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Arts on the ABC: Chris Westwood and the New Deal for Radio National and ABC FM
Chris Westwood and the New Deal for Radio National and ABC FM.
10th Birthday Issue
Ausgraph 90 Arts and Video Show
Over 100 individuals, companies and institutions contributed to the success of teh Ausgraph 90 Art and Video Program.
10th Birthday Issue
Contemporary Soviet Art
How can one describe contemporary Soviet fine art? How is it connected with the heritage of the avant garde of the revolutionary years? How are they related to the urgent problems of international art?
10th Birthday Issue
What It Is Not; Misreading the East
The Wall is down. The east is no longer red. Did we win? The Washington Post has called it the end of history, so something must be happening.
10th Birthday Issue
Art in Vietnam Now
A report from a week's visit to art schools, museums, galleries and artists' organisations in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City October 1990.
10th Birthday Issue
Treading Terra Technic
Advanced Technology Artworks by Paula Dawson and Jill Scott.
10th Birthday Issue
Ripples from the Margin: Refractory Speculations on the Myths of Oz
About 95% of registered Australian architects are male. As writers on architecture, women are most likely to be found in our 'traditional' role as hagiographers - disciplinary 'handmaidens to the Heroes' - chronicling the erection of Icons and the cultural penetration of Canons - often described as 'seminal works'.
10th Birthday Issue
Art in Space
As artists strive to turn outer space iinto a new canvas for creative expression, some of their proposals have provoked controversy.
10th Birthday Issue
Fred Truck's ArtEngine
A case study in the problematics of software art. The author test drives Fred Truck's ArtEngine a robot artwork that makes art. (sic). The work is in the form of a sizable piece of software written for the Mac2 computer.
10th Birthday Issue
The Many Faces of Design
A festival for schools initiated by the Key Centre for Design at RMIT aims to encourage young people to explore aspects of their human made environment.
10th Birthday Issue
Traces of Light: An Interview with Thierry Kuntzel
The slide from film to video may perhaps one day be compared to the move away from the alexandrine and toward free verse poetry - out of this there emerged a reflection on the literary fate of language and the same is happening today for the image.
10th Birthday Issue
Parables of Criticism
Looks at the current issues in the art versus craft debate and the impact of post modern theories.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Toward a Typology of Small Objects
With increasing anxiety, we face searching questions of the viability, the integrity, the destiny of craft. In themselves, the questions are salutory and point to an intellectual vitality in craft culture, a vigour and toughness which have not existed since the Arts and Crafts Movement. Responses to the challenge vary from relish in the contradictions of craft practice to the old-fashioned despair for any debate whatsoever.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
The Floating Web
For centuries now, textiles and the skills required in their creation - spinning, weaving, embroidery, sewing, quilting - have been considered women's work, occupying them indoors while men engaged in more serious activities like warfare.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Why Craftwork Does Not Compute
Will the computers, mobile or immobile, take over craft work in the near or medium future? Are craftspeople doomed to the fate of the Indian hand loom weavers of the last century-- will their bones bleach the plains? The answer is........
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Craft, Science and the Natural: An Introduction
There seems to be a consensus that craft is in a state of crisis. But consensus or not, the observation of this alleged crisis is sterile if we do not place it against its background. Is this crisis unique to craft, or is it a manifestation of a more general crisis which extends across other cognate areas? If it is more general, does it nevertheless have special implications for craft?
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
The Watch, the Pen and the Biro
To demonstrate the extent to which our relationship to the objects we possess has changed, Kevin Murray recently gave a short impromptu performance during a recent lecture, systematically removing a number of possessions and apparel from his person.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
The Archaeological Metaphor: A Personal Excavation
Now as a much older woman with another career as an artist I have been reconsidering my experience in Museums, reconsidering the structures of archaeology which grid and measure the chaotic site.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Distant Lives/ Shared Voices
Written with Janis Jefferies. Discusses the 1992 artist initiated and organised international forum for tapestry weavers in Lodz Poland.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
The Reflections of a Taxidermist
I view my memories as a fragmented collage of life, constantly in review and abstracted through the shifting of time and place. Taking and putting together some of these fragments I recall how I became a taxidermist.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
After the Art/Craft debate: Critical Writing into the 1990s
Most writers and researchers in the visual arts and crafts would now consider the debate about the difference between art and craft to be an old chestnut whose day has well and truly gone. Refers to the debates between David Bromfield and Anne Brennan.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Touching Things Lightly: The Furniture of Kevin Perkins
Kevin Perkins and the Parish Church of St Thomas Acquinas, Charnwood ACT. A model for collaborative design. Consummate technical skills, the continuance of long-established traditions which focus on excellence and a fundamental reverence for the qualities of the materials are discussion points that are, at times, given minimal attention when the products of today's craftspeople and designer/makers are discussed.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Design Visions: International Exchange: Time for a Stocktake
Design Visions; The second Australian International Crafts Triennial on show at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in August September 1992 provided a chance for local viewers, historians, critics, artists, designers and 'craftspeople' to discuss and possibly take stock of our place in the international arena.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Jill Smith: Artist/ Designer in Industry
Looks at the ceramic practice of Jill Smith. It often happens when people with different views and areas of expertise are brought together to solve a problem that something new emerges.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
NSW Tafe: A Different Approach to Ceramics
It turned out that 95% of the symposiasts were blissfully unaware that, starting with the TAFEs, they are already in the era of funding allocation on the basis of conceptually incoherent doctrines of an 'arts industry' with about as much relevance to their interests as atonal music has to the board of BHP.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
The Problem of Orthodoxy in Contemporary Glass
In her introductory notes to the exhibition 'Glass: Material in the service of meaning' the artist Ginny Ruffner comments on the current field of glass art as "being awash in objects, some beautiful, some ugly, most about glass itself - material as content."
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Making a Living: The Jam Factory
In May 1992, Stephanie Radok spoke to Frank McBride, Peter Tysoe, Stephen Bowers, David Adderton and Greg Healey about recent developments at the Jam Factory Craft and Design Centre in Adelaide, South Australia.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Two Countries, One Weave?
Written with Phillip (Piri) Everett Over the last year Tandanya (National Aboriginal Cutural Institute) has received much bad publicity but is carrying on and slowly and steadily making history. It opened in 1989 with celebrations featuring Ernabella Inma and Yothu Yindi. Includes photographs of indigenous women at weaving workshops in the South East of South Australia at Camp Coorong Cultural Centre.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Marketing from the Top End
Representatives from seven screenprint workshops in remote and indigenous Australia came together in March 1992 to attend a textile marketing forum in Darwin organised by Steve Anderson, co-ordinator of ANCAA (Association of Northern and Central Australian Aboriginal Artists).
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
From Italowie to Chambers Gorge - A New Tapestry
When travelling by car over long distances the landscape outside the window endlessly unfolds as a field of subtly carying colour and texture punctuated by the irregular rhythm of straggling trees and bushes.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Futurology...Crafts...
Margaret Kirkwood, craft practitioner from NSW and active in the Craft Council within her State, writes her prediction for the future of crafts in Australia.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Futurology...Crafts...
David Walker, craft practitioner from Western Australia and active in the Craft Council within his State, writes his prediction for the future of crafts in Australia.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Futurology...Crafts...
Marion Marshall,craft practitioner from Victoria, and active in the Craft Council within her State, writes her prediction for the future of crafts in Australia.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
4 Jewellery Co-operatives: On Staying in the Black: Fluxus
Looks at the workshop Fluxus in Dunedin in New Zealand, formed by Kobi Bosshard and Stephen Mulqueen in 1983.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Futurology...Crafts...
Helmut Lueckenhausen, craft practitioner from NSW and active in the Craft Council within his State, writes his prediction for the future of crafts in Australia.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
4 Jewellery Co-operatives: On Staying in the Black: Fingers
Looks at the Jewellery Co-operative Fingers formed in 1976 in Auckland New Zealand. Fingers sells the work of 30 New Zealand jewellers with a managment partnership of 6 to 8 practising jewellers. The rest sell on consignment basis.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
4 Jewellery Co-operatives: Ipso Factory Company
Ipso Facto Company formed in 1984 by 5 ex-students from the Sydney College of the Arts.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
4 Jewellery Co-operatives: Gray Street Workshop
Looks at the workshop Gray Street, Adelaide, South Australia.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
The Western Way - Linney's, Argenta and Others
Western Australia has a tradition of artist/craftspeople with studio - gallery -shops.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Yurundiali - Reasons for Optimism
The predominant group in Moree (outback New South Wales) are the Gomilleroi people who are considered the most cohesive moiety group in Australia. Looks at the indigenous artists co-operative Yurundiali which is marketing its screen print designs.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Screenprinting the Tiwi Way: An Element of Spontaneity
It is not accidentatl that amongst the Tiwis of Bathurst and Melville Islands, fabric printing has become such a significant craft form. Of all indigenous Australian cultures the Tiwis historically have perhaps the richest tradition of body painting.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
The Hermannsburg Potters
The Arrernte people from Hermannsburg a former Lutheran mission about 130 km west of Alice Springs in Central Australia are generally known for their Namatjira style watercolour paintings. Now they are making ceramics.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Semiotically Speaking: A Craftperson's View
One need not restrict this semiotic approach to an analysis of the objects of fashion given that the major role adopted by craftspeople in contemporary times is that of drawing attention to otherwise ordinary objects and processes by remaking them in a mode other than mass production.
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Tim Burns - Paintings and Drawings
Exhibition review Cape Bruny Winter 1990 - 1991
Paintings and Drawings by Tim Burns
Dick Bett Gallery Hobart Tasmania
7 - 26 May 1992
Thinking Craft, Crafting Thought
Some Thoughts on Museum Futures
The quintessential purpose of Museums is to encourage and instil the joy of intellectual and aesthetic discovery. Abstracted partly from a public lecture entitled 'Ideas -Heresies even - for Museum Futures' given in Perth for the Western Australian Government Department of the Arts Task Force on Museums in August 1991.
Museums on the Edge
From Curiosities to the Hyper-Real: Notes on Context in Museum Anthropology Exhibitions
Daniel Thomas provoked a distinct murmur at the 1990 CAMA Conference when he suggested that art museums have a greater capacity to disturb and move people than other cultural museums. If this is true and I think it is.....
Museums on the Edge
Aboriginal People and Museums: Restricting Access to Increase It
The South Australian Museum has the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of Australian Aboriginal material culture. It also has a vast archive of information about that material and about other aspects of Aboriginal life in the form of photographs, films, audio tapes, diaries and other records.
Museums on the Edge
Towards the Light: The story of One New Age Gallery's Quest for Purpose and Relevance in a Changing World
On 23 October 2002, yet another Council of Australian Museums Associations (CAMA) ran down. Conferees were already half deep in thought about melting credit cards and distant work site desks stacked high with urgent files. Well Not exactly CAMA...
Museums on the Edge
Cultural Diversity and the Challenges of Access
Cultural diversity has become a key issue in the 1990s for a number of reasons. In the United States we have recently completed a census. The results of that census indicate a dramatic change in the nation's demographics.
Museums on the Edge
Urban Regions and the City Centre: A Changing Cultural Relationship
One of the curious things about very large cities is the gulf that exists between the inner city and the outer suburbs or hinterland.
Museums on the Edge
Exhibiting Conflict - Who Dares?
Museum exhibitions tend not to challenge visitors with critical perspectives, contradictory points of view or subject matter which is controversial. I would like to explore different ways that conflict might be included in exhibitions and used to further our understanding of the past.
Museums on the Edge
To Have and To Hold: Art Museum Departments
One of the things which continues to fascinate me about museums is how, despite the vast amount of talk about displaying material culture, the often personal, often idiosyncratic, often haphazard decisions about departments are very rarely mentioned. Yet these decisions are central to much of the museum's collection, display, exhibitions and research programme.
Museums on the Edge
Whams and Whimms: An Exercise in Classification and Meaning
Interview with Louise Dauth about issues of gender. Dale Spender is a foundation member of the Women Heritage and Museums Group.
Museums on the Edge
The Ownership of Cultural Meaning: Local Museums and Access
According the the Australia Council figures in 1990 a number of people exceeding the entire population of Australia visited the 187 Australian Museums that employed paid staff in 1989/90 at a cost, for maintence, development and operations in excess of $13.00 per head of population, excluding any charges imposed on entry to museums or exhibitions. And what does $13.00 buy for the Museum going public?
Museums on the Edge
Implementing Aboriginal and Multicultural Policy in the Museum Sector
Helen Andreoni writes on matters which are addressed in the report commissioned by the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) by Amareswar Galla (also in this edition of Artlink).
Museums on the Edge
Background to the Project: Heritage Curricula and Multiculturalism (HC&M)
Background to the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia with the final report to be released by the Office of Multicultural Affairs OMA in mid 1992. See also the article by Helen Andreoni in this issue.
Museums on the Edge
European Museums Make an Exhibition of Themselves
Report on the 3rd International Salon of Museums and Exhibitions (SIME) at the Grand Palais Paris January 1992
Museums on the Edge
Repatriation of Papua New Guinea's Cultural Heritage
Jim Specht of the Australian Museum Sydney, has written that "public and private collections of archaeological and ethnographic specimens around the world contain tens of millions of specimens yet only a minute fraction of this total is actually held in its countries of origin" ; most of this material he says, was acquired through colonial or military occupation.
Museums on the Edge
Designing for Interesting People
Andrew Andersons is, and has been, engaged to contribute to many of Australia's leading art museums as well as to other public buildings and spaces. His work might be described as adaptive; accommodating to the style and typology of the major buildings on which he has worked as well as responding to the varied views of curators with whom he has co-operated closely when designing galleries.
Museums on the Edge
Abel Tasman at Dunedin
Looks at the exhibition 'Terra Australis Incognita' at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in New Zealand, to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Abel Tasman's discovery.
Museums on the Edge
Local Conditions: New Zealand Art
Headlands: Thinking through New Zealand Art. Exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney from 31st March 1992. Article by the co-curator Robert Leonard.
Museums on the Edge
Te Papa Tongarewa: Museum of New Zealand
Looks at recent issues for the National Art Gallery of New Zealand from the boardroom dismissals and judgments as well as the operations.
Museums on the Edge
A Continuum of Maori Art
Whatu Aho Rua - Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural Institute Adelaide Festival. The exhibition Whatu Aho Rua 'weaving with two strands' organised by the Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui, New Zealand, is a departure form exhibitions usually seen in New Zealand Galleries.
Museums on the Edge
Sources of Synergy: Museums for Design
The Zandra Rhodes costume in Sydney's Powerhouse Museum holds unique significance within the design collection.
Museums on the Edge
Exhibiting the Museum
The recession led rash of public conferences on the theme of Australian identity raises questions about the sources of our national self-knowledge. The congregation of bureaucrats, economists, television personalities, writers and artists has a democratic ring to it but it also points to the failure of our cultural institutions - notably our museums, galleries and libraries - to embrace their responsibility to develop a regional self consciousness.
Museums on the Edge
Charging to Disaster: The Introduction of Museum Entry Fees
Museums are complex social phenomena and valuable resources. There's an ecological analogy there; if you mess with even apparently trivial elements of a complex system, the results can be unpredictable, powerful and are most often catastrophic.
Museums on the Edge
A New Museum for Victoria
In the first project of its kind, private investors will provide half the money needed to build the Museum of Victoria at a new site on the Yarra River.
Museums on the Edge
Victoria Moves Towards Museum Accreditation
Accreditation is set to become one of the significant features of the Victorian museum scene in the 1990s. At a time when Victoria might be perceived as out for the count it may seem unlikely to be introducing major developments in the operation of the State's 400 Museums.
Museums on the Edge
Multicultural Artworkers: Sacrificial Anodes?
This is a new notion for me. I'm sure it is a term familiar to most readers. However, just in case, this is my version of what it means. To understand it you need to appreciate that there is an hierarchical order of metals determined by their 'nobility'. A sacrifical anode is less a noble metal which is used to attract impurities away from more noble metals that you do not wish to be eroded. Thus if you wish to avoid erosion in your copper boiler, you can put a sacrificial anode in the water which will attract the impurities in the water and keep them away from your noble boiler. The link between multicultural artworkers and sacrificial anodes is entirely my own!
Arts in a Multicultural Australia
If you Can't Measure It, You Can't Manage It!
I am particularly troubled about debates such as those illustrated by the publications 'What Price Heritage? - Finance 1989' and 'What value Heritage? DASETT 1990' and Professor Donald Horne's article 'Weekend Australian Jan 4-5 1992' on museums, because there is nearly always truth on all sides.
Museums on the Edge
Museums and Technology: A Recession Boom?
With so many people feeling bruised and battered by the 1980s, it may seem cynical to point out that this unlamented decade also produced some new museums. These two 1980s legacies appear unrelated. On the face of it, museums are a quintessentially boom-time phenomenon, another emblem of 1980s extravagance.
Museums on the Edge
Heritage Collections not Museums
In 1975 the Whitlam Government's Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections (the Piggott Committee, after its chairman P H Piggott) unsuccessfully recommended setting up of a Museum's Commission.
Museums on the Edge
Bad Names Improved
Suggestions for renaming many cultural institutions which are ambiguously named.
Museums on the Edge
Conservation: The State of the Art Conservation - Access, Equity and Future Directions
Conservation - access, equity and future directions. Everyone is talking about the effects of the economic climate, some people are calling it a recession and others a depression.
Museums on the Edge
A Virtue of Necessity: Deaccessioning Without Guilt
De-accessioning is too often characterised as an ill-wind, blowing through the vast and mostly undisturbed reaches of our cultural store-houses capriciously violating the integrity of our collections.
Museums on the Edge
Mom's Long Arms: The Art Institution Reaches Out
Art and Design Education A letter from Noel Sheridan to the editor Stephanie Britton. One of the main reasons for coming to Perth (Western Australia) was to get away from art education...
Art & Education
Art?
Art and Design Education For 2 years now, being busy about other things, I have not thought much about art education; and this abstinence seems not to have been injurious to anybody. But the thing nags. It ought to be possible to say something so manifestly enlightened and reasonable about art education that every rational person will agree and productive action will follow as the night follows the day.
Art & Education
The Balloon Man Cometh: A Salutary Tale
Art and Design Education A brief overview of the Australian Art and Design School phenomena today suggests that, given that educational philosophies are couched in the language of diversity, they still appear to be dominated by a referential and almost umbilical attachment to the early moderns...
Art & Education
Art Schools Academe 2001
Art and Design Education By what criteria do we judge the success of visual arts courses?
Art & Education
Crisis in Queensland
Art and Design Education The Queensland College of Art and its dubious future.
Art & Education
Amalgamation chaos at College of Art
Art and Design Education A student view See also article by Effemera Phaxx in this issue of Artlink.
Art & Education
Aboriginal and Islander Art Course: More than survival
Art and Design Education Written with Penryhn Henderson Discusses the Associate Diploma of Art (Aborigine and Torres Strait Islander) being offered at the Cairns College of TAFE in Far North Queensland and now in its 8th year.
Art & Education
More Exotic More Humane: World Music
Art and Design Education at the Victoria College of Arts.
Art & Education
Computer Art: Critical issues in teaching
Art and Design Education In attempting to teach something called computer art, we inherit our critical base from art history and another from engineering. Not only are these traditionally at odds with each other, but neither of them, nor a combination of the two, are adequate for our historical moment.
Art & Education
Mini-theories? Film and Video Education
Art and Design Education It would be beneficial for the educational sector to look at an integration with the low-budget, grass roots end of existing film practice and make links with other film makers and independent festivals both nationally and internationally that are responsive to the work.
Art & Education
From Solving to Setting Problems: Project-based Design Education
Art and Design Education The strength and vitality of post secondary design education programs in Australia arguably derives from the established tradition of project based learning.
Art & Education
Freemasonry or Free Interchange?
Art and Design Education A new model for training architects and designers.
Art & Education
Government Help Available
Art and Design Education Looks at the various government schemes which are available to art and design graduates and undergraduates.
Art & Education
Rites of Passage - Queensland Mergers
Looks at the Brisbane College of Advanced Education's art programmes more popularly known as the Kelvin Grove Art School and the Carseldine expressive arts department who joined forces in May 1990 on the occasion of the amagamation of B C A E with the larger entity of Queensland University of Technology.
Art & Education
A Sociology of Art... Why Does Art Look (or Sound) Like it Does?
Analytical perceptions for a new century. The artist - the creative thinker. The mechanics of thinking. Rational and irrational mechanics of thinking. Aesthetics and sociology - the conjugal relationship etc The critics best friend or friends must necessarily be the artist!
Art & Education
Problems with Art Publishing in Australia
Art writing and payment to writers and how this influences who writes for what!
Art & Education
Distribution - Who Will Tame the Bete Noir?
The case for a viable national infrastructure.
Art & Education
Funding for Visual Arts Publishing
The Visual Arts/Crafts Board has been grappling with the difficulties facing specialist visual arts publishing in Australia for many years.
Art & Education
A Cornucopia? Arts Publishing in New Zealand
Looks at the impressive range of publications on the visual arts in New Zealand. This is not an exhaustive overview but a thumbnail sketch of this large and diverse topic.
Art & Education
A Fact, A Question
Sculpture is not like painting because it is not flat and does not raise the question of mimesis in the same way. A theory of sculpture must therefore be, somewhere at its deep foundations, different from a theory of painting. Not just a bit different: a lot different.
Dimensions: Sculpture in Australia
Spatial Shamanism
It is a brief sober guide to certain spatial (and therefore sculptural) behaviours as initially identified and described by Bronte Edwards, Commander in Chief of the Art Army.
Dimensions: Sculpture in Australia