Art Column
James Rogers
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2020 Art Column,Some artists make their best impression in a group exhibition, others need a showcase to themselves. James Rogers is a sculptor who always seems to have one of the standout pieces in Sculpture By the Sea every year. I felt I knew his work pretty well, but his mid-career survey at the Drill Hall Gallery […]
Koo Bohnchang
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020 Art Column,“In matters of art,” wrote the erudite poet, Paul Valéry, “erudition is a sort of defeat.” The argument is that the freshness of first perceptions may be destroyed by specialised knowledge. Imagine, for example, an expert on ceramics standing in front of a great piece of pottery. There are questions about where and when the […]
Angus Nivison, Paul Higgs
Tuesday, September 8th, 2020 Art Column,If one had to nominate the most high-profile show in Sydney this week, it would probably be Patricia Piccinini’s The Gardener at Roslyn Oxley9. Touted as the most popular contemporary artist in the world in 2106, after two well-attended surveys in Brazil, Piccinini has become a favourite with the art museums. One might compare her […]
Khaled Sabsabi: A Promise
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020 Art Column,After the Lebanese civil war an elegant apartment block in Beirut, known locally as the Yellow House, was left disfigured by gaping holes, every surface scarred by bullets. Scheduled for demolition it was saved by a 1994 heritage campaign. Today the building has been artfully restored and turned into a cultural centre called Beit Beirut […]
Portia Geach Memorial Award 2020
Tuesday, August 25th, 2020 Art Column,Not even a pandemic can dampen down Australia’s love of art prizes. On the contrary, it’s possible the lockdown has inflamed this monstrous passion, as artists have found themselves in the studio for extended periods with no distractions. Perhaps we’ll soon have an oversupply of art to go with the oversupply of investment units. Those […]
Sydney Ball
Tuesday, August 11th, 2020 Art Column,For over a century each new artistic style or movement was viewed as a momentous historical breakthrough, but when everyone started doing it or buying it, the same stuff became mere “fashion”. As the pioneering sociologist, Georg Simmel, noted in 1895, with fashion, the moment of mass circulation spells the end of a particular look, […]
The Art of the Spanish Flu
Tuesday, August 4th, 2020 Art Column,Anyone who thinks COVID-19 has claimed a huge number of lives should look at the Spanish flu of 1918-20. In Pale Rider (2017), a compelling history of that earlier pandemic, Laura Spinney writes: “Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918, and the last sometime in March 1920, it killed 50-100 million, or between […]
Wollongong Art: eX de Medici, Hana Orszulok, Pamela Griffith
Tuesday, July 28th, 2020 Art Column,Earlier this year French President, Emmanuel Macron, announced a €7 billion support fund, largely intended to help small companies and independent artists. It’s a far cry from the $250 million Scott Morrison is sprinkling on the arts sector in Australia. To think of the arts in France is to think of the Opéra Garnier and […]
John R. Walker, Elisabeth Cummings, Ian Grant, Maria Kontis
Saturday, July 18th, 2020 Art Column,After months in lockdown memories of this season’s bushfire crisis have already begun to fade. People are so fixated on the moment, so ready to focus on present circumstances and forget past vexations, that the fires might have happened in ancient times rather than a mere six months ago. For our beloved Prime Minister that […]
Tom Gleghorn
Thursday, July 9th, 2020 Art Column,Robert Hughes once explained his reasons for leaving Australia by saying that if he’d stayed he would have ended up as the world expert on Tom Gleghorn. It wasn’t a swipe at one particular artist so much as an airy dismissal of Australian provincialism, but it left me with a lingering impression of Gleghorn as […]