About a year ago I read the collection of essays, Pulphead, by the American magazine writer John Jeremiah Sullivan. I’d seen his work here and there, and knew he was good, but a collection presents the opportunity to see where the piecemeal work of a pen-for-hire might add up to something larger. There are brilliant […]
Quentin Sprague
Trinket
Earlier in the year I traveled to Los Angeles. Nothing major, just two weeks in and out of the city, a little bit of time in Desert Hot Springs, on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park. Probably the most commonplace thing you can say about the city is that you spend a lot of […]
A short line between three points
“Exhibitions are texts that make their private intentions public.” This quote is loosely paraphrased from Paul O’Neill, the English curator-artist-theorist. I won’t pretend I’m up on his work because I’m not, at least not to any great extent. But this idea caught me. I now realise why: it’s that word, private. The idea that an […]
Out one spectre: Justin Trendall at Kalimanrawlins
I’ve always felt that Justin Trendall’s unique state screenprints attempt to map the nature of memory; the acrobatic things it sometimes does, the mistakes it makes in the pursuit of narrative logic, that kind of thing. He’s been making the prints for some years now. A handful of new versions are currently on display at […]
King for a day: ‘Heavenly stems’ at Neon Parc
These images are from the exhibition at Neon Parc, Heavenly stems, which has just closed. I want to draw attention to it because it echoes things I have been thinking about recently, and poses interesting questions about the nature of contemporary art and curatorship. If anyone saw the exhibition they’ll know that it made a […]
Alien in the mix: Bryan Spier at Sarah Scout Presents, Justin Andrews at Block Projects
Bryan Spier makes narrative abstraction. If this sounds like a contradiction in terms, it just might be. But it’s the kind of contradiction that allows an artist to work in an impossible space and make something of it. My understanding of what Spier means by narrative abstraction is relatively straightforward. Take his new exhibition of […]
Constant loss: ‘Third/Fourth: Melbourne artist-facilitated biennale’, and the 1980s at the NGV
To be honest, I thought that the NGV’s current show about the 1980s in the Melbourne art scene—Mix tape 1980s: appropriation, subculture, critical style—only transmitted the barest sense of the underlying social structure of the times. But then again, I wasn’t there. Afterwards I read Ashley Crawford’s review in The Monthly and although he notes that […]
‘Kid candle’ and ‘Rocks’: Two works by Robin Rhode
In Robin Rhode’s short black & white film, Kid candle, a young boy, dressed for the street, leans in to light a candle. The ‘candle’ is a simple line drawing sketched on the wall, or perhaps on a paper backdrop that stands in for a wall. Either way, the flame catches and we see a […]
TV Moore’s ‘The dead zone’ at AGNSW
In New York in February I saw the exhibition NYC 1993: experimental jet set, trash and no star, which I wrote about briefly for Stamm. Perhaps the most interesting thing for someone from my generation (born 1980) was its attempt to historicise 1993—a ‘period’ from my own lifetime. There was a bank of video monitors […]
The whole lot: ‘Theatre of the world’ at MONA
The simplest signs or gestures, like […] lines of paint or holes, whether they come from an Aboriginal woman artist, or from Papua New Guinea, or from an Italian artist, Lucio Fontana, can all become symbols of the whole of the totality, that is, the representation of immaterial life. Jean-Hubert Martin, 2012. Responding to prompts […]
In the hood
I first saw a reproduction of In the hood by David Hammons in the late 1990s, in a Phaidon publication called The art book. Still at school, my experience of art was limited to a love of Brett Whiteley, Jean-Michel Basquiat (as memorialised by Jeffrey Wright in Julian Schnabel’s then-recent film) and perhaps a few […]
Eyes wide shut
In building a figure from clay we might start from the inside—the kernel of vital organs perhaps—and work our way outwards. This process would mean that each substrate, each increasing layer, would be felt into being by the fingers. Classical sculpture (or drawing, or painting) insists that any figure is first and foremost a volume […]
Lars and the real world
Have we all heard the story about drowning being a good way to go? It goes like this: once the body gives over, a euphoric wave washes through it, a sense of calm to belie the raw fact of death. I imagine at this moment what you see is not that whole ‘my life flashed […]
Yolngu art in the age of mechanical reproduction
When Wandjuk Marika became the first Aboriginal artist to publicly raise the issue of copyright infringement, much more was at stake that one might have initially thought. In 1974, when travelling in his capacity as inaugural chairman of the Aboriginal Arts Board, Marika had been dismayed to discover his sacred clan designs adorning cheap cotton […]
Paradise
In European vision and the South Pacific, published in 1960, Bernard Smith wrote that, ‘European observers sought to come to grips with the realities of the Pacific by interpreting them in familiar forms’. That is, European vision, brought to the Pacific as it ‘opened up’ to Cook’s 1768 voyage, carried with it a familiar frame […]
(Mis)communication rules
Wikipedia tells us that Creole is a language ‘developed from the mixing of parent languages’. Like Pidgin—a necessary precursor to Creole—it is brought about through the coming together of previously incomprehensible differences. Europe’s colonial expansion brought many creoles into being by way of trade routes, colonial domination and the traumatic displacements of the slave trade. […]
New tricks
Sometimes when you see a series of shows what strikes you is not so much the specific intent of each, but a more generally pervasive feeling. It can be hard to discern whether or not this speaks of your own existing preoccupations more or less than the external prompt offered by an exhibition. Often neither, […]
Like seeks like
I enjoy the kinds of informal connections that you can make by simply looking at different artworks. Sometimes the brain has to catch up to the eye and try to explain away coincidences, or alternatively make a case for initial and perhaps superficial visual similarities to become more than that. It’s always positive to begin […]
Moya McKenna: Ideas once thought and then forgotten
Untitled (Cosmic bust man) is a recent artwork by American Tom Friedman; a bust of a man with dark apertures in place of eyes, mouth and nostrils. In a neat spatial inversion, the viewer peers in and unexpectedly sees the night sky. It’s not an artwork that begs detailed interpretation—ideas are suggested (about infinity, about […]
Coloured dirt
Shane Cotton’s recent paintings are dark, almost Gothic arrangements of cultural iconography floating on moody and uncertain fields. They draw on the post-colonial histories of the artist’s native New Zealand, but still carry a familiar charge for Australian audiences. In these works history is an ominous and uncertain place; ever open to revision, it haunts […]
Small giants
The earliest paintings of the Western Desert art movement sparked a shift that would become a game-changer for Aboriginal art in Australia. Their appearance in the early 1970s prompted a re-evaluation of existing art world discourse; the Papunya boards, as they became known, made a convincing case for their reception as contemporary art, rather than […]