‘Hidden deep in the furor/What we do is secret.’ Shouting those lines, Darby Crash of the Germs sketched out an alluring vision of punk. It was a raucous musical underground, a chaotic cult formed by self-selecting initiates dedicated to effrontery and outlawry. But how could punk be secret? Darby Crash was declaring it out loud, […]
This paper was delivered at the conference ‘Contemporary outsider art; the global context’, University of Melbourne, 24 October 2014. Along with many other speakers, I was responding to the suggestion that outsider art is now ‘in’. Late in the twentieth century, Arthur C Danto spoke of the ‘selective enfranchising’ of outsider artists. 1 Such mainstreaming […]
Can an art work be an oxymoron? A profound Jeff Koons, there’s one. A scintillating Bill Viola, there’s another. But those are oxymorons of the non-technical, colloquial kind; the snide put-down, the cheap shot. What about a more formally constructed oxymoron, one that uses a jolting contradiction for rhetorical effect? Noel McKenna’s current exhibition is […]
Over a period of 107 consecutive days, from December 1972 to March 1973, Robert Rooney photographed the clothes he wore. Each black and white image is uniform, a latent pun in keeping Rooney’s predilection for wry linguistic play. The artist’s garments are neatly folded and stacked, underwear on top, outer wear at the bottom, as […]
On a recent visit to the Australian War Memorial, I was surprised at the visual density of ‘classic’ war art. In the paintings of George Lambert (World War I) and Ivor Hele (World War II), the combat is hand-to-hand. The viewer is in the thick of it, given the now-familiar first-person shooter point of view. […]
A ‘behind the scenes’ account of the planning of the $100,000 Basil Sellers art Prize. Building a better art prize Tonight (25 July 2014) the winner of the fourth A$100,000 Basil Sellers Art Prize will be announced at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne, chosen from shortlist of 16 artists and decided by a panel of six […]
This piece was written for the exhibition brochure. As always, Hickey’s work prompted me to reflect on how complicated supposedly simple paintings can be. When paintings have a singular target, the writer’s task seems straightforward enough. Because Dale Hickey’s new paintings circle around the motif of the artist’s studio, they teasingly invite the writer to […]
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 […]
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 […]
Not long ago I found myself standing in a country pub staring at a print of that often-reproduced nineteenth-century engraving of three Australian farm hands carousing in a bar. Backs arched, arms flailing; they were the original wild colonial boys, out on a spree. Arjona’s rock’n’roll rednecks are their great-great-grandchildren, bingeing on Maccas and VB, […]