Journals
Brett Whiteley: Self-Portrait (1977)
Thursday, September 15th, 2022 Journals,Brett Whiteley was never shy when it came to measuring himself against the masters. At the age of 16, while boarding at Scots College in Bathurst, he came across a book on Vincent Van Gogh and painted a self-portrait in emulation of the famously misunderstood Dutchman. At 16 we are all misunderstood and ready to […]
Whiteley: the Opera
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,Ever since John Adams gave us Nixon in China in 1987, the possibilities for opera have been limitless. Unlike the Greek tragedians who were obliged to set every play in a mythical age of Gods and heroes, contemporary composers have drawn subjects from the news cycle, and from the tawdry lives of latter-day celebrities. Elena […]
Patrick Hall
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,A popular way of praising an Australian artist is to proclaim that his or work should be better known overseas. It’s ironic that Hobart-based artist, Patrick Hall, is probably better known overseas than he is on the other side of Bass Strait. Steven Joyce of Despard Gallery has shown Hall’s work at the renowned Chicago […]
It All Started with a Stale Sandwich
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,This year is the 50th anniversary of the Kaldor Public Art Projects, a testament to the persistence of a Hungarian migrant who needed to share his obsession with an entire city, if not a country. The birthday celebrations will continue to spread the Kaldor gospel via an unorthodox retrospective at the Art Gallery of New […]
Michael Armitage
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,Michael Armitage is one of today’s most acclaimed young English artists, the only problem is that he’s Kenyan. Born in Nairobi in 1984, Armitage attended boarding school in England, and went on to have an impeccable English art education at the Slade School of Art and the Royal Academy. Yet as so often happens, the […]
Art and Money Revisited
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,When Robert Hughes delivered his jeremaiad, Art and Money, in 1984, it seemed as if the earth would surely open up and swallow the greedy dealers, the opportunistic artists, the vulgar, nouveau riche collectors who had wrought such pestilence upon the fair face of Art. The gist of Hughes’s argument was that art was being […]
Acute misfortune (for the viewer)
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,When viewers of Acute Misfortune first catch sight of Daniel Henshall playing artist maudit, Adam Cullen, they may experience a flash of déjà vu. The quiet, menacing tones of John Bunting, mastermind of the Snowtown serial murders, are back on air. Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown (2011) is a movie I have no desire to watch again, […]
Suzanne Archer
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,In Wedderburn, on the outskirts of Sydney, the temperature was moving towards 40 degrees. Despite the fans, Suzanne Archer’s bush studio felt like an oven – the heat and glare of an Australian summer providing a strange backdrop for a body of work that has been growing darker, denser, ever more gothic in character. The […]
Kusama: Infinity
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,Kusama: Infinity has echoes of “Eternity”, that word inscribed in chalk on surfaces all over Sydney for 35 years, by the eccentric Arthur Stace. It took Martin Sharp to make Stace into a cult figure when he reproduced that distinctive cursive script on a poster, but Yayoi Kusama has been a one-woman cult since she […]
Looby
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,“He’s due for a late flowering,” says artist, McLean Edwards. “I just wish he hadn’t burnt so many bridges on the way.” One of those bridges is Mclean himself, who has already told us he no longer has any relationship with Keith Looby. It made me think: “Do I have any sort of relationship with […]