Art Essays
I Am Eleven, The Curse of the Gothic Symphony
Saturday, July 21st, 2012 Art Essays, Film Reviews, Other Writing,Screening opportunities are limited for Australian filmmakers, let alone documentary makers who may only expect to recoup their costs through TV and DVD sales. Two new efforts, I Am Eleven and The Curse of the Gothic Symphony, are currently enjoying the novelty of limited releases in cinemas around Australia. I Am Eleven by rookie film-maker, […]
Kamisaka Sekka & Hiroshige
Saturday, July 21st, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, International Art,Art in Japan has been through all the same upheavals as art in the west, but no other country has managed to retain so much of its own distinctive character. The defining characteristics include a respect for tradition that shines through even in a critical or satirical mode; a love of beauty and craftsmanship; and […]
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 […]
Portrait of Spain (a preview)
Saturday, July 7th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, International Art,For a visitor to the Museo del Prado in Madrid one moment stays fixed in the memory: entering the central gallery to be confronted by Diego Velasquez’s masterpiece, Las Meninas (1665). The most dramatic way of approaching the painting is to see it framed by a doorway from the other side of the room. There […]
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 […]
Theatre of the World
Saturday, June 30th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, International Art,For many people museums are uncomfortably similar to mausoleums – repositories of dead animals, dead art, dead ideas. Even those of us who spend their lives in these institutions experience moments when everything feels too dull or predictable. At heart, museums are educational organisations, competing for attention with an ever-increasing range of distractions. But the […]
Growing up with Goannas
Saturday, June 23rd, 2012 Australian Art, Blog, General Art Essays,A few months ago I advised a friend not to labour over her blog, but to write smaller, more spontaneous pieces and publish more frequently. Unfortunately, it seems I’m completely incapable of following my own good advice. The perennial gap between theory and practice – or should that be good intentions and reality? – has begun […]
AGNSW: A new hang
Saturday, June 23rd, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, International Art,A new hang of a gallery’s permanent collection was once a routine affair, but nowadays it has taken on the status of an event. This is partly because the rising costs of doing exhibitions combined with the dwindling budgets of public galleries have forced all institutions to draw more heavily on the works they already […]
Not the Way Home, Damaged
Saturday, June 16th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, International Art,In recent years there has been a spate of projects in which a group of artists are taken to some far-flung location and invited to respond to a new environment. The end result is a group exhibition that gathers together works made on the spot, and those created afterwards in the studio from memories, sketches […]
Down the Rabbit Hole
Saturday, June 9th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Chinese Art, International Art,Last year, according to The New York Times, 395 museums were built across China. As with most things in this vast, mysterious country, the statistics give only a superficial glimpse of the complexities involved. Firstly one might question the Chinese definition of “museum”, which may be a grandiose word for a lot of small-scale enterprises. […]