Publishing

Any Day Now...

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, introduced by Robert Leonard. / $15

Hot Off The Press...

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 a swag of 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 bazarr 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

Still Fresh...

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. Where travel and communication has 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 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 21st 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. 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