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White Rabbit: Hot Blood
June 13, 2019When the Chinese Defence Minister recently told us the government had been “correct” in its response to the Tiananmen Square protests he said a lot about China today. For the past three decades the Party has kept silent about Tiananmen and obliged its citizens to follow suit. To suddenly come out and portray the massacre […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Salon des Refusés 2019
June 7, 2019If Friedrich Nietzsche hadn’t come up with his theory of the Eternal Return in the late 19th century, a few visits to the Salon des Refusés at the S.H.Ervin Gallery would have planted the idea in the mind of any latter-day philosopher. For Nietzsche the thought that everything in life would repeat on an endless cycle was […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Monet: Impression Sunrise
Most museum exhibitions proceed like a piece of music steadily rising to a crescendo. Viewers trace the growth of an artist’s talent from humble beginnings to eventual triumph. Art movements begin with groups of poor but talented Bohemians scheming in cafés, and end by dominating the museums of the world. That’s pretty much the story […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor
May 30, 2019“Playful” is the word on everyone’s lips as they go around the National Gallery of Victoria’s Alexander Calder survey. Yet for Sandy Rower, the artist’s grandson, who manages the Calder Foundation in New York, the term is completely taboo. Rower argues that to imagine Calder (1898-1976) was “playful” is to completely misjudge his character. Based […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Archibald Prize 2019
May 23, 2019May has been the month of miracles. This was the way our highly devout Prime Minister described his election victory, which arrived on the back of three years of dysfunctional government and a campaign devoid of policies. It was also the way Tony Costa responded to his victory in this year’s Archibald Prize, for a […]
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Sydney Morning Herald Column
June 20, 2019
The Essential Duchamp
When Marcel Duchamp arrived in New York in June 1915, he was already famous – or rather, notorious – as the creator of Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912). The painting had been the sensation of the Armory Show of 1913, the first major exhibition to bring European modern art before the American public. Today […]
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Never Look Away
Gerhard Richter’s official biography, written by Dieter Elger, curator of the artist’s archive, is a very dull book. This is partly because Richter, a micromanager of his own career, is famously protective about the details of his life. In Never Look Away it is director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s achievement to have recognised a powerful set of […]
Film Reviews
Sydney Film Festival 2019 & Tolkien
June 13, 2019Week two of the Sydney Film Festival rolls on but most of the interesting features are due to get local releases. As I’m reluctant to write too much about a movie that deserves a review in its own right, I’ll talk briefly about the festival, then segue to the new bio pic of J.R.R.Tolkien, which […]
Film Reviews
Sydney Film Festival 2019: A First Look
June 7, 2019It’s time scientists studied the link between major arts events in Sydney and rainfall. All it takes to break the drought is the opening of Sculpture by the Sea, or Vivid, or, last week, the Sydney Film Festival. Admittedly one only gets damp en route to the Film Festival, and can spend the rest of the […]
Film Reviews
Rocketman
May 30, 2019Dexter Fletcher may well be the new Ken Russell. In Bohemian Rhapsody, and now in Rocketman, he reveals a taste for overheated theatricality that hasn’t been seen since Russell turned Franz Liszt into a teen idol. The difference is that this much-anticipated bio pic of Elton John never departs too far from formula, no matter […]
Monet: Lasting Impressions
June 20, 2019“A catastrophe seemed imminent to me,” wrote Louis Leroy in a notorious exhibition review of April, 1874, “and it was reserved for M. Monet to contribute the last straw.” That last straw was a painting called Impression Sunrise, a grey, misty view of a harbour wth the silhouettes of two small boats in the foreground, […]
Blog
Sandy Rower, Calder’s grandson
April 11, 2019Sculpture just sat around waiting to be admired until Alexander Calder (1898-1976) came up with the idea of the mobile– a set of forms suspended in mid-air that move gently as viewers walk past. On the eve of the first-ever Australian exhibition of this revolutionary artist’s work at the National Gallery of Victoria, I visited […]
Blog
Edmund Capon 1940-2019
March 22, 2019Death was certainly not in Edmund Capon’s plans when he retired as the longest-serving Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales at the end of 2011. For the following six years he kept up a busy schedule of public speaking, leading tours, and being generally open to all possibilities. When we met for […]
Blog
Fang Lijun: Facial Recognition
March 8, 2019A shaven head sends a message but it’s an ambiguous one. The shaven heads of prisoners or monks tell us they belong to an order of humanity removed from the social mainstream. The shaven head of a soldier, a footballer, or indeed a football hooligan, is a badge of aggressive intent. When a businessman shaves […]
John McDonald
For over thirty years he has been one of Australia’s best-known critics. He writes a weekly art column for the Sydney Morning Herald, a weekly film column for the Australian Financial Review, and contributes to a wide range of local and international publications.
Terror Nullius
Satire invites us to become conspirators in a joke made at someone else’s expense. As the usual targets are figures of power and authority it’s reasonable to assume the invitation will be accepted. The satirist adopts the Robin Hood position – defending the powerless against the few who seek to impose their will upon the […]
Artist Profile
Signature Art Prize 2018
March 7, 2019This year, for the fourth iteration of the Prize, 15 finalists were chosen from a field of 113 artists spread throughout the Asia-Pacific and – for the first time – Singapore’s cultural efflorescence over the past decade has been a source of wonder even to the Singaporeans themselves, who are forever celebrating their own progress. […]
Artist Profile
The Tarnished Prizes
No nation on earth can match Australia’s enduring love of art prizes. It reflects our obsession with sport (which is something we can do as well as anybody), allied with the perennial Cultural Cringe (the sense that we suffer from a lack of Old Masters and ruined temples). The Cringe was named by A.A.Phillips in […]