Tag: political art
White Rabbit: Beyond the Frame
Saturday, October 8th, 2011 Art Column, Chinese Art, International Art,Back again is Ai Weiwei’s Oil spill (2007) – a series of shiny black porcelain discs that sit flat on the floor, mimicking drops of black gold. In typical fashion, Ai Weiwei takes a substance associated with toxic pollution and transforms it into an aesthetic delicacy. Such ironic turnarounds and dislocations are characteristic of his […]
The Mad Square
Saturday, September 3rd, 2011 Art Column, International Art, Uncategorized,It happens from time to time that I fail to distinguish a cabaret from a crematorium – Joseph Roth From its traumatic birth, at the end of World War One, the Weimar Republic was an unstable experiment. The historian, Eric Hobsbawm charts its rise and fall in an introductory essay for the catalogue of The […]
Din Q. Lê: Erasure, Cairns Indigenous Art Fair 2011
Saturday, August 27th, 2011 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Australian Art,It was astonishing to learn that in a recent opinion poll Australians rated border protection as a more important issue than health, education, transport or housing. This is one of those statistical miracles that testify to our growing sense of social paranoia and the power of political scare campaigns. The facts are well known but […]
The last days of the Caponian empire
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011 Australian Art, Blog,What a deathly year it has been for artists! In quick succession we have lost Cy Twombly, Lucian Freud, and now John Hoyland. The latter was especially disturbing, as I had just contributed a catalogue essay to his exhibition with Charles Nodrum in Melbourne. Logically there is nothing surprising about someone dying at a ripe […]
Surrealism at GoMA
Saturday, July 30th, 2011 Art Column, International Art,“This life is a hospital in which every patient is tormented by the yearning to move to another bed. – André Breton It’s probably been said many times, but Queensland is a highly appropriate setting for a Surrealism show. Not only does one meet the most surreal personalities north of the border, only a few […]
Jim Anderson / Phillip Juster
Saturday, February 26th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,“I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher,” said Dr. Johnson to his biographer, Boswell, “but I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” Seeing the exhibition, Lampoon: An Art Historical Trajectory 1970-2010, I thought these lines were oddly appropriate for Jim Anderson. In a retrospective at Sydney University’s Tin Sheds […]
Shen Jiawei: the Art of Politics
Sunday, August 1st, 2010 Art Essays, Australian Art, Chinese Art, International Art,Shen Jiawei became an artist during the Cultural Revolution, making his first major works in the service of the state, embodied in the figure of the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong. For roughly a decade, from 1966 onwards, every aspect of daily life in China was politicised in a way that seems to defy logic. It […]
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. […]