Australian Art Research Articles

The emergence of Australian art therapies: Colonial legacies and hybrid practices

This article provides an overview of the emergence of art therapies in Australia, from the perspectives of two art therapy educators from the University of Western Sydney (UWS). It introduces the context of art therapy practice and education in Australia and draws together a background history to the development of the profession, including key historical figures. The paper locates current positions and horizons within a post colonial context, revealing the innovative and hybrid practices of arts therapies that have evolved and are emerging in this particular place. A series of images provides a visual, poetic counterpoint to the text. Keywords: Art therapies, Australia, colonial legacies, art therapy education; hybrid practices

Coalition

Coalition

Giving Back Time: Improvisation in Australian Hip-Hop Pedagogy and Performance

This article documents improvisatory practices in Australian community-based hip-hop, with reference to the work of Australian hip-hop artists Morganics and Wire. It places their teaching work with disadvantaged Indigenous communities in context with the work of free improvisation teachers and theories of improvisation and history, drawn from key critical texts in improvisation studies. Improvisation is shown as key to hip-hop practice and pedagogy in Australia. This paper argues, by employing a performance studies model of the archive and the repertoire, that improvisation in these case studies offers participants the chance to be part of a type of history making that accepts the constructed and performed nature of history and forwards improvisation-led challenges to social injustice.

Trading in Freedoms: Creating Value and Seeking Coalition in Western Australian Arts and Culture

Trading in Freedoms: Creating Value and Seeking Coalition in Western Australian Arts and Culture

Changing Perspectives on Modernism in Australia: Cubism and Australian Art

Changing Perspectives on Modernism in Australia: Cubism and Australian Art Catherine Howell Harding, Lesley, and Sue Cramer. Cubism and Australian Art. Melbourne, Australia: Miegunyah Press, 2009. Pp. ix + 309. $49.10 (hardback). Cubism and Australian Art. Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (Australia), 24 November 2009–8 April 2010. Curated by Lesley Harding and Sue Cramer. “New Perspectives on Cubism and Australian Art”. University of Melbourne, Melbourne (Australia), 29 March 2010. Symposium. Chaired by Alison Inglis. The appearance of this landmark exhibition and catalogue from the Heide Museum of Modern Art confirms the recent resurgence of critical and popular interest in Australia’s relationship with modernism. With few reservations, the exhibition and its accompanying monograph represent a clear and timely contribution to Australian scholarship on modernism in this country. More broadly, Cubism and Australia, in both its forms, contributes to current attempts within international modernist studies to take full account of the plurality of global manifestations of modernism, and, significantly, to rethink modernism beyond the confines of the nation state. Scholarly interest in Australian modernists, and modernism in Australia, has been building over the past five to ten years. A series of nationally touring exhibitions have re-presented important Australian modernist artists to an appreciative public, such as the painter Grace Cossington Smith (1892–1984), the subject of a major National Gallery of Australia retrospective show in 2005. Complementing this renewed focus on individual artists, and contributing towards a broader cultural perspective on modernism, came a successful exhibition from the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Modern Times (2008).1 [End Page 925] When on tour in Melbourne, Modern Times also showed at Heide, emphasizing the latter’s growing national profile as a “destination” institution for aficionados of modernism. The bold claim of Modern Times’s accompanying publication was to be “the first book to trace how modernism transformed Australian culture through the course of the twentieth century” (Stephen, Goad, and McNamara 2008, v). Modern Times thus served as an antipodean reply to Modernism: Designing a new world 1914–1939 (2006) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which took a similarly broad view of modernism’s impact on twentieth-century visual culture.2 Cubism and Australian Art therefore followed hot on the heels of Modern Times. Its curators, Lesley Harding and Sue Cramer, presumably hoped to build on a renewed public appetite for modernism—which Modern Times successfully tapped—while carving out a curatorial space of their own. The exhibition featured more than 200 works by 80 international and Australian artists, and included sculpture, collage, installation, and moving image-based works. This created a unique opportunity to see celebrated European and Australian works hung side by side: Amédée Ozenfant, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, and André Lhote sat alongside, or close, to Grace Crowley, Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan and Margaret Preston. Evidently, the focus for Cubism and Australian Art was different from, and in some respects, narrower than, that of Modern Times. In taking cubism as their theme, Harding and Cramer deliberately focused on the visual arts and especially, though not exclusively, on the medium of painting. Cubism and Australian Art likewise staked its claim as a “groundbreaking” (Harding and Cramer 2009, ix) study, but rather than investigating modernism in terms of visual culture, or design, it examined “in depth, and for the first time, the extraordinary influence of Cubism on the art of Australia” (viii). The conjunction in Harding and Cramer’s title is important. Their exhibition was concerned, certainly, with the artistic and cultural reception of cubism in Australia, but the curators’ approach went well beyond reception history, traditionally conceived. Cubism and Australian Art investigated the creation and dissemination of cubist ideas, methods, and styles among Australian artists, and also, the reception of cubism in the Australian art world. However, Harding and Cramer were concerned to question received art historical narratives of intellectual and cultural transfer. Therefore, they were interested in Australian artists who studied, worked, and lived in Europe during the movement’s formative years, and beyond, as well as those artists whose creative encounters with cubism took place within Australia. The curators’ guiding questions for investigation are stated in the catalogue’s Introduction as follows...

This Photograph, These People and the Invention of Australian Indigenous Art

This article argues that Australian Indigenous art was invented in the early to mid‐1980s by its very challenge to Western conceptions of aesthetics and authorship. To illustrate that claim, the article explores Roland Barthes’s concept of the photograph’s punctum as it relates to a particular press photograph published in 1984.

‘An idleness bordering on the wacky’: Paul Cox and the contradictions of an Australian art cinema

This study of the Australian filmmaker Paul Cox aims to tease out a number of contradictions in the institution of Australian art cinema from the 1970s to the present day. It looks at the cultural, social and historical factors which position Cox as a supposedly ‘maligned’ artist; the interpretive work of film criticism and analysis that helps construct the reception of his career; and recent changes in the arthouse sector that have ushered in first a critique and then a rehabilitation of his oeuvre. Beyond this socially defined circle of art, artist and art cinema, the publicly ‘repressed’ aspects of Cox's cinema that tend more to resemble the excluded arena of avant-garde production are explored.

Reimagining the Humanities: Proposals for a New Century

In 1922, Austrian art historian Josef Stryzgowski lectured in Boston on "The Crisis in the Humanities as Exemplified in the History of Art." In 1964, British historian J.H. Plumb published a volume of essays entitled The Crisis in the Humanities. Between 1980 and 2000 a "crisis in the humanities" was discussed more than a hundred times in the pages of major scholarly journals. Is there anything new to be said about it? Has the hypochondriac finally come down with a life-threatening disease? Certain forms of apprehension do seem built into the very structure of the modern humanities. I found no record of Stryzgowski's lectures, but Plumb's complaints from 1964 sound familiar: overspecialization; triviality; insularity; fragmentation; and opaque, overly technical writing. Just two years later, a certain James Newcomer, professor of English at Texas Christian University, identified a threat to the humanities almost identical to the one classicist and philosopher Martha Nussbaum warns about in her 2010 Not for Profit: "Since the sciences are … exerting a dominant influence on the activities of the universities, the humanities are in danger of being forced into practices … that can end only in diminishing still further their effectiveness in modifying the character and the customs of our society." And in 1975, a writing teacher named Mel Topf discussed much the same list of problems that Harvard professor Louis Menand sees as critical in his 2010 Marketplace of Ideas: "declining public support, declining enrollments as students turn away from the liberal arts to professional studies, and overproduction of Ph.D.'s."

Is child nudity in art ever pornographic?

AbstractIn 2008, police raided an art gallery in Sydney just prior to the opening of an exhibition of photographs by the famous Australian artist and photographer Bill Henson. The images depicted naked 12‐ and 13‐year‐old children. The photographs were seized, although later released and Henson was never prosecuted. This prompted vigorous debate about censorship. In this article, a paediatrician and a Fine Arts Honours graduate argue that censorship laws regarding the depiction of children in art are needed but only to protect children from exploitation, not to protect the public from being corrupted by viewing pornographic material.

Going ‘mainstream’: evaluating the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts

This paper considers how debates over the instrumentalisation of the arts have informed the cultural production of an Australian arts organisation – Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV). In an effort to make multicultural arts more ‘mainstream’, MAV has increasingly adopted market‐based rationales for its work – particularly the use of ‘audience development’ policy frameworks. It is easy to evaluate this marketisation of multicultural arts negatively as an acceptance of neoliberal policy agendas and as a weakening of its commitment to ‘cultural development’ goals. This paper suggests, however, via a critique of Ghassan Hage’s analysis of multiculturalism, that such accounts do not consider how economic rationales actually sit in practice with MAV’s other (cultural development) agendas. Such critiques, therefore, preclude an affirmative reading of the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts. An alternative analytical framework is proposed – one which can more readily account for multicultural arts as a set of practices informed by diverse agendas, and which acknowledges how such practices might both contest and converge with official government policies.

Towards a curriculum typology for Australian generalist arts degree programmes

The Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree is arguably one of the longest‐established and largest degree programmes in the Australian higher education system. Traditionally, the BA programme is a liberal arts degree that is considered the first step in the lifelong journey of learning and that is frequently marketed as such. Yet, in an increasingly commercial world, the relevance and the value of a generalist arts degree to the contemporary Australian society and economy are frequently called into question by students, prospective employers and university administration. A recent national federally funded project in Australia investigated the nature and roles of Australian arts programmes. Analysis of generalist arts degree programmes on offer at 40 Australian universities between 2001 and 2008 resulted in the development of a typology describing common features and purposes of these programmes. This article argues that this typology can be used to develop a common framework to clarify and articulate the purpose and intention of an arts programme.

Arts and Business: The Impact of Business Models on the Activities of Major Performing Arts Organisations in Australia

Managerial business models were first introduced to Australian subsidised performing arts organisations by the then Howard Coalition government in 2000. Until the early 1990s, Australian arts organisations were contextualised as ‘not for profit’ entities, with an overall objective of producing good art. Over the past decade, however, major Australian performing arts organisations have been viewed more frequently as part of an ‘industry’ and, within this industry construct, framed as ‘business entities’, with a need to prove positive financial outcomes as a first priority. This article explores what is meant by business models in the context of Australian major performing arts organisations and looks at the impact of this approach.

The Artistic practice-Research-Teaching (ART) Nexus: Translating the Information Flow

This paper reports findings from interviews with fourteen Australian artist academics, who discuss the complex relationships between their Arts practice, their Research and their Teaching. We refer to this as the ART nexus because of the strong flow of information reported between these three activities. However, this information flow is not achieved without conflict. Conflict arises over the balance of time available and different mindsets required for differing activities, and there can be hesitation about analysing intuitive creative thought. The findings reveal ways in which information is ‘translated’ for different audiences including undergraduate and postgraduate students, who are both recipients of and contributors to the nexus. The article problematises the ART nexus in an attempt to offer greater insight into the ways in which individual artist academics teach through their arts practice and their research, within a university system that struggles to accommodate this breadth of endeavour.

Failed Fantasies of Cohesion: Retrieving Positives from the Stalled Dream of Whole-of-Government Cultural Policy

Failed Fantasies of Cohesion: Retrieving Positives from the Stalled Dream of Whole-of-Government Cultural Policy

The state of arts and health in Australia

Australian community arts and mental health is described through its 40-year history with peaks of activity coinciding with federal labor governments and the establishment of four independent health promotion agencies from the late 1980s. The paper then takes a thematic approach to discussing the development of national approaches to supporting arts and health practice, data sources, current research and evaluation and advocacy challenges. The paper concludes by suggesting that under the current federal labor government arts and health may benefit from increasing recognition of the intrinsic benefits of arts participation and cultural rights.

French, Floral and Female: A History of UnAustralian Art 1900–1930

In this essay, which is another instalment in the authors' ongoing project of writing a history of 'UnAustralian' art in the 20th century, the period 1900 to 1930 is characterised in terms of three adjectives: 'French', 'floral' and 'female'. 'French' because so much of Australian art history took place in France, or in relation to France, during the period. 'Floral' because so much of this history can be understood in terms of flower painting, often included in still lifes and interiors, as opposed to the prevailing 'gum tree' nationalism enshrined after the War. 'Female' because, extending the existing accounts by women art historians, the entire period can be understood as feminine in character. This 'UnAustralian' account breaks with the importance attributed both to Norah Simpson bringing back books on Cubism in 1913 and to Grace Cossington-Smith's The Sock Knitter (1915) as the first signs of modernism in Australia, and to the War as an event that dramatically changed the course of Australian art history, either by sending Australian artists for the first time overseas or by explaining the prominence of women in Australian art after the War. To think Australian art 1900-1930 as 'French, floral and female' is to imagine a different account from the usual nationalist one, to reconceive a history that has remained fundamentally unaltered since William Moore's The Story of Australian Art (1934).

Effectiveness and Meaningfulness of Art Therapy as a tool for healthy aging: a systematic review protocol.

Review Question/s What is the impact of Art Therapy participation on the individuals’ wellness and emotional needs? What is the experience and meaningfulness of the aged person and their participation either in group Art Therapy situations or in one on one situations? Inclusion Criteria Types of Participants Participants will be people aged 65 years or over with no evidence of dementia or other cognitive disabilities. They will either be in nursing home care, community care, day care, residential, low-care, supported living or the medical home. They may have no family or other emotional support and be suffering from increasing introspection. Types of Interventions The intervention of interest will be Art Therapy with the focus on the visual arts. All available techniques will be considered, including for example, art therapy sessions using a variety of tools, drawing, painting, computer manipulated imagery, photography and any other mode of visual expression. Art Therapy techniques examined will be those used in the group situation or with the individual aged person. Examined will also be who runs the art therapy program, is it an artist, professional art therapist, general therapist, is the therapy self-directed, how long will the sessions run for, what time period are sessions conducted over? Are these programs six months, twelve months etc how do the frail aged cope with half hour sessions or one hour sessions. Types of Outcome Measures Quantitative outcomes will look at the measureable psychological and psychosocial outcomes and behavioural characteristics resulting from Art Therapy. Indicators will include measures of cognitive function, Quality of Life (QOL) scales, depression scales, frequency of participation in activities and art therapy assessment scales. What are the participants’ communicative skills, social interaction, and quality of social interaction, behavioural problems e.g. stereotypic behaviour, and attention and concentration skills? Do they have an improved cognitive abilities, do they cope with stress and adverse events more easily. Qualitative outcomes will be subjective from the patient’s point of view, how they react to what feelings and emotions they are experiencing from the therapy sessions. Does the reminiscing help or make them feel sad for what they’ve lost, or happy for what they’ve had in their past? Reasons for exclusion Studies will be excluded if they are about the performing arts - music, dance and drama. Participants will be excluded if they are under 65 years of age, and if they have been diagnosed with dementia, Alzheimer’s or other cognitive disorders. Editorials and opinion articles will be excluded.

Australian Art Market Prices during the Global Financial Crisis and Two Earlier Decades

This study constructs a quarterly hedonic price index using 64,203 artworks, by seventy-one well-known modern and contemporary Australian artists, sold at auction houses over the period 1986-2009. The hedonic regression model includes characteristics such as name and living status of the artist, the size and medium of the painting, and the auction house, quarter and year in which the painting was sold. The resulting index indicates that returns on Australian fine-art averaged one percent in nominal terms over the period from quarter one 1986 to quarter four 2009 with a standard deviation of seventeen percent. During the global financial crisis spanning quarter one 2008 and quarter four 2009, the average art returns declined in nominal terms by close to six percent with a standard deviation of twenty-one percent. This study also shows that over the entire period the art market only marginally underperformed the stock and housing markets. The low correlations between these markets suggest the benefits of portfolio diversification.

Art without borders: a philosophical exploration of art and humanity

People all over the world make art and take pleasure in it, and they have done so for millennia. But acknowledging that art is a universal part of human experience leads us to some big questions: Why does it exist? Why do we enjoy it? And how do the world's different art traditions relate to art and to each other? Art Without Borders is an extraordinary exploration of those questions, a profound and personal meditation on the human hunger for art and a dazzling synthesis of the whole range of inquiry into its significance. Esteemed thinker Ben-Ami Scharfstein's encyclopedic erudition is here brought to bear on the full breadth of the world of art. He draws on neuroscience and psychology to understand the way we both perceive and conceive of art, including its resistance to verbal exposition. Through examples of work by Indian, Chinese, European, African, and Australian artists, Art Without Borders probes the distinction between accepting a tradition and defying it through innovation, which leads to a consideration of the notion of artistic genius. Continuing in this comparative vein, Scharfstein also examines the mutual influence of European and non-European artists. Then, through a comprehensive evaluation of the world's major art cultures, he shows how all of these individual traditions are gradually, but haltingly, conjoining into a single current of universal art. Finally, he concludes by looking at the ways empathy and intuition can allow members of one culture to appreciate the art of another. Lucid, learned, and incomparably rich in thought and detail, Art Without Borders is a monumental accomplishment, on par with the artistic achievements Scharfstein writes about so lovingly in its pages.

Future spaces in contemporary Australian art: The law of proximity, overexposure and the city

This paper addresses Paul Virilio's notions of the ‘overexposed city’ and ‘the law of proximity’ in relation to contemporary Australian art practice in order to investigate the current cultural imagining of the ‘future spaces’ of the city. In one sense updating the cliché that a painting offers a window on the world, this paper substitutes recent art works by contemporary Australian artists for Virilio's ‘door without a city’. In attempting to discern the status of urban architecture in relation to the exponential development of technology, Virilio identifies ‘a transmutation of representation’ that he discusses in terms of film: ‘Here, more than anywhere, advanced technologies have converged to create a synthetic space-time.’ The art works selected in this paper serve to chart this filmic ‘transmutation’ from a geographical to a temporal representation of space as motion, where ‘the living and the living dead merge to the point of delirium’.