Art Column
Ever Present in Singapore
Sunday, September 4th, 2022 Art Column,Not so long ago, Aboriginal art was fighting for a place in the mainstream, trying to shake off the anthropological baggage that allowed sceptics to dismiss its claims to contemporary relevance. White fellas made ‘art’, blackfellas made artefacts. It wasn’t all that different to a once-popular distinction between men who made art, and women who […]
Heart of Country
Tuesday, August 30th, 2022 Art Column,One wonders if audiences are finally coming to terms with bark painting. It’s simultaneously one of the oldest living art forms on the planet, and one of the newest. The roots of the medium stretch back into prehistory, not only pre-dating western forms of painting, but the invention of paper, and even the papyrus used […]
Shaken to His Core: Nolan’s Auschwitz
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2022 Art Column,Auschwitz holds a special place in the modern imagination, being synonymous with a horror that defies the descriptive powers of art. It was the largest of the Nazi extermination camps, responsible for the deaths of more than 1.1 million people. It inspired the German intellectual, T.W. Adorno, to famously declare: “to write poetry after Auschwitz […]
NATSIAA 2022 in Darwin
Tuesday, August 16th, 2022 Art Column,For almost 40 years Telstra has had a dream run with its sponsorship of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA). Held every August at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT), the competition has become the primary focus for Indigenous communities and individual artists from all parts of […]
Ultra Unreal
Tuesday, August 9th, 2022 Art Column,Things have been quiet at the Museum of Contemporary Art this year, but Ultra Unreal aims at a reboot. It’s an exhibition that pushes beyond the contemporary, drawing us into virtual realms, both futuristic and animistic. These imaginary worlds have been created by new technology and populated with supernatural beings. It all sounds breathlessly exciting. […]
The Hadley’s Art Prize 2022 & MONA
Tuesday, August 2nd, 2022 Art Column,Unlike Errol Flynn and Douglas Mawson, I’d never stayed at Hadley’s Orient Hotel in Hobart – until it hosted an art prize. Established in 1834, Hadley’s is one of the oldest hotels in Australia, and it trades lavishly on its historical connections. There are plenty of hotels that are more up-to-date and luxurious, but not […]
White Rabbit: I Loved You
Tuesday, July 26th, 2022 Art Column,Anybody who has seen the Marriage Market in Shanghai’s People Park will never imagine the Chinese as a nation of desperate romantics. Every weekend the Market is swarming with parents eager secure an advantageous match for their son or daughter. One gets the impression that marriage is primarily an economic transaction, with love being a […]
Robert Wilson: Moving Portraits
Tuesday, July 19th, 2022 Art Column,Germany’s all-time literary giant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, once suggested to Caspar David Friedrich he should paint landscapes that systematically depicted each type of cloud identified in a famous treatise. Friedrich, by all accounts, was horrified at the suggestion. Being atttracted by the freedom and mutability of clouds, he resisted the idea of placing them […]
Colin Lanceley: Earthly Delights
Tuesday, July 5th, 2022 Art Column,For more than a thousand years the west was obsessed with the classical culture of Greece and Rome. In the cyber-age of today when all knowledge is available on the mobile phone, we can barely remember the cultural achievements of the past twenty years. This is partly because those who have been entrusted to preserve […]
Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles
Tuesday, June 28th, 2022 Art Column,Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles, at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art, is a daring but necessary exhibition for an Australian art museum. Daring, because local audiences have grown so accustomed to a diet of ‘masterpiece’ shows it’s difficult to imagine them flocking to see the work of a contemporary Japanese artist whose name will be […]