Barbara Kapusta, Desire and What You End up Doing, RMIT Project Space, Melbourne 27 August – 16 September 2010 Dying in Spite of the Miraculous, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 8 October – 6 November 2010 Things I Wish I’d Known, West Space, Melbourne 29 October – 20 November 2010 A work of art produces its own […]

Conventionally a retrospective exhibition is taken as an occasion for the artist to present his [sic] work to date as a reified, ‘logical’ whole, and as an opportunity to demonstrate that he has progressed. That one should be offered such an opportunity at all suggests the achievement of a certain currency in art world chit-chat, […]

Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA, Melbourne 10 March – 9 April 2011 curated by Matthew Shannon The spectre of late 1960s art haunts Margaret Seaworthy Gothic — from the exhibition’s title, sourced from the font designed in 1968 by New York artist Lawrence Weiner, to curator Matthew Shannon’s accompanying text, which positions the exhibition in relation […]

Artist-writers, art writing and art as writing … un Magazine 5.1 blurs the boundaries between these roles, mashing-up narratives both real and fake in current practice. Can fiction be critical? un Magazine commissioned writer Dr Jeanne Randolph to riff on her ficto-critical practice, to which she responded with a text that begins with a girdle, […]

Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart 22 January 2011 – 19 July 2011 Claire Lambe and Elvis Richardson In January 2011 an audacious new public museum was added to Australia’s cultural landscape. Located on a cliff-front in the outskirts of Hobart, the Museum of New and Old Art (MONA) houses the private art collection […]

The rationality of a grid on a map sinks into what it is supposed to define… One is liable to see things in maps that are not there. One must be careful of the hypothetical monsters that lurk between the map’s latitudes…[^1] What is legitimacy? What is it that makes a person, a group or […]

Kel Glaister (b. Melbourne 1984) is currently in Europe following an Australia Council Residency in Paris at the Cité International in 2010 and is currently on a residency at the 17th International Studio Program of the ACC Galerie Weimar and the City of Weimar. Glaister has been working with sculpture in recent years and this […]

Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis 20 November 2010 – 15 January 2011 Culturgest, Porto, 5 February – 23 April 2011 If I’m going to be completely honest with you, I have never been to Minneapolis nor [sic] Porto so I too have never ‘seen’ the show. — email to the editor, 22 April 2011 ‘Completely honest’, […]

History-History The fictional device of creating self-contained worlds in which plots and characters can unfold is not so far removed from the artistic strategy of creating hermetic situations wherein new rationales are allowed to evolve, not necessarily plausible in the ‘outside world’ but reasonable enough in their own terms. In German, geschichten means both history […]

Like so many insidious and powerful organisations before them, Bababa International (BI) prefer to remain undefined. At present, its six members are nameless and the collective will only agree publicly on their location (Bababa International Airport, Redfern) and their commitment to making and exhibiting art under the BI designation. Perhaps it is this indifference to […]

If a work of art was a woman’s body, could psychoanalytic theory serve as her girdle? A gal such as myself never overlooks an opportunity to exploit mundane activities for their metaphors, and I was definitely washing underwear when I realised I could write ficto-criticism. It was 1983 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and I was […]

The Narrows, Melbourne, 30 September – 14 November 2010 Curated by Dominic Hofstede In later covers, Mason moves through a variety of other art movements, such as arte povera, spatial art, colour field painting, geometric abstraction, abstraction, pop art and op art, to name a few. Such referencing kept Epicurean fresh and unhindered by a […]

from: brian fuata [email protected] date: tue, feb 15, 2011 at 2:48 pm subject: re: to: grant stevens Thanks grant, i had a very pleasant time in brisbane. I had a thought that i might ask something of you … and i apologise for any mist of flagrant opportunism. I make this enquiry with earnest sincerity. […]

The Victorian Police Force is actively recruiting. They have stuck new bumper stickers on divvy vans to reach the very best recruits imaginable. If you can pass the written exam and the physical exam, they train you and you fight crime ASAP. You also receive a Special Occasions Uniform with shiny brass buttons and a […]

TCB art inc., Melbourne, 2–19 February 2011, organised by Kate Smith and Alex Vivian Sculpture is an elastic and accommodating art form. When Gilbert & George, coated in metallic make-up, stood on a table and moved robotically to the music hall hit ‘Underneath the Arches’ in 1970, they invoked the medium by naming the performance […]

In the 1960s, Joseph Kosuth claimed that conceptual art would usurp the place of a number of other writing-based practices, such as literature and philosophy. It is now widely known that this bold claim was connected to his idea that the task of contemporary art had become to question and expand the definition of art […]

A West Space off-site project, Bogong Alpine Village, Victoria, 19–20 February 2011 organised by Philip Samartzis and Madelynne ‘Site specific’ is a term that, through over- and inappropriate use, tends to become slightly meaningless; much like the term ‘sound art’. Nevertheless, site specificity has come to play a large and ever increasing role within contemporary […]

Y3K, Melbourne, 4–24 December 2010, curated by Kate Briggs Finding is the first Act The second, loss, Third, Expedition for The ‘Golden Fleece’ Fourth, no Discovery — Fifth, no Crew — Finally, no Golden Fleece — Jason — sham — too.[^1] Extreme Beauty: Approaches to the Real followed the threads of the classic stories of […]

Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, Hobart 30 October – 21 November 2010 Kit Wise John Vella must be one of Tasmania’s, if not Australia’s, most anarchic contemporary artists. HANGBANG (nightshift) presented Vella’s work to date at Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania (CAST), Hobart, but was no ordinary mid-career survey show. Vella took his entire artistic output of […]

There was a time in the history of Victoria when the state collections of printed material, visual art and natural history artifacts were housed together under one roof. Of that early grouping only the State Library (SLV) remains in place, the gallery and museum collections relocated to new premises in the 1960s and early 2000s […]

Henri Papin was born on 6th June , third child and second son of his parents, who had between six and eight children. His father was a successful goldsmith, in the rural town of Tours in the Loire Valley in France. He emigrated to Australia in with his family and arrived in Tasmania in . […]