Art and artists

In a review of John Kean’s study of the Papunya Tula art movement, Martin Edmond examines the intricate negotiations between aesthetic intention and ritual restriction that made the artists’ work possible.

Like False Claims, ART is a collaborative work, where each poet works in tandem in a seamless discussion that is simultaneously a sovereign conversation and a critique of nation. Papertalk Green and Kinsella showcase their poetic talents in a dynamic exchange that responds to the artistic offerings of the late Nyoongar painter Shane Pickett (1957-2010).

This object might best be thought of as an ecology, a network of living, changing relations. We woke up early the other morning to read a little before the day became dominated by the rhythms of work. Our cat hurried into the front room, punctuating the silence with a series of yells that seemed to announce his surprise at finding us awake at this hour, and then stretched out on the firm yet inviting pages of the object in question. These pages invite use, suggest inhabitation, become part of the fabric of the house.

What happens, in that moment of encounter, when a book states its intention, pre-empting the act of reading it?

Our Members be Unlimited is a book of about workers and their unions. It starts out with the formation of the first workers union in a dark field in Europe, and takes us all the way to the first rumblings of new unions in gig-economy workplaces like the Amazon fulfilment centre. It’s an innovative new onramp for a modern politics of collectivism and its possibilities.

The opportunity to write music for an exhibition of paintings by Turner was irresistible. Turner had been a favourite artist…

‘Buried Not Dead is a study in the forces that can both create the conditions for art and cultural flourishing, as well as the conditions for its inhibition and decline.’

How alienating, how jarring, to be made aware that you’re one step away from a cascading world of ones and zeros instead of live, decaying art objects. Get free of queues and tickets and blood-sugar crashes, but can’t shake the feeling that a high-quality colour book reproduction would offer a superior form of viewing. Wonder if Walter Benjamin could have dreamed of such a flaccid form of artistic replication as a virtual gallery tour.

A key motif in Ali’s work is the dev, or demon, which is used to reflect critically on the experience of marginalisation.

The direction of indirection, or the discipline of indiscipline (to quote Frank Moorhouse) gives her writing a flow that is beguiling as well as relaxing. It suspends questions of interpretation and replaces them instead with interactions: the meaning of a work of art, whether from the Renaissance or from last week, is not to be written down like the answer to a question posed in an examination; it is found in our relationship to it, what we do or don’t do with or around it.