In ‘Trying to live now: chronotopic figures in Jenny Watson’s ‘A painted page’ series’, I bring together, for the first time, the six paintings in this important sequence from 1979–80. Combining gridded, painted reproductions of photographs, newspapers and department store catalogues with roughly painted fields of colour, the series combined a range of recent styles and […]
This previously unpublished text is a buffed-up version of a talk I gave over lunch at the Melbourne Club in 2002.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 […]
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 […]
‘Knackers’ is a backlit duratran, a twenty-first century evocation of a medieval stained-glass window. Hilton’s subject was a sex scandal involving the St Kilda Football club. Look for ‘Knackers’ and others of Hilton’s work at Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney. The television broadcast of an AFL football game begins with Mark Seymour and the Hunters and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]