Art and artists

It is in the worlds of design and architecture that the word Bauhaus is most familiar today. Bauhaus is sometimes taken as a synonym for ‘Modern’. The contribution of the Bauhäuslers and their lesser known colleagues in Australia – Elenore Lange, Dahl Collings and David Foulkes Taylor – and in New Zealand – Ernst Plischke, Heinrich Kulka and Vladimir Čačala – stands as testament to a not yet sufficiently well-known dimension of the art and design histories of those two countries. For too long those histories have been introverted and, in aspiration, excessively nationalistic.

Fairweather’s letters are unsettling enough not to make them good bedtime reading. Just like his two reckless sea trips in make-do craft – one in 1944 on an old boat, from Sandgate, on the outskirts of Brisbane, landing on Bribe Island off the coast by chance, and the second in 1952 on a self-made raft from far-north Queensland aiming for Dili – his letters are a rough ride on rolling waves.

Events like these used to feel like warnings. Freak tides, catastrophic fires, once-in-a-century storms. We used to describe them as omens of a time to come. Now they are the times we live in.

Richard tells me I should meet this old guy he knows, Jimmy Somerville, a strong union man, living legend – he remembers everything, Richard says – including that famous night during the war when tenor player Merv Acheson shot a bloke on stage at the 2KY Radiotorium over a missing shipment of illegal whisky.

‘Non-driving, my passenger assures me, is a far higher calling than being in the driver’s seat.’

Women are sometimes portrayed in traditional domestic settings in Leunig’s drawings, but they are never confined to simple human giver roles, or if they are, they chafe against these power dynamics, consciously or unconsciously.

Awoken by his insomnia after a performance by Grinderman in 2011, Nick ends up sending me an email that wrestles with his complicated sense of who his father was.

‘One essential insight is that the art always means something different to those who made it from what it means to those who buy it; and is understood differently again by those who curate, exhibit, collect, and write about it. Perhaps this is the case with all art, but an added complication with the art of the Western Desert is that there is a secret/sacred dimension to the imagery which may not be disclosed to those without rights to it.’

I count nine book bays. Seven shelves each. From floor to ceiling with not a bit of wall to spare. There are brimming boxes under a table which takes up much of the floor space; will I get to them?

A new visual essay by Mary Leunig.