The spectacle of the ordinary: painting the everyday

This presentation shows paintings that further explore my interest in depicting the complexities’ of contemporary urban life - images, concepts, and motifs from our everyday experience.

Chamber music in painting photography film

This exhibition expands upon the history, approaches of experimental film and image making. Through speculative and abstract approaches the artists appropriate images to deal with trauma, confusion and nostalgia. The artists in this exhibition use personal imagery to demonstrate abstract ideals and idiosyncratic perspectives. Work in the show will be made up of photographic prints, collage, 16mm film and video work. Through physical manipulations of the image surface, retrenching of forgotten archives and poetic layerings of time and place, this exhibition aims to examine the de-linear and personal ways artists can experiment with the image.Through incorporating work of long standing artists Dirk De Bruyn and Luigi Fusinato in contrast with the work of young artists Anna Higgins and Beth Caird, the exhibition will examine the relationship between experimental film from a pre-digital context and how it influences, echoes and evolves in a post-digital environment.

Look down, look up : Barbara Bolt's art beyond representation

I review the thinking of Barbara Bolt in her recent book, which is informed by Martin Heidegger’s theory of art. Bolt argues that it is in the flux of art practice, where the artist responds bodily, with hands and eyes, to the encounter with the materials of practice, that visual art produces real material effects. That is, through the praxical encounter, art does not merely represent, it performs radically. Bolt thus argues for a materialist ontology of the work of visual art. I examine what Bolt means by ‘real material effects’ and ‘radical performativity’.

In developing my own project on the poetic response to visual art, particularly portraiture, I have freely adapted Heidegger’s theory of art to propose that the poet responds to the visual encounter in a manner similar to that of Heidegger’s preserver, by restraining usual knowing and looking. In this way the poet facilitates the emergence from the work of visual art of truth about being and earth, as defined by Heidegger. In my forthcoming article ‘Ekphrasis and illumination of painting’, I argue that the poet, like the artist, restrains seeing-as and operates in a mode approximating mere seeing, as these terms are defined by Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

In the present article I propose to examine the role of looking down and looking up in non-representational art, and in particular Bolt’s ‘oil stain paintings’ exhibited in the Forty-five Downstairs gallery in Melbourne in conjunction with the launch of her book.

I propose to expose some blind spots in the thinking which underpins theories derived from Heidegger. I will examine the way ‘representation’ has been constructed in twentieth-century thought, and will argue that Heideggerian truth and Bolt’s ‘real material effects’ result from the privileging of perception over knowledge. I will examine, with particular reference to portraiture, Bolt’s assertion that the referent can be rehabilitated in Western thought and traced in ‘real material effects’. I will argue that ‘representation’ is an unstable process occurring within and outside signification, and that this very instability enables us to confidently predict that all art produces ‘real material effects’, or in other words, Heideggerian truth.

Application of soluble poly (3-alkylpyrrole) polymers on textiles

Soluble conducting poly(3-decanylpyrrole) was directly applied to textiles as a nanoparticle emulsion, using a variety of techniques including hand-brushing, dipping and spray painting. These coatings were compared to those formed by chemical polymerization of 3-decanylpyrrole on the surface of the textile by solution, using vapor and spray polymerization methods. The coating formed using chemical polymerization methods had lower surface resistivity than that formed by direct application of a soluble polymer.

It was observed that applied coatings of poly(3-decanylpyrrole) showed a smoother surface morphology with a more even dispersion compared to those formed by chemical methods.

Abstract art : pain and discomfort

Abstract art is often the most baffling to a viewer who may search in vain for a figurative reference or recognisable element. Abstraction may refer to "art that stylises, simplifies, or deliberately distorts something that exists in the real world" (Heller, 2002: 14). Further along the spectrum, however, is abstract art that is non-representational or non-objective and is based on the isolation or interplay between shapes, colours and forms.

The aim of this article is to illustrate how non-objective art can cause discomfort and pain. Here I am using the term ‘non-objective’ to refer to art that does not have recognisable and identifiable imagery. I will make a link between Munch’s The Scream or The Cry and non-objective painting, and argue for a similarity of intent between these works, the works of Kandinsky and of artists loosely described as ‘Op artists’.

Digital alchemy : two experiments in form processing

Programmatic form-finding and the visual analysis of creative works (architecture, sound, sculpture, painting, music or dance) can be combined to develop “alchemical” processes for the computational exploration of form. This paper reports two project-based form exploration experiments using such a process. The first experiment develops a process for capturing, manipulating and generating form based on a piece of dance choreography. The second experiment explores the decompression of space and architectural elements encoded within the Duchamp painting “Nude descending a staircase”. A discussion for incorporating programmatic strategies and for developing an innovative approach to conceptual form processing based on the language of geometry is presented.

An early painter's persona as metaphor

This article analyses the marketing of an early Australian entrepreneurial female painter as metaphor in the exploration of the brand concept. It does so through the extension of her persona to her art, through examination of her diaries, letters and public documents. The use of the metaphor as a means of promulgating the 'brand as person' is discussed. Thus, the buyer of art chooses a painting with confidence because of the personality projected by the creator of the art work, in the same way as a successful brand of another product might be purchased. This article places the analysis within the context of social change of the time, giving some indication of the market and competitor positions and her motivation for differentiating herself from others. It highlights the conflict that the painter's brand caused to the artist's competitors at the time and how that affected her long-term reputation. The artist's idiosyncratic approach to painting and her vigorous self-promotion as an artist sought a reappraisal of the genre of lowly flower painting in the late nineteenth century.

Deborah Walker : hommage to the infinite

Spirtuality is at the heart of Deborah Walker's enigmatically engaging works. Drawing on the interpretive nature of a philosophical world view, Walker presents a figurative structure imbued with a calmness, stillness, and sophistication. Elegantly dressed characters are warmly depicted witha touch of theatre and drama, their serene gaze gentle, sometimes melancholy and reflective. 

Guest editorial

An examination of Australian media reports over the last twelve months on the subject of Indigenous arts suggests a number of significant contradictions. Indigenous affairs Minister Amanda Vanstone called Aboriginal arts ‘Australia’s greatest cultural gift to the world’ (Australian, 24 January 2006), while the always-controversial expatriate Germaine Greer argued that much Indigenous art was in fact poor quality and ‘a big con’ (West Australian, 13 December 2005). Curators at France’s Musee du Quai Branly dedicated a wing of the new gallery to Aboriginal art. Yet many Indigenous leaders – including David Ross from the Central Land Council and Hetti Perkins, curator of Indigenous Arts at the Art Gallery of NSW – continue to publicise the widespread exploitation of Aboriginal artists in Central Australia by unscrupulous art dealers (Northern Territory News, 22 December 2005). Former head of the Northern Land Council and former Australian of the Year, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, who twenty years ago presented Bob Hawke with the painting Barunga Statement in celebration of the government’s commitment to a treaty, recently threatened to take the painting back from Parliament House in protest against ‘successive governments’’ neglect of Indigenous policy (Sydney Morning Herald, 21 January 2006). And in the performing arts, Richard Walley drew attention to the lack of professional recognition of Indigenous performing artists (Australian, 24 January 2006).

Such contradictions within the management and marketing of Indigenous arts have persisted for several years, and it was in response that this special issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management was initiated. As guest editors, we sought to present research that examines, more deeply and constructively, the marketing of Indigenous arts in Australia both historically and in the present. What emerges from this collection of five papers is a familiar scholarly theme: a tension between the ‘periphery’ and the ‘centre’, between outback and city, between larger and smaller Australian states and between Australia and other nations.

Jonathan Sweet’s ‘UNESCO and cultural heritage practice in Australia in the 1950s’ looks at the evolving relationship between Australia and the United Nations through an analysis of a significant touring exhibition: Australian Aboriginal Culture. Sweet pinpoints the 1950s as a period in which Australian museology’s approach to Indigenous cultures gradually changed, and in which Australian participation in UNESCO through the exhibition helped shape the ideological position UNESCO advocated. His article provides a useful historical contrast against which the following four articles may be read.

Chapman, Cardamone, Manahan and Rentschler look at local and contemporary issues in Indigenous arts marketing. Katrina Chapman’s ‘Positioning urban Aboriginal art in the Australian Indigenous art market’ investigates perceptions about contemporary urban Aboriginal art, concluding that the estrangement – and indeed stereotyping – of urban and traditional art creates a false set of values that urban artists are challenging. Similarly, Megan Cardamone, Esmai Manahan and Ruth Rentschler contrast perceptions of Aboriginal arts from the northern and south-eastern states, identifying crucial misconceptions that contribute to the value system applied to these arts. As Ruth Rentschler is a joint editor of this issue, the review process for this article has been managed by Katya Johanson as co-editor.

Two case studies of marketing the arts – which look at different artforms and in opposite sides of the country – then follow. Jennifer Radbourne, Janet Campbell and Vera Ding’s ‘Building audiences for Indigenous theatre’ analyses research on audiences and potential audiences for Kooemba Jdarra – Brisbane’s Indigenous performing arts company – to identify the ways in which audience attendance may be encouraged.

Finally, Jacqui Healy’s ‘Balgo 4-04’ provides a close examination of a unique art exhibition: a major commercial exhibition of the kind usually seen in Sydney and Melbourne, held in an arts centre in the middle of the Tanami Desert and retailing directly to collectors.

The editors are grateful to Warlayirti Artists Art Centre for permission to use the photographs that accompany Jacqui Healy’s article. We would also like to thank the contributors, Jo Caust for the opportunity to present this special issue, and Pearl Field for her assistance in putting it all together.

Light play

An abstract play of light, colour, geometric shapes and patterns synchronised with synthesised music. The image patterns have been created by scratching, drawing, painting and overlaying directly on clear and opaque film and fragments of photographed positive and negative images.