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 [...]
21st Century Artist was a conference held at Artspace in October 2013. It was remarkable for several reasons. Firstly if the proceedings were to be believed then the 21st century artist will be no different to the 20th century artist, and little different to the 19th century artist. Secondly apparently climate change will have no [...]
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 had the Victoria Street Resident Action Group and the squatting there in 1973 on my list of future posts. It was a critical experience for me and I have already talked about it before but I thought the whole event needed a bit more detailed discussion. Before I could get the time to do [...]
In the mid 1970s I was thinking hard about the relationship between art and other forms of work while reading the great American journalist and oral historian Studs Terkel – his 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do remains a classic and an [...]
The Barricades was written in January 1974 for The City Squatter, the newspaper we published within a few days of the massive police raid that closed down the Victoria Street squat and forced the Resident Action Group out of the buildings we had occupied for most of 1973. The complete text is at the end [...]