This piece is an example of my habit of filing thoughts away until things start to click. I saw the ‘Fandom’ exhibition in New York in November 1997 and Mutlu Çerkez’s exhibition back in Melbourne. In mid-1998 I was back in New York, where I saw Elizabeth Peyton’s work at MoMA and Erik Hanson’s drawings […]
‘America: painting a nation’ was presented by the Art Gallery of NSW (8 Nov 2013–9 Feb 2014) as part of its Sydney International Art series. It was the most expansive survey of American painting ever presented in Australia, featuring almost 90 works, ranging from 1750 to 1966. As curatorial consultant I worked with AGNSW staff […]
I don’t recall precisely when or why I began reading Richard Jefferies’s essays. I do know that at the time I was in the habit of borrowing from the research collection of the University of Melbourne’s Baillieu library. That was where redundant, superseded and foreign language volumes were stacked. The shelves were lined with uniform […]
I have a theory that Melbourne’s tram network has a significant impact on the city’s intellectual life. Tram travel is a time for reflection and gathering of thoughts. This article first took shape as I was standing on a tram stop thinking about the Gerard Herbst poster collection at the Ian Potter Museum of Art. […]
This essay was written to accompany a suite of photographs of Jon Cattapan in his studio. At the time I was occasionally interviewing artists in their studios for the ABC TV program ‘Sunday arts’. So I had a bee in my bonnet about the impact of post-production effects (especially music) on the meaning of the […]
‘The Shilo project’ was an art exhibition born in an opportunity shop on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. There I found two copies of Neil Diamond’s 1970 album Shilo. On one sleeve, the connect-the-dots portrait of Neil Diamond on the cover had been completed; the other was unblemished. Driving home, it occurred to me that it would […]
While the starting point for this piece was a news story on Citroen’s ‘Picasso’, its unfolding had to do with a sense of frustration at the simplistic ways in which capital letters and scare quotes were being applied to culture, Culture and ‘culture’. Earlier this year [2000], a minor media controversy erupted in France when […]
At 570 pages long and weighing in at 2.46 kilograms, Sasha Grishin’s Australian art: a history is the latest contender for the heavyweight title long held by Bernard Smith’s Australian painting. It’s a door stopper all right, but will it be a barbecue stopper? (And is there a barbecue’s worth of art historians among Australia’s […]
Sometime in the not-too-distant past the city of Donna, Texas spawned the unknown band ERIKKKLAPTON. They were a bunch of high school kids hammering out songs—‘Monkeyfuck evasions’, ‘Wonkaballs’ and ‘Oil mutant’—in a garage. Their chronicler, Fernando A Flores, tells us that ‘no songs were ever recorded nor did they ever gig—the only people who ever […]
Melissa Reeves’s play ‘Furious mattress’ was staged at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne in February 2010. It’s loosely based on the death of Joan Vollmer during an exorcism conducted by her husband in rural Victoria in 1993. I wrote this short piece for the theatre program accompanying the performances. The final line is spoken by one […]