Art and artists

There is not much of Martin’s vision left at Luna Park. A memorial to the fire victims mysteriously disappeared during a refurbishment in 2003. Up some stairs, where the Big Dipper used to be, there is now a mural in front of an uninviting courtyard where no-one sits. It is a trompe l’oeil, showing the scaffolding of the absent Dipper, like the skeleton of an extinct vertebrate, and in front of it, painted on a fusebox, is a variant of the Sharp Face. It looks ugly and sour though. There is something wrong with it, with its expression.

Nothing is simple in this philosophical arena, where rattling spears and tjurunga contend with sextants and theodolites; cans of spray paint with the sepia tones of old colonial photographs. The question is how to make a future. If the Dreaming was always about eternity poured into time, the problem the Enlightenment brought with it—along with its Cartesian accoutrements—was how to protect eternity from time.

This is not a study of Aboriginal art but of the way that Aboriginal art has been written and spoken about, mostly in Australia, since the 1970s. Fisher’s object is not only ‘art criticism’, as that phrase is usually understood, but also policy discourse in which Aboriginal art is understood to be a means to an end.’

‘Rose might be reckoned to have fashioned a body of work intensely linked in themes, preoccupations and techniques. The mention of a few will introduce a longer look at Rose’s fictional world: mutilation, metamorphosis, accidental deaths, artists working ardently in various mediums, the remote shores and landscapes of Tasmania, the impingement of a benign spirit realm on the daily lives of some of her characters, people ostracised or outcast from whatever need, fault or compulsion.’

George Gittoes is an autobiographical artist, almost to an obsessional degree, and like his life-long hero, Vincent van Gogh, he…

A parallel narrative to the rise of Whiteley as an artist is the detailed account of his sexual promiscuity and his growing dependence on alcohol and drugs. This ‘other thing’ implied in the book’s title, unfolds for the reader like a train wreck caught in slow motion with drug busts and encounters with customs colouring further an already colourful biography.

‘Mayakovsky was not, of course, the first poet or the last to desire a revolution of the spirit, a re-evaluation of all values. For all that he believed that he believed in Communism, it is not hard to imagine Mayakovsky in the clothes of one of the Romantics, or of the Fascists, or of the Beats, replacing the word Soviet with Love or Fatherland or Peace. The difficulty for Mayakovsky, however, was that his desired revolution had happened, the State for which he had cheered actually emerged.’

‘It is hard to imagine a life lived if you have not lived it. From the very first time that I could discern shade from light, line from tone, I have been in love with art and the creation of that art. I am here today because I am a creative creature, a creator if you will. But it is a long way from where I began.’ Bronwyn Bancroft on being an Aboriginal Artist.

There have been many attempts to come to terms in print with the Nolan phenomenon, but only one full length biography … Now we have a second biography by art historian and curator Nancy Underhill.

Battarbee and Namatjira remain, in their separate ways, like their beloved ghost gums, isolated in their landscapes. Their appeal is partly due to their political quietism. Their expressiveness is, in a way, like the treatment of the trees, deliberately enigmatic.