Australian Art Research Articles

The Beautiful Dead: The Aversion, Appearance and Mediation of Death in Australian First World War Art

Death was ubiquitous in the First World War but remained a difficult subject for Australian official and soldier artists alike. This article examines the techniques these artists used to create images that facilitated the public comprehension, understanding and commemoration of death. It outlines how soldier artists used their works on paper to contextualise and comprehend their actions for recollection at a personal level, occupying a space between personal and communal memory. Official war artists, meanwhile, engaged with death in the context of a nation-building cultural exercise, which informed the drawings created in the field and the final oil compositions of battle scenes painted after the war. While death was a definitive component of the art created, the depiction of the dead within the art was mediated out of respect for the dead, concerns for the bereaved and the personal sensibilities of the artists, with consequences for the continuing memorialisation of the war.This article has been peer reviewed.

Of the Morrow's Sweet Expanse (Diptych)

46 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 cover feature art poetry Panel I Assignment Zero: mis(s)- conception She is already here Or is it “I”? Antecedent that simply replied to her telluric calling first? Chimer of a “tick-tock vacancy” Body, any body in heat (of telling) Waiting Fating to be conscripted to serve ages of human time in one run of hope Or is it Mother? split-off- tongue cry(o)genic Gape of langue she still has no love in but incantation: Oocyte cele ovum cite Game-to-cite Blastocyte cele laukia tikisi ji laukia Ootid tikisi iki She is blast tiki laukia Blast wish laukia 12 ji tikisi iki Waiting tikisi iki to laukia Lull of null laike Gametocyte laukia A site of sight blasto counting site laukia ji tikisi ji Meiotic dance One zero(whirl) of show Meantime Fiona’s Wunderkammer clocks strike Habitat Reverter’s somber U-turn bells As in some ancient snake world of the wrong way time Ouroboros connecting night to night’s own tail of madness, badness and the World’s all sadness Or is this Noose twist of the future in yet another habitat bent wrong to do time for the gloom apportioners we never bargained for? Time wizens BTW at god’s “Sky(go)vernor” emporium and on the shelves there among mickle other “things un-living” are goods endangered some say babies Lithuanian are ticking low on stock Of the Morrow’s Sweet Expanse (Diptych) by Rita Malikonyte Mockus WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 47 Panel II Liniment: update(a)bility for “first-person singular” app [But wait] the world is way more hip than I my passé life and its uneasy slip Together, world and I we need to rest from me, say, carve a citadel out from the unfinished fear of see to soothe the fruit held crosswise barb(juiced) fibers of a private dark your darkling. Wake up, it’s time to begin / The forgetting Textual notes: Excerpted from a tetraptych (four-panel poem). Repetition of the phrase ji tikisi tiki laukia (Panel I) is in Lithuanian. It means“hoping, re-hoping, in-hoping, and waiting inside time.”The word iki means“until”and cele means “a cell.”Last sentence in Panel II is a quote from Ben Lerner. above Kampas, Nukryziuota Obelis (Crucified apple tree), 1993. Private collection. opposite Fiona Hall, Wrong Way Time, 2012–15 (detail), © the artist. Courtesy of the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia. Image credit: Clayton Glen. Rita Malikonyte Mockus, born in Lithuania, is a poet, performer, and translator. Her poetry was published in Salos (Sviesa Press, Lithuania). Mockus wrote a cycle of poems for the Electroshock Label, Russia, and her work“Yoin”was performed at the National Philharmonic of Lithuania. Mockus also read her poetry at the City of Asylum’s (Pittsburgh) Jazz Poetry Concert. Australian artist Fiona Hall’s installation Wrong Way Time— currently on view at the 56th Venice Biennale—responds to the perilous state of the environment and to our own “madness, badness, and sadness stretching beyond the foreseeable future.” Rimvidas Jankauskas“Kampas” (1957–1993) was a prominent Lithuanian abstract expressionist painter and one of the most temperamental, unrestrained, and rebellious personalities in the Lithuanian art scene of the 1990s. ...

Of the Morrow's Sweet Expanse (Diptych)

46 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 cover feature art poetry Panel I Assignment Zero: mis(s)- conception She is already here Or is it “I”? Antecedent that simply replied to her telluric calling first? Chimer of a “tick-tock vacancy” Body, any body in heat (of telling) Waiting Fating to be conscripted to serve ages of human time in one run of hope Or is it Mother? split-off- tongue cry(o)genic Gape of langue she still has no love in but incantation: Oocyte cele ovum cite Game-to-cite Blastocyte cele laukia tikisi ji laukia Ootid tikisi iki She is blast tiki laukia Blast wish laukia 12 ji tikisi iki Waiting tikisi iki to laukia Lull of null laike Gametocyte laukia A site of sight blasto counting site laukia ji tikisi ji Meiotic dance One zero(whirl) of show Meantime Fiona’s Wunderkammer clocks strike Habitat Reverter’s somber U-turn bells As in some ancient snake world of the wrong way time Ouroboros connecting night to night’s own tail of madness, badness and the World’s all sadness Or is this Noose twist of the future in yet another habitat bent wrong to do time for the gloom apportioners we never bargained for? Time wizens BTW at god’s “Sky(go)vernor” emporium and on the shelves there among mickle other “things un-living” are goods endangered some say babies Lithuanian are ticking low on stock Of the Morrow’s Sweet Expanse (Diptych) by Rita Malikonyte Mockus WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 47 Panel II Liniment: update(a)bility for “first-person singular” app [But wait] the world is way more hip than I my passé life and its uneasy slip Together, world and I we need to rest from me, say, carve a citadel out from the unfinished fear of see to soothe the fruit held crosswise barb(juiced) fibers of a private dark your darkling. Wake up, it’s time to begin / The forgetting Textual notes: Excerpted from a tetraptych (four-panel poem). Repetition of the phrase ji tikisi tiki laukia (Panel I) is in Lithuanian. It means“hoping, re-hoping, in-hoping, and waiting inside time.”The word iki means“until”and cele means “a cell.”Last sentence in Panel II is a quote from Ben Lerner. above Kampas, Nukryziuota Obelis (Crucified apple tree), 1993. Private collection. opposite Fiona Hall, Wrong Way Time, 2012–15 (detail), © the artist. Courtesy of the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia. Image credit: Clayton Glen. Rita Malikonyte Mockus, born in Lithuania, is a poet, performer, and translator. Her poetry was published in Salos (Sviesa Press, Lithuania). Mockus wrote a cycle of poems for the Electroshock Label, Russia, and her work“Yoin”was performed at the National Philharmonic of Lithuania. Mockus also read her poetry at the City of Asylum’s (Pittsburgh) Jazz Poetry Concert. Australian artist Fiona Hall’s installation Wrong Way Time— currently on view at the 56th Venice Biennale—responds to the perilous state of the environment and to our own “madness, badness, and sadness stretching beyond the foreseeable future.” Rimvidas Jankauskas“Kampas” (1957–1993) was a prominent Lithuanian abstract expressionist painter and one of the most temperamental, unrestrained, and rebellious personalities in the Lithuanian art scene of the 1990s. ...

Art, Activism, and Democracy: WochenKlausur's Social Interventions

This essay explores the sociopolitical practice of the Austrian art group WochenKlausur. Since 1993, members of this collective have produced what they call “concrete interventions”; using funds provided by various cultural institutions, they enact long‐term, problem‐solving measures in the surrounding communities. Mobilizing their status as an “art” group, they are able to draw attention to otherwise overlooked social ills. Their practice foregrounds the critical issues that arise when art is paired with activism, including the crucial and much‐contested differentiation between ethics and aesthetics. I ultimately find that this group's practical successes productively, if only locally, intervene in areas that have traditionally been the purview of democratic governments, while their works that fail in these terms serve as a mirror to governments' own failures to create and maintain programs of social betterment and to promote democratic inclusion.

The Heildelberg School in forming Australianness

In 1788, English people settled down in Australia, cleared and cultivated the land, making a big turning point to this old continent. Australianness was still vague in these initial years of the white settlement. Heildelberg School, the first school in Australian art, which emerged in 1887, laid the foundation for Australia's visual arts history as well as forming the Autralianness with three mains characters: “strong, masculine labour”, “national myth” and “harsh land of unique nature diversity”. In this paper, the writer would like to introduce 7 masterpieces by three prominent Australian artists of the Heidelberg school: Tom Roberts, Frederic Mc.Cubbin, and Arthur Streeton.

Seeking and finding: Creative processes of 21st century painters

This paper draws on empirical data from a 2004–2007 study of Australian art students and professional artists who specialised in drawing and painting to understand their work processes. Making use of Galenson's typology of ‘seekers’ and ‘finders’, the study discovered that ‘seeking’ rather than ‘finding’ was the dominant approach used by the vast majority of artists. To explain the predominance of seeking processes, the paper argues that Galenson's typology is best understood in the context of the field of artistic production in the 21st century and the habitus operating among painters. Creative processes of contemporary art are thus inseparable from artists’ strategies for surviving in the artworld.

Painting Country: Australian Aboriginal artists’ approach to traditional materials in a modern context

Painting Country: Australian Aboriginal artists’ approach to traditional materials in a modern context

Trepang: China and the story of Macassan- Aboriginal Trade – Examining historical accounts as research tools for cultural materials conservation

The incorporation of the formal study of artists’ materials and techniques into conservation practice has formed the basis of a range of projects, programs and publications at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Director of the Fogg Art Museum, Edward Forbes began to collect artists’ pigments for investigation and analysis. Of increasing interest to conservators is the way that trade and innovation impact on artistic production, including dates at which materials became available, centres of use, and the patterns of take up by artists. For conservators working in the Asia-Pacific region questions about Western artists’ materials are interesting and useful in informing decision-making. There is the danger, however, of embedding a discourse that privileges trade from the West as the most significant indicator of innovation in artistic practice.In Australia, across the continent and across the millennium trade goods from northern Australia were exchanged for material from the south. This trade supported the continued development of innovation in philosophy and practice in the performing and visual arts in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. By the seventeenth century, cultural innovation was supported by the important Asian north-south international trade in cultural material and commodities to China, through the Indonesian archipelago to the northern coastline of Australia. In return highly valued trepang (sea cucumber) and other items were traded from Australia through north Indonesia to China. In the late nineteenth century, Western artists’ materials from Europe were introduced into Australian Aboriginal art practice, and in the twentieth century an explosion of trade activity saw art materials produced in Europe and China purchased for use by Aboriginal artist and Aboriginal art traded across Europe, the Americas and Asia. This paper examines how the important trade routes, developed prior to European settlement, inform contemporary art making in Aboriginal communities today.

Tracks to Advocacy

This article considers the role of animal rights-based journalism and its connection to teaching media law and ethics to undergraduate students in an Australian university arts faculty. An anecdotal discussion of a reflective practice informing the teaching of an undergraduate course in a journalism major relates questions of ethics and law to broader considerations of the role of advocacy in and around journalism, and media practice. It is argued that animal rights-related stories have a role in training media professionals, and also in inspiring journalists to envision their own work as part of the democratic mechanisms of social and legal reform in Australia.

Evidence requirements for the development of the National Australian Arts and Health Framework

Abstract This article outlines the work undertaken to provide evidence required to support the development of the National Arts and Health Framework endorsed by the Australian health ministers in November 2013. The Institute For Creative Health was charged with being the sector’s reference organization and supplied the evidence required throughout the Framework’s development, as well as moderating the sector’s response to draft proposals. A two-phase process of assembling the evidence required to support government action was identified. With Finland, Australia leads the world in having the health jurisdictions create a National Arts and Health Framework, and appropriate evidence was critical at all stages of its development.

Nostalagia After Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film by Heidi Schlipphacke (review)

Reviewed by: Nostalagia After Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film by Heidi Schlipphacke Jacqueline Vansant Heidi Schlipphacke, Nostalagia After Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2010. 312 pp. In Nostalgia After Nazism Heidi Schlipphacke skillfully draws on postcolonial and postmodern theories in addition to recent work on nostalgia to frame her discussion of select works by the Austrian authors Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, and Robert Menasse, the German filmmaker Tom Tykwer, and the German writer Birgit Vanderbeke. Distinguishing between “Euro-American” postmodernisms and belated or displaced German-Austrian versions, Schlipphacke illustrates how these German and Austrian artists deploy postmodern techniques in a distinctive dialogue with their nation’s history and as a means of critiquing any desire to deny that history. The place or “nonplace” of nostalgia in their works also sets them apart from their European and American contemporaries. Since nostalgia has been seen as engendering forgetting, it might seem totally out of place in a literature that deals with the burden of a National Socialist past. However, Svetlana Boym’s “reflective nostalgia” offers Schlipphacke a useful interpretive tool. “As a reflective emotion” it “balances melancholy and mourning” (19) and preserves a sense of loss or longing, which disallows forgetting. Through what she sees as a dialectic of entrapment and escape, Schlipphacke shows how some of the artists find a way to introduce a productive nostalgia that is always shaped by the weight of the National Socialist past and its legacy. As this review is for the Journal of Austrian Studies, I concentrate my remarks on Schlipphacke’s insightful interpretations of the three Austrian writers. In her nuanced readings, she explores how each writer formally as well as thematically conducts a dialogue with the past. She also shows how both [End Page 115] Jelinek and Menasse are in a dialogue with Austria’s literary history. Moreover, Schlipphacke uncovers a progression in the work of the three writers from what she terms “displaced nostalgia” in Bachmann to a “performative entrapment” in Jelinek and “transnational nostalgia” in Menasse. In her reading of Ingeborg Bachmann’s fragment Franza (1966) Schlipphacke pays particular attention to intertextual references to the Victorian detective novel The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. She suggests that the textual irony adds a new dimension to the concepts of nostalgia and utopia that are explored in the text. While not denying Bachmann’s oversimplification of the victim/victimizer dichotomy, Schlipphacke explores how Bachmann’s allusions create moments of “displaced nostalgia.” The figure of Percival Glyde, a villain in the Victorian novel, appears as an idealized father figure for the narrator in Franza. Franza associates her memories of him with the immediate postwar years and with “moments of the magic of alterity and hope” (51). However, the intertextual reference to Glyde, a sadist in Collins’s novel, and her later reunion with Glyde, who doesn’t remember her, ironize the memories and the nostalgic gesture. In the chapter on Jelinek, Schlipphacke uncovers an aesthetic in the writer’s work that precludes any space for nostalgia or affect. Stylistically, Jelinek repeatedly performs a type of entrapment “tied to history and to a fixation with erasing historical forgetting” (81) that suggests the inevitability of the return of Austria’s National Socialist past in some form. Schlipphacke also discusses the untranslatability of Jelinek’s works. Using Die Klavierspielerin (1983) as an example, she effectively argues that the difficulty of translating Jelinek’s syntax and language, her use of citation and neologisms, and the failure of some critics to understand or consider the cultural context have led to misreadings abroad. Seeing the novel as the product of a “disturbed” mind or “pornography,” American and British critics fail to see the implied critique of fascism. Schlipphacke also compares the novel to Michael Haneke’s film La Pianiste (2001). She points out how the filmmaker removes “the national and historical concerns” and endows the figures with a “level of interiority absent in the novel,” giving the personal relationship a depth not in the novel (119). Schlipphacke also refers to Jelinek’s indebtedness to Bachmann and illustrates how the roles in Bachmann...

Towards a Politics and Art of the Land: Gothic Cinema of the Australian New Wave and Its Reception by American Film Critics

This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode.

Editorial: Pedagogical Media Ecologies

Editorial: Pedagogical Media Ecologies

The rhetoric of the new: The Field and the foundations of an institutional avant-garde in Australia

The Field, in 1968, was the first exhibition held at the new National Gallery of Victoria. The exhibition made a bold modernist statement: seventy-four abstract paintings and sculptures by forty young Australian contemporary artists. The Field was a controversial undertaking because it was clearly derived from contemporary New York avant-garde styles. This paper considers The Field's impact and legacy based on the numerous exhibitions it has subsequently inspired. It focuses on The Field's efforts to align Australian art with the international modernist tradition and argues that the exhibition established a new role and identity for the art institution in Australia. The modernist values introduced by The Field had a considerable impact on the Australian art world, far greater than the avant-garde style for which the exhibition is known.

The presence of absence: Tommy McRae and Judy Watson in Australia, the imaginary grandstand at the Royal Academy in London

Detail of Tommy McRae, Corroboree or William Buckley and Dancers from the Wathaurong People, c. 1890, ink on paper. University of Melbourne Archives.Nineteenth-century Indigenous art is remarkably absent from Australian contributions to World Art history. This close reading of Tommy McRae's drawings of a Victorian ‘Corroboree after Seeing Ships for the First Time’ argues that the presences and absences in Australian art history are epitomized in these nineteenth-century Indigenous works. The influence of photography and popular press imagery on McRae's representations of ceremony is analysed. How renderings of figure and ground bring colour and race into the very material support of his drawings is explored. The reverse assimilation of the ‘wild white man’ William Buckley is assessed in regard to the proto-national apparel in the colonial space that McRae illustrates. The reassessment of this early Aboriginal artist is framed by the exhibition of his work in London at the Royal Academy in 2013. Comparisons with Eugene von Guérard and William Barak are made in the visual analysis. The significance of the reception of the Australia exhibition as imaginary grandstand for the nation is further highlighted through Judy Watson's fire and water sculpture.

‘Under Western Eyes’: a short analysis of the reception of Aboriginal art in France through the press

Good afternoon, I know you are all very tired and are over swept by the communications, so I am going to try to be brief. I am not going to read my paper because when I read a paper in English usually people don’t understand what I’ve said, so I am going to talk more freely. My starting point will be a sentence which is quite known among the art historians : “ce sont les regardeurs qui font les tableaux”, it’s the people who look at the picture that do the picture. It’s a Marcel Duchamp sentence and Fred Myers said in one of his articles “ce qui fait l’art… what does art is the place of its reception”, so he has the same idea as Marcel Duchamp: to look at art from the reception place.To follow this idea I am going to, very simply, show you a press review, and sentences which are for me the main focus of the articles about Australian art. And, mainly I am going to talk about the reception of the Quai Branly project and the exhibition that we closed Sunday night (Aux sources de la peinture aborigene, 09/10/12-20/01/13).It would be good one day to analyze the history of the relations between France and Australia. For the moment I will take examples from exhibitions I know about. There are probably more than that, but I take examples from all the main exhibitions that took place in France in the 80’s and in the 90’s. I have stopped my review in 2000. What I am going to do is to start with the 1993 exhibition at the Musee des Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie (MAAO). This starting point [...]

Trying to Live Now: Chronotopic Figures in Jenny Watson’s A Painted Page Series

Between late 1979 and early 1980, Australian artist Jenny Watson painted a sequence of six works, each with the title A Painted Page. Combining gridded, painted reproductions of photographs, newspapers and department store catalogues with roughly painted fields of color, the series brought together a range of recent styles and painterly idioms: pop, photorealism, and non-objective abstraction. Watson’s evocation of styles considered dated, corrupted or redundant by contemporary critics was read as a sign of the decline of modernism and the emergence of a postmodernism inflected with irony and a cool, “new wave” sensibility. An examination of the Painted Pages in the context of Watson’s interest in autobiography and her association with the women’s art movement, however, reveals the works to be subjective, highly personal reflections on memory, self and artistic aspiration. Drawing on Bahktin’s model of the chronotope, this paper argues for a spatio-temporal reading of Watson’s Painted Pages rather than the crude model of stylistic redundancy and succession. Watson’s source images register temporal orders ranging across the daily, the seasonal and the epochal. Her paintings transpose Bahktin’s typology of quotidian, provincial and “adventuristic” time into autobiographical paintings of teenage memories, the vicissitudes of the art world and punk subcultures. Collectively, the Painted Pages established a chronotopic field; neither an aggregation of moments nor a collaged evocation of a period but a point at which Watson closed off one kind of time (an art critical time of currency and succession) and opened up another (of subjectivity and affective experience).

The first Australian painting of schizophrenia by Ivor Francis.

This article examines the 1943 surrealistic painting Schizophrenia by Ivor Francis, the first major Australian art work depicting a mental disorder. Francis was influenced by Max Harris who encouraged him to read works on surrealism and psychoanalysis, but took his ideas from the book on schizophrenia by the radical Melbourne psychiatrist, Reg Ellery. Ivor Francis produced a riveting painting that stands as an enduring visual beacon in the cultural history of Antipodean psychiatry.

Generating Cultural Capital? Impacts of Artists-in-Residence on Teacher Professional Learning

The introduction of the Australian Arts Curriculum and the rise of a twenty-first century creativity agenda in education signal an opportunity for teacher educators to re-examine the outcomes and potential of arts-based initiatives on teacher professional learning. This study re-visits the outcomes of the Australian Artist-in-Residence program in this context and analyses a subset of data collected for its evaluation. The study reveals that while teachers perceive an improvement in creative capital, it is important to consider questions about the capacity for such programs to generate long term changes in practice. The study illustrates how some States and Territories embedded opportunities for collective reflective activity to facilitate such change and suggests there is potential for AIR models to support pre-service and in-service professional learning in creative and critical thinking as well as the arts curriculum. With the Professional Engagement domain of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (Graduate teachers), in particular Standards 6 and 7, this is timely research.

From Gangs to Shopping Malls: Sentimental Aesthetics in Vietnamese Australian Community Arts

This article describes developments in Vietnamese Australian community arts in the context of recent reforms to Community Cultural Development (CCD) funding. While a discussion of two case studies suggests these reforms have encouraged a shift towards post-welfarist and enterprising modes of project development, the article argues that conspicuously ‘cosmo-multiculturalist’ and ‘sentimental aesthetics’ cannot be explained entirely in terms of post-1980s cultural policies of the Australian Labour government. The article concludes that recent attempts to link CCD work to professional arts networks were in fact anticipated by the explicit agendas of Vietnamese Australian CCD workers themselves, although for quite different purposes.