Book review Contemporary Australian Architecture
Graham Jahn
Photography by Scott Frances
Basel/East Roseville: Gordon and Breach International/Craftsman House 1994 241 pp
Across much of Aboriginal Australia the announcement of a death is followed by profound communal mourning, the removal or destruction of the deceased's belongings and most significantly a prohibition on the use of the deceased's name.
The cinema's ability to represent death - the act of dying, bodily transformations, decay, the corpse - in astonishing realistic terms helps to explain why film, the moving rather than the static image, has become the central depository of death narratives (ancient and modern) in contemporary culture.
Thus we come full circle to view the cemetery not as a necessary inconvenience to be isolated on the edge of town and visited once every few years but as a resource that can make a positive contribution to the community.
Nuclear conflagration - whether real or imagined - captivated the post war psyche. Endist images of one form or another were developed in response to what many foresaw as the likely outcome of a third world war.
Book reviews Indecent Exposures: Twenty years of Australian Feminist Photography
By Catriona Moore
Allen & Unwin in association with the Power Institute of Fine Arts
206 pp $21.95
Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970 -90
Edited by Catriona Moore
Allen & Unwin in association with Artspace
308 pp $21.95
Exhibition review Familiarity? Re-examining Australian Suburbia
Mikala Dwyer, Michele Beevors, Glen Clarke, Elizabeth Woods, Tony Schwenson and Aleks Danko
Curated by Brian Parkes
Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania
23 September - 16 October 1994
Exhibition review Perpetual Motion: Aboriginal Strategies for rejigging art and technology
Curated by David Kerr and Doreen Mellor
Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, Adelaide South Australia 8 July - 14 August 1994