Royal Mail vs McQueen: A very public memorial for the dead
Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen’s recent work 'Queen and Country' (2003-2010) overwhelmingly embodies the complexities and possibilities for memorial-making and public art today.
The Glenorchy Art & Sculpture Park (GASP!) project on the outskirts of Hobart is under construction just two kilometres from Australia’s largest private freely accessible art gallery the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), opening in January 2011.
The notion of public art has been shifting over the years to include hopeful new models for change in a time of uncertainty - festivals, the temporal, the long term developmental and experimental thinking about how art can modify and influence the public realm.
17th Biennale of Sydney The Beauty of Distance: songs of survival in a precarious age Curator: David Elliott MCA, Cockatoo Island, Botanic Gardens, Artspace, AGNSW, Opera House, Pier 2/3 12 May – 1 August 2010
Public artworks surrounding the Regional Arts Australia National Conference and Festival held in Launceston in August 2010 set the cat among the pigeons.
Kate Warren examines Melbourne's laneways and the many way artists have used them to re-energise and re-familiarise local audiences with their urban environment. Artists mentioned are Sarah Rodigari and Tim Webster, Troy Innocent, Matt Blackwood, John Alexander Borley, Anthony McInneny, Sue McCauley and Keith Deverell, and QingLan Huang.
Anna Zagala looks at two striking public artworks in Melbourne, Cameron Robbins and Christopher Lansell's The Solar System down at the St Kilda Foreshore and Alexander Knox's kinetic light work Maxims of behaviour on the corner of Bourke and Swanston Sts in the UBD of Melbourne.