Project Space is a modestly-scaled, street-level gallery with a full-width shopfront window. Nolan’s juggling of ambitious and diminutive scale in her work turned my attention to Anna Chave’s trenchant critique of ego and gender in minimalism. (For readers not educated within the Victorian school system, ‘Clag’ is a non-toxic craft glue with a magnificently onomatopoeic […]
Archive | Art Criticism
Stephen Bush; serial originality, 1994
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; […]
Redecorating; Stieg Persson, 1993
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 […]
‘Rad scunge’, curated by Dale Frank, Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 3–26 March 1993
In the early 1990s, the first hints that movements (-isms) had been replaced by tendencies (things artists were ‘interested’ in) began to emerge.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 […]