Aboriginal Art
The National
Saturday, April 8th, 2017 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Australian Art,One wonders if The National: New Australian Art is intended as a subtle riposte to the National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Now of 2013-14. “No navel gazing here in Sydney – we’re bringing you art from all over the country.” The NGV’s bright idea may have been predicated on Melburnian self-esteem but final attendances topped […]
18th Biennale of Sydney
Saturday, July 14th, 2012 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, Chinese Art, International Art,One of the most striking images in the 18th Biennale of Sydney is that of Japanese artist Sachiko Abe, dressed in bridal white, sitting in a small brick building in Cockatoo Island, cutting paper. Visitors are asked to remain silent, so the only sound is the noise made by Abe’s scissors as she trims sheets […]
18th Biennale of Sydney
Saturday, July 7th, 2012 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, Chinese Art, International Art,“Between belief in Nature and belief in politics, one has to choose,” writes French sociologist, Bruno Latour, in the stand-out essay in this year’s Biennale catalogue. We have a perfect demonstration of this principle in the hysterical debate about a carbon price. While Nature is forever, politics is an exercise in short-term, strategic thinking that […]
Parallel Collisions: The 2012 Adelaide Biennial
Saturday, March 10th, 2012 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, General Art Essays, International Art,“We love language,” confessed the curators of Parallel Collisions: the 12th Adelaide Biennial. This may not sound controversial – for the purposes of communication it’s very useful. It was only as I read through the boxed, brick-heavy catalogue for this exhibition that I began to feel Natasha Bullock and Alexie Glass-Kantor may love language not […]
Tim Storrier
Saturday, November 26th, 2011 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Art Essays, General Art Essays,Pablo Picasso is not the only highly successful artist to imagine himself as an outsider. In Australian art, Timothy Austin Storrier presents a perfect case study. A 2000 monograph by Catherine Lumby was even called: Tim Storrier: The Art of the Outsider. If you’re wondering how someone as prominent as Storrier can imagine himself anywhere […]
Din Q. Lê: Erasure, Cairns Indigenous Art Fair 2011
Saturday, August 27th, 2011 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Australian Art,It was astonishing to learn that in a recent opinion poll Australians rated border protection as a more important issue than health, education, transport or housing. This is one of those statistical miracles that testify to our growing sense of social paranoia and the power of political scare campaigns. The facts are well known but […]
Tonsorial philosophy
Friday, August 26th, 2011 Aboriginal Art, Australian Art, Blog,My barber is a philosopher. By this, I don’t mean to compare him to those hairdressers who style themselves “creative artists working in the medium of hair”. Dimitri Kokinelis, barber of Gardeners Road, Rosebery, is a genuine thinker who devotes his time between haircuts to pondering questions of truth, wisdom, justice and nature. He has […]
National Gallery of Australia: A New Extension
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Australian Art, General Art Essays,Nobody in Australia is more experienced in the ways of gallery building than Andrew Andersons, the chief architect of the new wing at the National Gallery of Australia. Although he is a super professional, Andersons has often been criticised by other architects who find his buildings prosaic, deficient in detail and artistry. To be fair, […]
Tommy Watson & the politics of the indigenous art market
Friday, January 1st, 2010 Aboriginal Art, Australian Art,Yannima Tommy Watson is said to have painted his first picture in 2001, in the community of Irrunytju, twelve kilometers south-west of the tri-border, where South Australia meets Western Australia and the Northern Territory. The white man’s borders don’t mean much to the inhabitants of this remote settlement, also known as Wingellina, but it is […]
Gunybi Ganambarr
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 Aboriginal Art, Australian Art,In many people’s minds there could be no art-form less open to change than bark painting. It is one of the world’s oldest living forms of artistic expression, probably dating as far back as those rock paintings done 40,000 years ago. Yet bark painting is also one of the abiding paradoxes of contemporary art, for […]