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back issue
It would be tempting to see this issue of Art & Australia as a manifesto on materialism - after all, the magazine begins with Petrina Hicks's Eye candy on the cover and ends with Sara Hughes's sale-tag work on the back. Along the way readers will encounter the work of featured artist Darren Sylvester, whose logo landscapes could be seen as carefully choreographed product placements. But don't be fooled. As the National Gallery of Victoria's participating senior curator Alex Baker astutely observes: 'People are not mindless drones simply consuming. We are human beings with agency... There is room for noise in the system.' For Art & Australia's Summer 2008 issue we invited Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Director Rhana Devenport to convene a roundtable discussion exploring the issues of an increasingly commodified contemporary art practice. Readers will engage with the disquieting dioramas of German photographer Andreas Gursky as well as the delicious blankness of contemporary photographic practice. The elaborate work of Yinka Shonibare is featured, as well as that of the indelible trickster Tony Schwensen. Colourful critics of culture as commodity, these artists provide ample noise in the system.
Vol 46 No 2 Summer 2008
Vol 46 No 2 Summer 2008
'Don't get depressed, get rad!'
At a time when art is often upstaged by a fascination with the market forces which drive it, Art & Australia takes pause to ponder artistic practices that address our consuming compulsions. From Damien Hirst's For the love of God, 2007, to the critical...
Tony Schwensen: Love it or leave it
As his contribution to the Biennale of Sydney's 'revolutionsonline' website, Tony Schwensen offered a link to a recording of Gil Scott-Heron's spoken word classic 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised' released in 1970, the year of Schwensen's birth....In...
Blank Face
In the 1990s a number of artists became known for making large photographs which exhibited the (usually young) subject as expressionless. Chief amongst these were Thomas Ruff and Rineke Dijkstra. While Ruff's work could be seen in direct descent from his...
Darren Sylvester and the cool aesthetics of (good-natured) melancholy
... Since 1998, Darren Sylvester has consistently couched his often interconnected themes - including the fallibility of relationships, urban alienation, the passing of time, mortality - within large-scale, narrative-driven photographic images of devastating...
A Guide to Earth: Looking at life with Andreas Gursky
We are alone on this planet. It is not a choice. Here we are. This is what everyone has to deal with.(Andreas Gursky, 2001).There are few people who haven't experienced the chill of isolation that can come in the face of modern life. It can creep into the...
Yinka Shonibare's theatre of the world
Yinka Shonibare MBE is, perhaps, best known as the dancing master of elaborate, balletic ensembles of headless mannequins who, in different historic and symbolic tableaux, seem frozen between the eighteenth century, as denoted by the style of their clothes,...
Clarissa Chikiamco: Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and Art & Australia Emerging Writers Program
Each year, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, stages an exhibition by a prominent artist who has made a significant contribution to Australian contemporary art.Lyndal Jones's 'Darwin with Tears' was the 2008 incarnation of this...
Sarah Hughes: ANZ Private Bank and Art & Australia Contemporary Art Award
I want the eye to travel along colour and form and perspective. Sara HughesSara Hughes is a heat-seeking device, an artist in search of a pulse in this digitally-enhanced, computer-generated, imaged-downloadable age. With her abstract wall works of collaged...
Travels in hyperbolic reality
Comprising some 40,000 creatures created by forty crocheters from around the world, The Hyperbolic crochet coral reef, 2006-, is the brainchild of Brisbane-born physicist and science writer Margaret Wertheim and her twin sister, Christine, a lecturer at the...
Takashi Murakami: Making strange of this world
I'm a geek person. I'm embarrassed, I'm sorry, but I'm here.Takashi Murakami is attempting to explain why a fleet of SUVs patterned with the fantasy female figures of anime are doing parked at GEISAI, the Tokyo fair he established for emerging artists in...
Richard Bell: We're not allowed to own anything
Of course, this is an opinion piece. I will be using generalisations. Given that there are always exceptions to the rule, there is a slight chance I won't be talking about you. So, here goes. Open any Australian art magazine and you will be bombarded with...
Cultural Globalisation and the post-Bilbao museum
If the twentieth-century art museum was a sober repository of precious objects, the twenty-first-century art museum is a theatrical set for staging multi-media experiences. Rather than being a storage bank of collective memory funded by national governments,...Powered by: 
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Tel: +61 2 9331 4455
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NSW 2021 Australia
Tel: +61 2 9331 4455
Fax: +61 2 9331 4577
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