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Getting Off Your Face With a Destructive Character
Christian Capurros Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette documents the act of erasure over a period of five years, with the artist asking family, friends, artists and others to each erase a page from the male fashion rag Vogue Hommes. Each rubber was asked to record how long it took them to rub out their page, the results were then tallied.
The Darkroom in the Age of Post-Film Photography
In both amateur and professional photography the few multinational corporations that control the industry have collectively marshalled their marketing strategies to capitalise on recent advances in digital technology. Jolly looks at the shifting photographic trends, their viability and the increasing loss of intimate image-making.
Pixel Perfect: The Craft of Photography in the Age of Digital Reproduction.
Walkling proclaims that something is being mourned that has to do with the physical object and its associated labour, in the meantime the distinction between amateur and professional photographer is lessening as this particular creative niche is becoming more automated.
Australian Drawing Now: Labouring Lightly
The on again/off again love affair between drawing and contemporary art practice seems to have been going on ad nauseam. From the sixties through to the present day, ongoing tensions between the apparent values of traditional and conceptual art have resulted in much of today's appreciation for the reworking of both aesthetics in what has become a new labour of love.
Nurturing the Handmade
In interacting with an object, its physical properties are paramount; as a result, the power of objects to affect us becomes identified with their physical attributes, leading to an emphasis on making, and so linking making with authorship. Sorzano explores the process of object-making as the work in our minds, the work in our hands, and the work as a result... .
The Hand in Making
The Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial began in 1975 and every two years a collection of contemporary fibre textile work tours nationally to metropolitan and regional audiences. For Attiwill, guest curator of the 16th Biennial, the spark for the exhibition A Matter of Time came from Sue Rowleys wisdom: it is useful to think of craft in terms of multiple temporalities, A Matter of Time is an exploration of this usefulness.
Bush TV's: Piliyi - Good One
Nyinkka Nyunyu is an art and culture centre located on Warumungu land in Tennant Creek, right in the middle of the Northern Territory. From the time the idea came up to build something alongside the sacred site of Nyinkka Nyunya, art was always going to be an integral part of the project. The result of many brainstorming sessions amongst traditional owners of the land on which Tennant Creek stands was the idea of dioramas, or Bush TVs to provide the means to present history and contemporary life through art to a diverse audience.
Hand to Mouse: Design and the Handmade
There have always been cycles in the making of what we describe as art, crafts and design, where surges of new ideas have been followed by revivals of earlier values or reform movements that challenge both. The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, is working on an exhibition for late 2006, on the interface between art, design, industry and the values of the handmade. Cochranes hope is that it will challenge audiences to look closely at some of the exciting working relationships that are possible.
In the Wake of Gesture: Architecture and the Handmade
Architecture has long since surrendered the tactile in favour of grander visions. Through an examination of Sandra Seligs recent work Synthetic Infinite at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and the unique responses to architecture and the handmade that this work displays, Murray attempts to question how we might then consider architecture and our relationship with built matter to restore a direct connection with human experience.
Domestic Arts in the White Cube
There exists an increasing number of artists - mostly women - creating art using what have been known, somewhat disparagingly, as domestic arts: knitting, crochet, sewing, tatting, embroidery. For many of these artists the choice of method is integral to what the work is saying, the making - the journey - as important as the result, even if that journey is not immediately obvious to the viewer.
Parallel Universe: The Gray St. Workshops @ 20
Gray Street Workshop, which is this year celebrating its twentieth anniversary, has pursued a creative work ethic closely aligned to values of the handmade, not as an end per se but as a means to evolve a creative language grounded in the interplay between ideas and practice.
Patrick Hall's Cabinets of Everyday Curiosities
For Hughes, Patrick Halls cabinets recall the great elaborately decorated cabinets of the 17th century. Rather than mere decoration, Halls cabinets express a poetry of the everyday that is neither a condescending celebration nor a critical analysis but a deeply personal response to his materiel.
Unpacking 'Il Cretino Veloci' or 'The Fast Idiot'
Thomson pays tribute to an increasing minority of Australians devalued for getting their hands in the mucky stuff. As he proclaims ...people who make things with their hands for a living are seen as a hopeless anachronism rooted to the ground. In an age where the majority of the Australian population now work in what are termed the service industries, the ability to apply ones motor skills are making for a society who rarely needs to use those funny slabs of flesh at the end of our arms.
Ecology: Everyone's Business
What does the onset of climate change mean to an artist today? We have known about species extinction for decades, and the death of ecosystems; artists whose work evolved around these issues first emerged during the sixties.
Batik and Kris: Duality of the Javanese Cosmos
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery 10 September - 7 November 2004
Living Together is Easy
National Gallery of Victoria: Ian Potter Centre, Melbourne 27 August - 7 November 2004 Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito, Japan 24 January - 28 March 2004 Curated by Jason Smith and Eriko Osaka
Disorientate: Colour, Geometry and the Body
John Aslanidis, Paul Boam, John Dunkley-Smith, NeilHaddon, John Plapp, Wilma Tabacco Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania, Hobart 15 October - 7 November 2004
Artifically Reconstructed Habitats: Finola Jones
Canberra Contemporary Art Space 13 August - 25 September 2004 Gertrude Contemporary Spaces, Melbourne 29 October - 20 November 2004
Fine Art Graduate and Honours Exhibitions Beyond
Griffith University, Queensland College of Art 24 - 27 November 2004 GraduArt 2004 Toowoomba Regional Gallery 27 November 2004 - 30 January 2005 modus vivendi Queensland University of Technology 3 - 5 November 2004
Christian de Vietri: The Nature of Things
Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth 27 November - 18 December 2004
Petrified Nature: Julia Robinson and Morgan Allender, Birds and Bees, Louise Flaherty
Downtown Art Space, Adelaide 28 October - 6 November 2004 The Project Space, CACSA, Adelaide 29 October - 5 December 2004
Everyone Lives Downstream: James Darling and Lesley Forwood
Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
24 November – 19 December 2004
24 November – 19 December 2004
A Response by a Fringe Dweller
Debates about what is mainstream, whether in global or national terms, seem to perennial. Some have claimed Aboriginal art is now mainstream. Stephanie Radok takes this notion apart.
Shifting Gears: Asian Traffic
Asian Traffic was, outside the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT), one of the most ambitious efforts undertaken in Australia aimed at exploring the multifarious nature of new Asian art and its complex intersection with contemporary Australian culture. Visitors were forced to join the Asian Traffic coming and going from the Asia-Australia Centre in Chinatown, Sydney, and in its ever-changing guises and fluid shifts in direction, the project successfully circumvented any traffic jams.
Towards Ubuntu: The Way of the South
Melbourne is the host city of the South Project, a project designed to celebrate the creative energies of people living in the southern hemisphere and create south-south dialogue between artists of the countries of the south. South 1 encouraged all kinds of responses: philosophical and whimsical, creative and conceptual, contesting and renewing ideas, in the first gathering of its kind.
Exchange Value # 1. If It's Tuesday it Must be a Conference on Art and Globalism
As with Feminism in the 1970s certain ideas are in the air and finding widespread expression amongst artists and art institutions. Globalism impacts upon artists options and this phenomenon of artists and curators on the move is the result of the explosion of communication around art. Peers looks at the influx in globalism and its various influences in the Australian and international art scene.
Exchange Value # 2. Keeping up the Momentum
Britton follows up from Peers examination of Art and Globalism to discuss the trends of international art residencies and the evident exchange in cultural values and creative receptibility that comes as a result of working in a foreign country; the buying of time away from other strategies for staying solvent - part time or full time jobs, or feeling under pressure to make work with commercial appeal .
The In-Between: Hybrid Arts Laboratories as Places to Question
Hybrid art laboratories - both funded and semi-funded - are dotting themselves around the Australian arts landscape. Most of them involve time away from the everyday, where experience can be intensified and where a new set of meetings between artists can take place. It is an experimental environment encouraging a mode of artmaking that struggles to exist between art form and another, one identity and another, one technology and another, one world and another.
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.
SameDifference: 04 Biennale of Electronic Arts, Perth (BEAP)
SameDifference 04 Biennale of Electronic Arts, Perth (BEAP). Director: Paul Thomas www.beap.org DistributedDifference: Cultures of Conflict The Bank, Midland, Perth, 10 Sept -12 Nov. Curator: Jeremy Blank. SonicDifference: Resounding the World The Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery, Fremantle, 9 Sept 10 Oct. Curator: Nigel Helyer. Drift Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, 26 Aug -26 Sept. Curator: Bec Dean.
SameDifference: 04 Biennale of Electronic Arts, Perth (BEAP)
PerceptualDifference John Curtin Gallery, Perth 8 September - 12 December Curator: Chris Malcolm BigDifference Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth 12 September - 3 October Curators: Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr
Out of the Dark
Out of the dark - night shots from indigenous artists is an exhibition I experienced online via the cyberTribe website. If you have not browsed the site, then you should. WiseART Gallery in Brisbane presented the physical exhibition from 7 –27 August.
Instinct
Emily Floyd, Sharon Goodwin, Irene Hanenbergh, Louise Hearman, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Ronnie Van Hout, David Noonan, Lisa Roet, Kathy Temin. Curator Lisa Vasiliou Faculty Gallery, Monash University 9 September - 5 November 2004
[in]stall(s)
Rebecca Coote, jonathan Hodgkin, Kylie Johnson, Nick Maxwell, Mish Metjers, Hanna Parssinen. Sally Rees, Tristan Stowards, Tricky Walsh, Matt Warren and Tiffany Winterbottom Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart 19 August - 5 September 2004 A Tasmanian Living Artists' Week Exhibition
1/2 Way: Scott Redford the Collages
Dell Gallery at Griffith University Queensland College of Art, Brisbane 13 August - 19 September 2004
Savvy: New Australian Art
Savvy: New Australian Art QUT Art Museum, Brisbane 6 August - 17 October 2004
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.
21st Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award
Museum & Art Gallery of the Northen Territory 13 August 7 November 2004
Jacky Redgate: Survey 1980-2003 [Three Exhibitions]
III, V, VI of Contemporary Art Projects SA 2004 Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Curator, Alan Cruickshank 23 April - 23 August 2004
Sue Richter. On Colour: Whiteblack Red
24HRArt, Darwin 9 July - 7 August 2004 Araleun Arts Centre, Alice Springs 3 April - 9 May 2004
Three Colours: Gordon Bennett and Peter Robinson
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne 8 April - 4 July Travelling to Victoria, Tasmanaia, Queensland, NZ July 2004 - July 2006
Barking Up the Wrong Tree
Carnegie Gallery, Hobart 10 June - 4 July 2004 Curators: Stephen Mori, Felicity Wade & Raquel Ormella
Octopus 5
Raafat Ishak, Horst Kiechle, Kaji Ryui, Grant Stevens. Curator: Nicholas Chambers Gertrude Street Contemporary Art Spaces 9 July - 21 August 2004
Philip Wolfhagen
The Inner Edge Academy Gallery, University of Tasmania, Inveresk 14 June - 9 July 2004
Peter Timms' 'What's wrong with contemporary art'
Blak Insights Queensland Art Gallery 3 July - 30 October 2004
Joan Kerr, Art Historian: February 1938 - February 2004
Joan Kerr, Art Historian, February 1938 - February 2004
News from the Front
Its less than a centimetre long, but the weapon of mass distraction on Artlinks March cover was deemed unacceptable for US audiences. For those who missed the media frenzy, our US distributors refused to put the Adelaide & Beyond issue of Artlink on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. The reason given was the completely nude male on the cover (would a hat have rendered it incompletely nude? Would it have mattered if it was a female nude, neatly packaged away?).
Artlink on the Road: a China Diary
March saw a little bit of history being made in Sino-Australian cultural relations with Artlink being the first Australian art magazine to be launched as well as offered for sale in China. Perversely we were not offering the Chinese an issue of the magazine about Australia, our normal subject area, but about China, a subject area we have only visited occasionally. In the manner of all human vanities that may have been one of the reasons we received such a warm reception. Imagining the reverse - reading an issue of a Chinese art magazine about Australian art is in the current state of art writing in China unlikely.
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.