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Stamm 2012

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Traumatic acts and therapeutic structures: A few ideas in, around and associated with Stamm

December 2012 by Jonathan Nichols

by Jonathan Nichols & Amita Kirpalani I The idea of a ‘traumatic object’ is around and can be found lurking in conversations about dOCUMENTA (13). Between us this year, the language of trauma is closer to being caught up with what happens with art making and art writing. Which is slightly different. As I read […]

Categories: Amita Kirpalani, December 2012, Jonathan Nichols, Stamm 2012 Tags: Hal Foster, Jan Verwoert

The mind is a muscle: Yvonne Rainer’s ‘Trio A’

December 2012 by Hannah Mathews

In April 2013 a workshop and showing of Yvonne Rainer’s iconic performance piece, Trio A, will be held in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. I plan to participate in the four-day workshop to be hosted by the VCA. I was introduced to Trio A via YouTube a few years ago. I had spent the summer in […]

Categories: December 2012, Hannah Mathews, Stamm 2012 Tags: Yvonne Rainer

Eyes wide shut

December 2012 by Quentin Sprague

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 […]

Categories: December 2012, Quentin Sprague, Stamm 2012 Tags: Brent Harris, Naomi Eller

Sadie Chandler: Café society

December 2012 by Eve Sullivan

Figures and faces have always been a feature of Sadie Chandler’s iconography. From her varnish-obscured portraits of an anonymous, genteel European ancestry to her pre-Mad men mad women strutting their stuff, and the latest forays into the group portrait as social document, art and life converge. Most recently, Chandler worked on the Moreland portraits, a […]

Categories: December 2012, Eve Sullivan, Stamm 2012 Tags: Sadie Chandler

Eat, clay, love

December 2012 by Rob McHaffie

Yoko Ozawa rides her bike to Northcote Pottery, and rides home with a 5-kilogram bag of clay. Placing the clay on the table next to her throwing wheel, Yoko sketches small shapes in a notebook alongside recipes for glazes. Yoko prepares a ball of clay, kneading it to release pockets of air. This is the […]

Categories: December 2012, Rob McHaffie, Stamm 2012 Tags: Yoko Ozawa

Being there—experiencing the art of Louise Bourgeois

December 2012 by Mila Faranov

I was at a gathering the other night where I mentioned that I was planning to write my next Stamm piece on the current Louise Bourgeois show at Heide. ‘Oh God, blah blaaah … the mother, the father, the nanny … how many articles have I read about that!?!’ ‘Nooooooooooooo!’ I say, ‘I’m going to […]

Categories: December 2012, Mila Faranov, Stamm 2012 Tags: Louise Bourgeois

invisiblevisible (with Emily Cormack)

November 2012 by Amita Kirpalani

OK, the document you sent to me had seven lines in it. And about twenty-six words. Is that enough? As I said it was just a start. Is this part of our writing together? The initial bickering? Anyway, it seems when talking about works like these, you and I want to talk about them as […]

Categories: Amita Kirpalani, November 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Emily Cormack

Kate Smith’s empire

November 2012 by Jonathan Nichols

Sutton is one of the few galleries in Melbourne still willing to underwhelm. The space was so sparse, I didn’t have a clue until I was up close to the six or seven works on canvas board propped vaguely around the walls. What were canvas boards ever supposed to be about: amateur utopia, the art […]

Categories: Jonathan Nichols, November 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Kate Smith

Lars and the real world

November 2012 by Quentin Sprague

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 […]

Categories: November 2012, Quentin Sprague, Stamm 2012 Tags: Trevelyan Clay

Mann in Japan

November 2012 by Rob McHaffie

I’m not sure where that itch of devotion comes from, the one that gets a person up early in the morning to fold their bed sheets carefully before having a cold shower in preparation for a job as personal as that of a singer-songwriter. Melbourne’s blessed, in a world where popular music has turned bland […]

Categories: November 2012, Rob McHaffie, Stamm 2012 Tags: Oliver Mann

Elizabeth Newman: The origin of life

November 2012 by Eve Sullivan

In a country in which the dominant culture has a limited pre-history in terms of art and artefacts, one strategy is to recreate these models for ourselves. The culture of the ‘second degree’, as Paul Taylor put it, hangs on this persistent return to the centre or source of creative endeavour as always elsewhere or […]

Categories: Eve Sullivan, November 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Elizabeth Newman

Colleen Ahern—’Cortez the killer’

November 2012 by Hannah Mathews

I recently had the pleasure of a studio visit with Melbourne artist Colleen Ahern. Ahern is a talented painter, best known for her domestic-scale paintings that portray popular musicians of the 1970s and onwards. The works are skilful and filled with love: there is a tender thrum of fandom in their composition and a nostalgia […]

Categories: Hannah Mathews, November 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Colleen Ahern

Fine family living

October 2012 by Rob McHaffie

‘Australia’s is a special kind of philistinism, an immovable materialism which puts art and ideas of any kind deliberately and firmly to one side to let the serious business of living proceed without distraction.’ Robin Boyd Just to the side of the city Matlok Griffiths rides back and forth from Richmond to his studio at […]

Categories: October 2012, Rob McHaffie, Stamm 2012 Tags: Hank Josefsson, Julia McFarlane, Matlok Griffiths, Rick Milovanovic

d13

October 2012 by Hannah Mathews

I’ve been struggling to summarise my thoughts on dOCUMENTA (d13). In the weeks immediately following its vernissage, the general response seemed to be one of elation and excitement, with several claiming it was possibly The Best exhibition of the 21st century. It wasn’t to be missed. On arriving in Europe two months later, however, the […]

Categories: Hannah Mathews, October 2012, Stamm 2012

John Spiteri

October 2012 by Jonathan Nichols

Social climbing The title of John Spiteri’s recent show at Neon Parc, Still life social climber, could be referring to himself, in a self-deprecating way, but I imagine there is a little salt meant for the audience too. I wonder what social climbers do, besides being a little blank? Watch being watched. Join in carefully. […]

Categories: Jonathan Nichols, October 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: John Spiteri

How to be

October 2012 by Amita Kirpalani

The point is, don’t become an asshole. As art-world participants we should be mindful of this, particularly at a moment when the current logics and cults of interaction, participation, production and performance feel especially social. Most of us are over-institutionalized and yet only partially professionalized. ‘Don’t become an asshole’, is demanded of Pecker, the emerging […]

Categories: Amita Kirpalani, October 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: John Waters

Semi-urban tragedy: The sad caravans of Stefan Gevers

October 2012 by Mila Faranov

Sometimes I feel like an emotional wreck. I don’t know how to express myself so, frustrated, I end up in a heap, dejected, rejected, bereft, if not by anyone else, at least by common reason, or rationality. Isolated, even abandoned, inarticulate and mute, feeling unloved and lonely. A self-indulgent deluge of descriptors plagues me. There […]

Categories: Mila Faranov, October 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Stefan Gevers

Yolngu art in the age of mechanical reproduction

October 2012 by Quentin Sprague

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 […]

Categories: October 2012, Quentin Sprague, Stamm 2012 Tags: Garrawin Gumana, Nyapanyapa Yunupingu, Wandjuk Marika

Rob McHaffie going native

October 2012 by Rob McHaffie

I saw Rob McHaffie’s recent paintings at his studio preview in the Schoolhouse Studios, Abbotsford. Destined for his solo exhibition in September at Darren Knight Gallery in Sydney, this was a one-night only affair, like meeting up with an old friend, several of them in fact. Rob McHaffie’s inspiration, following his Asialink residency at Rimbun […]

Categories: Eve Sullivan, October 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Rob McHaffie

Good behaviour

September 2012 by Amita Kirpalani

In preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, 4 million households in Beijing received etiquette guides which focused on things like how to queue correctly, that when standing in public one’s feet should be in the shape of a ‘V’ or ‘Y’ and, my favourite, that there should be more than three colours represented in any […]

Categories: Amita Kirpalani, September 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Ai Wei Wei

Organic happenings

September 2012 by Rob McHaffie

Drawing has been a great friend of Rhys Lee’s for as long as I’ve known him. Rhys went through a graphics course in Brisbane with fellow artist Matt Hinkley, but Rhys was always keen to get a little looser and wilder than graphic design would allow. Spending time throwing lines around with spray cans as […]

Categories: Rob McHaffie, September 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Rhys Lee

Konnichiwa Osaka

September 2012 by Jonathan Nichols

Osaka feels like a very cool city, cosmopolitan. I often found myself thinking, any minute the locals will just break into something I can understand, but of course it didn’t happen. Real Japanesque at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, looked at the practices of artists born after 1970. It comes way after super real […]

Categories: Jonathan Nichols, September 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Katsuhisa Sato, Maoya Kishi, Taro Izumi

Paradise

September 2012 by Quentin Sprague

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 […]

Categories: Quentin Sprague, September 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Daniel Boyd

Peter Schjeldahl: The critic as squid

September 2012 by Eve Sullivan

At one point in the pleasantly orchestrated conversation that was ‘An evening with “The New Yorker”‘, for the Melbourne Writers Festival, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl was likened to a large smoking squid. This reference to an outdated bad habit, and the old-school independence that one associates with art criticism in this age of institutional […]

Categories: Eve Sullivan, September 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Peter Schjeldahl

Some local birds

September 2012 by Mila Faranov

Why not, I thought. Go local. Pat Brassington’s had enough press already! So has ACCA. It just so happens that my friend Ben Sheppard has a show on round the corner from my house at Counihan Gallery in Brunswick. Excellent! I can walk there! And it just so happens that my friend Amy Jo is […]

Categories: Mila Faranov, September 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Benjamin Sheppard

Mikala Dwyer—agent orange

August 2012 by Amita Kirpalani

Last time we were here together we kissed inside the circular Olafur Eliasson installation on the second floor. Orange and you all around me. Tongues inside each other’s mouths, laughing out loud at our lust. Despite this version of elementalism requiring supplicant bodies to complete or form the work’s whole, we heckled these neat edges. […]

Categories: Amita Kirpalani, August 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Mikala Dwyer

Love and the machine

August 2012 by Hannah Mathews

Last Sunday I attended a private function held in celebration of the showing of Russell Gray Goodman’s Daytona dreamer as part of the Gertrude Street Projection Festival. Russell Goodman was a Melbourne artist whose untimely death in 1988 cut his life and emerging artistic practice tragically short. Daytona dreamer, a kinetic sculpture of complex construction […]

Categories: August 2012, Hannah Mathews, Stamm 2012 Tags: Russell Gray Goodman

Do ya thang Wang!

August 2012 by Rob McHaffie

I’m staying in Bang Pu Mai at the moment, just outside Bangkok, visiting a loved one. There’s not a lot of art out here as it’s a big industrial area. We drive along Sukhumvit Road each day and pass billboards with big photos of the King’s daughter taking photos of seagulls. We pass a few […]

Categories: August 2012, Rob McHaffie, Stamm 2012 Tags: Wang

Bradd Westmoreland—wet

August 2012 by Jonathan Nichols

In January 2009 Bradd Westmoreland painted this crazy huge frieze titled War & peace around three walls of a small studio space I’m attached to in Fitzroy as part of a very local, very diverse, summer series of impromptu weekenders. The full catastrophe was equal part dance of life and cycle of destruction painted over a couple […]

Categories: Jonathan Nichols, July 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Bradd Westmoreland

(Mis)communication rules

August 2012 by Quentin Sprague

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. […]

Categories: August 2012, Quentin Sprague, Stamm 2012 Tags: Newell Harry

‘The ark of catastrophe’: Guido van der Werve and Lyndal Jones in the 18th Biennale of Sydney

August 2012 by Eve Sullivan

Two of the works that are most memorable for me in this year’s Biennale of Sydney are Guido van der Werve’s film work Nummer acht: everything is going to be alright, and Lyndal Jones’s performance and installation at Cockatoo Island, Rehearsing catastrophe: the ark in Sydney. In the spirit of the biennale’s linked-in themes of […]

Categories: August 2012, Eve Sullivan, Stamm 2012 Tags: Guido van der Werve, Lyndal Jones

Same, same but different or three I liked best

August 2012 by Mila Faranov

I passed through the sliding doors of MUMA at Monash’s Caulfield campus. How things have changed since I was a student here. We weren’t lucky enough to have this in 1992. Well anyway, as I passed through, the first thing that met my knees, and then my eyes, was a long flat arrangement of objects, mostly […]

Categories: August 2012, Mila Faranov, Stamm 2012 Tags: Kit Wise, Patrick Pound, [The User]

New tricks

July 2012 by Quentin Sprague

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, […]

Categories: July 2012, Quentin Sprague, Stamm 2012 Tags: Jan Verwoert, Tomma Abts

House and home

July 2012 by Eve Sullivan

‘This is a country of many colourful, patterned, plastic veneers, of brick-veneer villas, and the White Australia Policy.’ Robin Boyd, The Australian ugliness. The recent re-release by Text Publishing of The Australian ugliness by Robin Boyd, first published in 1960, provides an occasion to reflect on the prevailing views around cultural diversity. Written from the point […]

Categories: Eve Sullivan, July 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Alex Selenitsch, Elizabeth Pulie

OMG

July 2012 by Amita Kirpalani

Tony Schwensen’s exhibition at Kalimanrawlins is based on a YouTube meme: a chimp, in the Honolulu Zoo, fucking a live frog that had hopped into his enclosure. Over five million hits. The YouTube video is an unshockingly blurry depiction of its title: Video what the hell another freaky monkey rapes frog orally!. One of the works […]

Categories: Amita Kirpalani, July 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Tony Schwensen

An interview with Azam Aris

July 2012 by Jonathan Nichols

1. The duck and the moon Azam Aris: They are actually trying to do this here now—send an astronaut into space. Not just for scientific experiments but because of the idea that there has to be a Malaysian in space. That is OK for me. It’s actually good. You can create this image in education, […]

Categories: Jonathan Nichols, July 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Azam Aris

The what and the why: Berlinde De Bruyckere

July 2012 by Mila Faranov

I once ordered an exhibition catalogue from overseas. It came in a brown paper package, beautifully bound, with a 10 x 8 cm image of each represented artist’s work. I lent it and lost it. I remember only one image from that book: a distended headless horse-ness. I saw a preview for Berlinde De Bruyckere’s […]

Categories: July 2012, Mila Faranov, Stamm 2012 Tags: Berlinde De Bruyckere

Digesting Michael

July 2012 by Rob McHaffie

In 2010, I visited Fergus Binns quite regularly for lunch at Friends of the Earth. We’d nibble on our organic lunch plate and then head upstairs to his Smith Street studio to have a look at what he was up to. The painting taking shape for the bulk of that year was Toy painting (Alice […]

Categories: July 2012, Rob McHaffie, Stamm 2012 Tags: Fergus Binns

Like seeks like

June 2012 by Quentin Sprague

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 […]

Categories: June 2012, Quentin Sprague, Stamm 2012 Tags: Boxer Milner, Nick Selenitsch

Shades of grey (gray)

June 2012 by Eve Sullivan

Thanks to Narelle Jubelin’s reference to an obscure literary masterpiece, and those recent works of erotic fan-fiction by EL James currently topping the best-seller lists, this month’s posting continues on a theme. The occasion is Jubelin’s occupation of the stairwell of the former Caulfield Technical School E Block (now the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash […]

Categories: Eve Sullivan, June 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Narelle Jublin

‘I’m not even supposed to be here today’, Clerks (1994)

June 2012 by Amita Kirpalani

When I was a pre-teen, it was the fully-fledged teenagers I knew who were able—as perhaps only teenagers are—to recount swathes of dialogue from the 1994 film Clerks, directed by Kevin Smith. I can’t help but quote critic Brad Laidman (surely not his real name?) at length, since Laidman’s review/lament encapsulates both the film’s plot […]

Categories: Amita Kirpalani, June 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Greatest Hits

Through the frame—another extemporaneous musing

June 2012 by Hannah Mathews

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is how we experience art. Mainly because my own ability to visit shows has become so limited for a time. Openings are out, studio visits impossible and any exhibitions I do get to are on the fly. My only conversations with artists of late have been more […]

Categories: Hannah Mathews, June 2012, Stamm 2012

A quiet one

June 2012 by Rob McHaffie

Friday night, aged seventeen, sitting, waiting. I’ve had a Mars bar from the freezer, Dad’s reading The Age, Mum’s watching a documentary on the Queen, I’m waiting for them to go to bed so I can watch the SBS Friday night movie. No friend has called me. I don’t want to call around, it could […]

Categories: June 2012, Rob McHaffie, Stamm 2012 Tags: Amanda Marburg, Patrick Hartigan, Suji Park

Raafat Ishak’s ‘decadence’

June 2012 by Jonathan Nichols

Around 1994 Raafat Ishak and I were interested in the French word décadence and its local translation, which had been flipped to read ‘decline’, in the magazine Art & Text. The magazine’s usage was ‘The decline of the nude’. This became the basis for an exhibition where we re-flipped the title back to The decadence of […]

Categories: Jonathan Nichols, June 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Raafat Ishak

Atlas: Andrew Hurle

May 2012 by Jonathan Nichols

Andrew Hurle’s work in Post-planning is about human imagination and its roots in pathology. There are six artworks: four small constructions (models), some more unfinished looking than others, and two prints about A3 size and pinned. The works are installed as a group on a stage or rostrum built of black stained timber sheets—a display […]

Categories: Jonathan Nichols, May 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Andrew Hurle

Moya McKenna: Ideas once thought and then forgotten

May 2012 by Quentin Sprague

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 […]

Categories: May 2012, Quentin Sprague, Stamm 2012 Tags: Moya McKenna

Photo finish, or harmony in grey

May 2012 by Eve Sullivan

Grey is the new blue, and Melbourne with its wintry aspect (for this last week at least) is my new Berlin, courtesy of John Nixon’s Black, white & grey. Photographic studies (photosheets), showing at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), and Corinna Belz’s Gerhard Richter—painting at the German film festival. While Richter ruminates on history […]

Categories: Eve Sullivan, May 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Gerhard Richter, John Nixon

Damiano Bertoli’s ‘Continuous moment: Anxiety Villa’

May 2012 by Mila Faranov

I know, because the writing on the wall told me, that this installation is somehow the restaging of a play written by Pablo Picasso. I do not feel it is necessary to know the event passed in order to situate myself into the present work but I can’t help wondering. So I do it. I […]

Categories: May 2012, Mila Faranov, Stamm 2012 Tags: Damiano Bertoli

Touching the surface: Angelica Mesiti

May 2012 by Amita Kirpalani

The vivid and the beautiful operate as an amnesty from the abundance of provisionality. But is it a satisfactory reprieve, say in relation to labour-intensive craftwork as another alternative? Specifically, I’m wondering how to find a space for ineffability in Mesiti’s work, beyond its surface—something problematic, a cleft where I can apply my own undirected […]

Categories: Amita Kirpalani, May 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Angelica Mesiti

Extemporaneously

May 2012 by Hannah Mathews

I’m in the middle of developing a new project. The idea has been with me for years. Percolating away, sometimes urgent—spurred on by a new piece of writing, experience or thought, and sometimes hanging back—quiet. I’m now at the stage where I’m starting to implement its structure in order to move along its conceptual development […]

Categories: Hannah Mathews, May 2012, Stamm 2012

Siri Hayes: The world is our lounge room

May 2012 by Rob McHaffie

Siri Hayes’s recent show of photographs and embroidery, All you knit is love is tricky to write about as I was left quite satisfied feeling the love of family, nature, and life in general. CCP is open on Sundays now so I popped in not knowing what was on. Siri’s exhibition fills the main gallery […]

Categories: May 2012, Rob McHaffie, Stamm 2012 Tags: Siri Hayes

Alesh Macak: 2 screens, 1 sandpit, music and bench, plus audience

April 2012 by Mila Faranov

The human remains presents as a type of epistemology. It provokes questions regarding our perception of self and with the super forces of existence and infinity. Caspar David Friedrich meets the New Age in Alesh Macak’s metaphysical meditation on the sublime and our relationship to it. With a sound-track evocative of those hippy–trippy binaural beats and […]

Categories: April 2012, Mila Faranov, Stamm 2012 Tags: Alesh Macak

Make vibes not things: Caroline Anderson A.K.A. Crystal Diamond

April 2012 by Rob McHaffie

Why are people making so much art? What’s on this month? The more I think about it, the more I think about it … Oh jeez, I’m a bit strung out, I couldn’t make it to the NEW13 opening at ACCA. Wanna come with me? Have you seen this? What did you think of that? I […]

Categories: April 2012, Rob McHaffie, Stamm 2012 Tags: Caroline Anderson

Elvis Richardson’s real estate

April 2012 by Eve Sullivan

‘All the world’s a stage, and all the people on it merely players …’ Elvis Richardson has, for some years now, built a body of work based on the found archives and stock images of a personal nature that people (apparently willingly, and sometimes for profit) present to the world. Whether it be the collections […]

Categories: April 2012, Eve Sullivan, Stamm 2012 Tags: Elvis Richardson

Coloured dirt

April 2012 by Quentin Sprague

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 […]

Categories: April 2012, Quentin Sprague, Stamm 2012 Tags: Shane Cotton

The clock and the rock: Aesthetic of the emblematic

April 2012 by Amita Kirpalani

4:17 pm. What happens to time if we fold it in half like a piece of paper, and then unfold it? Are the wrinkles at the end or the beginning? This is a poorly recalled line from one of the 6000 films sampled in Christian Marclay’s epic video work, The clock, currently on view at […]

Categories: Amita Kirpalani, April 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Nicholas Mangan

Background/middle-ground/foreground: Speaking about art

April 2012 by Jonathan Nichols

by Jonathan Nichols & Hannah Mathews JN: I was a bit disappointed with the Ute Meta Bauer talk last week. It was interesting to hear about her choices and curatorial influences but not much of an insight into the ‘why’ behind her preferences and ideas. It would have been interesting to hear about her current […]

Categories: April 2012, Hannah Mathews, Jonathan Nichols, Stamm 2012 Tags: Jan Verwoert, Olaf Nicolai, Paul O’Neill, Peter Friedl, Ute Meta Bauer

Vogue-ing for the dictaphone: Alex Martinis Roe

March 2012 by Amita Kirpalani

One thing I’ve learned is that you can’t undo a blurt or even a short rant. Perhaps because I speak to think, like most of us do … right? On Friday February 17 from 2 to 4:30pm, formerly Melbourne, now Berlin-based artist Alex Martinis Roe facilitated a workshop she designed as part of her work […]

Categories: Amita Kirpalani, March 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Alex Martinis Roe

The terror of n: Belle Bassin

March 2012 by Mila Faranov

In both style and content Belle Bassin’s recent solo exhibition, The terror of n, has a strong resonance with the work of 19th-century spiritualist artist Hilma af Klint. Both artists employ geometric abstraction, meticulous grid work and esoteric symbology that belie the formality, order and control implied by such approaches, instead quietly moving toward an […]

Categories: March 2012, Mila Faranov, Stamm 2012 Tags: Belle Bassin

Doom and gloom: Ronnie van Hout

March 2012 by Jonathan Nichols

Through Hany Armanious’s Venice exhibition you can find your way around the back to MUMA’s latest collection rehang. Into the middle of the room you look straight at two mini-figures dressed in pyjamas. Attached to both heads is an identical Ronnie van Hout painted skin face. They look a bit like Olaf Nicolai’s Oedipus (c. […]

Categories: Jonathan Nichols, March 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Ronnie van Hout

Small giants

March 2012 by Quentin Sprague

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 […]

Categories: March 2012, Quentin Sprague, Stamm 2012 Tags: Timmy Payungka Tjapangati

Jenny Watson: here, there and everywhere

March 2012 by Eve Sullivan

As someone who keeps hopping cities, states and (most recently) countries myself I can identify with the ‘Home and Away’ theme of this exhibition. It’s been a while since I’ve seen recent work by Jenny Watson and I know she was a bit unfashionable for a while in Australia. This exhibition cleverly addresses this tall […]

Categories: Eve Sullivan, March 2012, Stamm 2012 Tags: Jenny Watson

A morning with Julian Martin

March 2012 by Rob McHaffie

I haven’t seen a solo show of Julian Martin’s work but at the many group shows of Arts Project artists, I find myself gravitating toward his drawings. They offer clarity among the talking and wine sipping. The thick pastel colour on paper creates a velvety surface that absorbs and softens my intense art gaze the […]

Categories: March 2012, Rob McHaffie, Stamm 2012 Tags: Julian Martin

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About

This is the archive for Stamm, an online publishing project initiated by artist Jonathan Nichols in 2012.  [Read More] about About

Years

  • Stamm 2015
  • Stamm 2013
  • Stamm 2012

Writers 2015

  • Eliza Dyball
  • Amita Kirpalani
  • Michelle Mantsio
  • Kyla McFarlane
  • Anca Verona Mihulet
  • Jonathan Nichols
  • Tom Polo
  • Caterina Riva
  • Quentin Sprague
  • Sacha Waldron
  • Suzette Wearne

Writers 2013

  • Trevelyan Clay
  • Amita Kirpalani
  • Michelle Mantsio
  • Jonathan Nichols
  • Lisa Radford
  • Quentin Sprague
  • Pip Wallis

Writers 2012

  • Mila Faranov
  • Amita Kirpalani
  • Hannah Mathews
  • Rob McHaffie
  • Jonathan Nichols
  • Quentin Sprague
  • Eve Sullivan
  • Pip Wallis