I spent April 2010 as a writer-in-residence at Art Vault, Mildura. I’m not a regular theatre-goer but a production of Shakespeare’s ‘Taming of the Shrew’ at a small football club in nearby Nangiloc was tempting. The production was directed by Fiona Blair for The Old Van & NCDCA. The performance was at the Nangiloc Football […]
The first time I heard … The Ramones, ‘Beat on the brat’ (1976) was on a clock radio in a boarding school in Melbourne sometime early in 1977. The radio was tuned to what was then 3RMT FM, the educational-license FM station of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) … precursor to 3RRR. Good […]
Under circumstances I can’t recall, I was asked by the fashion/lifestyle magazine ‘HQ’ to write a short piece on Jon Campbell for their trend-spotting front section. Paul Taylor once ticked me off for being a snob about glossies—he’d offered to swing me something in ‘Vogue’ and I’d recoiled—so I thought I’d give it a shot. […]
Rock snobs! Vinyl junkies! Looking for some high-end trainspotting action? Put down that fanzine, log off eBay and get to an art gallery. Rare grooves, obscure pressings and pedantic top-ten lists are no longer the stuff of record fairs alone. Contemporary art is riddled with subtle nods to classic albums, nostalgic paeans to teen idols […]
Reviewing Barry Pearce’s catalogue/biography for the 1995 Brett Whiteley retrospective alerted me to two themes that I’ve circled around on-and-off ever since. First, that a good deal was being missed in looking art Australian. Visiting the exhibition itself, I realized that many elements visible in the art works—texts, collage elements, marginal images—were being over-looked. And […]
This research was originally delivered as a paper at the European Australian Studies Association annual conference, Toulouse 1999. Conference convenor Xavier Pons drew together speakers on Patrick White, Murray Bail, larrikin movies of the 1970s and a remarkable range of other topics from European scholars. I’ve taken the opportunity here to correct a few minor […]
My involvement with the Basil Sellers Art Prize—a biannual $100,000 award for contemporary art on the theme of sport—means that I’m often asked to comment on the supposed conflict between athletes and aesthetes. I usually begin by pointing out that this wasn’t always so. In this article I tried to identify the historical moment at […]
In the early 1990s, the first hints that movements (-isms) had been replaced by tendencies (things artists were ‘interested’ in) began to emerge. ‘Grunge’ and its cousin ‘abject art’ led the charge, to the immediate chagrin of virtually every artist involved. ‘Rad scunge’ featured works by artists associated with a Sydney grunge push (whether they […]
This previously unpublished text is a buffed-up version of a talk I gave over lunch at the Melbourne Club in 2002. These are the sorts of things you do to bring your museum to the attention of the ‘big end of town’. Given the context, I thought I’d approach it in the manner of a […]
In the evening, after I had last visited Stephen Bush’s exhibition ‘Steenhuffel’, I set about reading M P Shiel’s 1901 novel The purple cloud. I mean it to sound like a job of work; the book is the sustained ranting of the last man living, a descent into madness larded with arcane language and page-long […]