There’s a marvellous photograph of a corner of Sidney Nolan’s studio taken in 1949. On a small work table are the usual trappings of the bohemian laboratory: tobacco tin, overflowing ashtray, dog-eared books, and candlesticks picturesquely caked in melted wax. The only unfamiliar element in this ad hoc still life is a photograph pinned to […]
This essay was written for the catalogue brochure of Stephen Bush’s 1994 exhibition ‘The lure of Paris’. The exhibition presented multiple versions of the same motif—three Babar elephants climbing a modest cliff by the sea. Bush’s plan was to paint of version of the work once a year, from memory, indefinitely. He’s still at it; […]
From memory, I wrote this in New York, perhaps around November 1997, for a special issue of ‘World Art’ devoted to art and rock’n’roll. I wanted Patti Smith to stand for the ecstatic wing of rock’n’roll art, in contrast to the more studied and conceptualised emerging then (and now dominant). Any oddities in spelling, punctuation […]
In 2002, the Ian Potter Museum of Art staged a Peter Kennedy retrospective which included a reconstruction of one of his early neon sculptures. Kennedy’s involvement with neon went back to his youth when he had a job in a neon light workshop. Architect John Wardle, who has frequently collaborated with artists, visited the exhibition […]
At the time I wrote this piece, I was teaching a course on art and mass culture while working on a PhD on the anti-formalist impulse in contemporary American art. So there was a lot to table about a pivotal term in modernism and its transformation in the postmodern. Which meant that, even though I […]
Ostensibly, this piece is a reflection on football fans. But really it’s about how I live my life. No Nick Hornby-style meditations; it’s just some stuff that happened. Forget the prognostications of pundits and statisticians, omens are the crux of any football prediction. With the Grand Final looming, they count for more than at any other […]
Each year, Paul Daffey and John Harms publish the best of the year’s contributions to their ‘Footy almanac’ website in a hefty paperback documenting the football season just passed. They invite an artist to produce an image of the season’s iconic player for the cover. In 2010, John Harms asked me to write on Geoff […]
The arts editor of The Age called me a few days before the 2008 Grand Final wondering if I could string together something about art and sport. Just happened to have something lying around! Earlier in the year I’d been working through André Gide’s diaries; here was a chance to use his oddly gleeful discovery […]
I wrote this piece as a first step towards mapping what I thought might be a distinctive characteristic of Australian art (and perhaps colonial art in general); a preoccupation, shared by artists and audience alike, with what kind of artist Australia needed. At the same time, I wanted to demonstrate that iconic art works weren’t […]
As a performer, Dave Graney has always made a rod for his own back. The wry lyrics, sharp threads and acerbic between-song patter make it too easy for his audience to see his performance as some kind of pastiche. Here he’s a posturing rock god, there a laid back hipster; one moment a falsetto-voiced crooner, […]