Publishing

Hot from the Oven

Vernon Ah Kee: Born in this Skin

Because I am Aboriginal, because I was born with dark skin and dark, curly hair, I’ve never had the opportunity to be perceived as anything other than Aboriginal, and it has never occurred to me that I could be anything other than Aboriginal. So everything I think, say, and do is done from that position—never from outside that framework. I don’t think I’m always being overtly political. Mostly my works are simply about my life as an Aboriginal person. I use my work to establish some sort of equilibrium for myself.—Vernon Ah Kee

Brisbane-based Indigenous artist Vernon Ah Kee is known for his ennobling portrait drawings of family members, his declamatory agitprop textworks, and his video project CantChant, which reclaims the beach from white Australia. To coincide with Ah Kee's work appearing in the Australian exhibition Once Removed at this year's Venice Biennale, we produced a monograph on his work. Born in this Skin includes essays by Robert Leonard, Anthony Gardner, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and Blair French, and an interview with Glenn Barkley. With support from QIAMEA. / $30 

Rose Nolan: Why Do We Do The Things We Do

Melbourne artist Rose Nolan trafficks in and complicates forms, codes, and ideals founded in utopian strands of twentieth-century avant-gardism, particularly Russian constructivism. In 2008, she presented two full-gallery exhibitions, at Artspace, Sydney, and the IMA, both titled Why Do We Do The Things We Do. They incorporated works made in the previous six years, including paintings, banners, books, sculptures, photographs, videos, and found objects. The book documents both exhibitions and includes essays by Michael Graf, Ingrid Periz, and Blair French that range across the diversity of Nolan's practice, reaching back to the early 1980s, and examining rarely discussed areas such as her photography. Co-published with Artspace, Sydney. / $20

 

 

 

Paul Foss et al.: The &-Files: Art & Text, 1981–2002

Modelled after a famed sci-fi TV series, The &-Files gathers a covert body of documents following the long and often controversial career of Art & Text, one of the landmark contemporary art magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. Founded in Melbourne, Australia in 1981 by Paul Taylor (1957–92), who quickly moved to New York to make his mark as an art critic, the magazine became one of a handful of international art magazines that succeeded in capturing the turmoil and passing brilliance of those postmodern years. Narrated through the eyes and ears of its longtime publisher and editor, Paul Foss, The &-Files comprises an open letter, a lengthy interview, two questionnaires, and other commentaries and bibliographies, offering an insider’s account of the extraordinary advantages and pitfalls of publishing an art magazine. Co-published by Whale and Star, Florida. / $20

 

 

Stuart Koop: Crackle: Contemporary Art from the Middle of Nowhere

NHHHHNNNHHNNNNNNNNNHHH . . . beep . . . crackle. That’s the sound of the transporter's malfunctioning in Star Trek . . . Ten years ago I wrote of Callum Morton’s work, that it was as if it had got stuck between two material conditions—a slightly reduced platonic form and grim reality; as if it were beamed into the real world from faraway, but only partially. I still find this image of the transporter a concise coda for contemporary Australian art. Much of it falls between different conditions or states, as if 'beamed up' incompletely, or obliquely, or in some radical admixture, or into the wrong place or time, producing an unstable fascinating amalgam or situation.—Stuart Koop

Crackle showcases the work of seventeen contemporary Australian artists: James Angus, Kate Benyon, Pat Brassington, A Constructed World, Michael Doolan, Fiona Foley, Marco Fusinato, Simryn Gill, Andrew Hurle, Mathew Jones, Danius Kesminas, Callum Morton, Patricia Piccinini, Tim Silver, Ricky Swallow, Louise Weaver, and Ah Xian. It includes short essays on each artist by Stuart Koop and lots of pictures. Crackle has been supported by a grant from the Besen Foundation. / $30

Still Fresh

Chris Marker: Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men

A heavily illustrated study of French filmmaker Chris Marker's portentous video installation Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, with essays by Adrian Martin and renowned French film theorist Raymond Bellour. / $20

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diena Georgetti: The Humanity of Abstract Painting
Essays by Max Delany and Robert Leonard, jointly published with Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne. / $25

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art / Post-Medium

We now co-publish Australia's premier refereed art history journal with the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. Our first issue investigates the role of the medium today, when artists routinely work in and across different media. References to our current 'post-medium condition' have become ubiquitous and the old ideal of medium-specificity is firmly identified with high modernism. Do today's post-medium practices demonstrate the redundancy of medium as a category for understanding art, or is medium still crucial to aesthetic judgement? Indeed, do post-medium practices mark a return to an earlier form of modernism? This issue of the Journal examines a wide range of critical positions and artistic practices which focus on the question of the medium in art. It features essays by Diarmuid Costello on Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter, by Rosemary Hawker on Gerhard Richter, by Donna McColm on Morris Louis, and by Toni Ross on Andrea Zittel, an interview with French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, a pictorial by Berlin painter Katharina Grosse, and book and exhibition reviews. / $20 

Hany Armanious: Morphic Resonance

Sydney sculptor Hany Armanious makes formally diverse work, marked by its perverse conflation of opposing values. He morphs high-minded modernist formalism into hippy neo-paganism, confuses Scandanavian modernism with Arabian bazaar kitsch, and short circuits Bauhaus 'intelligent design' with Christian fundamentalist 'intelligent design' and Raelian 'intelligent design'. His work exploits our tendency to make links between things which resemble one another in form, material, function and process. He makes bogus analogies, sometimes with the seriousness of a conspiracy theorist, other times with prankster humour. There is a perversity to his project—sometimes he seems intent on elaborating some 'big picture' cosmology, at other times on scrambling the sensible. His underlying point is, however, phenomenological, pointing to our turns of mind. Our new monograph on Armanious surveys his work over the last decade or so, and features substantial new essays by Robert Leonard and Jason Markou. Jointly published with City Gallery Wellington. / $35

Richard Bell: Positivity

Dead Starlets Assoc. by Yvonne Todd

Dead Starlets Assoc. by Yvonne Todd showcases images from the New Zealand photographer's last four series. Todd is famous for her quirky studio portraits of imaginary female characters, all suffering from some malaise or affliction, obvious or implied. In his essay Justin Clemens writes: 'There is rarely an enormous intricacy to her compositions—on the contrary, she almost always arrays simple figures on a near-featureless ground—but the details are bafflingly fine-grained. The flatness, the chromatic modulations, the very simplicity of the compositions forces you to attend to the details with such care you no longer know what the details mean: those upper lips parted over almost-imperceptibly yellowed teeth; the pale burst of knuckles above a delicate tracery of veins; the complex knit of an industrially-produced sweater; peroxided hair tumbling over dark brows or curling down over upturned extended lashes; tiny pits and wrinkles marking otherwise immaculately youthful skin; the sag and fold of synthetic fabrics; and, above all, the alpha and omega of the entire operation, the unleashing of the sickly shine of appearances.' The book also features an interview with the artist by Robert Leonard. Supported by Creative New Zealand. / $20

Scott Redford: Bricks Are Heavy

Queer was big in the 1990s. Bricks Are Heavy surveys Brisbane's Scott Redford's 'Queer Project', with works from the early 1990s until now. Redford rereads and rewrites familiar modernist artforms, excavating or imputing queerness. The show includes his iconic Not the Formula for Population Standard Deviation; a minimalist wall painting of white paint laced with AIDS and other medications; an installation of life-size photos of sublime, glistening metal urinals recalling Rothko and Newman; various devotions to Kurt, River and Keanu; plus several recent videos. The exhibition title—Bricks Are Heavy—implies the weightiness of identity politics. Includes new writing by Chris Chapman, Robert Cook, Jose Da Silva, and Chris McAuliffe, and a massive new interview with Kris Carlon, plus an archive of writings by Rex Butler, Chris McAuliffe, and Robert Schubert. / $30

Supercharged: The Car in Contemporary Culture

The car has played a pivotal role in Australian cultural life. While travel and communication have been restricted by the tyranny of distance, the car has provided freedom. It has come to play a major role in the business and leisure activities of Australians from every corner of the continent. But the car is more than practical, it is symbolic, a marker of status and identity. Our new touring show Supercharged brings together the work of twelve Australian artists exploring the car's iconic status: Roderick Bunter, Sadie Chandler, Bill Henson, Martin Mischkulnig, Tracey Moffatt, Ben Morieson, Louise Paramor, Patricia Piccinini, Scott Redford, Tim Ryan, Daniel Wallwork, and Anne Zahalka. Essays by Vanessa McRae and Glen Fuller. Supported by Visions of Australia and the Gordon Darling Foundation. / $10

And the Classics

Radical Revisionism: An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art

Edited by Rex Butler

Radical Revisionism is a sequel to What Is Appropriation?, also selected and edited by Rex Butler. Radical Revisionism gathers important recent writings on Australian art. These writings are 'revisionist' insofar as they seek to bring a series of present-day perspectives to the study of art of the past: feminism, post-colonialism, the overturning of the legal doctrine of terra nullius. Radical Revisionism asks: What is the proper role for art history? Is it merely to chronicle the truth of the past, or is it to actively intervene in the events it records? These questions obviously bear a relationship to the 'history wars' that raged throughout the 1990s in Australia. The anthology concludes by asking whether there can in fact be a history of 'Australian' art in which white and indigenous artists come together. It proposes that the twenty-first century will be characterised by a certain 'unAustralian' history of Australian art. Radical Revisionism features a substantial introduction by Rex Butler and essays by Leonard Bell, Peter Beilharz, Tim Bonyhady, Kate Briggs, Keith Broadfoot, Ian Burn, Paul Carter, Brenda L. Croft, Mary Eagle, Ross Gibson, Anne Gray, Richard Haese, Jeanette Hoorn, Joan Kerr, John Lechte, Nigel Lendon, Chris McAuliffe, Ian McLean, Charles Merewether, Catriona Moore, Djon Mundine, Ian North, Juliette Peers, Toni Ross, Bernard Smith, Virginia Spate, Ann Stephen, and Nicholas Thomas. / $45

What Is Appropriation?: An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art in the 1980s and 1990s

Edited by Rex Butler

The classic anthology on contemporary Australian art, first published in 1996, and now in reprint. It was probably Ad Reinhardt, though it could have been Sherrie Levine or even Andy Warhol, who remarked that you only know you are doing something original when everybody else is doing it. This book explores this and other paradoxes raised by the practice of appropriation—the quotation and use of other artists' work—that became widespread in the 1980s. Why was the practice so uniquely popular in Australia? What did it say about the relationship of Australian art to the art of other countries; about white art to Aboriginal art; and about contemporary art to the art of the past? How and why does appropriation fundamentally challenge habitual ways of looking at pictures and thinking about art? The essays and pictures in this book provide answers to these questions, but always in the knowledge that the enigma of appropriation remains. What is Appropriation? features a substantial introduction by Rex Butler and essays by Judy Annear, Roger Benjamin, Ian Burn, Naomi Cass, Edward Colless, Peter Cripps, Juan Davila, Richard Dunn, Juliana Engberg, Paul Foss, Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis, Jeff Gibson, Memory Holloway, Tim Johnson, Vivien Johnson, Adrian Martin, Chris McAuliffe, Eric Michaels, Catriona Moore, Ingrid Periz, Nelly Richard, Terry Smith, Paul Taylor, and Imants Tillers. / $45