New artist? was written for the Object and Idea exhibition held at the National Gallery of Victoria in November 1973. The curator Brian Finemore had discussed the exhibition with me several years earlier when I had jokingly complained about being left out of the the NGVs 1968 opening blockbuster, The Field. "Dear boy, we did [...]
http://youtu.be/id0Un-CeoXs This article was written for a sustainability themed issue of Artlink magazine, Vol 34 No 4, 2014. This version is as originally written, structured differently to the published version although the content is substantially the same. Love among the ruins Is art sustainable? Well of course that depends on whether you mean the official [...]
Art As A Verb was an exhibition at Monash University Museum of Art 3 October – 16 December 2014, "a major thematic exhibition that takes as its departure point the concept of art as action, both inside the gallery and beyond. " I had one work in it, the circular tug of war originally shown in [...]
The exhibition at Artspace, Woolloomooloo Sydney in November 2013 was originally conceived as a survey but one that attempted to come to grips with the problem that most of my work was not conceived with exhibition in mind, it always had other forms of distribution. In the end it became something different, an exploration of [...]
June 2012 was the 250th issue of Art Monthly Australia and I was one of a number of writers commissioned to celebrate the occasion by writing about "critical art writing". My article, which became the lead, was not exactly reverential in tone, in fact I took a fair amount of delight in rubbing in the [...]
This is a lecture I gave in 2010 at the University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts. Joanna Mendelssohn, the lecturer who asked me to give the talk , is one the very few academics in Sydney who has both been aware of my work from almost the beginning and is politically as [...]
I've been thinking a lot about memorials recently partly because of other things I have been working on like Lithgow's proposed Inch Street memorials and also the bicentenaries of the the first crossing of the Blue Mountains by English toffs (Blaxland, Lawson, Wentworth) and the building of Cox's Road shortly after. But I've also been [...]
I produced a lot of work between the late 1960s and early 1972 when I stopped showing in galleries. There are at least 1200 drawings still in existence from this period, mostly for works that have never been exhibited. The works that were exhibited are usually just one of a series of variations and there [...]