Art Column
Beyond Bloomsbury & Futurism
Saturday, June 27th, 2009 Art Column,We tend to think of the Edwardian era as a time of long dresses and top hats, but it was also a period in which the British Empire began to disintegrate and the world shuffled towards a bloody war. The Edwardian interlude, roughly from 1901-14, was a time of radical social change that saw the […]
53rd Venice Biennale
Saturday, June 20th, 2009 Art Column,Making Worlds – Fare Mondi is the theme for this year’s Venice Biennale, the 53rd installment of the world’s leading contemporary art exhibition. In the words of Daniel Birnbaum, the Swedish-born, Frankfurt-based director, the title expresses a wish “to emphasise the process of creation.” This may sound a very modest ambition but Birnbaum does have […]
Sculpture by the Sea in Denmark
Saturday, June 13th, 2009 Art Column,Denmark is a glorious place on a sunny day, and the week leading up to the Sculpture by the Sea launch in Aarhus was especially pleasant. Alas, by the day of the media preview, Thor, the ancient God of thunder, finally lost patience with the protracted installation process. While a large part of the Australian […]
John Brack
Saturday, June 6th, 2009 Art Column,Will Sydney ever see the best of John Brack? The National Gallery of Victoria held its first Brack retrospective in 1987. Following artist’s death in February 1999 there have been further surveys held in Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide. Exhibitions have looked at Brack’s portraits, his paintings of the nude, and his relationship with Fred Williams. […]
Margaret Olley: Life’s Journey
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 Art Column,At this stage of her brilliant career there is nothing that any critical review can add to or subtract from the reputation of Margaret Hannah Olley. There have been two retrospectives, two Orders of Australia, four honorary doctorates. She has been painted by Australia’s best-known artists, and hailed for her constant public benefactions. As long […]
The Golden Journey
Saturday, May 16th, 2009 Art Column,Late last year the Art Gallery of NSW held a small but fascinating show celebrating the thousandth anniversary of Genji Monogatari – often hailed as the world’s first novel. One of the delights of that exhibition was the sense of cultural continuity that ran through the display, from the decorated screens of the early 1600s […]
Tim Johnson
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 Art Column,Tim Johnson once had a vision of the Buddha in his kitchen in Newtown. “The moment after I saw it,” he told an interviewer in 1991, “it somehow took over my thoughts, said ‘Don’t be afraid’, and floated towards me very quickly, merged into my body, and then said ‘I’ll always be here.’” Neither is […]
Art & Politics
Wednesday, January 15th, 2003 Art Column, General Art Essays,There was a period of about a decade, starting from the early-to-mid 1980s, when every major art event had to be accompanied by an extensive series of forums. These talk-fests were often boring, and always inconclusive. Some participants gave the impression of having done no preparation whatsoever, others had written papers of impenetrable, theoretical complexity. […]