Australian Art Research Articles

Peculiar integrations: Adaptations, experimentations and authorships in The Long Weekend in Alice Springs

This paper investigates approaches to authorship in The Long Weekend in Alice Springs (2013), a graphic adaptation by the Australian artist Joshua Santospirito of a psychoanalytic essay by Craig San Roque (2004). Because the subject of both essay and adapted text is the ability of stories to have lasting effects over time in a space of crisis, this unusual adaptation establishes itself as an unusual site of authorship, whereby multiple authorships create a complicated authority, and stories themselves are shown to be significant. Through its variable positioning of the different roles undertaken by the author, the adaptation struggles with the ongoing challenge of appropriating Indigenous storytelling and suggests a possible way to discuss these stories from the outside. Through analysing paratextual materials and the work itself, this paper shows how nonfiction comics can both convey stories and separate themselves from stories through destabilising notions of creation and authorship.

Remote Feelings: On Blind-Sighted Collaborations and Long-Distance Art Making

This essay is an account of Remote Feelings, a collaborative art project conceived of by the authors in 2016. Shaped by sensory difference, remote location and the use of digital technology, namely 3D scanning and printing technology, this project, like this essay, explores haptic experience, the pairing of analogue and digital methods, and the work and influence of Austrian artist and innovator Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971). The essay also shares information on our individual artistic practices and preoccupations, including Florian Grond's use of digital information as a starting point for the exploration of sensory experience and David Johnson's use of his blindness to inform his search for a new aesthetics.

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

The National: New Australian Art

The National: New Australian Art

SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium & Engagement, 21st Biennale of Sydney

SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium & Engagement, 21st Biennale of Sydney

Creatives talk technology: exploring the role and influence of digital media in the creative process of advertising art directors and copywriters

ABSTRACTThe everyday work practices of advertising art directors and copywriters are being transformed by digital media technologies. While there has been a long-term scholarly interest in the nature of the creative process in this professional context, it has yet to be combined with an examination of digital practices. To investigate this relationship, this article draws upon a qualitative study that explores practitioner perceptions of their creative process and the role of digital media technologies in the development of creative concepts for new advertisements. Analysis of interviews with Australian art directors and copywriters reveals digital media are widely used within the creative process as research tools and sources of inspiration, yet many participants are wary of the influence of these technologies on their work. Interpretation of these perceptions using the system model of creativity and literature on algorithmic gatekeeping provides insight into how digital media, particularly those with search functions, both enable and constrain advertising creativity. The article argues that while digital media provide convenient access to information about the field and domain in which practitioners operate, the personalisation algorithms applied by search-based platforms are simultaneously capable of limiting access to qualitatively diverse sources of knowledge and inspiration.

The photograph as archive: Crafting contemporary Koorie culture

In 2008, an Aboriginal Australian artist based in Melbourne, Australia, created a kangaroo-teeth necklace, revivifying an art/cultural practice for the first time in over a century. She was inspired to do so after viewing an 1880 photograph of an ancestor wearing such adornment. In this article, I bring the necklace and the photograph into the same analytical frame, arguing for the photograph as an archive itself. I consider the trajectories through which the 19th-century image has been replicated and circulated in various productions of knowledge about Aboriginal people, and how a 21st-century artist is mobilizing it not just as a repository of visual information, but also as an impetus to creative production. She produces objects of value and is making culture anew, in a context in which Aboriginality has long/often been presumed absent, extinct or elsewhere.

On Choreography

‘On Choreography’, prepared by Rachel Fensham, turns on an aesthetic investigation of twentieth-century dance history through the large-scale collage installations of Australian visual artist Sally Smart. Revisiting emergent concepts from articles in the 2008 Performance Research issue, it allows them to fragment, tear-up and reassemble major works from the Ballets Russes, Martha Graham and Pina Bausch as it works towards a feminist notion of radical movement.

The Airplane Boneyard Studio: Considering Stillness and Creative Practice from an Airplane Wing

In 1975, Australian artist Ian Howard taped sheets of paper to the nose of the Enola Gay, and through rubbing the surface with a thin layer of wax crayon, he created a ghost-like impression of the airplane that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Forty years later, in an aircraft boneyard in Arizona, I placed redundant maps of the Great Sandy Desert on the wing of a passenger jet to take an imprint of a similarly disused yet functionally different aircraft. Despite the conceptual and temporal differences that separated these two acts, the process of rubbing—or frottage—resulted in two artworks that revealed traces of the physical encounter with the aircraft surfaces, the dynamic handling of the materials of making, and the practical and aesthetic impact of working in the field. By its very nature of proximity and touch, the process of frottage records a bodily engagement with both object and environment. Recounting the experiences of working on the wing of a civilian plane in the desert heat of Arizona forty years after Howard worked on the Enola Gay, I reflect on the low-tech process of frottage and its capacity to suggest our respective embodied experiences of making. Furthermore, I suggest that traces of environmental factors such as high humidity, desert winds, or extreme heat, or time-based factors such as limited access to stationary airplanes can be captured and archived through creative practice as a way to contribute to contemporary understandings of mobility and its counterpart stillness.

Confrontational continuum: modernism and the psychedelic art of Martin Sharp

ABSTRACTThe Australian artist Martin Sharp (1942–2013) produced a series of psychedelic artworks in London between 1966 and 1968, the most famous of which were the Disraeli Gears record cover for rock group Cream and the Bob Dylan Blowin’ in the Mind poster. Sharp’s work exemplifies the connection between early twentieth century Modernist art movements, Pop art and acid-induced psychedelia of the 1960s. In addition, the poster Max Ernst: The Birdman from 1967, represents a homage to Dada and Surrealism, with special reference to anarchy, desire, and freedom of expression. In the spirit of Dada, the poster is meaningfully confrontational, exposing the darker side of the 1960s countercultural revolution in Western societies. This aspect of the youth movements of the 1960s is part of a continuum, drawing upon ideas and activities championed during the late 1910s and early 1920s by proponents of Dada and Surrealism. These resurfaced within the multifaceted counterculture of the 1960s, spurred on by Cold War tensions, rejection of 1950s conservative mores, opposition to nuclear proliferation, the conflict in Vietnam, an explosion in popular music, and the widespread use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD. Sharp’s art is part of this confrontational continuum.

Константин Величков: Ориентализъм и културна чувствителност

Angel Angelov examines the theme of Orientalism in the visual and the literary works of Konstantin Velichkov. He draws the conclusion that in Velichkov’s work Orientalism manifests as a cultural sensibility to the other and is part of his permanent interest in the more important theme of social justice. Angelov compares Velichkov’s paintings with some works of Italian and Austrian artists of the same epoch. He also makes a survey of the publications on Velichkov’s visual and literary works in Bulgaria.

Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women's Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora

Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women's Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora

Affective Everyday Media: The Performativity of Whiteness in Australian Digital Storytelling

ABSTRACTDigital storytelling is popular in Australian community-based arts and contemporary art more broadly, providing an accessible way for people to creatively describe their everyday experiences. While the field has been rapidly growing, little research currently exists on the material implications of digital stories, let alone those about cultural difference. By comparing Big hART's Junk Theory (2006) against Sam Haddad's Loving Lebanon and Australia (2007), this study argues that migrant digital stories represent a conjuncture of multiculturalism, affect, and performativity, and thus act as a useful node for thinking through “cultural diversity.” A new, more specific way to consider the connection of performativity and affect is mapped out and demonstrates its relevance for projects where identities are (re)articulated has to be one word on one line. The paper argues that while digital stories can function as a useful archival and personally transformative artistic medium, they carry a danger of consolidating normative affective responses, which may ultimately maintain the materiality of Otherness in Australian society.

Life After Extinction

Thinking about the value of human survival in the age of the Anthropocene this article asks: What about art that is created by people who have already lived for generations with the possibility of having to abandon the fantasy of their endurance, not of their species, but of their race and culture? What about performances and visual artworks that are created by Indigenous people who live with the legacy of genocide, with a recent history in which the extinction of their race was a very real possibility? How does this kind of art stage what is non-present, that which has perhaps already been lost, but also that which endures? This article considers these questions through the performance The Aborigine Is Present (2015), conceived of and performed (with others) by Australian artist Robyne Latham, Latham’s sculptural installation Empty Coolamons (2014), and the performance Remembering the Empty Coolamons (2017). I argue that works like Latham’s teach us that we don’t have to abandon hope for the endurance of our species, that we can remember or learn how to practice an ethics of care for each other and thereby reconfigure colonialist attitudes and ignorance that will make our place in the biosphere constructive and even vital to non-human others.

Fostering Diversity in the Creative Arts by Addressing Students' Capacity to Aspire

Research on young people's aspirations and their capacity to aspire to higher education has proliferated in recent decades, however, very little attention has been paid to the creative arts. Diversity in the arts remains a persistent issue in many nations, and repeated attempts to promote diversity in the Australian arts community have had limited impact, suggesting the need for new approaches. Drawing on data from a 4‐year longitudinal study of students from ages 8 to 18 (n = 6,492) in government schools, we examine school students' aspirations for careers in the arts. Arts‐related careers were popular among students, yet we found a distinct lack of diversity among those aspiring to such careers. Using logistic regression analysis we found that being female, high achieving, from an English‐speaking background, possessing high cultural capital, and attending advantaged schools were significant predictors of interest in the arts, suggesting the likely reproduction of existing patterns of participation. We argue that initiatives within schools are essential to disrupting these patterns and building the capacity of a more diverse range of students to aspire to careers in the arts.

Surrealism in the Hallucinatory City

Surrealism in the Hallucinatory City Natalya Lusty (bio) In his cultural history of Australian modernism, Ghost Nation, the poet and writer Laurie Duggan presents a “thick description” of the everyday contradictions that saturate the landscape of Australian visual culture. Attentive to the density of the everyday which includes “the residues of a dream-world” (Walter Benjamin’s phrase), Duggan’s portrait maps the visual landscape against the intersecting tensions that came to define Australia in this period, as enigmatic island-continent and emerging modern cosmopolitan nation.1 Here the nation’s ghostly residues are not mirages ignited by death, but the assortment of images that ghost each other: hallucinated assemblages that reveal a deeply embedded mythology of a distinct Australian natural light, increasingly transformed by a modern, industrial, and cosmopolitan sensibility.2 In describing Sydney in the interwar period as “an hallucination, an intense image,” that attracted photographers like moths “drawn to the light,” Duggan notes a shift in the representation of light by photographers in this period. Rather than a desiring to illuminate its subject, modern photography made light itself the subject. In these new images, he writes, “the photographs (and the city they ‘reveal’) are nothing but constructions of light” (Ghost Nation, 120–22).3 This article takes the representation of Sydney as a “hallucinatory place” as the starting point for an examination of the surrealist images produced by photographer Max Dupain throughout the mid-to-late 1930s. While a hallucinated sense of the city has a strong surrealist legacy—from Louis Aragon’s urban reveries to Walter Benjamin’s Parisian dreamscapes—in the surrealist-inspired work of Dupain and his erstwhile collaborators, Olive Cotton and Douglas Annand, the hallucinatory place that floods [End Page 269] their images nevertheless draws out the vernacular, everyday qualities of their home city. In what way did surrealism become an optimal language through which to redefine the importance of modern photography for a new vision of the city? And how was an experimental surrealist photography enlisted to record, as well to defamiliarization, the everyday environment of Sydney, including its startling light, so that it might be experienced, understood, and represented anew? The existing critical work on Dupain, while acknowledging the influence of surrealism, has fallen short of a sustained critical discussion of the surrealist phase of his work or indeed how his surrealist images reflect surrealism’s increasingly anti-imperial, regional inflection.4 While Dupain’s photographic practice was eclectically modernist, the sheer volume and range of images he produced using surrealist techniques and themes, along with their conceptual sophistication, deserve closer scrutiny. Dupain’s turn to documentary photography during World War II and his subsequent repudiation of commercial photography have tended to eclipse the importance of this earlier surrealist phase. This article argues that Dupain’s surrealist images—far from merely registering a playful response to the stylistic effects of surrealist photography, as some critics have argued—produced a regional variant of surrealism that accorded with the movement’s increasingly international spread.5 In developing a homegrown surrealism, Dupain forcefully argued for an experimental modern photography that rejected the constraining idealism of pictorialism, but nonetheless permitted a subjective and poetic response to the urban environment. The photographs from this period paradoxically exoticized the familiar and vernacularized a modern vision of the city, producing a cosmopolitan frame that paid homage to Sydney’s distinctive atmosphere and culture, while also internationalizing local photography practice through the assimilation of a modernist emancipatory ideology. Dupain’s resolute determination to remain in his home city and focus on its distinctive features went against the grain of the expatriate adventures that were the norm for many Australian artists and writers at the time. By the 1930s, he had also moved on from the trend among photographers to send their work to international salons in cities such as Paris, London, and Amsterdam, preferring to place his work in local exhibitions and publications.6 Dupain nevertheless engaged with the international modern photography movement, absorbing its ideas and images, circulated in both specialist photography journals and commercial print culture. Dupain’s cosmopolitanism thus registers the tension between a regional specificity and an intellectual and creative engagement with the transnational networks...

Keeping a Story Alive: Interview with Lukas Birk

The work of an Austrian artist Lukas Birk can be connected to some dilemmas of documentary photography. If the critique of the classical documentary photography stresses the responsibility towards the photographed subject and the problem of the exoticization for the western view, Birk’s work is often developed, displayed and distributed in the place where his projects are created. Therefore, the first audience of his projects are locals and are, in that way, maybe more closely connected to the project itself. He co-founded the Austro Sino Arts Program in China and founded a residency program SewonArtSpace in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The project Afghan Box Camera, which he developed with the ethnographer Sean Folley, focuses on the photographic praxis in Afghanistan, mainly on the type of a simple instant camera, which was traditionally used there but its use is now in decline. They investigated the origins, techniques and the many personal stories of the photographers using or having used this type of camera and also made instructional videos on how to build or use one. Attention to the overlooked photographic practices, history and contexts marks also his current project The Myanmar Photo Archive, a growing collection of Myanmar photographs that were created during and after the colonial period – the work of local photographers from that period has namely remained unknown until today. Keywords: local history, Myanmar photography, photographic backdrop, western view

The Millennial Condition

The Millennial Condition Evan Thomas (bio) Bottled Chris Gooch Top Shelf Productions www.topshelfcomix.com 287 Pages; Print, $19.99 A maxim of millennial dating says, "Never treat someone as a priority if they treat you as an option." This is the ethos that informs Bottled, the debut graphic novel by Australian artist Chris Gooch. It's about the dissolution of bonds that once kept a young Australian in place. Bottled depicts the ability to be unfaithful as both privilege and leverage. The protagonist, Jane, is a young woman living with her mother without any discernible career prospects after college. Jane can't afford to rent a leaking, unheated room which she tours—but she can scrape up enough earnest-money to prevent another person from moving into "her" room. By the end of the plot Jane can afford the room, but only after leveraging one backstabbing cheater against another. And, in moving out, Jane abandons her mother in a crumbling, potentially abusive relationship. As befits a post-recession plot about housing, each character becomes adept at maximizing their own portfolio of options: To be committed is to be inevitably betrayed. The inciting incident for Bottled is the return of Jane's friend Natalie, who is a glamorous international model, from a lonely work-trip to Japan. Their relationship is largely mediated by their cell phones. Natalie's life is one of constant surveillance and scrutiny—not only from her phone, but also a panopticon of cameras and video cameras. Gooch shorthands this motif as an ominous black rectangle. In a scene when Natalie is extremely intoxicated, her romantic interest slides a cell phone into her bathroom stall. This is somehow not the most violating intrusion of a camera into her life. Through much of the plot, Natalie is terrorized in this panopticon by an unseen spectator: She is subjected to a stream of disembodied threats from an unknown number. Her phone hurls an increasing crescendo of abuse at her: What? You think you're too good for me?You think you're great?I know what you really are.You don't want to fuck with me. You're reallygoing to regret this. This would be a chilling reflection of the contemporary treatment of women in popular culture, except that Natalie discovers a means to escape from it. At the climax of the plot, Natalie is able to buy out her blackmailer before uncovering his identity and his own pathetic desperation. Ultimately, Natalie is a speculator rather than a fetish object: She is able to buy back some of her own dignity, albeit in a deal that ends her last meaningful friendships. The men of Bottled tend to be cheaters: Jane's father and her partner Ben both cheat. Cheating is, of course, a kind of optionality for these men: it is liquidity, both relationally and visually. The telltale sign in Bottled comes when the cheating men visibly melt in one scene or another, typically in the heat of intercourse. Instead of droplets of perspiration, their hands, hair, faces all decompose into sagging tendrils. When Jane's stepfather, Steve, is in bed with an unknown woman, his face oozes such that his eyebrows are hard to discern from the sweat. Here is Gooch's vision of the masculine: something sensual, petty, and pestilential. Ben is most grotesque after his double-crossing has been revealed and his mask is quite literally peeled aside. [End Page 11] That mask had a smooth, alien, rigidity that betrayed the contorted, Hyde-like monster underneath. And when Jane succeeds in her plot to play the cheaters against each other, she is finally able to move into that leaking room with two male roommates: She may not have become as liquid as the men in her life, but she is able to buy her way into that position. The exception to the cheating, the optionality, the melting, and the contortion is Jane's mother. If others are option-traders, Jane's mother is Fort Knox. She abides by her vows to hold her daughter back from more interpersonal debt. In a way, this financial stance helps her keep Jane in a household that...

Confrontational Continuum: Modernism and the Psychedelic Art of Martin Sharp

The Australian artist Martin Sharp (1942-2013) produced a series of psychedelic artworks in London between 1966-8, the most famous of which were the Disraeli Gears record cover for rock group Cream and the Bob Dylan Blowin’ in the Mind poster. Sharp’s work exemplifies the connection between early twentieth century Modernist art movements, Pop art and acid-induced psychedelia of the 1960s. In addition, the poster Max Ernst: The Birdman from 1967, represents a homage to Dada and Surrealism, with special reference to anarchy, desire, and freedom of expression. In the spirit of Dada, the poster is meaningfully confrontational, exposing the darker side of the 1960s countercultural revolution in Western societies. This aspect of the youth movements of the 1960s is part of a continuum, drawing upon ideas and activities championed during the late 1910s and early 1920s by proponents of Dada and Surrealism. These resurfaced within the multifaceted counterculture of the 1960s, spurred on by Cold War tensions, rejection of 1950s conservative mores, opposition to nuclear proliferation, the conflict in Vietnam, an explosion in popular music, and the widespread use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD. Sharp’s art is part of this confrontational continuum.

Artists and the Rite of Passage North to the Temperate Zone

For an aspiring Australian artist, a sojourn north to the world’s large cultural centres has become a rite of passage and to some extent a requirement to achieve recognition both abroad and at home. Many of Australia’s most recognised artists have spent some or a considerable amount of time abroad, such as musician Peter Sculthorpe, painter Arthur Streeton and contemporary indigenous photographer Tracy Moffatt. Despite the frequency of this rite of passage, Australian art continues to struggle to achieve significant international recognition. This article considers the influence of this rite of passage for Australian artists in the context of a rapidly changing global art world, which is increasingly subject to changing production and consumption patterns. It does so in the context of what Bourdieu describes as a cultural field and which involves a complex arrangement of horizontal and vertical power relationships. The paper also considers the extent to which this rite of passage is relevant in the second decade of the 21st century and for a nation which, although having strong historical ties to Britain in particular, is geographically closer to Asia and in a time of the Asian century.