Sorting through old files, I found my photographs of a site visit to Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral jetty’ (1970) at Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake, Utah. This was my second visit; documentation of the first was on 35 mm slides which are as-yet unscanned. The date of the visit was Saturday 23 September 2006. […]
By 1997, I was well-and-truly entrenched in the work of Robert Smithson. This process had begun with my dissertation research; hence the ‘what did he know and when did he know it’ tone below. And it extended into a 1997 road trip to numerous earthworks sites in the American Southwest. (The ‘Spiral Jetty’ was under water […]
A written (and therefore polished after the fact) version of a speech I made at the opening of ‘Reinventing the wheel’, an exhibition at the Monash University Museum of Art, exploring the legacy of Duchamp’s readymade. Reproduction, repetition, saying the already said … these are the hallmarks of contemporary experience. The capacity to tolerate this […]
Tim Johnson’s interest in punk rock is manifested in prints, paintings, texts, photographs, super 8 films, musical performances, and collected recordings and ephemera. In a concentrated series of works made between 1979 and 1983, Johnson depicted Australian, English and American punk musicians and fans, using his own photographs or pictures from the music press. In […]
The jockey and his wife (1953) predates Brack’s sustained exploration of the comédie humain of the Australian racecourse in 1956. That series—encompassing watercolours, drawings and prints—studiously plotted the procedures of horse racing and the patterns of crowd behaviour. Each year, Melbourne’s famed Spring racing carnival brought a determined gaiety to the city: Brack responded with […]
This piece was written for an auction house catalogue for the sale of the Grundy collection of Australian art in 2013. It gave me an opportunity write at length on a painting I’d touched upon briefly elsewhere. It’s funny how the more iconic a painting becomes, the less detailed appraisals of it are. The painting was […]
Having pursued the topic further since this article was first published in 1995, I’d modify some of my comments. The issue of what precisely was meant by ‘national’ in Arthur Streeton’s The national game is still to be resolved but there are strong leads. Contrary to what I state below, ‘national’ could mean ‘geographically expansive’; […]
The idea of a book on Australian suburbia came from Chris Healy. Supported by a small grant, we plowed ahead. At some stage, the idea of contributions on art came up. I mused about some works by Dale Hickey and Ian Burn that I’d seen. Why don’t you write about them?, my colleagues asked. Which […]
Something strange happened to football on the occasion of the replay of the 2010 AFL Grand Final. With all sponsors, corporate freeloaders and once-a-year ‘opera goers’ sated the previous week, the gates were flung open to the average punter. For the first time in years, a ticket to the Grand Final was within reach of […]
The 2010 AFL Grand Final, contested by Collingwood and St Kilda, ended with a draw and required a rematch the following weekend. ‘The Age’ had commissioned articles from both my wife and me; knowing that we barracked for Collingwood and St Kilda respectively, they were looking for a his and hers story. Among the most […]