Tag: Museum of Contemporary Art
Doug Aitken: New Era
Tuesday, November 30th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Doug Aitken, born and based in California, is one of the most globalised of all contemporary artists. He once told an intervewer that “home can be motion” and his work sets out to prove that proposition. His projects are often conceived on a grand scale, requiring teams of collaborators. He makes video, photography, sculpture, performance, […]
The National 2021
Tuesday, April 20th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Conceived as “a celebration of contemporary Australian art”, The National has been a strange beast ever since its inception in 2017. One of the problems of this event – a biennial collaboration between the Art Gallery of NSW, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Carriageworks – is that it has occasionally seemed to be a […]
Fare thee well, Liz Ann
Saturday, March 6th, 2021 Blog,Retiring after 22 years at the helm of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Liz Ann Macgregor still inspires mixed feelings. She arrived in 1999 in a burst of Scottish exotica, a veritable blur of tartan, and says she is now returning from whence she came. Possibly Macgregor’s most notable achievement was to steer the institution […]
Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop
Tuesday, October 20th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Lindy Lee grew up in Brisbane in the 1960s, the daughter of Chinese parents who left Guandong when the Communists came to power. She is ethnically Chinese but Australian born and bred, a duality that has coloured her entire life. She remembers being the only Chinese face in her classes at school, which meant she […]
Biennale of Sydney 2020. Part 2
Thursday, March 26th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Another week, another avalanche of statistics about infections and fatalities. As I write, the Biennale of Sydney, which has made heroic efforts to remain open, has just announced it will be switching to a digital platform. This is a poor substitute for the first-hand experience of works of art but it’s better than a total […]
Cornelia Parker
Friday, November 15th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,A good deal of contemporary art is wilfully opaque but the work of Cornelia Parker is distinguished by a consistent, lucid intelligence – which is not to say there aren’t plenty of puzzles. I’ve never been a fan of wall labels that explain a work but with the survey Rachel Kent has put together for […]
Guan Wei
Friday, November 8th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,This is Guan Wei month in Sydney, with the Museum of Contemporary Art displaying its holdings of this popular Chinese-Australian artist; the University of Western Sydney hosting an exhibition at its Parramatta South Campus, and Martin Browne Contemporary showing new work. Not many artists can say they’ve had three exhibitions running sumultaneously in the same […]
Destination NSW vs. Yoko Ono
Thursday, August 22nd, 2019 Blog,Not many Australian bureaucrats would qualify as art experts but apparently this is no impediment to making pronouncements. And so we have Sandra Chipchase, the Chief Executive of Destination NSW, telling Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art that Yoko Ono is “a well-known celebrity” but not much of an artist. It’s a perfect example of that […]
Shaun Gladwell: Pacific Undertow
Friday, July 26th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,We all have our blind spots and Shaun Gladwell (b.1972) is one of mine. For almost two decades I’ve watched people getting excited about his slow-motion videos of a figure on a skateboard, on a BMX bike, on a motorbike, on a surfboard, on a train… As someone who has never had the slightest desire […]
Michael Armitage: The Promised Land
Thursday, July 4th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Michael Armitage as both an artist and a person is his immunity to cynicism. This is no mean feat in a world dominated by political immorality and self-interest in which voters seem to have lost the ability to tell right from wrong. Among artists the vogue is to produce […]