The McCarthy era of post-war America in the late 1940s had its eyes firmly set on all things communist, as well as an Orwellian attitude towards subversive behavior. Namesake and bastard child of the era Paul McCarthy however, has his eyes set on all things perverse and fucked up in American culture. His massive exhibition […]

JR : Rob, I want to discuss the concept of anachronism in contemporary art with you. This is the theme we are all working on for the 7.2 issue of un Magazine. You recently mentioned to me that you had been thinking about this subject, about ‘the perpetuation of antiquated styles and the way critical […]

Loose Change Menu: an apt title for a rather ill fitting yet satisfying jumbled assortment of artworks. On the whole, it’s a haptic exhibition: giant poster prints of an old couch drape over the walls, literally spilling into the creative studios next door; an unearthed tennis pole from a game of swing ball is lounging […]

Les Immatériaux roughly translates to ‘the immaterials’ or ‘the non-materials’. These materials are new in that they newly challenge our relationship to the world, whether through the dehumanisation of technology or by the faltering of man’s mastery over nature. And so the exhibition was filled with computers (often malfunctioning) but also artificial skin, Kevlar, and […]

In June and July 2013, Sean Peoples staged Channel G at West Space, transforming the gallery’s back space into a temporary, makeshift film studio that broadcast live and unscripted video content produced by an ensemble of local contemporary artists and friends of Peoples. As viewers of Channel G, we were privy to a wide range […]

Mike Brown is however not the only artist in Australian history to have been convicted of obscenity. The second, less well known case involved Cath Phillips, a one-time artist, author and publisher, and also organiser at the Sydney Mardi Gras and the Gay Games. Following complaints about her installation Butch Maison: The Palace at Femme, […]

Nearly a century after the Russian Supremacists, the contemporary relevance of the monochrome painting is explored in a considered exhibition at Sutton Projects. David Homewood’s curatorial statement speaks of the complications with our traditional process in trying to make sense of a painting when considering the monochrome. Instead of focusing on whether we like the […]

Since the viral sensation of Bangs with his song and video clip, Take U To Da Movies, a slew of African youth living in Melbourne have taken to rapping as a transformative mode of expression. Ezu, William 2k, Garang Garang, Clik Fablice/Flybz, D KAYZ, Prince Jay and Abiel are some of the names of the […]

Taking Form, a recent exhibition in the contemporary Project Space at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), presented six new works by Agatha Gothe-Snape and Sriwhana Spong, meditating the intersections between dance, choreography and language. Curated by Anneke Jaspers, the exhibition established a dialogue between the past and the present, exploring traces of […]

The 2013 version of Silver Bullets begins with a re-edited excerpt from Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s 1967 film I, a Man, in which Solanas performs her own scripted lines. Condensed from the original nine minutes to two minutes, Burchill and McCamley’s re-edit showcases Solanas’s particular brand of table-turning humour, as she wittily refuses a sexual […]

(top) To propose a petroleum jelly advertisement or campaign(movement, camouflage, etc.) (bottom) To propose a petroleum jelly advertisement or campaign(colour, clothing, etc.)

‘Didn’t the images and forms of modernism already have ruin, decay, and obsolescence written into them?’[^1] — Mark Lewis, Is Modernity our Antiquity? Daria Martin’s One of the Things that Makes Me Doubt is an ambiguous exhibition experience. The chattering of film projectors and the earthy soundtracks by Zeena Parkins resonate through the muddy acoustics […]

Mella Jaarsma and Nindityo Adipurnomo are artists and the Yogyakarta-based directors of Cemeti Art House, the art space they founded in 1988 in the front room of their house. Their aim for Cemeti was to exhibit new work and function as an information centre that promoted Indonesian artists over the longer term. Twenty-five years on, […]

When investigating cultural understandings of time and space at the beginning of the twentieth century, historian Stephen Kern notes a rising contest between ideas of public (or social) time and private time in Europe.[^1] Public time is the realm of shared understandings of temporal experience, disseminated through calendars, clocks and the adoption of standard time, […]

Emotion TJ : Being mindful to sidestep sentimentality, tell me about how emotion comes into this. Because I think it is something of a cornerstone. RC : I was planning an essay about this show called ‘The Exhibition as Catharsis’. This is why I’m a bad curator on a few levels, I am a free-association […]

It sounds like an art world joke: What do you get when you pluck a 1969 exhibition from a German Kunsthalle and reconstruct it in an 18th-century Venetian palazzo, forty-four years later? Add some gallery attendants in Prada suits and an audience fresh from Massimiliano Gioni’s 55th Venice Biennale, and you have an answer that, […]

I was recently lucky enough to spend two mornings in the Monash Artist Book Studio and Ancora Press headquarters. The space houses antiquated printing presses and their corresponding instruments: movable type, composing sticks, inks, etc. While I was in awe of the machines and tools housed within, and taken with the books that had been […]

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: [email protected] Technical details of permanent failure: DNS Error: Domain name not found —– Original message —– From: Silvio Berlusconi Date: Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 11.58 PM Subject: Urgent!!!! 🙂 To: Giotto di Bondone Ciao! It’s me, Silvio. Drop what you’re doing. Drop the brushes and paints Giotto! […]

An impeccable looking man in a tuxedo jacket and striped pants enters carrying a headless dressmaker’s dummy. He feigns marriage, puts a bunch of artificial flowers at the dummy’s feet, sits down, turns his back to the audience and begins to speak. As he speaks the tension in the room weighs heavier and heavier. Soon […]