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The Art of Living Sustainably
Written with Andrew Bryan The increasing urgency for us to achieve a harmonious relationship with the environment is stimulating artists in many media and designers in a range of disciplines to work in new ways with one another and community groups who share this concern.
Art, Architecture & the Environment
Further Reading and Glossary
Selected book list with notes. Includes a glossary of terms including acronyms.
Art, Architecture & the Environment
The Gordon Darling Foundation
Background to the Foundation and its support for the Artlink special issue on South East Asia. The personal interest on the part of benefactors Gordon and Marilyn Darling in the traditional cultures of South East Asia. Their mission to start the first national portrait gallery in Australia.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Australia Asia: Striking Up Conversations
Collection of items (some by other writers) relating to Asia and Australia: Adelaide Installations, and women in film program both in Adelaide Festival; Aboriginal connections with Indonesia; Australia-Taiwan exchange; art education exchanges throughout the Region; letter from Nguyen Thu of Hanoi College of Art.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Friends of Hanoi
Efforts to save the ancient city of Hanoi from redevelopment - an Australian businessman raises money and support
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Faces of Hong Kong to Australia via Singapore
The artist lived with local people in Singapore to find imagery from populist Hong Kong cinema resulting in the exhibition Mien.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Pink Herrings and Tasmanian Tigers
The artist as a gay Asian male who migrated to Tasmania to escape persecution in Hong Kong, has "copped it swee" a lot of the time. Undeterred he has produced work which addresses this theme and worked quietly towards reform of the laws against homosexuality in Tasmania.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Modern Art in Thailand: A Glimpse
A concise history of the beginnings of modernism in Thailand from the 1890s. In the 1970s the current Princess established an alternative space for young Thai artists in which the tensions between art for art's sake and art for religious purposes were evident. Politically correct art about Thai-ness was sponsored by banks in the 80s. Later political instability and environmental problems gave rise to a new kind of work challenging cultural consumerism.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Unpredictable Repercussions
The massacre of pro-democracy students in May 1992 was a watershed for Thai artists who began to identify with change, formed associations and took part in rallies, and called for public monuments to the tragedy. The City Art League was formed to present performance art in public places and the Concrete House to draw attention to AIDS through art activities. This brought social and political issues into the realm of art.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Asialink Making Pathways for Art (Part of Australia/Asia, Striking Up Conversations)
Asialink an organisation to encourage a better working understanding amongst Australians of Asia, was set up in Victoria in 1990. Since 1991 Asialink has organised a series of exhibitions of Australian art touring varoius Asian countries. Policy to always send an Australian curator and/or one of the artists to each venue to provide the human link. Artists' residencies are also an important part of the progam.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Australian Studios Hanoi (Part of Australia/Asia, Striking Up Conversations)
The efforts on the part of the author and others to set up a studio for Australian artists, writers, historians and others within the Hanoi College of Fine Arts. Support being sought from the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture and the art education institutions in Australia.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Where to now?
Thai art has grafted partly grasped Western styles onto a Thai base, and the market is booming But a lack of direction and critical voices is evident in this rigid status-ridden society. Pioneering innovators like Thawan Duchanee who translated Buddhist philosophy into a modern mode lost his fire and became repetitive. Corporate patronage has encouraged this. Those who are breaking new ground include Prasong Lueuang, Vasan Sittiket, Montien Boonma, Chirasek Pattanapong.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Confronting Paradox
As a Director of the School of Fine Art at Silpakorn University, Somporn Rodboon has been instrumental in helping students get an international perspective. She invited Australian women eg Joan Grounds, Noelene Lucas, to be artists-in-residence. Diane Mantzaris arrived in 1992 and made a suite of contentious computer generated prints dealing with the May anti-democracy military crackdown.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Strange Encounters
'Art Festival: Temples and Cemeteries' is an unusual event held in Chiang Mai over three months. Organiser Uthis Utimana, lecturer at Chiang Mai University, chose to show art in temples and cemeteries as Thai people are more familiar with them than art galleries and they encourage people to contemplate life. Artists ran into trouble with religious and education authorities who misunderstood some of the pieces but were undeterred.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
To be an artist
The author recounts her education in a Thai boarding school under the male patriarchal system. As an artist she has tried to come to terms with her upbringing and her work has reflected the situation for her mother and grandmother as well as the death from cancer of her father. She describes her installation work 'Dinner with Cancer' as a commentary on consumption - "humans are not only consumers, they are also being consumed".
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Thawan Duchanee: Art and Philanthropy
Thawan Duchanee is a successful Thai artist whose studies abroad helped him to create a new Thai art which is a hybrid of western and eastern ideas. He set up a museum in Chiang Rai to promote all the contemporary Thai arts and has funded many scholarships. He was a resident artist at the University of Melbourne April-May 1993 where he created a huge painting as well as an 'Oz' version of his Thai homes using various elements as votives to nature.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
An Art Space in QSNCC
The Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre was opened in 1991. It includes an art space managed by the new company CON-tempus which strives to introduce the idea of an art dealership in an art community in which up to now artists have had to handle their own marketing and promotion. The directors hope to foster art collecting, and make artists less commercial in their outlook and more willing to create better and more radical art.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Posturings under the Bodhi Tree: The selling of Pseudo-Religion
Thai artists of the 'Buddhist Revival' claim to make Buddhist art just because they use the visual conventions of that tradition. The Tantric mandalas have been widely misappropriated. As soon as you take temple art out of the temple you run into difficulties of definition and authenticity. There is still traditional Buddhist art being made in the temples, but there is a great trade in pseudo-Buddhist art which is cheap and damaging.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Learning About Difference
Artist Joan Grounds describes the experience of her first residency in Thailand in 1989. Her lack of knowledge of Thai culture and language and having to operate in a climate where open critical debate about art or other topics was not possible were some of the challenges she faced. Since then she has returned four times to make art works in Thailand and witnessed the rapid changes which occurred over the period including a greater willingness to discuss issues.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
A Thai-Australian Exhibition
Thai-Australian Cultural Space was an exhibition at the Bangkok National Gallery in 1993 of works by Montien Boonma, Vichoke Mukdamanee and Kamol Phaosavasdi from Thailand and Joan Grounds and Noelene Lucas from Australia, all of whom had experience of working in countries other than their own. A common theme of the work was our relationship to nature and the spiritual in art and life.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Metaphor for a Delicate Balance
Artist Noelene Lucas describes the rationale behind the work The Presence of the Centre which she made at Silpakorn University in Bangkok during a residency. It deals with her perception of the landscape of theAustralian Centre as seen from 11,000 metres flying to Thailand, and the fragmentary way we perceive. It is a metaphor for negotiating our position in the world.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Modern Art in Thailand: A Glimpse
A sketch of the main institutions and galleries, the prizes, sponsors and patrons, as well as a list of the main galleries was a guide to the art scene in Bangkok at the time of writing. Several of the large hotels also had commissioned murals as well as acquiring new works by contemporary Thai artists.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Introduction to Indonesian Modern Art
There are perennial debates within art circles in Indonesia about applying terms like surrealism to local art. The history and geography of Indonesia mean that theirs is a 'different' kind of modern art which took the form of an art rejecting Dutch colonial rule. Later, in the 80s the influential theorist Dr Soedjoko advocated including traditional art and craft in the fine art canon. He predicted a shift in world focus from Europe and America to the South.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Art of Social Concern
A survey of the role played by politics in art and vice versa before during and after Independence from the Dutch. Artists were employed by political parties to promote their ideologies; by 1950 artists rejected this. Some were arrested for depicting social realities. 20 years later a new group took up the baton, and again incurred the displeasure of the government. Humour was adopted as a means of expressing truths.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
The Power of Yogyakartan Surrealism
Why has Yogyakarta produced a school of surrealist painters and what do they paint about? Life perhaps offers strange encounters, especially in the meeting of eastern and western elements,but the clue is in traditional attitudes to the ghostly or uncanny. These are transposed into scenes of modern life which are richly varied and powerful. They include one of Indonesia's only woman artists, Lucia Hartini.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Women Artists in Bali
The author organised an exhibition of work by Balinese women artists to travel to Australia with a grant from the Australia-Indonesia Institute. She took a year to research and collect work and discovered a great deal about how and why the work was made. Her brief was inclusive - not just painting but craft including the famous woven textiles and temple offerings.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Role of Galleries in Contemporary Art
Around 1983 art dealers first appeared in Indonesia. By 1990-91 there was an art boom, and galleries were operating in Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, and Bali. Owners come from various walks of life, including oil trading. With some notable exceptions, there is a sameness about the offerings in most of these galleries. A brief history 1930 - 1955 describes the establishment of galleries to supply visitors interested in local art.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Exploring the Potential of Printmaking
Indonesian printmaking emerged around the time of Independence in 1945. It began to be taught in colleges in Bandung, Yogyakarta and Jakarta and became a way of showing Indonesian art abroad. Prints are now seen in offices, banks, hotels and homes. Indonesian printmakers have participated in international print exhibitions in Norway, Taiwan, and Japan.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Introduction to Art in Vietnam
Vietnam has a long and diverse cultural history with strong sculptural traditions of Dong Son and Cham ethnic groups. At various times artists went to Europe to study and French art was a strong influence. In the north a socialist realist mode flowered in the 60s and 'formalism' was repudiated. Printmaking and political posters were strong during the war. Now painting flourishes; in Hanoi 'the village' is an inspiration, in Saigon various western styles are seen.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Vietnamese Lacquer, Silk Painting and Modern Vietnamese Art
1. Lacquer painting is a very old medium which was adapted by 20thC painters including Nguyen Gia Tri. 2. The most famous exponent of Silk painting was Nguyen Phan Chanh (1892-1984) who painted villagers and country life. 3. After 1925 artists adopted oil paint and after absorbing French influences, by the 90s formed a new Vietnamese identity typified by a group of 3 senior artsits. In 1989 a group show of young artists was a turning point.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Trailblazers Recognised at Last
3 major influences. Nguyen Sang (1923-1988) painted in a politically charged and nationalistic mode but always as a personal expression. Bui Xuan Phai (1920 - 1988) painted small streetscapes depicting the soul of old Hanoi, a nostalgic view. Nguyen Tu Nghiem (1922-) was more innovative looking again at ancient village sculpture in pagodas and paradoxically moves closer to a Modernist style.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Women Achieving Against Great Odds
Women make up 30% of painters in Vietnam yet have received little attention. Women face many obstacles to success. Married women whose husbands do not approve of their practice are the most disadvantaged. A handful of women artists have become known, and one has taken part in exhibitions overseas. Previously there used to be annual group shows of women artists, but now the trend is towards solo shows.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Fine Art in Ho Chi Minh City
Interview between author and the painter Ca Le Thang about new developments in Ho Chi Minh City brought about by the open-door policy doi moi and the increasing commercialisation of fine art. Modernism is more easily accepted here than in some other parts of the country. The magazine My Thuat was formed 2 years ago as an organ of the City Fine Arts Association, and provides a forum for artists and critics to air important issues.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Changing Attitudes to Ceramics
Ceramics have a long history in Vietnam and two 13th Century centres Bat Trang and Phu Lang are still active today. Old blue and white porcelain ware used to be in common use in peasant families, but different polychrome styles are now in vogue and fake antiques are common too. In some design colleges non-functional sculptural forms and decorative motifs have replaced functional ware, but there is a healthy expansion of production nationally.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Hanoi- Heritage in Danger
Hanoi was founded 1000 years ago, and has always been an important centre, culturally and economically. Its Ancient Quarter is a miraculous human-scale blueprint for living and working and much of its original character survives today. The French Quarter built in the 19th Century was a sensitive complement to the old Asian architecture, but today all this is threatened by ugly, insensitive development motivated by greed. Hanoi needs a handsome prince to rescue her!
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Printmaking in Vietnam: Old and New
There are very few specialised printmakers in Vietnam, partly because of the expense of materials and equipment. Woodcuts, a traditional form, with the use of multiple coloured plates, are in demand but are now rare, engraving in both metal and plaster is growing, lithography dates from the anti-French resistance, and silkscreen was used for socialist posters in the 70s. Graphic arts are moving into the world of advertising where the money is.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Textiles Bridging Vietnam and WA
Carpets have long been a link between East and West. In 1992 a Western Australian textile designer-maker Rinske Car-Driesens began working with the Vietnam Women's Union and a Singapore business women's body to have her carpet designs hand-knotted in Vietnam using Australian wools dyed in Albany. While Car-Driesens uses CAD-CAM technology to design them, the Vietnamese workers rely on their hand and eye skills to produce wonderful results.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Refugees Confronting Memory
The US/Mexico based Border Workshop group worked on a collaborative shopfront installation in 1992 with the Cabramatta community of western Sydney where many Indo-Chinese refugee populations settled in the 70s. A large installation representing a refugee boat and a walk-in temple containing video monitors playing back student interviews with local people.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Introduction to Philippines Art and Culture
Many ethnic groups have melded to form the present day Philippines. Colonial rule and the influence of the US, Spain and Japan have all left their mark while there is still much resistance to losing traditional values. Art expression is varied and unrestricted and since the 1990s regional areas have come to the fore. Support from the state has been erratic. Artists are struggling against the onslaught of capitalist developments and art for investment.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Indigenous Statements Now
From early 80s artists began to search for local identity - the use of local indigenous materials was part of this. One 70s pioneer was Junyee who used living plant material in performance art. Roberto Villanueva and Santiago Bose work in mixed media to explore ideas of being Philipino in a modern world. Imelda Cajipe-Endaya's paintings deal with 3rd world citizens, women, migrant workers, poverty. Roberto Feleo uses mythic narrative in a playful idiom.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Images of Women by Women
Women are producing some of the most challenging art in the Philippines by using feminist themes and achieving a synthesis of art and feminism. These are drawings, paintings, 3D works in all media from papier machŽ to stone, and performance art. The work is confronting, emotive, full of vitality. Images are drawn from the kitchen, childcare, main domination, domestic surroundings and the natural world.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Woven Textiles: The Enduring Tradition
Traditional Philipino woven textiles are still made today, keeping alive an ancient regional art form which is poorly documented in museums and not well recognised. All the varied types of weaving are described and illustrated. The patterns, iconography and styles are now seen in modern interior design and in fashion and help to maintain something essentially Philipino in a society which has taken on the trappings of world culture.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Struggle in Baguio: The Arts Guide Makes a Difference
In the 80s artists working abroad began to return to the Philippines; the author established the Baguio Arts Guild with a group of other artists in the highlands 5 hours from Manila. In 1989 the first Festival was held and has established itself as a vital proving ground for new artists as well as being part of the local community. An Arts Centre was set up in 1992. However a devastating earthquake in 1990 is just one of the many obstacles for artists in this 3rd world situation.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Writing About Craft
What is the relationship between the art or craft object and its maker? This question is put from the Philippines in relation to crafts and compares the importance of the origin or culture of the maker in that country to that in Australia. Students of Philippine crafts have applied the 'mapping' method which helps to understand the depth of tradition and their subsequent evolution into urban variants. Writers on the crafts are developing ways of exploring these questions.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
An Australian Creates Space in Manila
From 1989 - 1991 artist Neil Roberts found himself engaged on a series of working visits to the Philippines. He decided to use only local materials, striking a welcome chord with his hosts. His tendency towards sparse presentation was in sharp contrast to the overload of the installations and paintings of local artists, echoing the contrast between Australian and Filipino attitudes to space. At ARX in Perth he collaborated with Cesare Syjuco who has the ART-LAB space in Manila.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
The Shaping of Contemporary Art in Malaysia: New art new voices
Theatre director Krishen Jit talks to artist Wong Hoy Cheong about contemporary Malaysian art and his adoption of a figurative style of painting after he returned from study in the USA. This is being used by young artists in Malaysia as an expression of rebellion, as is performance art. Malaysian society avoids dissenting voices and has been slow to accept the angst in modernism, which perhaps has only just been fully internalised though it was introduced in the fifties.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Looking to Origins: Mastura Abdul Rahman
Mastura Abdul Rahman is a Malaysian Islamic woman artist and draws on the tradition of SE Asian woven textiles in the very precise ordering of her compositions which depict the arrangement of traditional Malay houses seen from above. Traditional head and breast cloths are ritual objects of great potency with the power to kill the weaver who makes a mistake in the design. To the initiated the paintings embody some of the same aura.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Culture of Silence: A Reading of Three Malaysian Artists
An overview of the history of Malaysian modernism and the work of three artists who rebelled against their Islamic-style training at the Institute of Teknologi Mara. Riaz Jamil Ahmad, Ahmad Shukri Elias and Tengku Sabri. Riaz and Ahmad paint in a neo-expressionist figurative mode, Tengku makes carved wood sculptures which have echoes of old Malay motifs. After some years of dissent the three have adopted a stratgic self-imposed culture of silence.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Fauzan Omar - Layers of Meaning
Malaysian artist Fauzan B Haji Omar has worked in collage and mixed media since the eighties when Malaysa was freeing itself of British influence. For some time he used strips of torn canvas heavily encrusted with paint, followed by work which draws inspiration from rotting jungle vegetation, reflecting the changing landscape where the natural world gives way first to rubber plantations and now to golf courses and industrial estates.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
David Castle's Journeys into Asia
David Castle's jewellery has been influenced by over 15 journeys to Indonesia since 1972, particularly the islands between Darwin and Bali. He finds the ceremonial activities of the Balinese attractive and this is evident in his body adornment pieces. He was an artist in residence in Kuala Lumpur in 1991 creating links with the University of Tasmania in his home base Launceston where his current exhibition Journeys was held.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Support for Art in Malaysia
A critique of a culture of self-congratulation where there is no place for critical feedback, institutions are not scrutinised and standards are low, where criticism is greeted with hostility. The major art school is lavishly funded but authoritarian and there are no checks and balances on lecturing staff. Art museum shows are poor, corruption is evident in some places. Artists suffer from neglect and have little support for their practice.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Women Breaking Taboos
Women artists in Malaysia have a lot to deal with - pressures to give priority to family duties over art practice, and oppression of women while the Islamic prescription against representation makes it hard to make political statements. Hamidah Rahman, Shu-Li, Norma Abba, Eng Hwee Chu and Mastura Abdul Rahman are breaking taboos including that of including sexual content in their work. However the price they pay is marginalisation.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
An Australian on the Road to Shah Alam
An account of an artist in residency in 1993 at the Institut Teknologi Mara (ITM) at Shah Alam outside Kuala Lumpur. The spatial excitement of the building was not matched by its usability or enlightened curriculum. She produced an installation using local materials and learned about ITM's positive discrimination in favour of bumi putera students (local Malay) and how the school fits into the Islamic State.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
"Current Issues" in Singaporean Art
A brief history of 20th Century art movements in Singapore and the state of art and art debate in the 1990s. In terms of how non-Singaporeans view and understand current art, the politically motivated performance art of Tang Da Wu and Amanda Heng in 1991-2 appears very similar to performance art in other countries but due to different cultural background it can be misread and those elements which are different are often ignored.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
New Models for Survival
Problems of survival of new art without subsidy have created two groups: The Artists' Village, a loose collective of artists who occupied two buildings scheduled for redevelopment, ending up in the Substation near the National Art Gallery. 5th Passage was allowed to occupy an area in a shopping centre where they made performances on environmental themes and ran very popular school holiday art programs for children.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Artists' Regional Exchange: The Next Wave
The third edition of ARX, the biennial artists' exchange project between Australian and Asian artists, put much energy into promotion, andtravelling the visiting artists around Australia to give lectures and workshops in an effort to create more opportunities for Asian artists. ARX is constantly shifting its focus and is an evolving event but a continuing interest is cultural nuances and the visual manifestations of these.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Curtin University Connects with Singapore
Curtin University developed ties with Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand since its foundation in the sixties, initially through Engineering and Business and then through the Design School spearheaded by artist-lecturers Nola Farman, Paum Gaunt and Head of Design John Teschendorff. Frequent visits and exchanges and enrolling Asian students have all helped the School of Art there to identify as a South East Asian art school.
Contemporary Arts of the Region: SE Asia & Australia
Polemic: From the 21st Century and Through the Telescope
Polemic: There has been a paradigm shift in Australia with the development of Aboriginal art, which may be as consequential as that of the Impressionists. Over the last 30 years Aboriginal artists have been making their voices heard and now make up at least 25% of the country's working visual artists though they are only 1.7% of the population. Their art will go down in history as providing new perspectives with which to view the world
New insight into old North Australian Rock-Art
The rich rock art of Australia, especially of Arnhem Land and the Kimberly continues to be the subject of research, as well as fierce debate about their meaning and age, with obvious implications for Aboriginal cultural history. Three signficant styles are identified : the 'Bradshaws', (named after explorer Joseph Bradshaw who discovered them in the 1800s) the 'Dynamic' and the 'Wanjina' paintings. Most of the more than 100,000 ancient sites are not effectively protected but are of great importance to living Aboriginal people.
Homeland: Sacred Visions and the Settler State
In spite of supporting a vast artworld of curators, critics and collectors, the 'otherness' of Aboriginal art in the Western canon persists, fuelled by white settler reluctance to acknowledge history. The valorisation of the life and work of Emily Kame Kngwarray is one of the great imponderables of our time. Her extreme age, traditional origins, style of painting and prodigious output were the causes. Most significantly she demonstrated the possibility of human intimacy with landscapes.
The 'Aboriginal Art Scandals' Scandal
A chronicle of a spate of so-called 'Aboriginal art scandals' which happened in the late 1990s, some of which involved white artists passing off work as Aboriginal. The custom amongst indigenous artists of family members working with an artist on paintings creates problems for the western art market and leads to claims of fraud. The media is often guilty of distorting and sensationalising events. The newly launched Label of Authenticity enters the scene.
Black Glory: Erotica Old and New
The exhibition 'Love Magic' explored Aboriginal male erotica and reveals a little-known dimension in traditional spirituality which has been echoed by contemporary artists. Images of phalluses, couples embracing and testicles going walkabout refer to legends and stories of the Old People. This very large exhibition was a life-affirming spectacle with humour and poignancy as well as some powerful eroticism.
Looking at the Stolen Generation
The government policy of separating Indigenous children from their parents was still in force until the 1970s in some states. Indigenous artists who have recently begun depicting these events include Julie Dowling, Gordon Syron, John Packham, Rea and Brenda Croft. Their work has been part of the uncovering of the hidden history of these children of which many non-indigenous Australians were quite ignorant until the mid 1990s.
Good Brother Working with our Kids
Ron Gidgup was the first Aboriginal fashion designer in WA. Since getting the Aboriginal of the Year Award in 1997 he began to turn his skills towards helping Aboriginal youth in crisis. He runs workshops in textile and clothing design and brought many young people back from the brink of death from substance abuse. He has worked in urban and rural settings, with schools and other groups.
Charting Co-existence
Mapping Our Countries was an exhibition at the short-lived Djamu Gallery in Sydney, curated by artist Judy Watson and archaeologist Dr Paul Ta'on. They collected objects and works of art to illustrate how they relate to the idea of mapping land or sea. Mapping is done for a huge variety of reasons, for exploiting resources, for proving theories, for simply finding one's way.
Health and Art: Can art make people (feel) well?
Art can function in a wide range of ways beyond what is normally regarded as its arena. It can empower by raising confidence, providing income which can be used to improve diet and living conditions, it can be therapeutic, liberating and provide an emotional and intellectual outlet, while posters and TV ads can convey important messages about health issues. When a culture is strong the people are healthy.
Photography with Intent
Various indigenous artists began to use photography to express ideas about their social and political position in the 1980s; the 1988 Bicentennial celebrations were a strong catalyst. Formerly they were always on the other side of the lens, as anthropological subjects. The exception was Mervyn Bishop, employed as a press photographer in the 1960s, and pioneer in the medium and role model for younger artists including Fiona Foley, Ricky Maynard, Peter McKenzie.
Challenging boundaries: Indigenous Art in Three Dimensions
Recent Indigenous 3-D work is regarded as both art and craft. The materials range from shell and rushes to scrap steel, grass, ceramic, glass and bull kelp; the works may be vessels, installations, necklaces, small figures etc. The works often contain explicit references to cultural or historical truths eg the figures by WA artist Joyce Winsley which recall characters from her youth in the country, or Lola Greeno's water containers made in the traditional way from bull kelp .
Printmaking Gains Momentum
The first Aboriginal prints were linocuts made in jail by Kevin Gilbert. By the late 1970s Aboriginal printmaking in collaboration with print studios had begun. The Canberra School of Art, Port Jackson Press and now Northern Editions have been catalysts for the many enthusiasts at the Yirrkala, Papunya, Tiwi, Munupi, Oenpelli, Ernabella etc communities and workshops are run in remote centres at their request. Some like Lockhart River are now setting up their own facilities.
Political Theatre in Beyond the Pale
The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Artin 2000 was a survey of new indigenous art titled Beyond the Pale. This attempt to show the best of new work was staged as a series of rooms each with a different mood from baskets and shimmering paintings to rooms of confrontation where works invited viewers to be shocked by figures of authority seen in very unflattering mode.
Bush Toys
Bush Toys was an exhibition of toys made from scraps of metal and copper wire by the male members of the Eastern Arrente tribe of Central Australia in the late 1990s. These recall the era when Aboriginal people were the backbone of the pastoral industry, as stockmen and horse trainers. There are miniature horses and riders, windmills and stockyards, and wooden 'cars' for children to push along or ride in. The toys are a source of great pride for the men who make them.
Art in Warmun community
A new art centre at Warmun in the Kimberly of WA is a showcase for the talents of the artists of the area, some of whom used to work on big pastoral stations in this remote area. Celebrated founders of the centre were Rover Thomas and Queenie Mckenzie. There are tensions between their interests and those of white landowners in relation to access to 'country' being denied. Young people are unable to have a traditional education and are becoming westernised through videos.
New Ways With Clay: Tiwi Pottery
The Tiwi people on Melville and Bathurst Islands just north of Darwin have a 30-year tradition of pottery. They have absorbed a range of influences from the British Michael Cardew to visiting potters from Australia or via annual workshops with a Swiss potter Claude Presset. Some pots were collaboratively done - thrown by experienced potters and decorated by local artists. Slab and coil pieces drew on artists' experience in wood carving and painting.
Tandanya: One City and a Festival
3SPACE -C21st Indigenous Explorers was an exhibition by Darryl Pfitzner Millika, Mark Blackman and David Pearce for the 2000 Adelaide Festival. In common is their shared history as contemporary indigenous artists in Adelaide, the city which had the first indigenous art centre Tandanya, a powerful catalyst for many enterprises which without it would not have been so well presented or widely seen.
Boomalli: Fact or Fantasy: you decide!
Boomalli, founded in 1987, enters an unlikely future where anonymous benefactors help them to buy premises in an inner city suburb, to employ curators and become independent of funding bodies. Tax-free havens are set up for indigenous artists in NSW and Boomalli members exhibit regularly at MOMA in New York.
Judy Watson's etched zinc wall at Bunjilaka
Queensland artist Judy Watson spent three months in Melbourne on a commission for a zinc wall around 50 metres long for the Bunjilaka gallery at the new Museum Melbourne. Watson used motifs relating to Aboriginal material culture in the etched panels of this work.
Contemporary Voices: Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery in the SA Museum
The new Aboriginal Cultures Gallery at the SA Museum has set a new standard of excellence in interpretation of historical material. The use of film, video and computer terminals carrying extensive information from songs and interviews to historical documentation adds to the rich texture of the displays. Contemporary Voices is a set of filmed interviews conducted by museum staff in the six months before the opening of the new Gallery
Labelled - Buyer Be Aware
The introduction of a Label of Authenticity has some problems for contemporary urban Aboriginal artists who feel once again that they are being asked to confirm their status. Another issue is that any indigenous person can apply for the Label regardless of the integrity of their art practice. Is the Label too blunt an instrument to be useful to most artists?
The Indigenous Visual Arts Industry: Issues and Prospects for the Next Decade
The economics of indigenous art is analysed in detail in relation to production, collection and distribution, consumption, developments in the 1990s, prospects for the next decade, tourist art, protection of intellectual property, quality control, authenticity and leadership.
Fair Trade in Central Australia
Without regulation in a market there will always be carpetbaggers. Warlukurlangu Artists was set up by a group of artists to protect them from this. DESART, the peak body for Central Australian art producers, in 2000 has initiated a Central Australian Indigenous Art Label which aims to educate consumers and lead the way by example rather than police a market.
The House of Aboriginality
The House of Aboriginality is an evolving multimedia project about the merchandising of Indigenous imageries. A CD-rom sets out the story of the circulation of this in mainstream culture through the metaphor of a house entirely furnished with products bearing Aboriginal art designs.
Snapshot of a Culture
A conference about Indigenous arts and crafts was held in 1999 and was a useful sounding board for issues from the new Label of Authenticity and copyright, to the new Goods and Services Tax and art in cyberspace.
Nomad to TV star in three years: Walala Tjapaltjarri meets the world
In late 1984 Walala Tjapaltjarri and other Pintupi tribespeople walked out of the Gibson desert in WA and met Europeans for the first time. Within a few years Walala adapted his traditional ground and body painting to painting on canvas and was filmed by Robert Hughes for his TV series Beyond the Fatal Shore.
Remote Area Computer Art: Multi-Media Talent Emerges in Yuendumu
Donovan Rice is a young Warlpiri man who has virtually taught himself to make computer art in the remote community of Yuendumu. He is making digital images and animations which relate to his own cultural situation against the backdrop of a chronically disfunctional society. He works under the aegis of Warlpiri Media, a community-run media resource centre and TV production house.
Snapshots of Contemporary Sound, Movement and Words from Broome
Broome is a town in WA with a long history of many cultures living and working together. It is the home of a vibrant Indigenous music industry, its most famous sons being the Pigram brothers and Jimmy Chi, author of the musicals Bran Nue Day and Corrugation Road . Magabala Books is flourishing, and the Stompen' Ground Festival is gaining in strength and reputation.
The Tate goes modern
The Tate Modern opened in May 2000 to great fanfare and applause. The refurbished power station on the Thames now houses the international post-1900 art of the Tate collection. The public has rushed to visit with huge crowds enjoying the experience, but putting pressure on the facility. Critics have questioned the way the work has been arranged by theme rather than by school, chronology or geography.
The Art of Gift Giving...
The magnificent donations made to museums, galleries and libraries in the last 12 months were made possible by the Commonwealth's Cultural Gifts Program, an initiative that encourages Australian patronageof the arts by offering attractive tax incentives to donors. Wallace here presents a short expression of appreciation.
XSProject: From the (Dirty) River
Artist Ann Wizer has been on a mission to protect the environment and reduce poverty in South-East Asia for many years. She has battled against indifference of the most callous variety. Undaunted she continues to find creative solutions to make a difference. Here she shares the trials and tribulations of working long-term and hands-on with consumer waste in Jakarta - complete with the stench of landfill.
Dragon seeds and flea circuses: some moments and movements in contemporary Chinese art
Post-revolutionary China was a time of testing boundaries of official tolerance and experimentation with the newly accessible Western art ideas. The first art exhibitions were held and groups formed, as artists started to realise they were not, as Mao said, just the hair on the skin of socialism. Resistance to the old political order and a deliberate courting of Western buyers with post-Mao imagery has to give way to finding an original voice.
Simulating the Flow
Alfred Deakin was not a man to muck about. As well as being a major player in the long campaign to establish an Australian Federation, he was an indefatigable crusader for irrigation, pushing hard to establish a pioneer industry. As President of a Royal Commission on Water Supply & Irrigation, Deakin visited and studied Californian irrigation schemes in 1885.
Reading the Waters
Norman has based this article around Terry White's concept of 'land literacy', a notion he defines as 'the ability to read and appreciate the signs of health [and ill-health] in a landscape'. From a cultural perspective, the land literacy idea quickly compounds itself into a multi-dimensional concept and perhaps a new discipline 'Landliteracy' that calls into question interdisciplinary demarcations, understandings of home, perceptions of the land and how we might experience place. Furthermore, Norman has used this concept as a way of discussing artmaking operations in relation to the landscape and the idea of 'waterliteracy'. Britain's Common Ground Movement, the work of Craig Andrae and the art project website redreadwater.com are here referred to.
Wild Art at the World's End
During the 1970s and 1980s conservation battles were fought over the meaning of wild places such as Tasmania - previously regarded as Australia's deep south - a pioneering place where the normal rules hardly seemed to apply. Grant looks at some of conservation battles both lost and saved during this time, and at one of the key agents for change, a wilderness photographer, the late Peter Dombrovskis. As a result of Dombrovskis' important work, the Tasmanian arts community and two government bodies have come together to try and ensure that this arts/environment symbiosis continues. Some other key artists discussed in this article are Julie Gough, David Martin, Tim Pugh, Anthony Curtis and Kim Kerze.
Dinoflagellates and Art: Jane Quon's Marine Installations
Jane Quon has evolved from printmaker to multi-media installation artist - though she much prefers the descriptor 'ecological artist'. Her installations make strong use of 'ephemeral' media - light, sound - and her focus is the quality of the marine environment, within that the threat to vulnerable aquatic ecosystems posed by the dumping of ship ballast water. Quon has been involved in a number of ecological projects, including installations at the new headquarters of the Centre for Living Aquatic Resources Management in Penang, the International Maritime Organisation building on the Thames Embankment in London and was part of the CSIRO's Metis exhibition in Canberra. Hay here pays particular attention to her installation devised for the Bass Strait Forum in Launceston in December 2000.
Nola Farman's Wind Tree
Nola Farman's The Wind Tree is one of a series of three permanent public artworks commissioned in 1998 by Griffith Artworks, Queensland College of Art, and installed at the new Logan Campus of Griffith University south of Brisbane. The Wind Tree stands on a site that was once occupied by indigenous inhabitants and from the time of white settlement until the recent sixties, the homestead site of the dairy cattle stud Ellerslie. The Wind Tree has been christened according to a traditional pedagogical symbol: the Tree of Knowledge. Ross examines Farman's site specific work in relation to its complex functional and aesthetic qualities.
Reflections on the Noosa River
In early 1999, Gregory Pryor spent 28 days in meditative reflection on the Noosa River. The resulting work and exhibition, Wearing Clothes on the Noosa River, presented the complete drawing cycle of 224 parts at the Noosa Regional Gallery. In this personal intervention in Noosa, Pryor has produced a record of cyclical flow and the passing of time. The artist's written and visual observations encompass minute details of daily life - its sights, smells and sounds - juxtaposed with ruminations on the metaphysical, the power of nature and the interconnectedness of life. Other artists who have been involved with the 'river residencies' at Noosa and the creative documenting of other important water ways include Christine James, Scott Avery and Britt Knudsen-Owens.
Water and Dust: Coongie Lakes
To non-indigenous people, Australia has often seemed a paradoxical, even perverse country. It is indeed the most climatically unpredictable of all continents - a land where seasonal cycles are overwhelmed by unpredictable drought and flood. Dr Puckridge examines this fact about Australia, with a particular focus on the Lake Eyre Basin and Coongie Lake. This article includes text by artists Peter Richards and Erika Calder who work extensively alongside Dr Puckridge in their ongoing pursuit to inform and educate the wider community on the importance of working co-operatively with all the different and varied users of the Lake Eyre Basin.
Karra: River Red Gum
Karra was a visual arts project devised for the 2000 Adelaide Festival. Its focus was the River Red Gum, once the most widespread tree in south eastern Australia and quite justifiably an Australian icon. The project comprised an installation by three artists Chris De Rosa, Agnes Love and Jo Crawford in the Artspace Gallery, Adelaide Festival Centre, from 1 March to 20 April, and a 40 page publication with essays and visual material from many contributors. As curator, Thwaites' intention for Karra was for people to consider their connection with the tree as well as the urgent problems facing this ecosystem, such as salinity, diminished water flow and environmental degradation.
The Waterworks Project
Culturally, spiritually, intellectually, water runs through our lives creating and suggesting connection and renewal. All life depends on water. Like those European explorers who encountered this land so recently, the artists who worked on the Waterworks project searched to make sense of the many manifestations and meanings that water has. It is no real surprise that survival was the thread that connected most of the thinking of the artists. The project saw the work of artists Cameron Robbins, Malcolm McKinnon, Lisa Philip-Harbutt, Jo Crawford, James Darling, Catherine Truman, Graeme Hopkins, Jonathon Novick and Elena Gallegos.
Staring at the sea, staring at the sand: the work of Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion
Humanity's universal relationship to the environment has always been at the heart of Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion's work, and in large part stems from their own working and living proximity to the ocean on the coastline of Scotland in the fishing village of St Combs. Kubler conducts an examination of some of Dalziel and Scullion's installations, many of which offer that most magical and rare thing in art, the miraculous. Kubler looks at their collaborative works General Release, Sargassum, Rain and Melt and the various ways they have explored the Nature/Culture dichotomy. In particular cyclical weather patterns and mankind's evolving interaction with Nature.
A Water or a Light
Water figures in Australian art and Australian history as a vital thread binding together many narratives and imageries. Art that concerns itself with some manifestation of water demonstrates what can be considered a new phase in Australian art about the land. David Keeling, Nicole Ellis, Ruby Davies, Peter James Smith, Patricia Picinnini, Judy Holding and Danielle Thompson are all Australian artists whose work is manifested by this notion of the land and of water.