A Catalogue of Failure
Curator James Gatt asked me to write something for the first issue of his new magazine Kafay Larday. The magazine turned out, like many art magazines before it, to be very short lived when he got a job in New…
Tag conceptual art
New Artist?
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…
Love among the ruins
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…
Art As A Verb
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…
Notes On The Works
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…
Shoot for the head!
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…
Why Stuff Doesn’t Matter
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…
The Shame File
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 first crossing of the Blue Mountains by English toffs (Blaxland,…
Doormats
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…