Tag: politics
Steirischer Herbst 2019: Grand Hotel Abyss
Thursday, October 10th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Welcome to the Grand Hotel Abyss. The phrase was coined in 1933 by Marxist literary critic, György Lukacs, as a put-down of another group of Marxist intellectuals – the so-called Frankfurt School, whose ranks included luminaries such as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas. Lukacs argued that the Frankfurt School practised a form of […]
David Goldblatt: Photography & Truth
Friday, August 9th, 2019 Blog,David Goldblatt will always be known as the photographer who exposed the evils of Apartheid to the world, but to characterise him as a ‘political’ artist is to diminish the breadth of his achievements. This is something Goldblatt has in common with all great photographers who have found their subjects in war, poverty, hatred and […]
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 […]
White Rabbit: Hot Blood
Thursday, June 13th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,When the Chinese Defence Minister recently told us the government had been “correct” in its response to the Tiananmen Square protests he said a lot about China today. For the past three decades the Party has kept silent about Tiananmen and obliged its citizens to follow suit. To suddenly come out and portray the massacre […]
Newsletter 288
Monday, May 27th, 2019 Newsletter,In last week’s newsletter I wondered: does Jesus really want Scott Morrison to be Prime Minister? It seems the answer is ‘Yes’. After his grandstanding election victory, Scummo announced he has always believed in miracles, and has just delivered one. It was a pretty clear confirmation that he imagines God is in his corner. Now […]
2040
Thursday, May 23rd, 2019 Film Reviews,On election night, that wily political tactician, Arthur Sinodinos was asked whether a re-elected Coalition would take steps to address climate change, after years of policy chaos. His reply was that climate change had become such a prominent issue that measures would be adopted as a natural result of increasing community pressure. This was an […]
Newsletter 287
Monday, May 20th, 2019 Newsletter,Politics in Australia isn’t a game of thrones but a game of suburban lounge chairs, with both leaders striving to appear more normal, natural and likeable than the other. The late Bob Hawke was the master of this, and was rewarded with four successive election victories. Hawke’s secret, as he told interviewers, was that he […]
Peterloo
Friday, May 10th, 2019 Film Reviews,Rise, like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth, like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you: Ye are many – they are few! Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, thought by many to be the greatest political poem ever written, was inspired by one, singular event. In the […]
Galveston & Woman at War
Wednesday, April 3rd, 2019 Film Reviews,We’re in the slow season for high-profile new releases but there are plenty of worthwhile films that never make it to the big cinema complexes. Two such movies are Galvestonand Woman at War, which I’ll review this week as a double feature. Galveston is directed by Mélanie Laurent, better known for her work in front of […]
Us
Friday, March 29th, 2019 Film Reviews,Every great horror film acts as a metaphor for some underlying truth, but Jordan Peele’s Us is one long metaphor. In his well-received debut, Get Out, (2017) Peele gave us a horror-comedy in which an Afro-American protagonist discovered that his white girlfriend’s parents and their friends were colonising the bodies of younger, healthier black people. […]