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Old Categories, New Frameworks: Asia-Australia
Writer, researcher and arts manager Christen Cornell studies the way China is now much more of a player on the international art curcuit than Australia and what it means to young Chinise-Australian artists.
Transcultural Radical
Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney Aaron Seeto attends to the artwork of Sumugan Sivanesan, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Guan Wei and Kaleb Sabsabi to raise questions of experiences of cultural difference and the way they are inadequately critically interrogated in contemporary art practice.
Unrequited Language: Khaled Sabsabi
Freelance writer and doctoral candidate Farid Farid analyses the installations and videos of deep thinker Khaled Sabsabi which use sound and collaboration as a significant part of their presence.
Flight, Philippines: Nothing to Declare
Associate Professor at the University of the Phillipines and visiting research fellow at the University of New South Wales Flaudette May V. Datuin looks at the complex ideas of home, absence and presence in the work of artists examining the lives of Overseas Filipino and Filipina workers (OFWs).
Traditional Skills: Refugees
South Australia's Craftsouth ran an outstanding workshop series in May 2010 where refugees with traditional craft skills from six countries taught their secrets to Australian craftspeople.
Weeds without Frontiers: Stephanie Radok
Poet, novelist and broadcaster Cath Kenneally examines the recent work of Stephanie Radok which involves weeds painted on beer coasters and finds tenacity, diversity and survival-skills in it.
Iran: Scripts of Despair and Love: Nasim Nasr & Siamak Fallah
Curator, artist and doctoral candidate Lisa Harms writes about two artists, Nasim Nasir and Siamak Fallah, both originally from Iran who now live and work in Adelaide and make work that references their homeland.
Creative Adaption and Continuing Conversations
A flying journey through some of the Australia Council's most recent innovative projects which are also conversations with community partners and where outcomes are broad and diverse leading potentially to new forms of contemporary art practice...
Open House Singapore Biennale 2011
One of the curators of the Singapore Biennale Australian Russell Storer explains how the Biennale is a sited conversation, about place as well as process.
Curious and Collaborative: Encounters in Tokyo, Singapore & Yogyakarta
Next Wave Artistic Director Emily Sexton and Next Wave Artistic Program manager Ulanda Blair discuss the waves of Invisible Structures a project curated by Next Wave and supported by Asialink in which Australian artist collectives do exchanges with collectives in Tokyo, Singapore and Yogyakarta.
Gwangju Summer: Open 2010
London-based curator and postgraduate researcher Tania Doropolous discusses 10,000 Lives: the Eighth Gwangju Biennale as well as the curatorial summer school that accompanied it.
Reconnecting the Dots: Next Sydney Biennale Directors
Indigenous Canadian Gerald McMaster and Belgian Catherine de Zegher are joint directors of the next Biennale of Sydney. Joanna Mendelssohn interviewed Catherine de Zegher about the global and the local, difference and similarity...
Manifesta 8: Seeking a Dialogue with Africa
Curator and arts manager Alison Carroll visited Manifesta 8 the European Biennial of Contemporary Art held 9 October 2010 - 9 January 2011 in both Murcia and Cartegena in Spain and featuring over 100 artists.
After the Deluge
Novelist, freelance writer and contributor to Inside Story website www.inside.org.au Jane Goodall writes about the recent floods in Queensland in relation to climate change and art and how "we need the merging energies of many artists to shift the consciousness of an era mesmerised by determination to perpetuate a way of life that may well be no longer viable."
Designing with the Neighbours in Mind: Unlimited Asia Pacific
'Unlimited Asia Pacific' is a platform for the Queensland state government to join Victoria as a leading force in Australia’s emergent design economy. It coincides with the birth of the Australian Design Alliance as a lobbying group to promote design as a capacity across government.
Patronage of the Passionate
Stephanie Britton was very impressed by her visit to the country's only art gallery devoted to contemporary art made by Chinese artists - White Rabbit Gallery and its third six monthly hang titled 'The Big Bang'.
Resistance to Change: Art in the university environment
Novelist and former Director of Research and Postgraduate Studies in the College of Arts at the University of Western Sydney Jane Goodall responds to the new collection of essays edited by Brad Buckley and John Conomos called 'Rethinking the Contemporary Art School'. Goodall analyses the complexity and often dire times engendered by the incorporation of art schools into universities. However she is optimistic and suggests a first step to be a well-designed retreat system.
Art and Sport
Artist and art critic Peter Hill reflects on the boredom factor of sport and how the Basil Sellers Prize has got it right.
Art as a Catalyst of Change: Sydney's HotHouse International Symposium
Chief Curator at the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA) at the College of Fine Arts, Uni of NSW, Felicity Fenner discusses the HotHouse Symposium the launch event of a longer-term research project called 'Curating Cities' being conducted by NIEA in association with Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design and the City of Sydney. Other research partners include the Melbourne-based group, Carbon Arts, which facilitates opportunities for artists to generate awareness and action on climate change. The central premise of the project is that we can no longer simply curate art, but need to think more holistically, instead curating space in ways that are environmentally sustainable.
Is it Sacred? The Collarenebri Files
Senior curator Djon Mundine reflects on his experiences in the past of consultation with Aboriginal people about artefacts, in particular carved trees in NSW that he wanted to include in 'Spirit and Place' at the MCA in 1997.
Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera
One of Artlink's London correspondents Jo Higgins visited EXPOSED : Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera at the Tate Modern, an exhibition of photography first developed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and found it overwhelmingly strong.
Liverpool Biennial 2010: Touched
Former Head of Asialink Alison Carroll visited Touched the Liverpool Biennial and found 870 artists showing in 400 exhibitions over the 10 weeks of the event.
The Push Pull Decade
Artlink began thirty years ago in a corner of an office in Adelaide. Today it is available in the Tate Modern Bookshop purveying its unique brand of attention to important issues in contemporary art, mostly Australian, often international, wherever the ideas are sharp and the ideals are idealistic.
The Fourth Plinth
In Antony Gormley’s living portrait 'One and Other' for 100 days, from 6 July to 14 October 2009, 2400 randomly selected, otherwise unextraordinary, individuals continuously occupied the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square for an hour at a time.
Echigo-Tsumari: Public Art as Regenerating Force
Janet Maughan travelled to the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial in September 2009. With Stephanie Britton she interviewed the indefatigable Fram Kitagawa, Director of both the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial [ETAT] and of the new Niigata Water and Land Art Festival in the seaport of Niigata, and wove his words around the experience of seeing outstanding art in the unusual and delightful surroundings of the Japanese countryside.
Who Stole the Southern Cross? A Cautionary Tale for Public Art
Curator and cultural visionary Kevin Murray asks what happened to Southern Cross Station, once Spencer Street Station now lost under a morass of advertising. Where is the public art?
Torches in the Night: The Odyssey of Craig Walsh
'Craig Walsh Digital Odyssey' is a national touring Project presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art in association with the artist. www.digitalodyssey.com.au With his partner artist Hiromi Tango Walsh is also making complementary collaborative works called 'The Home Project".
A Public Spectacle: Next Wave Risks All
Next Wave: No Risk Too Great, directed by Jeff Khan, took place in Melbourne from 13 – 30 May 2010.
Strangers and the Slow Laneway Experience
Kate Warren examines Melbourne's laneways and the many way artists have used them to re-energise and re-familiarise local audiences with their urban environment. Artists mentioned are Sarah Rodigari and Tim Webster, Troy Innocent, Matt Blackwood, John Alexander Borley, Anthony McInneny, Sue McCauley and Keith Deverell, and QingLan Huang.
Social Conscience, Migration, Rivers and Oceans: Virginia King
New Zealand sculptor Virginia King is an artist who has long recognised the changing nature of public art and the part it can play in raising awareness and social conscience.
Solar Systems and Winter Glow: Cameron Robbins, Alexander Knox
Anna Zagala looks at two striking public artworks in Melbourne, Cameron Robbins and Christopher Lansell's The Solar System down at the St Kilda Foreshore and Alexander Knox's kinetic light work Maxims of behaviour on the corner of Bourke and Swanston Sts in the UBD of Melbourne.
Synergy Tasmania-Style - Ocean, mountains and windpower meet boardwalks, public art and a new museum
The Glenorchy Art & Sculpture Park (GASP!) project on the outskirts of Hobart is under construction just two kilometres from Australia’s largest private freely accessible art gallery the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), opening in January 2011.
Self in the City: Launceston Living Laneways
Public artworks surrounding the Regional Arts Australia National Conference and Festival held in Launceston in August 2010 set the cat among the pigeons.
Royal Mail vs McQueen: A very public memorial for the dead
Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen’s recent work 'Queen and Country' (2003-2010) overwhelmingly embodies the complexities and possibilities for memorial-making and public art today.
Thirteen paragraphs on the underground
Artist/ writer, curator/designer at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation Teri Hoskin's thirteen paragraphs sum up facts, apprehensions and suspicions about the underground.
Hiding in plain sight: regionalism and the underground
Margie Borschke was in Canada in the mid 1980s when she discovered the Underground.
1. Muffled sounds 2. The ear trumpet of the artworld has been struck by lightning
Emeritus Flinders University Professor and philosopher Donald Brook writes about his 'new theory' and why it has never been taken up. He wonders: 'Could it be that he is wrong?'
Stop the press: the allure of ink
Caren Florance is Ampersand Duck, a blog and nom de press for activities including letterpress printing. Florance has breathed the ink and describes the history of moveable type focusing on the recent past and the present and how something magical happens to text when it is printed.
When zines meet archives: above - and below - ground collections
Marmalade-maker and Phd candidate at the University of Technology in Sydney Jessie Lymn's writing focuses on her research into unconventional archival spaces that hold collections of zines, those idiosyncratic sites of memory.
Conquest for country: Rockhole or mine
Anthropologist Eve Vincent has done fieldwork in mining towns in South Australia. She writes about Ali Russell's documentary Keeper about mining on Kokatha land near Ceduna.
Dig it! The hole in Australian contemporary art
Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney Glenn Barkley surveys the hole in contemporary Australian art starting at the 1973 Mildura Sculpturescape.
Underground film in Australia
Writer and curator of the moving image Danni Zuvela examines underground film in Australia to draw out its spirit it from the pre-Seventies to now - 'profane, collective, improvised, transgressive, convivial, illegitimate'.
Seed bomb
Farmer, artist, writer Kirsten Bradley who works from Milkwood Permaculture Farm near Mudgee in the high country of NSW spills the beans on how to make a seedball or seedbomb to revegetate or vegetate urban spaces around you. Like guerilla gardening, it's quick, it's quiet and it creeps up on you.
Underground networks in the age of web 2.0
Media Theorist, nethead, activist and founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures Geert Lovink reports on the erotica of touching between 'weak links' and the importance of experimenting with new forms of organisation both on and offline.
Steampunk: gunpowder and cups of tea
Between 13 October 2009 and 21 February 2010, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford held the world's first museum exhibition of Steampunk art. Writer, artist, emerging, networked and distributed culture geek Melinda Rackham was there.
Not black enough, the politics of skin
Bundjalung man, journalist and radio broadcaster Daniel Browning, guest editor of this issue of Artlink, writes about the current state of racism and Aboriginality in Australia.
Lin Onus: picturing histories, speaking politics
Art historian and painter Gamilaroi/Gamilaraay woman Donna Leslie examines the work and the legacy of Lin Onus, its humour, its depth and its urgency.
Learning to be proppa : Aboriginal artists collective ProppaNOW
Senior Research Fellow and Senior Curator at the National Museum of Australia Margo Neale presents an incisive account of the genesis of proppaNOW the Queensland collective of urban Aboriginal Artists who are making waves in Australia and internationally with their intelligent brash art.
Gordon Hookey : Flash Gordon’s message - language is a virus - the King's English (not)
Curator, artist and South Australian School of Art lecturer Brenda L. Croft gives the lowdown on Gordon Hookey's really rude and loud art that uses language and Australian animals to put the boot into racism and lend a voice to the silenced.
History is a weapon: Fiona Foley history teacher
Badtjala woman Fiona Foley is a sculptor, installation artist, painter, printmaker, photographer, public artist, curator, lecturer and public speaker. Her work addresses lacunae and silences in Australian history, opening wounds and drawing attention to important topics of the past and how it affects the present.
Art of glass: Yhonnie Scarce
The first Aboriginal student to graduate from the University of South Australia with a major in glass, Yhonnie Scarce makes blown glass objects that explore Aboriginal history and draw on her Kokatha and Nukunu ancestry.
Dianne Jones : a little less conversation
Curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia Clotilde Bullen provides insight into Nyoongar artist Dianne Jones' use of humour and iconic images from Western art to make hard-hitting blak art about racism, the absence of black faces in history and the portrayal of black women.
Tony Albert: there’s no place like home
Wirri man Bruce McLean of the Birri Gubba nation is currently Associate Curator, Indigenous Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. He writes with personal insight about the art practice of the youngest member of proppaNOW Tony Albert who comes from Cardwell in Queensland and was included in the 2009 Havana Biennale.
From Tiwi with love: Bindi Cole
Yamatji man Stephen Gilchrist is curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria. He writes about recent winner of the 2009 'Victorian Indigenous Art Awards' Bindi Cole’s provocative artwork as an inventive addition to the genre of portraiture photography.
Gary Lee: the outsider
Photographer Gary Lee makes work saturated with beauty and homoeroticism. His photographs of Aboriginal men are celebratory, bold and uncompromising.
Beaver Lennon: painting country
Trainee curator of Indigenous Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia Nici Cumpston writes about the new art of Beaver Lennon a young emerging artist of Mirning and Antikirinjara people who lives in Ceduna on the far west coast of South Australia. His great-grandmother was the author of the memoir 'I’m the one that know this country, the story of Jessie Lennon and Coober Pedy'.
Nowhere Boy
Emeritus Curator Djon Mundine OAM, currently Indigenous Curator of Contemporary Art at Campbelltown Arts Centre, Western Sydney, spills his guts on the current state of play as he sees it in Australian Aboriginal art where fashion has overtaken activism and some artists are just so hot right now.
Look good feel good: the art of healing
Murri woman Jenny Fraser has recently completed a Masters in Indigenous Wellbeing at Southern Cross University in Lismore. She writes about different avenues for wellbeing for all Australians through practices known by Indigenous Australians.
New Creations in Aurukun: Ceremonial Art
For the Adelaide Festival, Aptos Cruz Gallery in the Adelaide Hills is showcasing an extensive range of art from senior and emerging Aurukun artists, with about 35 works representing all artists using the art centre. This is a great opportunity to see new creations coming from the community. The exhibition continues to 4 April 2010.
Queensland Indigenous Artists Creating More than Great Art!
The Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency (QIAMEA) was established in 2003 to promote the export of quality Queensland Indigenous art globally and nationally. A focal point for Queensland Indigenous art will be the 2nd Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) to be held from 20 to 22 August 2010.
The Ramingining Megaphone
Distinguished pioneer Indigenous Curator, activist and writer, Curator of Contemporary Art at Campbelltown Arts Centre Djon Mundine tells a very funny and intriguing story about how modern communication technology came to Ramingining and how it intersected with 'community consultation' by government departments.
Lean, mean and living dangerously
Associate Professor of Fine Art at the College of Fine Arts, Uni of NSW, Joanna Mendelssohn analyses a slice of the current state of art publishing in Australia from reviews in newspapers to the DAAO (Dictionary of Australian Artists Online - now rechristened Design and Art of Australasia Online).
From here to everywhere: the evolution of blogging
'The Art Life' blogmeister Andrew Frost spills the beans on the genesis of that infamous and lively blog in 2004 and its ongoing evolution in the context of new technologies and their uptake by publishing and by readers.
Artists want catalogues
Campbelltown Arts Centre Director Lisa Havilah writes about the crucial importance of catalogues to artists. Famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei had his first international survey exhibition at Campbelltown in partnership with Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. The incentive for Ai Weiwei was that a 2,000 print run book on his art would be published.
Environmental costs of going digital
Director of the Media and Communications Program at the University of Melbourne Professor Sean Cubitt asks: what is the weight of the internet, is it green, clean and immaterial with no environmental costs? The answer is a scary and resounding no.
Measuring the footprint: dead trees vs live text
Freelance writer, author of True Green @ Work and editor Tim Wallace discusses the conflict between new technologies making everything available for free and writers and content creators needing to be paid. He quotes from on a book by Kevin Kelly called New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World: 'The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.'
Zine publishing and the long tail
Adelaide-based Zinemeister Dr Ianto Ware discusses how prophecies of digital dominance are colosally wrong with regard to zine publishing a genre which remains exclusively hardcopy. He finds zines to be quintessential examples of Editor of Wired Magazine Chris Anderson's Long Tail in which tiny niches multiply and thrive.
Finding the right balance: print + online
Managing editor of RealTime Keith Gallasch describes what the web means to print journalism and how RealTime manages its website and its hardcopy in a careful adaptation to a changing and unpredictable publishing ecology.
Copyright: Copyleft
Copyright lawyer Zoe Rodriguez discusses the implications of digitising works of literature and the contentious Google Book Settlement of 2009.
Libraries, creators and Google
The University of Sydney Librarian John Shipp describes the changing world of university libraries and the way they handle information in a digital age. He has nightmares about the Google settlement and his mantra is that 'creators should retain their rights.'
Communicating and the law
Bill Morrow, artist and legal expert in copyright law, sets out the current state of play. He says that some form of copyright is here to stay but it is in flux with regard to digital rights and the upcoming introduction of laws providing greater privacy protection.
Creative commons: fair to share?
Research Assistant at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries Elliott Bledsoe throws light on (rants about) the wide-ranging implications of Creative Commons - the way of the future for copyright?
Artistic intention, branding and value
Artist Zina Kaye of www.laudanum.net writes about the importance of branding for artists and how artists play with copyright and fair use. She examines the artwork of Deborah Kelly, Soda_Jerk and Shepard Fairey to show variants on artist's intentions and outcomes.
Writing in the age of graphomania
Novelist and sinologist Linda Jaivin rejects the excess writing and publishing that the internet affords every person with a keyboard and compares it to Milan Kundera's definition of graphomania(an obsession with writing books). She would rather have fewer readers than more scanners believing that a 'long form' like a novel or book-length non-fiction needs slow writing and carefully crafted prose.
Copyright materials in university teaching
Art History Librarian at the Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide Margaret Hosking explains the way fees and access are currently worked out for copyright materials in teaching at universities in Australia.
Mix and mash, take it, change it
Writer and curator Danni Zuvela celebrates remix or mashup culture and traces its history back through the Dadaists, Futurists, Max Ernst, Esther Shub, Arthur Lipsett, Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner and Stan VanDerBeek. In a remix culture people valorise appropriation and talk about being copyfighters who believe the idea of text as property is a joke.
Collaborative Practice
Amanda Matulick is the managing editor of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT)'s publication Filter magazine, which is hardcopy as well as online at http://filter.anat.org.au. Filter uses open source Creative Commons licensing for its contributors. This means free sharing of information and ideas or as she puts it: "creation for creation's sake".
Don't look it might bite: censoring the visual arts
Executive Director of the National Association for the Visual Art (NAVA) Tamara Winikoff looks at the recent situation in Australia regarding censorship, art, politics and the law.
Freedom of expression and the mode of detachment
Art theorist, philosopher and Emeritus Professor at Flinders University Donald Brook advocates 'detached contemplation' as the most desirable, appropriate and potentially rewarding response to art.
Netting the big and the little fish: monographs and biographies
Emeritus Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia and highly respected investigative curator and writer Daniel Thomas pulls out the stops in a far-ranging appraisal of art book publishing in Australia. He writes: "Once the artist is well dead, even if the book is 'only' a monograph, disregard the family and friends; we need to know everything."
Lives of the 'settled' artists
Tess Allas is the Researcher of Storylines, an ARC funded project officially titled This Side of the Frontier: Indigenous Artists in Settled Australia. It focuses on biographies of Aboriginal artists from all over Australia except for the remote regions. Storylines can be found online at www.daao.org.au - the DAAO (Dictionary of Australian Artists Online - now rechristened Design and Art of Australasia Online).
Living palely
The Stoics may have taken rationality too far in their resolute minimisation of all feeling. Are emotions no more than disturbances in the logical landscape? What of Pascal’s ‘the heart has its reasons that reason is not acquainted with’? Perhaps the rationality/emotion divide is overdrawn, risking battle lines forming around pure opposites never found in real life examples. Yet the issue has bite, relevance to intimate features of our life: our friendships, our sense of safety in the world, how much we give of ourselves and give up of ourselves to our working life and the living texture of what it feels like to be us: fugitive, or having the ‘warm antiquity of self’.
Speed of dark: Boris Eldagsen
Artist Boris Eldagsen and writer Robert Cook are both looking down the barrel of forty. Cook is fascinated by other members of his exact generation. In his words: 'They are alternative selves, part of my body. Mid-life is hard life, the life as lived not the life not lived, the other path, the no stepping back.' Cook and Boris did not meet.