I am interested in awareness and how to acknowledge it within a visual framework. It may be that Ellyards vision of the periodical table is a bridge: between life made up of many little things and the one big thing toward which we all yearn. She leans more to wisdom art than to the mimetic or the sublime. Ellyards art is incorrigibly plural, and sustainedly committed to the broadest kind of human vision. Textual references include the works of D.W. Winnicott, Jacob Rosenberg, Arthur Koestler, Basquiat, Brett Whiteley and Primo Levi amongst others.
1.004
Robert Owen: A Different Kind of Modern
Robert Owens longstanding interest in exploring dimensions of light and space beyond the merely visual reaches back into an important line of constructivist art of the early twentieth century. Experiments with form and material have characterised Owens practice throughout his career, as has his openness to heterogeneous influences. Some of the major influences on Owens practice include metaphysical philosophy, Buddhist spirituality, optics, geometry in physics, minimalist sculpture and the work of Marcel Duchamp. This article refers to the works of Naum Gabo, De Stijl, Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus, Lynden Dadswell, Walter Gropius, Chairman Clift, George Johnston, Leonard Cohen, Jack Hirshman, Jean-François Lyotard, Charles Biederman, David Bohm and Stephen Hyde.
0.72
Becalmed: The Art of Going Nowhere in the Work of Nicholas Folland
Becalmed: the art of going nowhere in the work of Nicholas Folland
0.758
Sara Hughes: The Big Stick Up
The symbolic and perpetual possibilities of pattern are constantly under interrogation in the work of Sara Hughes as she is compelled to inhabit the capricious edges of what painting might be. Being a child of her times, Hughes was part of the sticker generation who adorned the unsuspecting surfaces of schoolbooks, bedroom walls, wardrobes, mirrors and fridges. She applies similar processes to her work as a means of mimicking the act of making something ones own and thus reinforces the claiming and transforming of spatial environments. This article follows Hughes practice through the visitation of childhood moments while simultaneously offering a platform for new conversations about spatial interplays and the shifting dialogues between surface and form, codes and perception and graphic modes and painterly references. Some of Hughes' primary influences include William Gibsons 2003 novel Pattern Recognition and the works of Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Yoshinori Tanaka and Sergio Leone.
0.71
Renate Nisi: Sculpture of the Senses
Renate Nisi is obsessed by being packaged in a body, that condition common to humans, other animals, plants and even microbes. Growing up in Germany, where 'art had epic qualities', she flirted with the Sublime and the Romantic but converted to Expressionism 'with the figure as central motif.' A further shift has occurred since then, towards minimalism and three-dimensionality, 'away from the sovereignty of forms onto the relational qualities of environments.'
0.992
Indigenous Art of the Kimberley > Warmun Arts: The Unfolding Stories
This January, in the startlingly beautiful country of the Warmun Community, rained in by a particularly intense wet season, art matriarch and grandmother of eighteen, Mabel Juli, sat on the veranda of the Ngalangpum School looking through some of the old paintings which comprise the Warmun Community Collection.
0.936
Indigenous Art of the Kimberley > New Energy: Mananambarra
On the white walls of the gallery the large paintings of Wandjina by senior Kimberley artist Omborrin beam forth filling the room with the radiance of his beloved Kimberley homelands.
0.928
Noel Sheridan
Noel Sheridan 1936 - 2006
0.984
Bronwyn Oliver
Bronwyn Oliver 22.2.59 - 10.7.06
0.662
Peter Townsend
Peter Townsend 1940-2006
Twenty: Sherman Galleries 1986-2006

Twenty: Sherman Galleries 1986-2006 Laura Murray Cree (ed) Craftsman House ISBN 0 9757684 1 7 RRP $95

0.724
Biennale of Sydney 2006
Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art, Pier 2/3 and 14 other venues in and around Sydney 8 June  27 August 2006
0.458
Tracey Clement: Border Zones
Groundfloor Gallery, Balmain SafARI, Pelt, Chippendale Sculpture, installation, jewellery http://www.groundfloorgallery.com/ 14 June - 1 July 2006
0.916
Deluxe: decorous crossover between art and design
Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania Hobart 6 - 26 May 2006
0.66
d&k we see a darkness
spectrum project space, Perth 25 March 13 April 2006
0.53
Terra Incognita
Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces Melbourne 26 May 24 June 2006
0.512
Bloom: Anna Hughes, Lisa Harms & Kaylie Weir
Queens Theatre Adelaide 29 April 21 May 2006
0.66
Office 6000
Level 2/16 Milligan Street, Perth, 27 - 31 March 2006
0.746
Reflections in a Golden Eye
James Lynch. Sean Meilak. Viv Miller. Jonathan Nichols. Lisa Radford. Michelle Ussher Curated by Jan Duffy and Kate Barber Linden - St Kilda Centre for Contemporary Arts 8 July - 13 August 2006
1.098
Michael Schlitz prints
Dick Bett Gallery Hobart 9 June - 4 July 2006
0.746
et al: the second of the ordinary practices
The second of the ordinary practices et al Institute of Modern Art Brisbane 10 June - 22 July
0.568
Mike Stubbs: Burnt
Experimental Art Foundation Adelaide 21 April  20 May 2006
0.256
Kim Demuth: Signs of Life
Jan Manton Art, Brisbane 23 June - 15 July 2006
0.688
Confluence: Palimpsest
Murray Bridge Regional Gallery 24 July 31 August 2006
0.648
A Memory of Times Past
Australia's 'official culture', the face that government puts on to show the country to the world has changed, and although those changes were set in motion well before the events of 11 September 2001, they are only now beginning to emerge as defining forces. Mendelssohn looks at the role of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games as a celebration of Australia's diversity and one of the main catalysts for such change. However, there is a darker side to all of this celebratory glory which Mendelssohn has addressed with reference to Australia's political climate and the granting of permission to express its collective worst feelings of fear and loathing.
0.974
Refugee stories: Afghanistan & Iran
The Migrant and Workers Resource Centre (MWRC) was established in Brisbane in 1995 by a group of migrant factory workers, with the aim of providing assistance to migrant communities. Recently, the MWRC conducted an independent investigation into the condition of refugees released from detention centres and now residing in Brisbane. The MWRC coordinator and the centre's consultant psychologist, Madonna Abella, visited the homes of refugees for face-to-face interviews, assisted by an interpreter. This article presents the findings of these interviews and the individual experiences of the refugees.
0.666
Borderpanic: open channel on refuge
Borderpanic was a conference and tactical media lab hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, a seminar hosted by Metroscreen and an exhibition at the Performance Space. It was a coming together of artists, activists, cultural theorists and people of social conscience examining a world of burning borders. Many of the artworks exhibited at the Performance Space reflected in positive mode the documentation, connectivity and networking between people around the planet. Some of the artists included in these shows were Julian Burnside, Ghassan Hage, Mickey Quick, Geert Lovink, Stephen Best and Peter Lyssiotis.
1.12
The Pathos of Boat People
On 10th April 1999, a large boat carrying 60 passengers and crew who had travelled all the way from China seeking asylum arrived on the shores of the small town of Scotts Head on the mid North coast of NSW. Shayne Higson created a series of poetic images in response to this desperate attempt for freedom. These poignant photographs present the remnants of these asylum seekers, the striped plastic bags and rusting hulk which were abandoned and replaced by suits, ties and good shoes, items worn by the refugees in an attempt to fit in with the mainland surroundings.
0.642
Ambient Fears
Artlink here prints a slightly abbreviated version of Nikos Papastergiadis essay which was first delivered as a lecture in Finland on 30 September 2001. This essay covers issues surrounding the idea of the other, the enemy, and discusses some of the ramifications of the events of September 11. In november that year it was used as a companion piece to the exhibition Fallout at the Victorian College of the Arts. The Exhibition featured artists Destiny Deacon, Elizabeth Gower, Homi Vesal, Jarrad Kennedy, Justine Khamara amongst others. Nikos Papastergiadis is Deputy Director of the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne.
0.714
Fallout: Quick Response to 9/11
Fallout was a quick response exhibition that only lasted for one week. The show examined the impact on art of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, globalisation and the refugee crisis. The thirty-seven artists who participated, each at different stages in their careers, contributed their work purely on political conviction. Many of the works in the show were quite raw, and captured this desire to re-express the shock of the violence towards the western world, but also the violent and brutal way the western world sought revenge. Sanja Pahoki and Rowan Douglas were amongst those to exhibit.
0.392
Pat Hoffie: Compassion and Anger
The element of denial ingrained in Australian society provides the basis for much of Pat Hoffie's work. The popularly constructed myths, histories and relationships that reinforce Australian society involve a certain amount of self-delusion, and Hoffie uses her work to amplify this fact. This article explores some of the political and humanitarian issues at the core of Hoffie's artistic practice, with specific reference to the 'children overboard' incident and Australia's role in the 'war against terror'.
1.294
Disorientation: Afghan War Rug, No Easy Answers
Lendon takes up the idea of cross-cultural interpretation and exchange as exemplified through the symbolism imbued in a traditional 'Afghan war rug', an item which was part of the exhibition 'The Rugs of War' held in June 2003. Through deconstructing the seemingly violent and barbaric visual imagery, Lendon is posing some important questions regarding the role of traditional artefacts and the valuing of such hand made craft once it has reached its destination in the west.
1 2