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Asad Raza: Absorption
May 10, 2019Archibald madness may be raging in Sydney this week, but I’m in Europe, feeling a slightly guilty pleasure at being so far from the frontline. Looking at the entries on-line proves the point that it’s impossible to judge works of art from photos. Every year at the preview I feel pretty confident that I can […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Old Masters in Shenzhen
May 2, 2019Thirty years ago Australia began to export Aboriginal art to major venues in the United States and Europe. Unlike earlier international forays, Dreamings (1988) and Aratjara (1993) were framed as art exhibitions, not as collections of ethnographic artefacts. Nowadays, with China unassailable as our largest trading partner, the National Museum of Australia is repeating the exercise with […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
The National 2019: New Australian Art
April 25, 2019In its second “edition”, The National: New Australian Art, is just as hard to love as its predecessor of 2017. A collaboration between the Art Gallery of NSW, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Carriageworks, the show is intended as an overview of the best and the brightest work being produced in Australia today. It’s […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Suzanne Archer: The Song of the Cicada
April 18, 2019Suzanne Archer’s career as an Australian artist began in a blaze of publicity in 1969. Her first solo exhibition at Sydney’s Clune Gallery was written up in the papers, and splashed on radio and TV. It helped that Archer was young and glam, and that the local gallery scene was limited to a handful of […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
The Historical Expression of Chinese Art
April 11, 2019Look no further, we have a winner for the competition for this year’s least sexy exhibition title. The Historical Expression of Chinese Art: Calligraphy and Painting from the National Museum of China, at the National Museum of Australia, will take a lot of beating. Perhaps it sounds better in Mandarin, but this is only too […]
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Sydney Morning Herald Column
May 17, 2019
Villa Cerruti
A little over a year ago I was in Turin for the announcement of one of the most remarkable private bequests ever handed to a museum of contemporary art. Francesco Federico Cerruti, a local industrialist who made his fortune from the perfect binding process that allowed the spines of books to be glued instead of […]
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Little Woods
Little Woods is a defiantly little movie – the story of two mismatched sisters in the backwoods of North Dakota, struggling with poverty and crime. In an age when films are valued in terms of big budgets, box office and celebrity power, Nia DaCosta’s directorial debut gives the impression that it was shot in a remote […]
Film Reviews
Peterloo
May 10, 2019Rise, like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth, like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you: Ye are many – they are few! Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, thought by many to be the greatest political poem ever written, was inspired by one, singular event. In the […]
Film Reviews
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
May 2, 2019Hollywood legend has it that Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) was the longest running – and most expensive – shoot in screen history. More than 400 days were spent on set, as costs (and Liz Taylor’s paypacket) continued to skyrocket. Yet if we measure the sheer amount time spent on any film, from first conception to […]
Film Reviews
1985
April 25, 2019It’s become a reflex action nowadays to judge every film about America’s recent past as a comment on the present. Movies such as BlacKKKlansman or Vice make it easy to draw the connections. Others, such as 1985, by Malaysian-born director, Yen Tan, take a more oblique approach. Shot in melancholy black-and-white, the scenario is small and intimate, […]
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 […]
Blog
Charles Blackman 1928-2018
August 23, 2018It’s a cliché when the death of an artist also represents ‘the end of an era’, but the death of Charles Blackman draws a line under a heroic generation of Australian figurative painters. Although it represents only a small episode in a long career, Blackman was the last of The Antipodeans – a group brought […]
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
March 8, 2019Satire 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 […]