As its title suggests, Occasional Miracles: Contemporary artists respond to the Shepparton Art Museum ceramics collection makes use of a classic curatorial device by inviting six artists to create new works that engage with the museum’s extensive holdings of historic Australian and international ceramics. It seems a foolproof formula. The museum’s collection is enlivened with […]

Post-irony: the beginning One day, my roommate, who is not an artist, but is still interested in art, asked me to define my art practice. As I later retold our conversation to some art school friends, I noticed how I kept positioning my roommate as someone who is outside the art world, which simultaneously feels […]

I meant to read all about Nietzsche in preparation for this editorial, but I didn’t have the time. Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher who lost his mind in Turin, a city where I once spent a short, but very enjoyable, amount of time. Apparently, a coach driver was whipping a horse in Piazza Carignano […]

I was invited to deliver a paper on a panel of young researchers, editors and curators at Impresario: Paul Taylor | Art & Text | POPISM, Monash University, 1 September 2012, a forum held in honour of the work of the late Australian art critic Paul Taylor, founder and editor of Art & Text. This […]

‘Knowledge’, as described by educational institutions, is disciplinary knowledge. There is no way to know how much knowledge is held in an object of knowledge (a report, for example) until one has done the work to understand how a field of knowledge is constructed. No report is self-authoring, containing all the knowledge needed to understand […]

Arts Research? WTF?! Who the hell would consider bringing together such antipodal signifiers unless they were a bureaucrat or a pervert or both? Under what institutional conditions could such a rebarbative oxymoron even make sense? Surely the term freights all sorts of seamy occlusions and destructions? But perhaps my surprise—even shock and horror—at the very […]

Last year I spent a couple of days visiting a friend in Frankfurt. During this visit, I sat in on a class run by Michael Krebber at the local art school. Krebber is an artist known for his ambivalent, ironic and relatively antagonistic position, and his classes are known for being quite loose and free-form. […]

The child is a born researcher. —Loris Malaguzzi The term ‘educational turn’ is gaining momentum in contemporary arts theory. Artworks within the definition seek to transmit or create knowledge from and between an artwork and its participants, the knowledge often stems from other disciplines such as sociology, science, history and psychology. This desire to learn, […]

The late Giovanni Intra once wrote an article in the journal Art & Text about the contemporary Los Angeles sculptor Evan Holloway, telling a story about how the artist locked custom-made steel boxes over parking meters in the street outside his studio, with the title When Bad Attitude Becomes Form. The phrase has always struck […]

I feel I’m in a beautiful private garden, in the middle of the city. I look up and see all the buildings and the beautiful sculptures. On Tuesdays, when the gallery is closed, it really does become our private space. It’s that sense of privacy in a public environment that I enjoy.[^1] —Isobel Crombie Throughout […]

The Mappa Mundi: an example from history of another internet. Although revolutionary in scope, the internet’s quest to amass knowledge into one repository isn’t a new idea. There is a lineage of both libraries and encyclopaedias stretching back to ancient times, for example the great library of Alexandria and Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, written in AD77. […]

Much of what I find funny in life emerges from the exhibitions I go to, so when the art’s humourless, I tend to feel a bit deflated. If work doesn’t have an element of humour in it, it’s hard for me to imagine the artist having any fun creating it, thus making it hard for […]

The amalgamation of art schools into university frameworks over the past decade has meant a new development in advanced degrees; the birth of the studio-based Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). In many ways this was an inevitability, part of the increasing tertiary accreditation of visual arts/studio arts courses over the late twentieth century. In Australia, initially […]

1. Sampling I originally tried starting this with a quote from Kenneth Goldsmith quoting Douglas Huebler but, as you pointed out, we ended up trying to start at a dead-end. Misquoting it, re-opens it: the world is full of objects, more or less interesting.[^1] An updated notion of genius would have to centre around one’s […]

Our conversation took place on Thursday 25 April 2013. Present were Elvis Richardson (artist, former director of Death Be Kind and editor of online blog CoUNTess), Helen Grogan (artist, curator, co-director of art space and curatorial project Open Archive) and Eugenia Lim (artist, co-director of Channels video art festival). The trio discussed tactics for negotiating […]

Tom Ellard is a ‘musician’—a term he describes as ‘an old descriptor for a sound/video/interactive artist’. While it is hard to establish all aspects of his work briefly, Ellard is best known as founding member of electronic and industrial band Severed Heads (officially active from 1979 to 2008). For those wondering, think tape loops, discordant […]

Mentioned in the same breath as anyone from Christian Marclay to David Shea and Grandmaster Flash, British avant-garde turntablist Philip Jeck has built an oeuvre via the act of pillaging, appropriating and manipulating a record collection that traverses a vast span of music history. But Jeck’s approach to records—and the devices he uses to extract […]

Everything Falls ApartPart I: Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck & Media Farzin, Jem Cohen, Phil Collins, Sarah Goffman, Sarah MorrisPart II: Vernon Ah Kee, Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler, Jem Cohen, Tony Garifalakis, Merata MitaCurated by Blair French and Mark FearyArtspace, SydneyPart I: 27 June – 5 August 2012Part II: 10 August – 16 September 2012 After […]

Uncommon RoomJessie Bullivant, Heidi Holmes, Isabelle Sully and Isadora VaughanCurated by Isabelle SullyRear View, Melbourne5–25 May 2012* These artists have made the job of a reviewer pretty easy. I can think of no better metaphor for their outsized ambitions and inflated egos than the two giant beach balls that dominate the front space at Rear […]

Tony Garifalakis and Tully MooreDenimismWest Space, Melbourne27 July – 18 August 2012 These days anyone can resist, but, in a world of global capital, it’s very difficult not to be unintentionally hypocritical: you sign a petition online, whilst buying shoes made by children in sweatshops, while Occupy protestors fight back against the one per cent […]

There’s materialism and there’s materialism. Some documents.[^1] It’s as though this writer is speaking to and on behalf of a public that thinks not-knowing about Adorno, St John of the Cross, Derrida or Lacan is a responsible ignorance. As though to know that double messages could displace and even replace an image or thing is […]

Pretty Air and Useful ThingsDan Bell, Sanné Mestrom, Alex VivianCurated by Rosemary FordeMonash University Museum of Art, Melbourne19 July – 22 September 2012 In the changing consideration of the artistic ‘object’ beyond it’s physicality alone, many artists and critics have sought to contemporise the practice of sculpture by emphasising its broader social context as being […]

Few artists are independent. Almost all rely on or seek support of some kind. There are, however, certain artists that require particular types of support. In 2010 I became involved in a project called the Supported Studios Network (SSN). The working group that maintains the project consists mostly of artists who work within visual arts […]

Hi Liang, Let’s make the most of this letter-as-trope-for-talking thing that we started. The irony of pitching an issue on work and unprofessionalism hasn’t been lost on us, especially considering that we ambitiously wanted more content, we wanted to know what others thought and if there was something actually to be said. This is why […]