Max CreasyMaking MarksWest Space24 August – 15 September 2012 Looking at Max Creasy’s photographs at West Space, I am confused. The room sheet tells me that they are C-type photographs, but my eye suggests something else. The subjects of the images — highlighters, markers, pencils and pens — are depicted in a manner that is […]

Whilst taking part in an MFA seminar discussion regarding Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster and using it as a model to understand an audience’s reception and production of an art experience — my thoughts became very literal.[^1] Could I have admitted to my 2002 Year-Eight metalwork class that I lacked oxy-acetylene welding experience and that […]

Kosuke IkedaMelbourne Art-Power PlantRMIT Project Space20 July – 16 August 2012 Although at first glance Kosuke Ikeda’s Melbourne Art Power Plant may have looked like a room filled with boys’ toys, it was more like an alternate space for evoking a quiet revolution in the way we think about dirty energy. The exhibition was a […]

Vivienne BinnsVivienne Binns: Art and LifeCurated by Dr Penny PeckhamLatrobe University Museum of Art, Melbourne2 July – 24 August 2012 Some exhibitions allow you to realise that there are gaps in the discourse we conduct about contemporary art. In the introduction to the catalogue published to accompany the exhibition Vivienne Binns: Art & Life at […]

Katherine RileyPanpsychic Household SolutionsResidential locations throughout Melbourne Panpsychic Household Solutions is a project by Melbourne artist Katherine Riley, where her services as a ‘house cleaner’ are offered free of charge to willing participants. This offer, initially made in emails to friends, family and acquaintances and later publicised through social media and The Thousands, became so […]

edited by: Chris Kraus Chris Kraus is a Los Angeles-based author and critic, founding editor of Semiotext(e)’s Native Agents imprint and onetime filmmaker in the New York downtown scene of the mid-eighties. Her novels — part-fiction, part-memoir and part-philosophy — include I Love Dick, Aliens and Anorexia and Torpor. Kraus has written three books of […]

ASsPEN Island Justin Andrews, Julia Gorman, Melinda Harper, Bianca Hester, Clement Meadmore, Calum Stirling and Jan Van Der Ploeg Neon Parc, Melbourne 26 October – 19 November 2011 When abstraction first appeared in the early part of the twentieth century, the use of simple geometric forms and broad expanses of uninflected colour was conceived as an idealisation of […]

Gertrude Contemporary Art Space’s walled-up front window feels like a rebuff to my bad habit. When the traffic is quiet I sometimes idle my engine, forget the road and superficially consume the front space like a teenager cruising down Chapel Street on a Saturday night. I admit my drive-by window-shopping is not qualitatively dissimilar to browsing […]

Isabelle Graw is a Berlin-based art critic and author of High Price: Art between the market and celebrity culture, published in 2009 by Strenberg Press. She is the co-founder of art journal Texte zur Kunst in Berlin and professor at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule). Liang Luscombe — What were the circumstances and motivations […]

As a retrospective, Kusama — showing currently at the Tate Modern — satisfies the standard requirements for historical span and conceptual consistency across material and spatial frameworks. However, these paintings, sculptures and installations seem so directly transmitted from the artist, it’s difficult to assess what kind of dialogue they’ve participated in over the decades. Stepping […]

This year’s annual Kinetica Art Fair, hosted by the Kinetica Museum in London, attempted a balanced representation of analogue and digital art practices. In this way, the 2012 event marked a break with Kinetica Art Fairs of years past, which have traditionally privileged the display of digital media. For Kinetica Art Fair 2012, ‘kinetic art’ was […]

Having pedaled across the Yarra one Saturday morning in October 2011, I found my friend amongst a cluster of people waiting in the foyer of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. A few weeks prior, Julie had forwarded me an email invite to an art field trip to ‘investigate the influence of Australian farmer Percival Alfred […]

Agatha Gothe-SnapeFour PartsKalimanrawlins, Melbourne4 February – 2 March 2012 Agatha Gothe-Snape is something of an anti-hero in a line of work defined by individualism. An artist whose work has almost always been commemorative, she has long been concerned with acknowledging artists in Australia and contemplating their collective worth. Drawing on and drawing in her precursors […]

Angela De La CruzTransferAnna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne4 February – 17 March 2012 Angela De La Cruz’s monochromatic compositions begin at the site of the Minimalist object which attempts to represent nothing beyond itself. From this sense of presence, De La Cruz speaks toward Otherness through the receptivity of chance and uncertainty, allowing the beauty of […]

Like all productive collaborations, Open Archive is a discussion — a swirling, organic (a word used many times during our conversations), epistemic questioning, where utterances may stall and waver, and ideas are picked up later, the formation of ideas denying a definitive full stop. Jared Davis and Helen Grogan share an interest in performance, so […]

The editors of Fashion and Art (F&A), Adam Geczy & Viki Karamininas, would agree with Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum, New York, who claims that any distinction between fashion and art is ridiculous, ‘Fashion at its highest level is an art form!’.[^1] However, as the editors of F&A note, if fashion really aspired […]