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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thresholds of Tolerance
Thresholds of Tolerance ANU School of Art Gallery, Canberra 10 May - 5 June 2007
Freestyle: New Australian Design
Freestyle: new Australian design for living Curator: Brian Parkes QUT Art Museum, Brisbane 1 June - 22 July 2007
A Constructed World
Increase Your Uncertainty A Constructed World Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2 June - 26 July 2007
Eternal Beautiful Now
Eternal Beautiful Now Curator: Tania Doropoulos Sherman Galleries, Sydney 10 - 26 May 2007
New Deities
New Deities: art and the cult of celebrity Curator: Catherine Wolfhagen Devonport Regional Art Gallery, Tasmania 30 June - 29 July 2007
Snap Freeze
Snap Freeze Curator: Jenna Blyth Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria 20 May - 11 November 2007
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
Matt Hunt
Cause I see the Light Surrounding You, so Dont Be Afraid Matthew Hunt Turner Galleries, Perth 1 - 30 June 2007
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.
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.
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
Editorial
Richard Tipping looks at the role of text and language from an historical and contemporary context, covering areas of interest such as recent technological advancements, graffiti culture and going as far back as 46,000 years to briefly discuss some of the oldest found examples of Indigenous cave art in the south of Australia. Along the way he looks to medieval and ancient Phoenician developments, Clement Greenbergs promotion of painting as a purely optical experience, one in which text has no place except as another kind of surface, the role of Dada in claiming the relationship between word and image and discusses other important figures such as Duchamp, Brancusi, Stephane Mallarme, Christopher Brennan, Picasso, Braque, Kurt Schwitters, Charles Olson, Alex Selenitsch, Allan Riddell, Rosalie Gascoigne and many others.
The virus and the oracle: words as signs
Jane Goodall explores the notion of text and the word as a kind of virus, something William Burroughs considers a parasitic organism , especially as is the case in contemporary visual and semantic culture. Words act as signifiers for semioticians, but their visual presence in art makes them work as spatial indicators, suggesting that they contain directions or instructions. Here Goodall poses the potential of words in revealing something else about themselves: a secret yearning not to give orders but rather to be oracles, channelling strange truths from who knows what sources. Artists discussed include: Suzann Victor, Susie Lingham, Joseph Ng, Tony Schwensen, Samuel Beckett, Cheo Chai-Hiang, Redza Piyadasa, Heather Ellyard, Barbara Campbell.
Fluxus and after
Fluxus is a phenomenon that defies ready classification. This article highlights some of the printed and published matter that Fluxus inspired, starting with Maciunas-directed productions, those of Dick Higgins and other examples of individuals working in Australia today. A common factor in the instances of all Fluxus activity is a passion for improvisation and experimentation, a conscious elevation of the mundane and over-looked, often an active zeal in the face of disturbing political events, and not least, a stress on producing unusual and visually arresting statements. Australian artists following the Fluxus tradition here discussed include Michael Phillips, Madonna Staunton, Alex Selenitsch and Richard Tipping.
In black & white: text in Indigenous Queensland art
Timothy Morrell examines the significance of words within the context of Australian Indigenous art subsequent to the efforts of colonisation in neutralising indigenous identity through assimilation. The point is made through this article that: Words give artists the opportunity to be more direct than they usually are with images . Morrell uses the case of a handful of Queensland based indigenous artists such as Gordon Bennett, Richard Bell, Ah Kee, Fiona Foley and Vanessa Fisher.
Playing with art & language: some personal memories
Peter Hill chooses here to examine a personal interest in the marriage of text and image in contemporary art. From the inextricable links between text and image made through magazine and advertising media to the mix of graffiti and gravitas achieved through the works of Jean Michael Basquiat, this article covers a wide range of avenues and artists paramount to this investigation. Other key figures mentioned include Joseph Kosuth, John A. Walker, Ed Ruscha, Peter Burgess, Bruce McLean, Lawrence Weiner, Douglas Gordon, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Thyrza Nicholas Goodeve.
Words and things
Concrete Poetry is both a form and an attitude to poetry that emphasises the visual and material elements of letters and thus words in relation to their meaning. 'Words and Things' is a project Patrick Jones set out to produce to represent concrete poetry and text-based art in Australia. A project that took him four years and that has attempted to dissolve the traditional form boundaries between art and poetry. The material considerations of 'Words and Things', both environmental and aesthetic, lead the reader into a work that is more like a sequence of short films than a standard book. Contributors to the book included Richard Tipping, Aleks Danko, Alex Selenitsch, Peter Tyndall, Geoffrey Baxter, Peter OMara, Jeff Stewart and Marie Sierra.
Walking with letters: Michael Parekowhai, John Reynolds, John Pule
This article looks at the recent works of New Zealand artists Michael Parekowhai, John Pule and John Reynolds to explore notions of identity through text and image relations. Parekowhais sculptural piece The Indefinite Article spells out I AM HE in an ironic critique of Colin McCahon and goes further through wordplay to cement a link between the word, identity and the complexities of translation. Reynolds Cloud comprised of nearly 7,000 white canvases transcribed with words from Harry Orsmans Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English and acts to illuminate New Zealands separate identity and regional diversity within a worldwide community of English speakers. Stories of migration, of dispossession, of alienation characterise the work of John Pule. Similar to Parekowhai and Reynolds, Pule deploys words to multiply meanings and confound interpretation or translation.
Words, words, words: Mike Brown, Ruark Lewis, Rose Nolan
On its own, a word points to both the sentence that it might end up in, and also to the thought that precedes it. This zone between thought and convention allows artists to foreground qualities that are normally ignored in linguistic acts. Alex Selenitsch looks at a number of post WW2 tendencies or art movements which have made use of words: Action Painting, Graffiti, Concrete Art, Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Pop Art. Selenitsch uses the examples of Mike Brown, Rose Nolan and Ruark Lewis to highlight specific functions of the word, whether it be the morphing of word and image into one, the iconic and formal aspects of words or the relationship between visual and aural language.
Sacred texts
Books hold a privileged place in our society as keepers of knowledge, spiritual truth and cultural heritage. Melinda Rankin examines the role of books in artistic practice and the robust relationship that exists between artist and book via a willingness to challenge some of the apparent conventions of structure and content. Simryn Gill, Ken Orchard, Alex Selenitsch and Gerard Genette are artists whose practice is deeply entrenched in the seemingly offensive act of fiddling with these sacred texts . For these artists, the slicing, tearing and unpicking of books is not an act of violence or irreverence. In subverting the original narrative to their own purpose, they reconsecrate the text into artworks creating contemporary objects of veneration and desire.
Text-art and interactive reading
James Stuart explores the spatial and interactive aspects of text-based artworks, leaping off the page and into the textual practices of Peter Lyssiotis and Franz Ehmann. Lyssiotis is a writer and photomedia/collage artist and creates books that generally combine his own artworks and writings in collaborations with others. Among the most impressive of his projects is the recent A Gardener at Midnight: Journey into the Holy Lands, developed as part of a Creative Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria in 2003 which is of particular focus in this text. Brisbane-based/Australian-born Ehmann is concerned with the physical reading environment of the gallery and in turn deploys a multi-disciplinary approach to the physical space and temporal duration of his exhibitions. Via the works of these two practitioners Staurt here wishes to posit the very real sense of bodily and not just intellectual interaction with language that reading entails.
Word as Image: Islamic calligraphy in contemporary art
In the broadest terms calligraphy can be seen as a prescriptive form of drawing and in this liberated sense an artist is free to investigate its role as both message and ornament. This article looks at the nature of Islamic calligraphy via the works of two very different artists working in Australia today Iranian born Hossein Valamanesh and Naeem Rana of Pakistan. With the significance of language and the written word in Islamic culture it is hardly surprising that visual artists have in recent decades turned to it as the source of cultural and political potency.
Review: Visible Language magazine on Fluxus
Review of two special issues of Visible Language magazine Vol 39 no 3 'Fluxus and Legacy' (2005) and Vol 40 no 1 'Fluxus after Fluxus' (2006), guest- edited by Ken Friedman and Owen Smith. The publications evaluate the ongoing life of Fluxus as an idea including what Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics owes to it. Fluxus 'scores' by Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, and Vuc Cosic.
Unreadable Writing
This brief article offers insight into a form of writing or drawing that Henri Michaux has termed asemic and which is the subject of interest for Tim Gaze, editor of Asemic magazine, published in Adelaide. As stated by Michaux Most people make asemic writing at some time, possibly when testing a new pen. They tend to have no fixed meaning. Their meaning is open . To explore the nature of asemic writing visit http://www. typisart.com.
A new alphabet? Guan Wei goes bush
A project coordinated by 24HR Art in Darwin brought artists of Chinese, European and Japanese origin to the township of Injalak in Gunbalanya, Western Arnhem Land. Ashley Crawford looks at the time Chinese-born, Sydney-based artist Guan Wei spent with three members of the local community and the stories he learnt to accompany the ancient rock art of this region. Subsequent to discovering the similarities between Indigenous Australian and Chinese visual narratives, Wei wanted to use the images as an alphabet to tell the story of his own encounters and experiences with the people and the landscape of Gunbalanya.
The book, the poet, the artist and the breakthrough
As a container of information in text form, the book is designed in a linear fashion to move the reader along line by line. Many artists seek to break this convention and direct the reader/viewer into a more exploratory realm, as is true of the work of Jan Davis. This article leads the reader (in a somewhat linear sense) through Davis seven-volume artist book simply titled SOLOMON a journey developed out of the artists concern with the operation of space in visual imagery and her interest in writing.
Emily Floyd against herself
Emily Floyd is attracted to texts that focus on identity and place and that offer new ways of thinking about these issues in the light of globalisation and post-colonialism. She is interested in the malleability of language and its connection to knowledge and power. The process Floyd employs to produce her numerous large-scale wooden letters mirrors the anxiety and obsessions with the various novels they are referencing Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment, Kafkas The Trial and Camus The Outsider. Sarah Tutton looks at Floyds practice, calling particular attention to her recent installation works its because I talk too much that I do nothing, Gen-existential Crisis and Compulsory for young intellectuals.
Skywriting
The idea of four-dimensional sculpture proposed by the Dimensionalist Manifesto of 1936 has found its realisation through the continuing use of skywriting as a medium in contemporary art. Here Richard Tipping briefly discusses the phenomenon looking at artists Mary Lou Pavlovic and Guy Warren who produced works in association with major public, sporting and political events within Australia. Tipping also raises the question of how such a temporal practice as this is to be considered within the realm of contemporary art.
Gwangju Biennale, South Korea
2006 marked the 6th Gwangju Biennale: Fever Variations in South Korea. Stephanie Britton sets the scene for what she describes as having been generous and daring, though not grand or pretentious and never (that kiss of death) magisterial. This event saw a definite shift from an international focus to look more intently at Asian preoccupations of the recent past as played out in the minds and hands of artists. Some of the simple headings at the recent Biennale were Myth and Fantasy; Nature and Body; Trace of Mind; Past in Present, as a way to initiate dialogue and illuminate the stories of how Asian artists began to work within an international context. Some of the artists showcased were Xu Bing (China), Kim Jong-ku (Korea), Miwa Yanagi (Japan) and Lee Sookyung (Korea).
Vivienne Binns survey at TMAG, curator: Merryn Gates
The Tasmanian School of Art in collaboration with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery have created an exhibition focused on the phenomenon of the solo survey, using the work of Vivienne Binns to open a space for conversation about the personal aspirations of the artist and the broader role of curator and institution. Through the complex layering of this exhibition the artist and curator entice the viewer to engage more directly with the trials and joys of the artist's struggle. By engaging a museum-style presentation, Vivienne Binns becomes a contextual display marking milestones, thoughts, actions, protests, interactions, people, places, discisions and emotional responses that accumulate to give meaning to current choices.
Glory, glory, glory curated by Elizabeth Gertsakis
Melbourne public culture, curator/artist Elizabeth Gertsakis assembled a visual arts project around the life and work of early twentieth century Melbourne entrepreneur, sports and entertainment manager John Wren1871-1953. Artmaking, curating, presentation and display in a broad not narrowly discipline-centric definition are explored and unpicked. His world is, as Gertsakis argues, a constructed, directed one of effect and presentation within which Wren emerges as exemplar and victim in a process of image creation and narrative spinning that is central to social life in a media age.
Tom Muller > Gold Standard Art
This article discusses the artistic practice of Tom Muller - one concerned with both elegance of appearance and versatility of application. It is argued here that his astringent imagery is surely the art of our times not only in terms of its subject matter but its ease of distribution. Two works closely examined are Mullers 2006 piece 'Gold Card' in which the artist offered an edition of 24 carat gold credit cards and 'World Passport' (2000 present), considered to be two of Mullers most accomplished works because of the tension between their formalist pleasures and their real time operation.
APT5
5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT5) Queensland Art Gallery Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane 2 December - 27 May 2007
APT5
5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT5) Queensland Art Gallery Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane 2 December - 27 May 2007
The Other APT
Raw Space Galleries
99 Melbourne St, South Brisbane
28 November 2006 - 23 January 2007
99 Melbourne St, South Brisbane
28 November 2006 - 23 January 2007
Northcliffe Sculpture Walk
The Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Northcliffe, Western Australia Permanent artworks, launched 25 November 2006
