Australian Art Research Articles

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

No Free Tickets

No Free Tickets

Situating Conceptuality in Non-Fungible Token Art

Situating Conceptuality in Non-Fungible Token Art

‘The Lucky Country’: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Revitalised Australia’s Lethargic Art Market

Since its publication in 1964, Australians have used the title of Donald Horne’s book, The Lucky Country, as a term of self-reflective endearment to express the social and economic benefits afforded to the population by the country’s wealth of geographical and environmental advantages. These same advantages, combined with strict border closures, have proven invaluable in protecting Australia from the ravages of the global COVID-19 pandemic, in comparison to many other countries. However, elements of Australia’s arts sector have not been so fortunate. The financial damage of pandemic-driven closures of exhibitions, art events, museums, and art businesses has been compounded by complex government stimulus packages that have excluded many contracted arts workers. Contrarily, a booming fine art auction market and commercial gallery sector driven by stay-at-home local collectors demonstrated remarkable resilience considering the extraordinary circumstances. Nonetheless, this resilience must be contextualised against a decade of underperformance in the Australian art market, fed by the negative impact of national taxation policies and a dearth of Federal government support for the visual arts sector. This paper examines the complex and contradictory landscape of the art market in Australia during the global pandemic, including the extension of pre-pandemic trends towards digitalisation and internationalisation. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative analysis, the paper concludes that Australia is indeed a ‘lucky country’, and that whilst lockdowns have driven stay-at-home collectors to kick-start the local art market, an overdue digital pivot also offers future opportunities in the aftermath of the pandemic for national and international growth.

Hofstetter Kurt: Ich Schaue in den Himmel um Mich zu Erden (I Look up to the Sky to Ground Myself)

Hofstetter Kurt: Ich Schaue in den Himmel um Mich zu Erden (I Look up to the Sky to Ground Myself)

Beautiful Piet\xe0s in South Tyrol (Northern Italy): local or imported works of art?

The study, dedicated to Beautiful Pietàs conserved in South Tyrol (Northern Italy), aims to establish, for the first time, a connection between Austroalpine raw materials and the high-fired gypsum mortars constituting the Gothic figure groups in question. The origin and chronology of this stylistically and qualitatively differing ensemble have been subject of art historical debate for nearly a century. The discourse is dominated by three main hypotheses: itinerary of an Austrian artist versus itinerary of the work of art created in an artist’s workshop in Austria versus itinerary of the stylistic vocabulary via graphical or three-dimensional models. The comparison of the δ34S values and the 87Sr/86Sr ratios of the gypsum mortars and Austroalpine sulphate deposits (in a compilation of own reference samples and literature data) points to the exploitation of sediments in the Salzkammergut and possibly also in the evaporite district of the Eastern Calcareous Alps, thus evidencing the import of the sculptures and not the activities of local South Tyrolean or itinerant artists. Two geochronological units are distinguishable: The Pietà in the Church St. Martin in Göflan can be assigned to Upper Permian raw material, whereas the metrologically consistent sculptures in the Church of Our Lady of the Benedictine Abbey Marienberg and in the Chapel St. Ann in Mölten correlate with deposits of the Early Triassic (or the Lower-Middle Triassic transition). The medieval gypsum mortars also differ in their mineralogical characteristics, i.e. in their geologically related minor components, as in the first case, characterised by a significant proportion of primary anhydrite, natural carbonate impurities mainly consist of calcite (partly converted to lime-lump-like aggregates), whereas in the second group dolomite (or rather its hydration products after pyrometamorphic decomposition) predominates, accompanied by celestine, quartz and potassium feldspar. The Pietà in the Cathedral Maria Himmelfahrt in Bozen turned out to be made of Breitenbrunn calcareous sandstone (Leitha Mountains, Burgenland, Austria), which is why the sample is not considered in the geochemical analysis.Graphical

Removing the armor: art, the fat body and vulnerability

ABSTRACT It feels transgressive to reveal what I am most scared to reveal, to share stories, vulnerability and sometimes “dirty laundry” in my writing. It can open me up to potential attack. But a few years ago, I realized that it was still safer for me to express my fat activism in written form. I made the decision to move from fat activism driven by writing, to include activism that explores fat embodiment through representation of my body in shibari (Japanese rope) performance, photography and visual art. I am now taking it a step further to reflect on the representation of my fat body in art. In this autoethnographic piece, I find that I have an ability to frame how a story is told, where to expose and reveal my body in ways that challenge what fat bodies are capable of doing, or how they “should” be visually represented, is a more vulnerable position for me as a fat activist. Self-protection and self-preservation would dictate that I keep myself hidden away. Revealing myself and my body, and becoming vulnerable by doing so, takes courage. It means putting aside the instincts of self-protection, to reveal aspects of myself so that others either see themselves reflected in my body, and take strength and courage from that, or are exposed to a representation of a fat body they wouldn’t normally be exposed to. This article includes, and discusses, visual art with my body as the subject, from an Australian artist and two photographers.

Sonic Touch

This article is an edited round-table discussion between a collective of Australian artists and academics working with sonic touch and gestural technologies across contemporary performance, public art, and care contexts. This discussion was conducted in August 2021 via Zoom and sought to articulate what a foregrounding of touch and gesture might offer scholarship engaging with the role of sound in performance. This specific collective was assembled because these artists represent a broad cross section of the ways touch and gestural technologies are currently functioning in contemporary sound-led performance practice, sharing as they do a positioning of practices at the nexus of sound, theatre, dance, public art, and music.

Review: FAT, by Regina Hofer

From its arresting cover through its final ambiguous page, Regina Hofer’s graphic novel FAT provokes and disorients the reader. Hofer, an Austrian artist and author, battled with anorexia and bulimia from her teen years in the context of family abuse and dysfunction. The memoir promises to resonate with anyone grappling with, or trying to understand, an eating disorder. Armed with sharp lines and indeterminate symbolism, Hofer confronts readers with the reality of distorted perception, mirroring her own experience with anorexia and bulimia: “When you have an eating disorder, you lose a sense for your own appearance—among other things. The perception of your own body changes significantly” (7). Informed readers will recognize through lines sourced from science fiction, the animal kingdom, and even Shakespeare’s Henry V, but may buckle under the weight of the sense-making enterprise, as Hofer’s commitment to disorientation is complete.Hofer’s memoir is a story of damage, drawn in black and white; there are no gray areas. Describing the daily practice and bodily effects of her eating disorder, she offers panels filled with abstractions—heavily inked circles, dots, slashes, lines—as she plays with negative space. Hofer deploys a visual vocabulary that is less transparently illustrative than it is evocative, and sometimes, meant to disorient. The book’s cover provides the only splash of color, the bright yellow shirt of the objectively not fat narrator, alongside the memoir’s all-caps title, FAT, offering an inaugural experience of dissonance. Artifacts of early twentieth-century industry populate Hofer’s panels: clocks, robots, blimps, and sinking ocean liners conjure the mechanical and nonhuman as sources of violence, and stand in jagged contrast to the more sympathetically rendered animal world, which exists at its mercy. Hofer’s abusive father is drawn as a robot, whose “R.U.R.”-emblazoned chest piece slyly nods to the artificial people—soulless replicants—in Karel Capek’s eponymous 1920 play. Hofer, although protean, sometimes appears almost orangutan-like, with her anorexic’s downy lanugo reimagined as the shaggy hair of a primate; other times, she is a slug, a fish—unhuman, but alive.Themes of sexualized violence—toward women and animals—abound in Hofer’s work. She visually morphs her father from a human into a robot spaceman, describing him as a master hunter and recounting a degrading “tavern ritual” among hunters that ties together entitled masculinity, sexual cruelty, and disregard for the other, both feminine and animal. Her hometown in Upper Austria—“a place that’s known for its priests”—is surprisingly illustrated with a louche, stubbly, brassiere-clad angel, a naked butch horse-straddling saint, a jowly degenerate pastor, and a little-boy Hitler, juxtaposed to plaque-mounted rabbit heads, as she tenders the cryptic observation that “Not even the forest offers protection from people’s narrow-mindedness” (59). A topsy-turvy armadillo accompanies Hofer’s narrative about being hit on by a man in a bar. Hofer-as-woman and creatures at the low end of the food chain are presented interchangeably, only their suffering in common.Perhaps the most violence-evoking measure in Hofer’s memoir is her threading-through of excerpts from Shakespeare’s Henry V. Hofer samples heavily from King Henry V’s brutal Act 3, Scene 3 speech, weaving the Bard’s savage imagery of “naked infants spitted upon pikes” and “most reverend heads dash’d to the walls” into the story of her nervous breakdown and devolving relationship with her father. In the speech itself, Henry V shifts blame for the slaughter he threatens, warning the governor of Harfleur that he is about to bring this dark madness upon himself and his town if he fails to surrender, much as the violence of Hofer’s paterfamilias has put her in a no-win situation.FAT is not a graphic novel about the violence and damage of eating disorders that neatly resolves its tensions. The final page is forward-looking although ambiguous, but any hopes for an epilogue of peace and self-acceptance are seemingly undone by Hofer’s admission on the first page that just two weeks ago, she was still roiling, riddled, disoriented. Hofer’s graphic memoir succeeds in that it provokes a similar dis-ease in readers, laying bare the harsh lived realities of abuse and disordered eating.

Amanda Harris. Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance, 1930–1970

In Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930–1970, Amanda Harris sets out a history of Aboriginal music and dance performances in south-east Australia during the four-decade-long period defined as the Australian assimilation era. During this era, and pushing its boundaries, harsh government policies under the guise of ‘protection’ and ‘welfare’ were designed forcibly to assimilate Aboriginal people into the mainstream population. It is striking while reading this book how few of these stories are widely known, particularly given the heavy influence that Harris uncovers it having on the Australian art music scene of today. As such, the book makes an important contribution to the ‘truth telling’ of Australian history while also showing that—despite the severe policies during this era, including the banning of speaking in Indigenous languages and restricting the performance of ceremony—Aboriginal people have remained active agents in driving their own engagements and asserting their own culturally distinct modes of music and dance performance. This resilience against significant odds has been aptly described by one of the book’s contributors, Yorta Yorta and Dja Dja Warrung cultural leader, visual and performance artist, curator and opera singer Tiriki Onus, as ‘hiding in plain sight,’ referring to the ways in which Aboriginal people ensured the continued practice and performance of their culture by doing so in public, the only place they were allowed to…

From Rust: Growth, Decay and the Unknown in the Prints of Petr Herel

AbstractThis paper explores the work of Czech-born Australian artist Petr Herel (1943-), and the ongoing focus in his practice upon, in his words, ‘seeking in chance another world of the unexpected’. Specifically, it will examine the artist’s decision to reprint proofs of his Borges Sequel (1982) portfolio twenty years later to create Tardieu Sequel (2004), despite the plates having rusted. This rusting was not a conscious decision, having occurred while the plates were stored in damp and humid conditions. For many, this rusting would be seen as a disappointing reality, an unintentional and unwelcome disruption of the original compositions. However, upon seeing if reprinting the rusted plates would be a physical possibility, Herel found himself surprised by the way the rust printed ‘like the finest aquatint’, and was fascinated by the erratic and irregular patterns formed by the organic process which had been entirely out of his control—‘and all this just ‘by themselves’. Suddenly, the exquisite corpse monsters that inhabited the compositions were situated within a new environment, an environment that complemented their aberrant grotesque forms but also threatened their very existence on the page. Inspired by Herel’s observation that the interplay between conscious decision making, error, and chance has always had a presence in his work, this paper draws upon Herel’s decision to print the rusted plates as a portal to interrogate how the artist’s embrace of chance and ‘error’ impacts the way viewers might interpret the imagery in question today. This paper reveals and explores the ripe space for new interpretation facilitated by Herel’s printing of the damaged plates, specifically discussing the ways in the notion of ‘error’ can be used to re-frame examinations of the subject matter, composition and themes contained within the Borges Sequel and Tardieu Sequel prints. Herel’s preoccupation with the concepts of ‘Growth’ and ‘Decay’ works in the face of the notion that printing plates should be a reliable source of repeatedly consistent imagery, instead engaging with the nebulous nature of unknowingness. Like the very biological process of rust itself, the artist’s choice to print the rusted plates breaks down convention and creates new matter. This paper proves that, in the case of the Borges Sequel and Tardieu Sequel prints, there is a wealth of growth to be found in decay

Night Vision, Ghosts and Data Proxies

In 2008 visual artist Jon Cattapan was deployed to Timor-Leste as an official Australian war artist. The fact that the Australian soldiers were conducting peacekeeping activities in Timor-Leste meant Cattapan could accompany them on patrols outside military bases. While on night patrols Cattapan, like the soldiers, wore a night vision monocle. This article addresses how, in subsequent paintings, Cattapan’s saturation of night vision green paint speaks to broader issues of accelerating developments in contemporary militarised technology. Particular attention is paid to militarised technologies designed to augment or replace the capabilities of human vision. Jean Baudrillard’s ideas of the ‘violence of the global’ are used to interrogate how Cattapan’s paintings Night Patrols (Around Maliana) (2009) and Night Figures (Gleno) (2009) pose questions about current and future ramifications of perpetual war fought in physical and virtual spaces. This interrogation is conducted through close visual analyses of the two paintings.

Australian queer screen stakeholders and creative artists: perceptions of value, motivation and impact of LGBTQ+ Australian film

ABSTRACT This paper reports findings from interviews with key Australian stakeholders involved in Australian films with gender- and sexually-diverse (LGBTQ+) characters, themes and narratives. The paper found that directors, creative producers, screenwriters and actors involved stakeholders of Australian LGBTQ+ film expressed a desire to impact their audiences in ways that emphasise the value of entertainment texts for minority representation, pedagogy and social change beyond pure storytelling. This paper presents an account of three key frameworks through which film stakeholders expressed their understanding of – and motivation towards – impact beyond storytelling: (i) as filling a gap in LGBTQ+ representation in contrast to what was otherwise perceived as relative invisibility; (ii) their perception as stakeholders dealing with LGBTQ+ content as having a special role as ‘educators’ for the benefit of vulnerable youth; and (iii) an understanding of their texts as contributing to social change in Australia, including wider acceptance of LGBTQ+ persons, family members and communities. A significant finding from this study is that screen media films about LGBTQ+ topics continue to be perceived as playing a role connected with but exceeding entertainment.

A History in Blue Pencil: Cyril Monk’s Performance Annotations and a Bygone Musical Style

Australian violinist Cyril Monk (1882–1970) was described in the 25 July 1920 edition of Sydney’s Sun newspaper as ‘one of the best-known violinists in the Commonwealth’. Although he is an unfamiliar name today, Cyril Monk was a prolific recitalist, chamber musician, orchestral leader, and lecturer, as well as a pioneer in the presentation of Australian music. As Monk’s early musical training and most of his long professional career took place in Sydney, his individual playing style offers a perspective on the performing traditions of this time and place. Due to the scarcity of recordings of Australian artists before 1940, how Cyril Monk and violinists of his generation sounded is a mystery today. This article surveys Cyril Monk’s published editions as well as recently discovered annotated scores to document aspects of a string performance style which has been all but forgotten. Extant materials and a surviving recording from Cyril Monk’s musical life provide a snapshot of his individual playing style and of the performance culture in which he operated.

Feeling into Paula Dawson’s Holograms

This article discusses the Australian artist Paula Dawson’s (b. 1954) landmark work of art holography To Absent Friends (1989), a triptych of an empty bar, devoid of life except for streamers and abandoned champagne glasses cluttering the countertops. The largest analog holograms ever made, Dawson’s work pushes the limits of holography in both scale and subject matter. By attending to the experiential aspects of Dawson’s holograms––the interplay of looking, touching, and moving that they elicit––I situate holography within a longer history of art and aesthetic experience than is typically lent to this medium. By extension, I consider the relationship between the optic and haptic senses in both making and viewing holograms, which recall earlier artforms and theories of haptic viewing. I emphasize holography’s similarities to relief sculpture and trompe l’oeil painting and draw on ancient theories of extramission as well as nineteenth-century aesthetic empathy (Einfühlung, or feeling-into) to discuss the haptic sensation and somatic movement activated by these elusive images. I suggest that holographic images draw the beholder into a dynamic, bodily, and intersubjective relationship that happens in neither virtual nor real space-time but somewhere between the two. While viewers are denied physical entry into the virtual space of the holographic image, by feeling into the image and acting on their tactile impulse in real space, they effectively collapse the distinction between what is real and what is virtual. While Dawson’s holograms are not moving images, I suggest they are animated images that move their viewers, both physically and emotionally.

Teaching transnational Morrison: curation and comparative American studies

ABSTRACT This article is the edited text of a talk given in May 2021 for the AHRC-funded Black Female Intellectuals network. It argues that through comparative, transnational work American Studies scholars can widen the definition of who is considered a Black Female Intellectual first in terms of what we understand to be public intellectual work and also in terms of who American Studies scholars recognise as Black. I explore the act of curation as an act of public intellectualism by looking closely at exhibitions curated by African American writer Toni Morrison and Aboriginal Australian artist Fiona Foley. I then discuss Foley’s work as a ‘Blak’ Female Intellectual and argue that as such, her work should be engaged with and taught within transnational, comparative American Studies classrooms.

Australia in the World’s Art Colonies

Work by Australian artists made during time spent overseas in art colonies before returning, and the work of artists who lived in art colonies overseas and did not return has almost entirely been erased from Australian art history. Therefore the participation of Australian artists in art colonies across the world has largely remained unwritten. This paper presents an outline and framework for further work to be done on the histories of art colonies in Australian art history. It is first of all something of an exercise in an expanded art history, including those artists who should rightly be part of a more widely encompassing account of Australian art, but, more than this it proposes that the art colony as such contests the idea of a national art history: that, beyond the specifics of any particular art colony, the principle of the art colony—of artists from different countries or from different regions of the same country living and working together—challenges the assumption that modern art must come from an identifiable people and place within modern state formations. We argue that the art colony is always international or even transnational in character. Therefore the art colony in modern art might be best understood as a forerunner to contemporary art in its crossing of spatial and temporal borders and its flattening of (if not its complete doing away with) imposed hierarchies.

Održivost i ekologija u arhitekturi Fridensrajha Hundertvasera

Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser today stands for a veritable example of a man as an accomplished ecological being. The merging of art, architecture, politics, and ecology into one utopian concept oriented towards the future positioned Hundertwasser not only an architectural experimenter but also as a specific visionary of ecological architecture. Throughout his lifetime, Hundertwasser opposed the so-called "mainstream" culture and materialism, which later contributed to his popularity. This popularity is certainly limited just as for those circles of social activists who believed that architecture must possess a "human figure". He was a man who, through art, knowledge of nature and its processes, created a new chapter in various fields, such as painting and design, all the way to architecture and the fight to preserve nature. This paper deals with the contribution of an unconventional artist to architecture and ecology. The introductory discussion approximates the significance of sustainable architecture, while the first part of the paper presents a brief biographical overview of Hundertwasser's character and oeuvre, as well as his understanding of life. The second part of the paper focuses on his views of the importance of ecological identity and the place of architecture in it, while the third part of the paper shows examples of the ideas of sustainable construction and their possible implementation in practice.

Western Rock Artists, Madame Butterfly, and the Allure of Japan: Dancing in an Eastern Dream by Christopher T. Keaveney

Reviewed by: Western Rock Artists, Madame Butterfly, and the Allure of Japan: Dancing in an Eastern Dream by Christopher T. Keaveney Rebecca Suter (bio) Western Rock Artists, Madame Butterfly, and the Allure of Japan: Dancing in an Eastern Dream. By Christopher T. Keaveney. Lexington Books, 2020. x, 229 pages. $105.00, cloth; $39.99, paper; $38.00, E-book. Christopher Keaveney's monograph is a very welcome addition to the field of transnational and comparative Japan studies, and by extension contemporary cultural studies. Examining the history of Western rock music's engagement with Japan as a form of Orientalist discourse, the book is in conversation with a growing body of scholarship that, ever since Richard Minear's 1980 review of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) for the Journal of Asian Studies, has reflected critically on the applicability of the notion of Orientalism, initially developed by Said in relation to the European discourse on the Middle East, to Anglo-American discourse on East Asia. The book fills an important gap in this debate by examining an understudied area of cultural and creative production, namely rock music. It focuses primarily on rock music of the golden age of the long-playing album, that is to say the decades between the late 1950s and the mid-1980s, but it extends its scope to also consider early twentieth-century and early twenty-firstcentury musical genres such as opera, jazz, and pop. The title of the book is slightly misleading, since the objects of analysis are not so much "Western" artists as British and North American ones. Except for a couple of Australian artists, such as Crowded House and Kylie Minogue, and a couple of "honorary English" groups such as the Swedish band ABBA, the analysis centers almost exclusively on musicians from the United Kingdom and the United States. It could have been interesting to examine a few more examples of Western European musicians who made a career in Japan, such as Claude Ciari, who left the French rock group Les Champions in 1964 to pursue a highly successful career as a solo singer popular with Japanese audiences, or Rosanna Zambon, who after traveling to Tokyo as a vocalist for a rock group as a teenager remained in the country and rose to popularity in the 1970s as part of the duo Hide and Rosanna. Another rich and unexplored object of inquiry potentially very relevant to the book would have been Western European musicians who deployed Japanesque imagery in their lyrics, music videos, or band names, like the 1984 album Rita Mitsouko, by the eponymous French pop rock duo Les Rita Mitsouko, or Italian singer-songwriter Francesco Gabbani's kimono-clad performance of his award-winning "Occidentali's karma" song at the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest, to name only two. [End Page 248] As a study of British and North American rock artists' encounters with Japan, and of their contribution to Orientalist discourse, Dancing in an Eastern Dream is a brilliant interdisciplinary endeavor, combining a sophisticated close reading of lyrics, sound, and visual imagery deployed in the songs, the albums, and the related promotional videos with an in-depth analysis of the British, North American, and Japanese music industries. The study of the context of reception is equally thorough and persuasive. Particularly convincing is the investigation of the impact of Japanese rock journalism—and of locally specific cultural practices such as the production and distribution of visually striking flyers advertising concerts and albums—on the formation of a distinctive Western rock fan culture in Japan, and the impact of this fan culture, in turn, on the "Budōkan concert" and "live in Japan album" phenomena. Given the focus on the importance of fandom, readers might be curious to learn a little more about actual fan responses and the phenomenon of "gaijin akogare" that could have been gathered for example by examining information drawn from fan letters in rock magazines or from interviews with fans. This, however, would probably be the subject of a different book. The book is based on an impressive number of English- and Japaneselanguage primary and secondary sources in a variety of disciplinary fields. The best part of the study is undoubtedly...

Anthony Mannix

The Australian artist Anthony Mannix (1953–) has been publishing and exhibiting his writings, artworks, and artist’s books since the early 1980s. As a self-taught artist with lived experience of diverse mental health, or what Mannix prefers to call “mixed realities,” a question has been asked repeatedly of his work: is it connected to the broader conventions, institutions, and networks which make up the contemporary art world? In this essay, Mannix’s interest in traditions of art which rebelled against conventions; his efforts to set up novel exhibition structures within which his work could be appreciated; and the acerbic critiques within his work of the mental health system are understood as forms of secession through which the artist consciously sought to establish alternative institutions and paradigms for the production and reception of his art.