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An Artist's Project: Banduk Marika
Margie West talks to NE Arnhem Land artist Banduk Marika about artists working in Yirrkala, an Aboriginal community. She addresses traditional ceremonies today, the appropriate use of traditional designs, payment for work, copyright, and working to redress environmental damage to the beaches and lands by regenerating native trees and plants.
Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art
East to West: Land in Papunya Tula Painting
Painting movement at Papunya 1971-75 one of the few positive offshoots of the Government's Assimilation Policy. Senior men began to paint on boards and made murals for the school, initially showing sacred secret material, later self-censored. Paintings use complex patterning and dotting to describe formation of land by Ancestors, natural features and travel.
Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art
Decrepitude in Venice
Report about the 48th Venice Biennale 1999. Discusses works by various artists as the Millennium approaches: Sergei Bugarev, Thomas Hirschorn, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Federica Thiene, Stephanie Mantovani, Dieter Roth and Louise Bourgeois. Focus on disintegration in the city of Venice.
Disintegration
The Future Breed: Creatures and Mad Science
Explores the links between film and computer generated games which emulate life. With the creation of artificial intelligence on the computer, complex questions of the nature of human behaviour are raised. Science fiction confronts issues of intelligence and sentience.
Disintegration
Who's Afraid of the Prosthetic?
Explores relationships between human participants and the machine. Describes two projects Fuzzylove Dating Data Base and The Brain Project which use their location in a technological matrix as a means of exploring inter-relationships between the user and the their sources of energy and fear, Discusses formulation of information --the computer and related technologies -- as an industry.
Disintegration
Things Falling Apart: The Work of Ian Howard
Discusses Professor Ian Howard's visit to Beijing - his earlier frottage works from the days of the Vietnam war and the Berlin Wall as well as the large computer painted image making. Howard's work represents direct encounters with the real world combining personal and esoteric images with public and popular ones.
Disintegration
A Contradiction in Time: Bleak Days After Meltdown
Independent film making is experiencing an exciting resurgence in the wake of great social and cultural change. Looks specifically at films and videos from Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Thailand screened at the 23rd Hong Kong International Film Festival.
Disintegration
Sorties into the City: The art of Elmer Borlongan and Emmanuel Garibay
Explores the works of two contemporary artists of the Philipines who paint the city -- Manila -- in expressionist style, depicting narratives of survival amid inhuman conditions. Borlongan as a resident and Garibay as a commuter express their views of the city in different ways.
Disintegration
Fashion for Civil Disturbance Bandung-Style
An interview by Damon Moon with Rifky Effendy, a curator and artist based in Bandung Indonesia. Effendy's curatorial project Wearable has been exhibited in Indonesia. The project explores some of the living conditions in Indonesia in the times leading up to the resignation of Suharto. The idea of clothing is used as a metaphor for identity --camouflage or exposure vulnerability or protection.
Disintegration
Bored with Polite Language: Dissidents and Reformasi
Currently in Indonesia there is a remarkable tendency to speak, write and create art works using critical, open, and sometimes vulgar language. The contemporary art scene is full of social and political intent. Describes works by Juni Wulandari, Iwan P Wijono, Toni Volunteero and Mella Jaarsma.
Disintegration
Marginalia: Photography of the Here, Now
Examination of the issues raised when documentary photographers represent the alienated margins of our society despite an openly dismissive and hostile critical environment. Examines the works of photographers working in Australia who use various strategies and methodologies to document the margins. Explores the difference between photojournalism and documentary.
Disintegration
Life and Death on Aboriginal Land with Anne Mosey
Exploration of the work of Anne Mosey who attempts with her installations and collaborations with indigenous artists to represent the tumultuous and often tragic events of life in Aboriginal communities, in particular Yuendumu, where death and grieving are ever present elements. Discusses collaboration with Dolly Nampijinpa Daniels which explore familial and cultural histories from a dual perspective.
Disintegration
Naming and Reclaiming: The Searching Eye of Pam Lofts
Central Australia remains at the post-colonial interface where issues such as reconciliation, cultural dislocation and otherness are daily issues. Examines the work of Pam Lofts and her relationship as a white artist working in such an environment. Explores the distinctions between the European concept of landscape and the indigenous focus on country.
Disintegration
Taking Control of the Grog: Yuendumu
Mosey who acted as consultant for a video project by Pat Fiske, Valerie Napaljarri Martin and Tom Kantor which documented the damaging impact of alcohol on indigenous communities tells of the making of this video. It documents the history of the Yuendumu Women's Night Patrol from 1991.
Disintegration
Traumatising States: Film Reflects Dysfunction
How dysfunction, abuse, drugs, gambling, war, suicide etc are depicted through the moving image. Argues that artists are able to tease out psychic and emotional states and present them in ways which are not spectacularised as entertainment for a consumerist culture. Examines particular examples to support his argument. Refer to artists list.
Disintegration
TV Docos and Realpolitik
The author Des Kootji Raymond as the director discusses with Jeffrey Bruer, co-writer, editor and associate producer, the production of a controversial television documentary ÒWrap me up in PaperbarkÓ. The documentary is about indigenous peoples right to reclaim the remains of their elders who were forcibly removed from their homelands as children. Discusses the repatriation of remains of Aboriginal people from museums.
Disintegration
Ethnicity and Excellence in the Arts
One of the leading debates in Cultural Studies around the world deals with the issues of cultural difference or ethnicity in relation to concepts of a national culture.
Arts in a Multicultural Australia
Living out the Abject/Subject
Larry Clark is a well known American photographer and film maker. The Experimental Art Foundation mounted an exhibiton of photographs from the 1960s through to the 1980s as well as a series from the film Kids. Clark's trademark is gritty realism and under age sexuality. Discussion of the boundaries of eroticism and pornography.
Disintegration
Laughing and Killing: The Guilty Pleasures of Anime
Anime (Japanese animation) is increasingly violent and yet the Japanese level of violence is much lower than in America. Viewed as an escapist form of entertainment with female characters idealised and existing in a male fantasy land runs counter to the Wests view of feminism. This form of popular culture is a useful vehicle to examine the country's psyche.
Disintegration
Reconstructing Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Visual arts in South Africa since the 1970s have played an important role in the struggle for freedom. They have chronicled the country's history of political oppression, chaos and transformation. Artworks today investigate a highly individuated sense of the political self.
Disintegration
Disqualified Knowledges: Insight into Disturbance at Splash
Explores the positioning of artworks made by people with a mental disability looking specifically at the arts access program --Splash Art Studio. The studio encourages the voice of the participants each attempting to articulate their own knowledge. The studio operates between the dominant voices of the psychiatric and art institutions making possible a space for people to develop their own ways of working.
Disintegration
Faites Vos Jeux: Aesthetics and Dis/Order in Kennett's Victoria
Explores the idea that basic qualitative aesthetic lifestyle values in Australia are by no means neutral but highly coloured by political judgements. The mood and style of the governance of Victoria can be read as an issue of taste and lifestyle as well as political ability/responsibility.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
Pictures on Plates
Divided into subheadings 'The Parsley Garnish' 'La Nouvelle Cuisine' 'Transgressions' the author explores the role of food and decoration -- pictures on plates -- in Australian (and wider) cuisine from the 1950s through to the 1990s. Refers to Marinetti's The Futurist Cookbook of 1932. Examines photographs of food and the paradox of indulgence and self denial.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
Mediterranean Paradise: artists and the kitchen: David Strachan and John Olsen
Examination of the work of David Strachan and John Olsen from the 1950s in Europe to Australia in the 1980s and the pleasures of painting and food. Linking of painting with the recipes and philosophies of Elizabeth David.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
Breadline: Women and Food
Since the advent of 1970s feminism, the joining of women food and art has been about mixing a metaphoric concoction of consciousness raising, community and corporeality. Looks at women's art movement practice in South Australia
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
Cookbooks
Examines the relationship between food, cookbooks and the art of illustration. Cooking however elaborate is always about the assuaging of hunger but.....Looks at Elizabeth David's 'Italian Food' published in 1954 and illustrated by Renato Guttoso. John Minton had illustrated David's earlier books.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
Bush Tucker: Some Food for Thought
Bush tucker (food and medicinal purposes) for indigenous communities is looked at in terms of commercial opportunities with traditional knowledge finding application in contemporary contexts. Examines the role of aboriginal people in scientific research and subsequent commercial exploitation. Also looks at issues of Aboriginal intellectual property.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
Honey: It's Meaning in Aboriginal Art
Across the far north of Australia, honey is enshrined at the centre of life's meaning as a nourishing and creative presence in a landscape derived from the Ancestral Beings themselves. Looks at the visual representations of honey for the Dhuwa and Yirritja people. Discusses the creation myths and their contemporary expressions in bark paintings and sculptures.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
Nostalgia, Nation and Gobstuff
Linking of food and memory == elements of nostalgia for other times and places. Proust and James Joyce and the role of food in their writing and the centrality of place or locality in food. The 'authentic' and the 'other' have been amalgamated.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
Greek as a Souvlaki
Musings on seeds, weeds and the author's mother's cooking. An exploration of Greek food, issues of multiculturalism and history. Touches on genetically modified food and colonisation.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
Fast Food: Don't spoil your appetite
Art and its relation to the museum may be seen in terms of the analogy of food passing along the intestinal tract. Looks at exhibitions like EAT 1998. Food is one kind of culture that is always in demand. Why not give the public what it wants. Eating in art galleries may break down the barriers of art as an exclusive kind of experience,
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
An Gotta Mor: A Sculpture for the Irish Famine
In 1999 The Australian Monument to the Great Irish Famine at Hyde Park Barracks was unveiled. Designed by Hossein and Angelea Valamanesh, it commemorates the arrival in Australia of young women many of whom were orphaned by the great hunger. National competition within the constraints of the Francis Greenway building and historic precincts.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
Force-Fed: Food in the Art of Destiny Deacon.
Discusses 'Home Video' made in 1987, 'Welcome to my Koori World' (1992) and 'I don't want to be a Bludger' (1999). Food in these videos is the bearer of sly innuendo, misguided intentions, complicated emotions. In these invented worlds food is either inedible, unnourishing or unavailable or a lurid torrent of junk food.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
Homemade: The Rosalind Brodsky Cookery Show
Looks at the CD Rom by Suzanne Treister 'No other symptoms - Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky'. There are two cooking segments on the CD. The cooking demonstrations are imbued with historical and cultural pain and prejudice.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
My Millennium Dome: Domes Tripe and Teacups in the art of Donna Marcus
Donna Marcus series of Millennium Domes imagine the everyday aesthetic practices of living in houses and with objects in terms inflected by processess of memory, dream and the imagination. Reference to the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller organic materials and recycling.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
Nariphon: How to eat a bowl of noodles
Examines the series of paintings Nariphon I-III by Phaptawan Suwannakudt which deal with issues of change and consumption, absorption of multicultural practices into dominant cultures -- Prostitution (girl fruit) and survival in Thailand. Her work blurs the distinctions between meditation and revolution (east and west) and between tradition and modernity.
Good Taste: Food, Consumption & Pleasure
Polemic: The End of Art Schools as we know them?
Art and sport both attempt to construct value and meaning within our lives. For art this is a likely outcome. For media sport it is a contrived ingredient. Artists and art schools have perpetuated a myth about the importance and value of art objects. Suggests possible answers to the issues of teaching art in art and design schools.
The Future of Art
Polemic: Practice Makes Perfect: Art Museums, Audiences and the Future.
Examines how galleries, art spaces and arts infrastructure might evolve over the next 25 years to accommodate changes in interaction between artists and audiences. Focus is on the State Galleries and how we might present the multiplicity of view points from the last 30 + years. Resource issues are explored.
The Future of Art
A Worthwhile Investment: The Ceramics of Pippin Drysdale
Examination of the ceramic works of Pippin Drysdale of Western Australia from her early years through to the 1999 Festival of Perth. Looks at her national and international successes.
The Future of Art
The Rise and Rise of Michael Eather
Examines the work of Michael Eather as art maker, gallery director, educator, project promoter and consultant. He established Campfire Consultancy with others. Also established the Fireworks Gallery: Aboriginal Art and other Burning Issues in Brisbane, Queensland.
The Future of Art
Talking about Ethics: Marie Sierra takes on her audience
Examines the career of Marie Sierra from her arrival in Australia in 1984, her coming to Melbourne in 1986 and her Barcelona studio residency in the mid 1990s. Explores how the roles of academic and artist sustain and inform each other. Deals specifically with works 'Justice' 1992 , 'Do that Job' 1993, 'Knowledge is Power' 1994, 'Planning' 1995, 'Public Address' 1995, 'Separation and Growth' 1996.
The Future of Art
Striking a Chord: David Keeling's Postcolonial Tasmania
The measure of an artist's public success is the extent to which his or her art matters to a particular community. David Keeling aims to present a critical discourse that participates in existing social and political debates. His turning point was not completing his post-graduate degree, not moving to the big smoke or winning a grant or prize, or having a sell-out exhibition but a revelation.
The Future of Art
Hossein Valamanesh: Taking the Intuitive Path
Valamanesh has developed a unique and characteristic art vocabulary and his eloquent work occupies a distinct and prominent position in Australian art. Looks at 'the Untouchable' 1984, 'Pyramids with Light - Inside/Outside' 1980, 'Change of Seasons'.
The Future of Art
Deschooling Art
Education is the second most depressing non-subject in the entire catalogue of non-subjects, beginning with the Aardvark as Social Construct and ending with The Flagant Signifier in Finno-Ugric Zyrian,
The Future of Art
Thin Red Pocket Lining: A Note on the Value of University Art Schools
As it rushes headlong towards the stock exchange, lining its tattered pockets by devilishly offering students the educational stock of the deepest desire, university art schools shed its role under modernity of defining and transmitting cultural value. Mammon replaces machismo in the squeezing of art. And yet....?
The Future of Art
How the Tail Now Wags the Dog
One would have to be a marketing executive, or just extremely sanguine, to see much that is good in the current system for funding teaching and research in our universities. This is not to claim that the Dawkins reforms replaced something wonderful or fair. But we now have a system that is actively promoting mediocrity ona a national, even international scale. Let me explain, for the uninitiated how it works.
The Future of Art
An Identity Crisis for Art Education?
Examines recent reports by the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs [DEETYA] and Strand 1998 'Research in the Creative Arts'. Should our retort be 'If you don't know much about art I don't care what you like.' ?
The Future of Art
The Traditional and the New - Artists and Teachers Please Note
Explanation of the benefits to the artist and the environment of working with photopolymer plates (solar plates) in printmaking.
The Future of Art
Virtual Futures for New Media Art: A Report on dLux Media Arts' Immersive Conditions Forum
New media art has developed a close if troubled relationship with the figure of the future. Discusses Troy Innocent's ICONICA, Mousetrap by Ian Haig, RAPT by Justine Cooper, OSMOSE and EPHEMERE by Char Davies and Immersive Conditions a forum held at the Powerhouse Museum Sydney. Examines concepts of virtual reality and apparent reality.
The Future of Art
Forget the White Gloves: Plug-ins Rule OK ANAT National School for New Media Curation
ANAT Australian Network for Art and Technology devised its 1999 National School, me.d.ia.te, to assist curators and arts workers in gaining a technical and theoretical understanding of new media art exhibition practice. It aimed to provide a 'world's best practice' model.
The Future of Art
A Country Practice...
The Northern Rivers Region of NSW has more practising artists per head of population than any other region of Australia. Issues such as surviving as a country artist, traditional art practice, commercial considerations, prescribed political and gender issues are raised. Critiques the project 'Beyond the Basin' funded by the NSW Ministry for the Arts and its resultant exhibition 'A Country Practice'.
The Future of Art
New Geographies of Knowledge
Explores the relationship between art making in the city and the regional areas. How much do curatorial strategies or templates order and determine what we see in State galleries and large exhibitions? Looks at the exhibition 'Palimpsest #2' to raise questions of curatorial control or whether it should continue without such controls.
The Future of Art
One Pole Too Many? Learning to Speak the Language of a Successful Australian Arts Practitioner
Discusses the exhibition 'Diaphanous' at Span Galleries curated by Kirsten Rann, deconstructing and challenging the notion of multicultural artist.
The Future of Art
Unheard Voices: Asian Artists in Australia
Discussion of the issues for artists of Asian descent in the Australian milieu, exploring issues of identity and displacement. Unheard voices could also characterise emerging artists as well as those from a multicultural background.
The Future of Art
Art Teachers Hampered by Lack of Training
Art teachers today are expected to have a greater proficiency in a broader range of art skills, yet due to the under funding of teacher training they are receiving less training and professional development to prepare them for the classroom. Discusses the 1999 International Society of Education through Art (InSEA) the theme being 'Cultures and Transitions' held in Brisbane. 1st conference held in 1951
The Future of Art
The Artist and the Critic
Fortunately not all critics are so urgently in need of friends that they write hymns of praise after every long lunch. Some even relish being labelled 'ungrateful'. I would argue that the only critic worth reading is an ungrateful critic. Looks at the role of visual art criticism in the newspaper columns of the daily press.
The Future of Art
Hypothetical Product
Critics rarely talk about money and art. How to price a work of art and how to make a living of about $35,000 per annum are discussed. Artist need to work out how to make a name for themselves to increase the base price of their artworks. And anyway if you have to think about the price, chances are you can't afford it.
The Future of Art
The Good the Bad and the GST
The role of the arts within the Federal Coalition portfolio. Proposed new tax arrangements suggest a contraction in support for new innovative work in favour of much more conservative, market driven high end focussed practice, and a drop overall in arts activity.
The Future of Art
Upping the Ante: SALA'99.Leter to the Editor
Describes the nature of SALA South Australian Living Artists Week to celebrate the talent and imagination of SA artists and aims to promote widespread recognition of their achievements by exposing their work to new audiences. There were 50 venues, 28 of which were outside the metropolitan area.
The Future of Art
User-friendly Internet Options for the Arts
Dynamic interactive web-sites are becoming increasingly the norm. Lists the types of functions that are available using particular technology.
The Future of Art
Polemic: Object and Text
"So the question raised for art theory is this....Is a physical autographic sculpture - a Brancusi woodcarving for example - only an 'instantiation'(albeit rather a privileged one) of some imperceptible, intentional object that is the 'real' sculpture? Are sculptures more literally than metaphorically - 'poetry in stone'? Are they in a word 'texts' whose proper reading (as we are told) had best be undertaken in French?"
Four Shoes Many Signs
Four artist's projects initiated by the National Gallery of Victoria engage contemporary art practices and the role of the museum and public galleries as mediators between the collections and the viewers. Impacts on policies regarding the moral rights of artists.
Artists and Collections: a working partnership
The notion of the artist working with the museum collection is not new. Historically, artists have drawn inspiration from museums and their diverse collections - archaeological, ethnographic, medical, botanical and zoological- as a basis for academic studies and finished works.
Is there an Artist in the Museum?
Examines two multi-site exhibitions Archives and the Everyday, Canberra Contemporary Art Space September/October 1997 curated by Trevor Smith: and Collected, Photographer's Gallery London June 1997 curated by Neil Cummings. The museological urge in artists has for some time been a part of contemporary practice...leading to the new museology.
The TMAG Commissions 1998
Here at the end of the twentieth century, the world is having to come to terms with the socio-political, economic and environmental legacies of nineteenth century imperialism. Contemporary art participates in this post colonial discourse: issues of ancestry and inheritance, relations between indigenous and settler peoples, national and imperial mythology, mapping and borders, migration and language, ecology and exploitation - these are increasingly familiar themes.
Mining the Archive
Fabricating Archives: Six New Zealand Artists confuse the system
In New Zealand, conceptual and post conceptual artists from the 1970s to the present have incorporated various references to the archive; its contents, classificatory systems and its institutional adjuncts, the library, the art gallery and the museum.
Mining the Archive
Wunderkammern: Actual and Virtual
The notion of the Wunderkammern is discussed in the work of Shiralee Saul (an on-line hypertextual essay for the World Wide Web WWW) and Luke Roberts ( a series of exhibitions from 1990 onwards).
Mining the Archive
Market Mark-Art: Forgotten Fruit
In the final stages of the demolition of the old Adelaide fruit and vegetable markets, Margaret Dodd and Jennifer Hughes collaborate to produce an installation which caught the echoes of the history displayed in situ at the markets.
Mining the Archive
Photosynthesis: Two approaches
The photograph as a source and subject for photographic practice iteself is characteristic of the work of a great many artists today. Tracey Moffatt and Margaret Dawson's works are considered. Each draws on photographs which precede their own, but work in markedly different ways.
Mining the Archive
Debra Phillips: List
'List' examines Phillips recent investigations into issues of memory, history and renown, and the structuring of such through systems of language representation and communication. The work traverses the worlds of royalty, theatre, film, science, politics, literature and fashion. The images range across a period of 150 years.
Mining the Archive