November 2006 Issue 195
1 Follow that ribbon: Circumnavigating the Julia Morison survey: JOHN HURRELL, Christchurch
Julia Morison, RoCoco, detail from Gargantua’s petticoat, 2006, mixed media on aluminium laminate. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery 64zero3
2 Imants Tillers: CHRISTOPHER CHAPMAN, Canberra
mants Tillers, Hiatus, 1987, oilstick, gouache and synthetic polymer paint on 190 canvasboards. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki
3 TogArt Contemporary Art Exhibition: History in the making: DAENA MURRAY, Darwin
Marina Strocchi, Red river, 2006, acrylic on linen
4 Book Review: Painted Histories: Early Maori Figurative Painting & Carved Histories: Rotorua Ngati Tarawhai Woodcarving, ROGER NEICH & Mick Douglas (ed): JO DIAMOND
5 Book Review: Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, Martyn Jolly, reviewed by JOHN THOMPSON
6 The vacant girl, the phallic teapot and the nasty flowers: Charles Blackman: Alice in WonderlanD: TIM FISHER, Melbourne
Charles Blackman, Feet beneath the table, 1956, tempera and oil on composition board. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, presented through the NGV Foundation by Barbara Blackman, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2005.
© Charles Blackman/Licensed by VISCOPY Ltd, Sydney 2006
7 1968 DONALD BROOK
Readers of the Australian Magazine of 27-28 March 1993 will know that the year that changed the world, a quarter of a century earlier, had been 1968. John Gorton had become Prime Minister. The Seekers were named Australian of the Year. Lionel Rose beat Fighting Harada. Edward Kennedy was shot and Nixon won the US presidency. France braced itself for more violence, and de Gaulle refused to resign.
It was not reported that I had just joined the newly opened Power Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney with a mandate to bring the latest and ideas and theories about the visual arts to the people of Australia, and had also become the Sydney Morning Herald’s new art critic. The fact that this was a watershed year for Australian art was clearly coincidental.
My small family moved to Glebe, to a cottage overlooking a park where our son Simon, born in Canberra almost four years earlier, was taken and killed. After this Bernard Smith, the Power Institute Director, did me a great kindness. The American Clement Greenberg was at that time the most influential art critic in the history of the world, and Bernard had invited him to give the first John Power Memorial Lecture. He asked me to prepare the second lecture in the series, for delivery in the following year. His generous impulse, I am sure, was to give my mind somewhere safe to go; but he must also have been confident that my response to Greenberg would not be acquiescent. Greenberg had come to reassure whoever doubted it that the history of art – still widely regarded as a fiction under European construction – had been trans-nationally acquired and its headquarters moved to New York.
Read the rest in this issue of Art Monthly Australia
8 Dude Ranch Dada: William T. Wiley comes to Australia: ANNE KIRKER
William T. Wiley, travelling c 1980. Photo Judy Olausen
9 Art, politics and the economy: A possible future for art and craft in Australia in the twenty-first century: MICHAEL DENHOLM
Dick Marks, Droughty Point, 2006, digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist
