dogadobisangdo (design is design is not design) Gwangju Design Biennale 2011 2 September – 23 October 2011 Gwangju, South Korea Artistic Directors: Seung H‐Sang and Ai Weiwei With an almost suffocating sense of winking irony, recently established East Perth ARI Galleria shares its name with one of the city’s most obnoxiously oversized megamalls. One can […]

I’ve learnt that it’s dangerous to mention I spent the first twenty-something years of my life living in ‘The Emerald City’, for it invariably leads to the question that seems to fascinate Melburnians of all ages, races, genders and creeds: ‘how do the cities compare?’ An innocent enough question, perhaps, but it is typically asked with […]

Brad, If you recall, when Jennifer Allen wrote the article ‘Divine Disorder’, she reminded us of Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable, between beautiful decoration and agreeable use and thus between art and design.[^1] As such, for a long time, perhaps there has been an uneasy divide between the two between what we […]

— Alex Vivian Men’s Apparel, distressed Craft Victoria, Melbourne 8 March – 21 April 2012 In the myth of Pygmalion, a Cypriot sculptor falls in love with the realism of his own statue of a female figure after previously being unable to find attraction in women. His abstracted object of desire is manifested in the […]

Once upon a time, Perth’s most ambitious graduates went travelling and then moved east, returning home once a year to see family and friends. In 2012, relocating to Melbourne is still their preferred ‘next step’, but in recent times their visits home have become more frequent.[^1] The vitality of the artist‐run scene in Perth, together […]

— James Eisen SAYLE (Internal Painting ~ Valuable Gift) 253 Swanston St, Melbourne 10–15 February 2012 Whilst sitting his solo exhibition Deus Ex Machina at TCB art inc. in 2011, James Eisen was robbed. It seemed that the exhibition’s neon text, reading ‘Your going to cop a burg’, had cursed its creator. The situation was mitigated, […]

Design has become something of a lingua franca for the present. Design artifacts — both custom-made and mass-produced — are widely acknowledged as prime agents of ideology, identity, social distinction and meaning. Designers are highly adept at leveraging aesthetics to create heightened desire and depth of experience, but only a few outlying areas of design […]

As I ponder how Scott Mitchell’s way of being in the world might be positioned or discussed in relation to broader frameworks of art and design, it becomes increasingly apparent that this distinction is an afterthought.[^1] He privileges neither art nor design, as such inhabiting a space where both modes of practice might in some […]

— Sarah crowEST The Inexplicable Magnetism of an Alien Object VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne 10 February – 3 March 2012 Collections of handmade, amorphous non-shapes and mounds inhabit the gallery space. Varying in size and colour, the objects’ surfaces offer a changing spectrum of shades, from rusty browns to shiny white glazes mottled with […]

In the contemporary era, the ability to perform consolidates the biopolitical affects of a designed subject.[^1] Such notions are intrinsically involved in the ‘tacit but increasing inscription of individual lives’ into a society that now prioritises the ‘primacy of the private over the public’.[^2] According to Boris Groys, this is also accompanied by the contemporary […]

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 […]