Contemporary art is kind of a pyramid scheme: the few artists who make a living making art in this speculative market obscure the vast majority who must do all kinds of other work to pay for food, rent and the art practice itself. I say this not to create an us-versus-them situation between more and […]

With the implementation of lockdowns and social distancing measures last year we witnessed an almost overnight closure of a large part of the Australian arts sector, prompting a widespread call for financial support. These calls for assistance often took a well-trodden road, emphasising the significant contribution that the sector makes to the national economy, as […]

SORRY FOR BEING GRUMPY Standing alone in Te Puno O Waiwhetū (Christchurch Art Gallery), I snapped this detail from Marie Shannon’s work and sent it somebody (text accompaniment: ‘NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL: art’). It was meant to be a kind of witty apology – stealing someone else’s words to make light of the kind […]

For a week now I’ve had a file saved to my computer titled ‘Notes on Hobiennale 2017’. It contains fragments of thoughts, passages copied out from gallery room sheets, quotes from artist and curator talks, headings in caps lock with no writing yet to follow – ECOLOGY, CULT, SITE, WALKING. The list goes on. I […]

Artist: Nástio Mosquito We sit in the middle of the front row to watch the thundering that was Nástio Mosquito’s Respectable Thief in late July as part of Season 2 (2017) at the Arts House in the North Melbourne Town Hall. A large shadow appears from behind a screen wall, singing an acapella gospel song. […]

Australia is an island. The significance of this came home to me when I was talking to a friend who arrived here without papers. He explained to me how trapped he felt by our incongruous geography: ‘I am stuck, I can’t go anywhere.’ The distance from Melbourne to Sydney would be far enough to cross […]

A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. — Vladimir Nabokov, […]

In Aotearoa New Zealand ‘Pacific art’ as a descriptor is taken for granted. As a curator—New Zealand–born with Sāmoan and English heritage—the question of labelling frequently comes up for me. In addition to being described as a ‘Pacific art curator’, I’m also placed in positions where I too need to contextualise and situate artists’ practices, […]

The role that difference has played diachronically across various eras of feminist organisation presents us with this same ethos of contradiction. Where in the eighteenth century difference between the sexes was viewed as a limiting agency that sought to subordinate and control women’s aspirations, gendered difference became a liberating force for women of the nineteenth […]

An artist and a law graduate go to ‘Is Prison Obsolete’, a conference held by Sisters Inside, a group advocating to abolish prison and to provide advocacy for women.[^1] Feeling pretty unaware, seriously interested and somewhat illegitimate, they attempt to find a way through the murky social structures of race, gender, class, power and privilege. […]

‘The practice of happiness is subversive when it becomes collective.’[^1] The idea that we must move towards more collective ways of understanding ourselves as subjects is so commonly held it is almost a priori. Perhaps the most surprising and amusing call to community I have encountered recently is in K-Hole marketing report Youthmode. K-Hole is […]

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, […]

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 […]