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Sutapa Biswas: Birdsong
Sutapa Biswas was born in Santinekethan, India, in 1962 and immigrated to the UK with her family at the age of three. Her subsequent life and studies in Britan have resulted in a truly cross-cultural, multi-layered dialogue within her work. Her 2004 film Birdsong encapsulates the realisation of a young boys dream (in this case her son). Sutapa believes for a child, there is nothing that holds them back if you allow them to dream....
Audience Implication: PVI Collection
Back in 1998, the PVI (Performance, Video, Installation) Collective were a neat group and a fledgling collective. In 2004, seven years and eighteen major works later, the group has expanded to include new members, in addition to remote cells and networks of groups and individuals across Australia. The PVI refer to themselves as shape-shifters, and in this sense the shifting evolution of the collective has been influenced as much by the consequences of their national and international residencies as their addoption of new technologies.
Virtuous Networks
While many art institutions are just coming to terms with incorporating networked media into their exhibition programs, the genres have been exponentially expanding and mutating. In recognition of the newly hatched species that is networked media art, the ISEA2004 (the nomadic biennial festival held in Finland, Estonia and onboard a Baltic cruise ship) and the Australian ARS ELECTRONICA, dedicated a stream of their conference and exhibition programs to networked themes.
The City of Light: Video Projection and Public Art in Adelaide
The recent initiative of the Adelaide City Councils Public Art Program Luminosity has seen the commissioning and exhibition of five temporal public art projections between June and December of 2004. The objectives of the initiative aim to foster the Citys image as a centre of creativity and innovation, supporting established and emerging artists through the encouragement of quality new media art, thus making a contribution to the social and cultural substance of the city space.
Fakery and Fabrication in Photomedia
A series of photographs, still images from Monika Tichaceks 2002 video/performance work Lineage of the Divine, were exhibited in Japan in Supernatural Artificial, an exhibition of nine contemporary Australian photomedia artists. Tichacek exploits a heightened intimacy between viewer and work to construct complex and ambiguous scenarios that simultaneously delight, unsettle and confound.
SenseSurround: Empathy Between Human and Machine
The artists featured in ACMIs latest exhibition of new media work, SenseSurround, both use and develop cutting edge audio/visual technology to enhance sensorial experience for the spectator. The idea was to use the film soundtrack to trigger massively boosted low frequency signals, below the audible threshold, in the theatres. This would cause vibrations of the ear-drum and the body of the spectator and provide the sensation of earth tremors.
Bridget Riley on Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley is an artist who has pursued her own agenda for over thirty years with no concessions and has made a place for herself within the heart of the art world not only with her work but through her extraordinary desire and willingness to communicate. On the occasion of her major survey exhibition in Sydney in the summer of 2004 at the Museum of Contemporary Art she kindly assembled for Artlink some excerpts from some of these interviews.
The Importance of Being 'Un-Australian'
Melbournes Moomba festival held in 1956 replaced the annual celebration of the winning of the eight-hour day. Thus an occasion that had originally been devised to commemorate an important victory of the Australian labour movement was transformed into a bipartisan celebration of civic pride and family values.
The New Cosmopolitans
During his visit to Melbourne in April this year, Bombay-born, Oxford-educated, Harvard professor, Homi Bhabha spoke of Vernacular Cosmopolitanism, the global citizenry of refugees, economic migrants and minorities within cultures who must learn about translation because you survive that way.
Location Location Location
The position of long-term visitor or unfaithful citizen affords a view from both within a culture and outside it. The art of Pasifika is as diverse as its people, it is a 21st Century hybrid reality. Pasifika is urban.
'Aboriginalism' in Europe: On the Way Out?
Subsequent to Nicholls three month residency in several European regions, she has been examining some of the ways in which Australian Aboriginal art is currently being perceived, received and curated in this part of the world. As she states, the Salzburger Kunstvereins programme, juxtaposing photographic works and video installations by Destiny Deacon and Lisl Ponger was the only one of the four European Indigenous art exhibitions she saw that made any serious and genuine effort to address the postcolonial legacy of Anglo-European colonialism.
Michael Jagamara Nelson Gives It A Go
Michael Jagamara Nelson is an artist who love - maybe even needs - a challenge. As Johnson examines, he has had his fair share. With his first painting, a piece he did for his uncle Jack Wayuta (a senior custodian for the Flying Ant Dreaming for Yuwinji) going unrecognised as one of his own for fifteen years, Michael Nelson made his mark in the indigenous art scene after his big break from Daphne Williams of Papunya Tula Arts.
The Sea Is In Them: Narelle Autio and Trent Parke
Narelle Autio and her partner in life and work, Trent Parke, completed a 16-month journey around Australias coastline in 2004. The two set out to document the culture of Australian coastal dwellers with an exhibition lined up at the Australian Centre for Photography the following year. Baxter speaks of her first encounter with the works of these remarkable photographers and goes on to offer some insight into the profundity encapsulated by these images.
The Poetics of Agoraphobia
Polish/Australian artist Gosia Wlodarczak draws obsessively, as a means of engaging with a biological cognitive bedrock. By drawing out the duration of her being she avoids the burden of memories and hope. This, she thinks, will lighten the weight of ideology that oppresses her with its exaggerated claims of authenticity...Ideology is already manifest in her sence of self, freedom and individual consciousness. It is even there in the languages she lives between; in her name, in her history, a graduate of the Poznan Academy of Fine Arts in Poland, now living in inner-city Perth.
Raw and Cooked Margins
A series of journeys and pilgrimages characterise Paul Hobans life, his account of which is spotted with significant exhibitions, readings, people, music and events. It wasnt until 1993, when he was 39, that Hoban first had a one man exhibition at Greenaway Art Gallery. Radok here paints a clear picture of his work - A sense of surfaces and layers; words - intelligible, unintelligible, back-to-front, upside-down; wrinkles and transparency; colour and pattern; modernism and archaism, and so on. A myriad of conceptual and stylistic devises that exist largely within the margins of art conventions.
What's Mine Is Yours: Touching the Surface of the Practice of Sue Ford
Melbourne artist Sue Fords 2003 photographic series Continuum is a suitable portal through which Stanhope looks at aspects of Fords work, a practice that has consistently evinced strength of vision and a humanistic philosophy, rich in connecting personal and local subjects to the field of national culture, social politics and the nature of individual existence. Continuum looks at the aftermath of bushfires and is aligned with her passionate reflection and documentation of the nature of our being in both time and place. If there is one medium that records time it is photographs - Sue Ford.
That was Then, This is Now: New Work by David Wadelton
David Wadeltons artistic career took a dramatic turn in the years 1997-98 after he purchase an iMac computer. Prior to this time he had been painting hybrid canvases and creating refined pencil and silverpoint drawings that displayed a unique quirckiness that was informed by the artists affection for the culture and language of Pop art. Gott explores the apparent shift in Wadeltons work, from the assemblages of the everyday objects that he first exhibited to his new works; mesmerising, hypnotic, dizzying.
MFC's and Gunter Christmann
Gunter Christmann was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1936. After two years in Canada, he arrived in Australia in 1959 and studied, somewhat casually, at the National Art School, Sydney, from 1962 to 1965. This article looks at the life and work of Christmann, that shambolic figure who, even as he is approaching his seventieth year, shows something of the perpetual youthful student. From his dress and demeanour to his his sloping walk and willingness to talk to the people he knows. A self taught artist, Christmann once saw his work as Geometric Abstraction and now states that the only major difference in style is the lack of intellectual order imposed on the work.
That Strange Quivering of Substance: The Recent Paintings of Catherine Woo
Many years ago the Chinese writer Lin Yutang expressed that, from an Oriental perspective, Western artists always seem to depict objects from the outside, whereas those from China and Japan express their experience of them from within. This Eastern approach is inherent in the culture, not a position able to be merely adopted, and springs in part from religious inheritance, but also from the pictorial nature of Asian written languages. This inherent approach can be found in the recent work of Catherine Woo, expressing some sort of biological affinity. If the paintings can be said to be about anything, it is a the fine balance between energy and rest rather than the apparent subject matter.
On Your (Motor)bike - REVIEW: Reason and Emotion, Biennale of Sydney, 2004, and 2004: Australian Culture Now, Melbourne
Sydney Biennale bad, 2004 in Melbourne good. The artworld's consensus locked in quick and hard. Fair? Of course not. Why compare the two, anyway? Because the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) seemed to set it up that way, by the timing of their show. They certainly took as 2004's model the nationally bound Whitney Biennial and, in particular, the Art Gallery of New South Wales's Perspecta exhibitions (last one 1999) - in turn established to counter the perceived internationalism of the Sydney Biennale.
Tokyo Shopping Mix: An Email Saga*
It is not hard to shop given the entire city of Tokyo seems to be premised on the activity. Tokyo is a space as complex and flowing as the most convoluted natural system. One may be in a train station but it is filled with shops. Above ground, below ground, on the ground - shops. Haley documents his activities over a period of a couple of months in what is most likely the worlds largest consumer oriented city. He discusses the somewhat surreal and absurdist nature of this environment and paints a picture of the plethora of advertisements, signs, extreme fashion trends and other visual paraphernalia that consume the city.
Flatness Packed
While the idea of modern and contemporary art are located in a fairly nebulous discursive realm, the notion of modern or contemporary lifestyle (the two seem, in fact, interchangeable) are very much a part of the familiar rhetoric of consumer spending. No Nonsense Return Policy (2003), Pat Foster and Jen Bereans installation at BUS Gallery, documented six miss-assembled items of IKEA furniture and dissect the curious aesthetic cycles that drive the commercial products in both realms. Taylor looks at this work and others which are focused on drawing attention to the formal and ideological intersections between modernism and the stuff of homes and home decoration.
One or Two Things about Art and Shopping
This article explores the relationship between art and shopping, in particular the contemporary alignment of the two as one and the way feminist identity is largely constructed through the media and consumption. Wilson looks at the work of Barbara Kruger and her critique of Western consumer habits, in particular the way Kruger explores the different shopping patterns of men and women to reflect some inherent gender traits.
How Much is that Artwork in the Window? Notes on Shops and Art
Through reference to Walter Benjamin's writings, Peers suggests that it has become commonplace to describe the city in terms of the progress of the flaneur, the middle class bohemian who strolled through the city, moving in the ephemeral sphere of impressions and images. This article looks at shopping as a central feature to the manner in which Australian art and culture has developed. The artist is a shopper and collector, moving through the materiality of things. Australian culture has itself become flaneur-ised over the past decade in the expansion of new museums and cultural precincts inviting discovery and added pleasure to the experiences of viewing and consuming art.
Food Slut > Manifesto
Food increasingly became alienated from the body over the latter half of the twentieth century. Its material, its preparation, its distribution and its consumption became hostage to the banal aesthetics of the food stylist, the aridity of cultural studies and the repressive partnership of the public health zealot and the liability lawyer. Paul van Reyk here presents a manifesto on the food slut, a model for the examination of current food consumption trends in our society. As he states, a food slut is never indifferent to food, any more than a sex slut is indifferent to sex.
Pornography and Photography
A series of three exhibitions which appeared to erase or at least redraw the boundaries between art photography and pornography was seen at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 2003. Helen Grace talked to Alasdair Foster, Director of the ACP and curator of one of the exhibitions, about this timely and challenging project.
The Perverted Gaze of the Artist: Recent Work of James Guppy
James Guppy has a curiously ambiguous place in contemporary art. This is not because of his subject matter, but rather because of his technique. For the most part Guppys recent work is not about fun, nor is it even really about sex. Rather he argues it is about the nature of exploitation. He argues that artists by their nature are voyeurs who see the world around them and all its objects as items to be used as visual product. His recent Peeping Box series taps into this idea where images of sexual activity with a particular sadistic overlay are presented behind thick glass to incite some vain attempt on the part of the viewer to engage in such voyeuristic acts.
Chaotic Attractors: Jake Chapman Lecture Tour 04
The two hours of Jake Chapmans lecture at the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne in March 2004 were in many ways a homage to Modernism and the aesthetic of industry - albeit back-handed. The hierarchies of art history, the possibility of the poetic and the tradition of humanism all came under attack. The core issue circled around throughout the discussion was the degree to which art was simply a diversion for the middle-class: a market-responsive product or cathartic moment in which people could be and even pay for the privilege of being shocked.
Enchantment/Disenchantment: The 2nd Auckland Triennial
The generic theme for the 2nd Auckland Triennial Public/Private sought to address central issues concerned with the relationship of the visual art scene to that of the everyday life (to banality), the potential or otherwise of new technologies to engage with the conditions of modern society and the ability of art to deal in specific ideas of a social and political nature. Furthermore in bringing together artists projects that are cross-cultural and transgenerational, the curatorial aim was to make connections which would intensify the privacy debate. Edward Hanfling examines some of these works with regards to such issues and concerns.
Signs of the Times: Stephen Page, Sacred Symposium, Adelaide Biennale
Stephen Page is the first Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival of Arts to be indigenous and his program for 2004 includes indigenous works but perhaps not many more than most Adelaide Festivals, which have always had a significant indigenous component. Yet there is a sense that the commissions that Page has initiated represent a maturity in approach and development that signifies a watershed for Indigenous culture in Australia. Page expects it to be optimistic, philosophical, constructive, to reflect on the fusion of the old and new without bastardization.
The Dave Inside
About the work and fame of Las Vegas based art writer Dave Hickey. Like all icons Dave comes with a portable, pocketable, mythology. A pungent blend of his own statements, press hype, rumour and dubious speculation.
Virtual Adelaide
One of the leading interactive groups to come out of Britain is the Blast Theory who are making interactive gaming projects, installations and mixed reality projects in various major cities of the world. They were based in Adelaide from January to March 2004 under the South Australian Premiers Thinkers in Residence Program in partnership with various other major Australian art corporations. Through the use of real and virtual city cityscapes there is an overlapping of concepts of time and space, with a focus on ideas of absence and presence amongst players online and those on the streets.
Beyond Adelaide
Brook looks at the role of geographic location throughout the ages of art theory and practice. The metaphor of adverse location prompted some baroque theorising about the metropolis as contrast-partner to the provinces...with the onset of neo-conservatism and the supervenience of economically rational accounts of virtue and of value the idea that art is peculiarly sensitive to location because it is more cultural than clothing and footwear came under challenge.. . Addressed in a context that concerns the locality of Adelaide, and beyond.
Young South Australian Art
This article is about hip young artists working outside the field of contemporary art. Even if the changes of the last forty years have meant that liking things for being cool and fashionable has generally lost its polemical significance, my sense is that this still may hold some currency with regard to the specific condition of contemporary art in South Australia . Strickland examines the work of South Australian artist Magosia Miow.
Wet Culture - Playing With Codes
Melentie Pandilovski, the Director of the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, sees the current manifestation of the word experimental in Experimental Art Foundation as relating to biotechnology, consciousness and the places taken up by artist in scientific places where experiments are the usual tasks at hand. In a move away from dry hard-wired technologies the last five years has seen a rise of wetwork and a new subculture within science as artists find new roles in scientific laboratories and ask fresh moral, ethical and aesthetic questions.
Stories: Past, Present and Future
Franchesca Cubillo, the Artistic and Cultural Director of the National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, has a broad cultural background with Spanish Catholic and Filipino cultural infuences fusing seamlessly with her Aboriginal heritage. Aside from her administrative and managing roles at the institute she is also a painter and photographer. Maughan looks at Cubillos life and work as it is shaped through an appreciation of the importance of family and community.
Isolated Interventions
This article explores the artistic and economic viability of living and working in South Australia, a state with less than 400,000 people, most of whom reside in the south-eastern corner. Theres enough professional isolation here to remind us that were living in a world where art is not a self-evident virtue . As a result of living in the geographic margins, artists require considerable ingenuity, flexibility and lateral thinking in order to sustain a viable practice.
In the Far North-West
Colin Koch is the coordinator of Ku Arts, the artists representative and development body, a role which requires him to make the journey up into the northern regions of South Australia, land belonging to the Anangu people, once every six weeks. Koch discusses the significance of Ku Arts: some of the hurdles they have had to overcome and the subsequent milestones this regional indigenous arts centre has acheived.
Can Culture Save the River and Wetlands?
This question 'can culture save the river and wetlands'was put to a debating panel at the annual conference of Country Arts SA in October 2003. The river in question was the Murray. This article takes up some of the important issues surrounding environmental degredation and focuses on the SunRise 21 Artists in Industry Project which saw the collaboration of artists and organizations working together to establish a mutual relationship between arts and the environment.
The Second Experiment: Floating Land 2003
Floating Land 2003 was an event held as part of Noosa Regional Gallerys second major biennial site-specific art project that ended in high drama at 3am on the top of a mountain and one that unexpectedly created a new lobby group. The emphasis for this project was on experimentation both in terms of the art and the notion of what consitutes an event/festival that takes place over a period of time.
Ara Irititja: Protecting the Past, Accessing the Future - Indigenous Memories in a Digital Age
White fellatechnology was once considered a threat to Anangu culture and identity, but when iMacs, data-projectors and printers turned up in Anangu communities, they attracted a great deal of interest and excitement. The above mentioned title was an exhibition that opened at the South Australian Museum in October 2003 and comprised of three remarkable multimedia interactive databases which stand to offer unique opportunities to investigate pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples history and culture.
Community Arts and Artists in the Community
The Parks Arts & Functions Complex is situated in the Parks Community Centre in the Western suburbs of Adelaide, a region made up of many disadvantaged and minority groups. Weekly and fortnightly groups meet to explore different mediums and creative processes, and working without the assistance of a tutor means they rely on each other to develope their skills. The social benefits of these groups are often as important as the creative concerns. The centre invites guest artists to run various workshops to help sustain this interaction amongst members of the community.
Transfiguring ACMI
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) is now just a little over a year old. Housed in a purpose-built venue at Federation Square in Melbourne , ACMI is home to two multi-format cinemas, a variety of exhibition, education and production zones and the Screen Gallery, the largest of its kind in the world and, arguably, the jewel in ACMIs crown. Gye looks at the recent success of the new Screen Gallery and the future direction of ACMI.
Sacred Food: Elizabeth Nyumi
Like many of the people at Balgo, Elizabeth Nyumis early life was a nomadic existence with her family group on the Canning Stock Route. Whe her mother died she walked with her father into the old Catholic mission at Balgo. She began painting for Warlayirti Artists in 1988. Recently a very successful painter, she was invited to show at the 2004 Biennale of Sydney. OBrien examines Nyumis life and work.
The Real Thing: Recent Art of Derek Kreckler
The twenty-first century, it seems, will not be the age of manifestos. Like advertising campaigns and the design of cars and other consumer items, contemporary art has started to look the same....there is no agenda, no politics, no historical claims . As McLean states, for Derek Kreckler, the point of being an artist today is not how well you resist this condition, but how well you can bend it to your own ends. Krecklers work is here positioned in a postminimalist rather than a postmodernist framework.
The Museum is the Message
The fifteen artists involved in Inside SAM's Place all acknowledge the shared language of art objects and museum artefacts.
Distance in our Lives
Exploring collaborations and their relationship to crossdiscipline and cross-cultural art practice is a key interest of Parallelo, South Australia's leading edge performance company. For over 18 years Parallelo have experimented with fusions of culture, media and artform as mediums for artistic expression and for new audience access.
Smart Strategy for Art Education
The marketing of senior secondary art achievement in South Australia, which has seen a rise in popularity in Year 12 art exhibitions, cannot be taken as proof of the depth and sustainability of visual art education in schools across all levels.
The Chapman Brothers
UK artists Jake and Dino Chapman have been the subject of public and media controversy since their emergence on the British art scene in the early 1990s. The Chapmans assert that their shock tactics are in aid of an examination of cultural taboos.
Two Faces of Contemporary Art in China
In these days of 'Theory', innovative curatorial practice calls for a certain empirical discipline; by revealing the arts subtle and yet detectable connections with the social world. Having established this position, Souchou looks at the controversial performance work of Chinese artist Zhang Huan; a practice which displays a confronting yet contemplative look at the relationship between people and society in a post-Mao and contemporary China. An ongoing process of losing oneself in order to understand the effects of cultural and material life, and to animate the desire for release.
The Cost of Creativity?
The fabric of the contemporary art scene in China comprises the densely woven strands of politics, economics and aesthetics specific to the immediate socio-cultural framework: a cloth that is today increasingly more sophisticated that the coarse serge of the past. A vibrant contemporary art scene which emerged in the early 1980's following years of rampant cultural destruction and rigid doctrinal control over its form and content. This article focuses on the economic viability of contemporary Chinese art, a movement that found its key members a part of the lower socio-economic class.
Backflow: Returned Chinese Artists
The decades since China's Great Proletarian Cultural revolution (1966-1976) have witnessed a tide of artists leaving China, and now returning, propelled in part by the desire to locate a healthy climate for art production. There was a time when western society provided a climate more conducive to creativity and these artists sought better living conditions and freedom of thought and expression. Now many of these artists fight a battle over the encroaching forces of materialism and globalisation and there is an increasing backflow of these artists returning to China in the light of new policies valuing creative output and generally higher living standards.
Chinese Art Sydney Style
After more than a decade since many of the Chinese artists who have the highest profiles here migrated to Australia, several of them are currently at a crossroads with respect to their careers and what their next steps will be. As is the case with Guan Wei and Ah Xian, two of the best-known mainland Chinese artists working in Sydney, there has been an invested interest in exposing their work to local and international audiences. Teo looks at some of the initiatives which have propelled these artists work both locally and internationally and the various approaches in bringing together aspects of Australian and Chinese life and culture.
Xiandai Shufa: Brushes With Modernism
As similar to the changes that came to be called 'modernism' in the West in the nineteenth century, the nature of changing artistic traditions in the East are as far-reaching and as significant in that they also prefigure a contestation of the tradition/modernity duality. This article looks specifically at the tradition of Chinese ink painting and calligraphy and the insistence by Chinese critics that evolution - if not revolution - in these forms is occurring. Moreso the concentration here lies with modern calligraphy (xiandai shufu) and the distinguishing of calligraphy from the generalised use of Chinese characters in contemporary art.
Broadening the Scope
The First Beijing Biennale, held in September of 2003 somewhat echoed the Venice Biennale in it's approach to expansive venues and activities. Although Chinese Officials are realising the importance of contemporary art and its role in promoting international activities in Beijing, it is the artists themselves who have managed to expand the scope of contemporary art events in the city. Furthermore the event hosted a series of forums and international conferences to promote dialogue between Chinese experts and their international counterparts.
Thinking About Guan Wei
With Traditional Chinese art education requiring students to master the painting styles of each historic period, it is not surpirising that Guan Wei's own style (having painted systematically from Impressionism to Postmodernism over ten years) has rendered his work appealing to Australian audiences. His works are cool in colour, surreal in style, quirky in wit. Wei's work displays a graphic sensibility and visual language similar to that of Leunig's cartoons and is successful for these exact reasons.
A Lens on Diversity
'To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life' - Ludwig Wittgenstein. So to it is that to read the works of contemporary Chinese photography is to read Chinese social life. During the middle of the 1990's photography was admitted to the canon of contemporary Chinese art and the Chinese economy started to reflect a 'glocal' trend through the merging with the global economy. As a result Chinese artists began experimenting with new media and dialogue between Chinese and international artists became more frequent. This article looks at the diversity and proliferation of contemporary Chinese photography and the shifting perceptions of Chinese society from an international perspective.
Wang Jianwei: Working on the Boundaries
New media in China is probably the most rapidly developing medium used by contemporary artists in that country. As an art form new media characterises a form of communication with an almost endless capacity to be manipulated, making it the perfect tool to express a new artistic confidence. The intent of this article is the concentration on the work of one artist Wang Jianwei, whose work typifies many of the issues being expressed nationally through contemporary art. His is a practice differentiated by the way he slides from media to media allowing the intent of the art to govern the form of expression.
The Decade of the Rise of Chinese Women Artists
Socio-economic conditions and traditional ethics encourage Chinese women to maintain the ideal of harmony between genders, whilst certainly pursuing and endorsing independence. The state of women's art in China is an increasingly pluralistic art establishment within which international feminist thought has been a great source of energy but where there exists a clear opposition to the 'we don't bite' attitude. This article examines the impact of western feminist thought on a group of Chinese women artists who studied in Europe and America and the new awareness of their own feminist identities that came as a result.
Alors, La Chine?
Alors, La Chine? was a major exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at the centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, from 25 June to 13 October 2003. An exhibition of this kind had been planned for several years and included several research visit to China by Pompidou curators. Eventually the French government intervened when it decided that such an exhibition should be part of a planned two-year series of Franco-Chinese exchanges. Clark examines some of the political and ethical issues which surfaced as a result of this major event being held.
Changchun, China: to Confront or Confirm
Scarlett pays homage to the opening of an International Sculpture Park at Changchun, northern China, which bosts 315 works by numerous international and local provincial Chinese artists. Scarlett looks at this event and examines how audiences react to both controversial and more accepted and confirmed art within a society.
Economic Downturn in Hong Kong Breathes New Life Into Culture
The situation today for creative, especially cultural, industries in Hong Kong is perhaps better than it has been for many years. Tsong-Zung looks at the effects of a dramatic economic downturn in Hong Kong as it is providing artists with two of the most defining conditions for creative work, leisure and space.
The Meaning of Aboriginal Art
This essay is not about interpreting Aboriginal art rather it is about the wider issues raised by Aboriginal art, issues that tear through the discrete context of contemporary art and connect it to history, to the everyday, to politics and to the future.
Loop-Back: New Australian Art to Berlin
Engberg writes about FACE UP, a large museum exhibition curated for the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin in October 2003. Britta Schmitz who curated FACE UP was intent on extending the discussion surrounding conceptualism and modernism that is reflected backwards with a sideways glance created by a slow burn effect. Photography was delivered in the works of Rosmary Laing, Simryn Gill and Darren Siwes. Installation, in a variety of manifestations, was offered in works by Patricia Piccinini, Mikala Dywer and Fiona Hall.
Why Correggio Jones is not The Hero of the 2004 Biennale of Sydney
The title of the 2004 Sydney Biennale was Biennale Of Reason and Emotion, the curator was Isabel Carlos, a Portuguese woman who will stress her cultural links with the New World, but in her case it is South America rather than North. One of the ideas she wished to explore through the Biennale was the concept of 'south' in a world dominated by the culture of the 'north'. As she states - "what I really want is to create a Biennale that works on the borders of the perception and on artworks that change our way of seeing the world around us."
A Leaf May Become a Forest
Like nature itself, Hossein Valamanesh's artistic oeuvre is inextricably articulated as an evolution which is cyclical. Following his emigration to Australia in 1973, the diverse, but thematically unified art practice of Valamanesh has come to encompass installation, sculpture and works on linen and paper in addition to substantial public artworks. The intricate patternings of Islamic architecture play out in his work which are consistently fragile and subtle in both appearance and approach.
The Entire Life Behind Things: David Keeling's Little Epiphanies
Timms paints a vivid picture of one of David Keeling's paintings, simultaneously posing questions surrounding how we as audiences deconstruct, interpret and therefore place values on certain images. His argument clearly lies in the appreciating of a process, a journey over the final image, especially when the image is as seemingly banal as that which typifies Keeling's practice. Keeling's previous works tended to acknowledge the traps of both the dewy-eyed romantic and the coldly rationalist approach. With his recent shift from a surreal satirical atmosphere to the common everyday, though the subject matter may be different, the locating of meaning is still the same.
Thinking Big: Spatial Conception in the Art of Dorothy Napangardi
The Warlpiri artist Dorothy Napangardi was born in the late 1940s or early 1950s in the bush near Mina Mina, northwest of Alice Springs at a time when colonisation meant that whites were increasingly encroaching on Walpiri land. Although Napangardi did not begin painting until much later, her childhood spent in the bush gathering the plentiful bush tucker and watching family members catch animals for food has had a critical influence on her artistic work. Because Napangardi did not live in a house in her formative years, the ability to view the landscape in its full 360 degrees enabled a different kind of 'eye' which plays out extensively in her visual scapes. It is in this sense that Nicholls looks at the spatial conceptions of the work of Napangardi.
Warped Reflections
Through this article Clement examines the idea that, as human beings we never tire of looking at ourselves, and we particularly seem to like looking at a self we recognise. In this sense it is not hard to see why Mueck's sculptures are so popular, not only in their satisfying familiarity but also in the sheer technical virtuosity they display. The same cultural anxiety that subtly animates Mueck's seemingly ordinary human figures deforms the flesh of Patricia Piccinini's hyper-real creatures. Subsequent to this idea of self observation, Clement looks at the increasing fluidity of the boundaries of the human body and, through examples of such artistic concerns, questions what it means to be human.
Stone Into Flesh: Julie Rrap
Australian artist Julie Rrap has consistently explored issues of corporeality and history. Her recent Fleshstones series expands upon these interests by directing her attention to public sculpture and, in particular, the relationship between landscape and the body. Using digital photography Rrap questions the hierarchical organisation of space through fusing figure and ground relations together. These images refer largely to the sculptural work of Henry moore and the myth of Galatea, the tradition of figurative sculpture in which stone is transformed into flesh.
Place-Urbanity: A Psycho-Ethnographic Portrait of Melbourne by Jeffrey Shaw
Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw has been at the forefront of interactive new media practice for the past two decades. He has used complex technologies to create large-scale immersive experiences that explore the meeting point between physical touch and human motion, and fantastic and uniquely conceived digital landscapes. He is also the founding Director of the Institute for Visual Media at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in Germany. Right looks at Shaw's film piece Place-Urbanity which premiered in November 2002 and which has proven to be one of the most popular works in the ACMI's collection.
Impressive Risk-Taking: The Ideal City at the Valencia Biennial 2003
While the Venice Biennale remains the pre-eminent visual arts event on the international calendar there are now over 40 similar events that claim to be truly international. One of the newest is held in Spain and its second addition in 2003 gave us a tightly curated, human-scale celebration of ideas with some outstanding exhibitions. Developed expediently over the last five years, taking the community with them, the government is changing face and mindset of what was only ten years ago a city in the grip of chronic decay. Paul Greenaway reports.
Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith
Colin McCahon was born in 1919 in the South Island of New Zealand, in the town of Timaru, that is to say, about as far from the centres of modern art as it is possible to get. The early Italian Renaissance as much as the work of Gauguin and Picasso provided McCahon with his lead in these paintings. Raw and strange, they were greeted with puzzled and angry responses whilst at the same time these profound works secured a number of loyal and powerful supporters. McAloon looks at what was initially a slow and meandering ascent to his career and examines one of McCahon's most well known exhibitions which included 78 of McCahon's works covering the span of his career from 1946 to 1982.
Sideways Glances: South Africa, Australia and Intersections
With the showing of the BHP-Billiton collection of South African art at the RMIT Gallery in late 2002 early 2003, Australians not only saw convincing artworks, but also contemplated a culture that is both akin and alien. Synchronicities and differences in these two cultures and specific artistic experiences played out through the Intersections exhibition, with a recognition of the two nations being joined by mediating a white culture, looking upwards to Europe for inspiration and validation. Peers explores these and other parallels drawn between Australian and South African art and culture and addresses some of our own countries ongoing inequalities and historical misfortunes.
The New Brisbane
Brisbane's coming of age has been announced a number of times, most recently with millennial-expansiveness, in its claim to be the Creative City leading the Smart State. Over the past 15 years the city has spawned new enterprises, a new generation of artists, new cultural policies, new public buildings, and a new sense of grace. With an ugly past left largely unexplained, the focus is on the present and the ambitions for the city. While government and the mainstream media look to the future of the New Brisbane, it has been the role of writers, artists and a few historians to examine the past as part of the task of fully inhabiting the city. This article provides a discourse with Ross Fitzgerald about some of the above mentioned issues.
A History of Forgetting
Anderson looks at one of Brisbanes formative cultural events, The Demolition Show, an exhibition curated by John Stafford in 1986 to mark to demise of the relatively short lived Observatory artist run space and in the fact the whole city block that surrounded it. This notion of demolition is raised in this article not only in the context of this particular event but also as a way of exploring a past which has for the most part fallen through the cracks. As Anderson states: Long after the dust has settled, the perception that Brisbane has no past in visual art, no critical mass, still lingers. Yet it is far from a new issue.
Is Art Built-in Built-out? debating public art
In 1999 Art Built-in was declared public policy by the Queensland Government, mandating that two percent of all construction budgets over $250,000 across governments be allocated to the artworks equating to some $15m worth of arts projects annually. Recently the first in a series of formal debates took place to canvas opinion on results so far. The topic was that the role of the curator is essential to create great public art. Looks at the role of local artists such as Jay Younger and her collaborative partner, architect Michael Rayner as well as Wendy Mills and Jill Kinnear.
The Campfire Group
The Campfire Group is an independent cultural enterprise where Indigenous and cross-cultural perspectives provide the organising principles. This article talks briefly of Balance 1990, the first exhibition held by The Campfire Group, open to Murris and whitefellas alike with curatorial efforst by Michael Eather, Marlene Hall and Marshall Bell. The diversity of Campfire Group's projects over the past few years is testimony to its members ability to transform and reinvent artistic practices and introduce those practices to new audiences. Carrolli looks at the various projects, both local and international, which have contributed to the success of the transitional authorial figure that the Campfire Group has come to be.
Hybrid Arts, Cultural Policy and Chinese Whispers
Recently some of the individual, performance and new media artists who have been collaborating across borders in Brisbane and Queensland have networked their way out of the city and into Europe and Asia. With cross commissions and research and development for contemporary performance work there is a new and vibrant creative export. This article explores some of these artists and their international work and looks at how such collaborated efforts are contributing to a new examination of what culture actually is for a country steeped in its European heritage. Follows the practice of local performance artist Lisa ONeil and her collaborations with Keith Armstrong as well as examining The Bonemap Project initiated by artists Russell Milledge and Rebecca Youdell.
The Artists
Notable for their ability to conduct practices from Brisbane over recent years are Luke Roberts, Scott Redford, Eugene Carchesio, Leonard Brown, Sebastian de Mauro, Gordon Bennett, Joe Furlonger, and Jay Younger, who have all emerged since 1980 into the national (and several into the international) marketplace. These practice are here explored in all their diversity. Martin-Chew looks at the increase in available resources and some of the opportunities that Brisbane has to offer for young and emerging artists wanting to break into the local and international art scene. Other artists discussed include Jemima Wyman, Lisa Adams, Rod Bunter, Vernon Ah Kee, Sandra Selig, Andrea Higgins and Michael Zavros.
New Media Art in Brisbane
The investigation of New Media Art is especially relevant in a city that is hyped with the rhetoric about critical mass in the New Media and Creative Industries. Machan here attempts to redraw some lines of definition in what the term New Media Art actually means, as it is often seen as a doomed and short-lived handle. She does this through examining some of the key New Media artists (including Craig Walsh, Keith Armstrong, Tim Plaisted, Bonemap, Trish Adams, Di Ball, Grant Stevens, Jenny Fraser, Simone Hine, Alex Gillespie, Jay Younger, Adam Donovan, Andrew Kettle and Molly Hankwitz) and the difference between New Media and other visual arts as well as looking at government support and initiatives in the line of New Media Arts.
Fuelling Innovation: Starting Young
Over the last two decades, Queensland has generated an arts and innovation culture for children and youth. Brisbanes distinguished reputation in the arts for young audiences rests on several solid foundations, most developed with support from major civic organisations, cultural institutions and successive governments. To understand how critic mass for childrens participation in the arts has been achieved, this article looks at a few of the formative events such as Play and Prime held at the Queensland Art Gallery and the popularity of artists such as Yayoi Kusama and Cai Guo Qiang amongst young audiences.
Prime Two
With the redevelopment of many inner-city dwellings which in the past were alternative hot spots for the local youth, Brisbane was left with very few arts venues catering for youth-specific programs, and limited opportunities for young artists to present their work. In 2001 the Queensland Art Gallery appointed an Access and Youth Program Officer and 2003 saw Prime Two, a six-hour long celebration of youth culture for National Youth Week. The intensity of Prime Two transformed the gallery into a festive and lively venue and created an experience that was reminiscent of an adventure rather than a visit to a state institution. Featured artists include Jemima Wyman, Arryn Snowball, Anne Wallace, Brett Whiteley and James Gleeson.
Moving Beyond Pragmatism: filmmaking in Queensland
The local film production community in South-East Queensland has come a long way, and over the past decade it has been important for local filmmakers to lay claim to an authentic local production that has achieved commercial if not critical success in the box office. Ward looks at those feature films and documentaries (Blurred, Under The Radar, Getting Square and Feeling Sexy) which have contributed to the emerging critical mass of the local film industry and the current debate surrounding creative pragmatism within this fledgling sector.
'Glocal' Government: Cross Cultural Understanding
David Hinchliffe has been a Councillor with Brisbane City for 15 years. He is also a photographer and exhibiting artist with 16 exhibitions to date. His background makes him a powerful supporter of Brisbanes art scene. Artlink asked him to tap into his experience and tell us how the new Brisbane came into being and where it is headed next.
Always Remember: there is no past
This article examines Brisbanes steeped conservative polical history and looks at the radical changes which occured as a result of the early 1990s shift to a Labour goverment. As an aftermath to the anti-climax that was the 1988 World Expo, the 90s was a decade which saw the Queensland Art Gallery embark on new avenues of experimentation and a new confidence was in the air. Furthermore Hoffie addresses the ongoing lack of substantial criticism in relation to arts and cultural development as many saw this as the single most pressing problem dogging the local scene.
Great White Sharks
Holubizkys article deals with the ever present attitude that Brisbane is a city 20 years behind the times in the cultural sector and poses the question as to what this really means? Culture has become a business only within the relative scheme of things, and ahead may only be the false competitive edge and gamesmanship of regional-urban cultural ambition. Comparisons, therefore, should not be made lightly, nor benchmarks for the vitality of a cultural milieu. Discusses the works of Craig Walsh, Eugene Carchesio, Caitlin Reid and Vernon Ah Kee.
Parallel Precincts
Once depressed inner-city suburbs that were havens for students, migrants, artists and fringe communities, the high profile precincts of South Brisbane/West End and Fortitude Valley/New Farm have developed into fast-growing centres of urban residential and cultural development. The Millennium Arts Program now underway will see the expenditure of over $100 million on the development of a new Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) through the Queensland Art Gallery's Two Sites-One Visionstrategy. Heather locates the diversity of Brisbane's arts and culture scene through such new and existing precincts, establishments which mark an exciting transformation in the future of the cities art scene.
A Memory of Times Past
Australia's 'official culture', the face that government puts on to show the country to the world has changed, and although those changes were set in motion well before the events of 11 September 2001, they are only now beginning to emerge as defining forces. Mendelssohn looks at the role of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games as a celebration of Australia's diversity and one of the main catalysts for such change. However, there is a darker side to all of this celebratory glory which Mendelssohn has addressed with reference to Australia's political climate and the granting of permission to express its collective worst feelings of fear and loathing.
Refugee stories: Afghanistan & Iran
The Migrant and Workers Resource Centre (MWRC) was established in Brisbane in 1995 by a group of migrant factory workers, with the aim of providing assistance to migrant communities. Recently, the MWRC conducted an independent investigation into the condition of refugees released from detention centres and now residing in Brisbane. The MWRC coordinator and the centre's consultant psychologist, Madonna Abella, visited the homes of refugees for face-to-face interviews, assisted by an interpreter. This article presents the findings of these interviews and the individual experiences of the refugees.
Borderpanic: open channel on refuge
Borderpanic was a conference and tactical media lab hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, a seminar hosted by Metroscreen and an exhibition at the Performance Space. It was a coming together of artists, activists, cultural theorists and people of social conscience examining a world of burning borders. Many of the artworks exhibited at the Performance Space reflected in positive mode the documentation, connectivity and networking between people around the planet. Some of the artists included in these shows were Julian Burnside, Ghassan Hage, Mickey Quick, Geert Lovink, Stephen Best and Peter Lyssiotis.
The Pathos of Boat People
On 10th April 1999, a large boat carrying 60 passengers and crew who had travelled all the way from China seeking asylum arrived on the shores of the small town of Scotts Head on the mid North coast of NSW. Shayne Higson created a series of poetic images in response to this desperate attempt for freedom. These poignant photographs present the remnants of these asylum seekers, the striped plastic bags and rusting hulk which were abandoned and replaced by suits, ties and good shoes, items worn by the refugees in an attempt to fit in with the mainland surroundings.
Ambient Fears
Artlink here prints a slightly abbreviated version of Nikos Papastergiadis essay which was first delivered as a lecture in Finland on 30 September 2001. This essay covers issues surrounding the idea of the other, the enemy, and discusses some of the ramifications of the events of September 11. In november that year it was used as a companion piece to the exhibition Fallout at the Victorian College of the Arts. The Exhibition featured artists Destiny Deacon, Elizabeth Gower, Homi Vesal, Jarrad Kennedy, Justine Khamara amongst others. Nikos Papastergiadis is Deputy Director of the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne.
Fallout: Quick Response to 9/11
Fallout was a quick response exhibition that only lasted for one week. The show examined the impact on art of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, globalisation and the refugee crisis. The thirty-seven artists who participated, each at different stages in their careers, contributed their work purely on political conviction. Many of the works in the show were quite raw, and captured this desire to re-express the shock of the violence towards the western world, but also the violent and brutal way the western world sought revenge. Sanja Pahoki and Rowan Douglas were amongst those to exhibit.