August 2006 Issue 192
1 STOP PRESS
Vale Noel
Noel Sheridan, the inaugural director of the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) in Adelaide and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), died in Fremantle on 12 July. Sheridan was a painter and a video and performance artist as well as an innovative arts administrator, and was deeply committed to the development and promotion of contemporary art. Read the rest in Art Monthly...
Vale Bronwyn
Bronwyn Oliver, one of Australia’s best and brightest sculptors, has died aged forty-seven in Sydney, her home for nearly thirty years. Read the rest in Art Monthly...
Mr Smith goes to Tuscany
It’s been one of the hottest scandals in the Australian art world since, well, forever. Geoffrey Smith, a curator of Australian art at the National Gallery of Victoria for some fifteen years, well-known for his substantial exhibitions of Arthur Streeton, Russell Drysdale, Sidney Nolan and James Gleeson, is embroiled in a court case with his ex-lover, the equally well-known Melbourne art dealer Robert Gould of Gould Galleries. Read the rest in Art Monthly...
Gertrude seeks new Assistant Curator
Jeff Khan is moving on from the position of Assistant Curator, Communications at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces in Fitzroy, Melbourne, and Gertrude is seeking a replacement. Read the rest in Art Monthly..
2 Desert painting from the town camps of Alice Springs: A new art centre and a new social landscape: SALLY BUTLER
Image caption: Artists and supporters Jane Vadiveloo, Margaret Kemarre Turner OAM, Rhonda Renwick, Janice Williams, Rachael Williams and kids at the Tangentyere Artists exhibition opening at the Araluen Centre, Alice Springs in March this year
A recent exhibition of desert painting by Aboriginal artists living in Alice Springs town camps signals one way that Australia’s remote Indigenous communities are negotiating a new social landscape
3 Constable, now and then: MICHAEL ROSENTHAL
mage caption: John Constable, The hay wain, 1821, oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London
In 1984 I was surprised to discover from a furniture advertisement in the Brisbane Courier-Mail that, in Australia as much as in Britain, the walls of the home beautiful would typically be embellished with reproductions after the landscapes of John Constable. While I pondered what resonance these could have for a population whose experience of actual landscape tended to the dry and ochre rather than the wet and green, at least I learned that the art of Constable was as familiar to some Australians as we assume it is to the British
4 Zones of contact: 2006 Biennale of Sydney: CHRISTOPHER CHAPMAN
Image caption: Olga Chernysheva, Russian museum, 2003-05, video still from DVD, 6 mins. Courtesy of the artist
It would be difficult to argue against the stated aims of Artistic Director and Curator Charles Merewether for his sprawling and heterodox Biennale of Sydney
5 Lost in translation: ASHLEY CRAWFORD
mage caption: Pat Brassington, October, 2001, pigment print. Courtesy of the artist and Asialink
It is strange to realise in this day and age of media-image saturation that art can still shock and offend. It doesn’t happen that often, but two Australian artists showing abroad in recent months found their work banned – one by Catholics, the other by communists – at the last moment
6 The sound of the sky: The Northern Territory in Australian Art 1802-2005: ANITA ANGEL
Image caption: Thomas Baines, Baines and Humphrey killing an alligator on the Horseshoe Flats, Victoria River 27 June 1856, 1857, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
As an historical survey and chronological assembly of ‘visual responses to the Northern Territory by artists of European descent’ over a period of more than 200 years, The sound of the sky exhibition was a museum milestone in a regional and national sense
7 Roland Barthes The Language of Fashion: PETER MCNEIL
The reading public might be alarmed that we have here a new translation of Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System, that 300-page tome which Michael Carter calls a spectacularly impenetrable book, the ‘Moby Dick of structuralism’
8 A good rate of exchange between Malaysian and Australian artists: GINA FAIRLEY
Image caption: Angela Hijjas and Hijjas Kasturi in the gardens at Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia in 2005. Photo: Gina Fairley
This year Malaysia’s Rimbun Dahan Artist Residency program celebrates its twelfth year of operation. The philanthropic brainchild of Malaysia’s pre-eminent architect Hijjas Kasturi and his Australian wife Angela Hijjas, this program has made an important contribution to the development of contemporary art practice in Malaysia
