Exhaust is an exhibition at Contemporary Art Tasmania in Hobart from 13 January to 14 February 2016, then travelling as a portable boîte-en-valise exhibition and online. My contribution was to be my first in depth look at the years I spent working for trade unions, but rather than being a simple historical view it was [...]
http://youtu.be/E6giLpIkzjU I had never given portraiture much thought until early 2014 when a friend, Louisa Chircorp, proposed painting my portrait for the Archibald Prize. The result was both truthful and unflattering so I had to comfort myself with Rembrandt's comment. But let's be blunt about it, a portrait painting competition like the Archibald is a [...]
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 [...]
Usually when you hear the name Vladimir Tatlin you think of his proposed 400 metre tall Monument to the Third International, a project that was never built but if it had been would now be regarded as one of the wonders of the world. But there was far more to Tatlin than that. In fact, [...]
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 [...]
My friend Guo Jian texted me from Beijing a few months back just saying "New York Times today". A quick Google showed up this New York Times article about his latest work, a rather brave thing to do in the current difficult climate facing artists in China. Guo and I have been friends since the [...]
Stephen Jones' book Synthetics : Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia 1956 - 1975 was launched last week at the AGNSW. For someone like me who has complained for decades now about the way Australian art history of that period was being written this book is a real breath of fresh air. So I'll [...]