Art Column
Head On 2015
Friday, May 15th, 2015 Art Column,When a show draws a huge crowd to the Town Hall on a rainy Friday night it is testimony to Sydney’s booming interest in photography. The occasion was the opening of Head On, the annual photo festival that has grown to colossal proportions over the past few years. The influx of photographers and fans from […]
Anzac Shows, New Zealand
Saturday, May 2nd, 2015 Art Column,Australia is allegedly spending $325 million on the commemoration of the First World War. This figure, we are told, is more than twice what the British have allocated, and 20 times the budget for events in New Zealand. Some will see this is a waste of money at a time when the government is preaching […]
Trent Parke
Saturday, April 25th, 2015 Art Column,Death and the photo are close relations, as every click of the camera records a moment that will never be repeated. What we tend to admire in a photographer is the ability to transcend this inherent morbidity, to take the stuff of everyday life and shape it into something strange and marvellous. No photographer could […]
Robert Campbell Jr.
Saturday, April 18th, 2015 Art Column,Artbank, the Australian government’s art rental agency, has been around since 1980. It was an initiative of a Fraser administration returned to power for a third consecutive term that year – a reminder of an era when both sides of politics took an active interest in the arts. By contrast, today’s politicians seem completely devoid […]
David Lynch
Saturday, April 11th, 2015 Art Column,For 35 years David Lynch has been an enthusiastic devotee of Transcendental Meditation. “This field within, this field of pure consciousness” he tells curator, José Da Silva, “has qualities and those qualities are: unbounded intelligence, unbounded creativity, unbounded happiness, unbounded love, unbounded energy and unbounded peace. It’s all positive there within – the big treasury!” […]
The Photograph and Australia
Saturday, April 4th, 2015 Art Column,Some exhibitions should come with a ‘Buyer Beware’ warning. Many will go along to The Photograph and Australia at the Art Gallery of NSW expecting to see a comprehensive historical survey of Australian photography. The AGNSW has encouraged such expectations by using well-known images by David Moore and Olive Cotton in its publicity material. In […]
Roy Jackson
Saturday, March 28th, 2015 Art Column,In an era when art has plumbed new depths of frivolity, Roy Jackson (1944-2013) was almost too serious for his own good. He stubbornly believed the only thing that counted was the quality of the work, not the ephemeral ego gratifications artists enjoy during their 15 minutes of fame. He wasn’t even sure about the […]
Art Basel Hong Kong 2015
Saturday, March 21st, 2015 Art Column,At the Cocktail Reception that followed the Private View of this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong the Swiss luxury brand, Davidoff, was handing out free cigars. It proved a wildly popular giveaway. The entire party, held around the swimming pool of the Grand Hyatt, was wreathed in a fog of cigar smoke. A food queue […]
Shaun Gladwell
Saturday, March 14th, 2015 Art Column,Watching the inexorable rise of Shaun Gladwell over the past decade makes me feel like the only teetotaler at a drunken party. After absorbing many hours of video, I still don’t get it. When everyone was gasping about Storm Sequence (2000) – a slow-motion film of Gladwell on a skateboard, I thought it was stupefying. […]
Perth Festival Art 2015
Saturday, March 7th, 2015 Art Column,Over the past few years the Perth Festival has established a reputation for an adventurous visual arts program. This is in contrast to most of the arts festivals around Australia, which are dominated by the performing arts. Even Adelaide, which has had a long-term commitment to the visual arts, has dispensed with its regular Artists’ […]