It’s surprising how urban myths take hold in Australian art history. A few comments made by Albert Tucker in interviews and promotional material have convinced everyone that his iconic painting ‘Victory Girls’ (1943) is based on sexual depravity witnessed in Melbourne’s streets. I began this piece wondering whether it was possible for a painting to […]
Sorting through old files, I found my photographs of a site visit to Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral jetty’ (1970) at Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake, Utah. This was my second visit; documentation of the first was on 35 mm slides which are as-yet unscanned. The date of the visit was Saturday 23 September 2006. […]
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 […]
A written (and therefore polished after the fact) version of a speech I made at the opening of ‘Reinventing the wheel’, an exhibition at the Monash University Museum of Art, exploring the legacy of Duchamp’s readymade. Reproduction, repetition, saying the already said … these are the hallmarks of contemporary experience. The capacity to tolerate this […]
This piece was written for an auction house catalogue for the sale of the Grundy collection of Australian art in 2013. It gave me an opportunity write at length on a painting I’d touched upon briefly elsewhere. It’s funny how the more iconic a painting becomes, the less detailed appraisals of it are. The painting was […]
The jockey and his wife (1953) predates Brack’s sustained exploration of the comédie humain of the Australian racecourse in 1956. That series—encompassing watercolours, drawings and prints—studiously plotted the procedures of horse racing and the patterns of crowd behaviour. Each year, Melbourne’s famed Spring racing carnival brought a determined gaiety to the city: Brack responded with […]
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 […]
For those who still believed in rock’s outsider mythology, ‘pose’ was a pejorative term. A rejection of the pose in favour of ‘honesty’ was a hallmark of New York’s New Wave underground. In Australia, RAM magazine championed what it called ‘street punk’; an ‘honest and relevant’ version of rock, unadulterated by corporate values. Melbourne’s New […]
Hiding in plain sight in Sydney’s Centennial Park, Tomaso Sani’s We won! (1893) is the first monumental sculpture of a footballer erected anywhere in the world. Commissioned by New South Wales premier Henry Parkes in 1891, it is often mistaken for an emblem of ‘muscular Christianity’. But Parkes’s commitment to public sculpture, his personal involvement […]
Tim Johnson’s interest in punk rock is manifested in prints, paintings, texts, photographs, super 8 films, musical performances, and collected recordings and ephemera. In a concentrated series of works made between 1979 and 1983, Johnson depicted Australian, English and American punk musicians and fans, using his own photographs or pictures from the music press. In […]