Tag: political art
Newsletter 307
Monday, October 7th, 2019 Newsletter,From the ‘Wet Tropics’ of Far North Queensland my travels have brought me to Klagenfurt, Austria, where I just saw a forest planted in a football stadium. The ambitious installation, For Forest, was dreamt up by Swiss curator, Klaus Littmann, who took years to organise and fund the project. The idea sprang from a 1970/71 […]
Nusra Latif Qureshi & Adam Chang
Thursday, September 5th, 2019 Art Column,Before moving to Melbourne in 2001 at the age of 27, Nusra Latif Quereshi was trained as musaviripainter in her birthplace, Lahore. The term refers to a type of Islamic and Indian miniature painting that requires a high degree of skill and patience. Before moving to Australia in 1997, aged 37, Adam Chang studied painting […]
Basquiat’s Defacement: The Untold Story
Wednesday, August 28th, 2019 Art Column,It’s a sign of the times when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, one of the standard bearers for modern art, hosts an exhibition exposing the brutality of the city’s police force. In the age of Trump the United States has become a radically divided nation where issues such as refugees, racism and […]
Janet Laurence: After Nature
Thursday, March 21st, 2019 Art Column,“What need has nature of thought, of care?” asked Confucius in the 5thC. BCE. “Plenty” is the answer he’d receive today, as we struggle with the effects of global warming, deforrestation, salination, loss of species and habitat. In the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ era nature needs all the help it can get. Having worked so dilgently to […]
Quilty
Wednesday, March 13th, 2019 Art Column,It’s often said that having a lot of enemies must mean you’re doing something right. Ben Quilty discovered long ago that the price of fame for an artist is the undying enmity of a large proportion of one’s peers. This hasn’t put the brakes on his glorious ascent but neither has it left him unscarred. […]
Nick Cave: Until
Friday, November 30th, 2018 Art Column,One truly astonishing story last week concerned Sandra Parks, a 13-year-old in Milwaukee who was killed by a random bullet fired into her house from the street. What made this pointless crime even more bizarre was that two years ago the same girl had written an award-winning essay called Our Truth, on the problem of […]
William Kentridge: That Which We Do Not Remember
Friday, October 12th, 2018 Art Column,There is nobody in the upper echelons of contemporary art quite like South Africa’s William Kentridge. There may be artists with more natural talent. There are plenty whose works sell for greater sums. There are artists with a much better feel for colour or texture, or who draw with greater fluency. Kentridge’s works are not […]
Steirischer Herbst 2018
Thursday, October 4th, 2018 Art Column,In the words of Thomas Bernhard, Austria’s greatest novelist of the late 20th century, the city of Graz was “a nest of Nazis”. In a speech of last year, Georg Friedrich Haas, Austria’s foremost living composer, reeled off a list of Nazis that had remained faithful to the Führer in post-war Graz, including his own […]
Colony
Friday, May 4th, 2018 Art Column,If I seem to be constantly writing in praise of the National Gallery of Victoria this isn’t because the grass is always greener interstate. It’s because the NGV has been attending so well to the fundamental business of what a gallery should be doing. Arguably the most important task is to provide a vibrant program […]
Chinese New Year Lunar Lanterns & In Your Dreams
Friday, February 23rd, 2018 Art Column,Bread and circuses was the classical world’s formula for keeping the population happy. The famous phrase originates in Juvenal’s 10th Satire, when the poet laments that Romans have become so blasé about the political process they are happy to sell their votes for grain handouts and lavish public entertainments. With the NSW Government proposing to […]