- news & views
- history
- artist editions
- gallery
- emerging artists
- stockists
- art directory
- contact us
- links
back issue
In planning our dark issue, Art & Australia sought to look beyond the now-ubiquitous skull imagery, bejewelled by Damien Hirst, to the historical sources of this back-in-black moment in art.
In a special collaboration with Art & Australia, Nick Cave - the Prince of Darkness - and Melbourne Arts Centre's Janine Barrand have curated for our pages a menagerie of dark beasts of creation.
The spectral presences of Tony Oursler, Bardayal Nadjamerrek and Louise Hearman are illuminated in monographic features; the hitherto ineffable and unnerving practices of Francis Upritchard and David Noonan find full voice in insightful essays by Justin Paton and Jennifer Higgie, and Robert Leonard mines New Zealand's deep reserves of all-black angst.
Vol 46 No 1 Spring 2008
Vol 46 No 1 Spring 2008
Hello darkness: New Zealand Gothic
The Gothic is at risk of becoming a reigning truism in New Zealand art. But is it a telling term or a convenient marketing device, Zeitgeist or constricting cliche?New Zealand art's Gothic turn was partly a response to biculturalism, the dominant discourse in...
Mixed Feelings: Francis Upritchard's 1970s show
She sits on a raw wooden stump at the end of a long white plinth. Weirdly thin-limbed, naked except for an odd cowled hat that flops over her eyes, and painted in colours that suggest an accident in a tie-dyeing vat, she raises one white arm and points a...
Tony Oursler's post-punk phantasmagoria
'Where do you think you're going?' says one of Tony Oursler's typically interrogatory video-projected phantoms. Perhaps more than anyone else, this New York-based artist has helped liberate the medium of video from the gallery wall, sending it in directions...
David Noonan: Seven scenes among many
David Noonan's deeply private yet richly communicative pictures - made in the last few years from silkscreen prints on jute and linen, or gouache and paper collages - imply, despite their stillness, an animated world of richly expressive possibilities....
Bardayal Nadjamerrek: wild honey painter
I am looking after this place, this my Dreaming place put here by the earliest ancestors, the old people a long time ago, maybe by Djingalawarrewoni [an ancestral being] or by God ... They promised this place for me and the honey spirits, but I'm going...
UNENTITLED: On Louise Hearman, untitled
What was that you just heard in the dark, on the edge of intelligible sound? The creatures of the night. And what beautiful music they make! Something breathing an inarticulate serenade, something more aware of you than you can be of it. Not overtly...
Nick Cave: Black Dogs and other animals
Like many people, I am a compulsive doodler. Some people doodle eyeballs or Eiffel Towers or swastikas or whatever, but I doodle naked women and have done so since I was eleven-years-old. In fact, I got into so much trouble for it at school that I had to take...
A revolution with harbour views
If one of the most regularly voiced criticisms of biennials concerns the format's complicity with global spectacle culture and local political agendas alike, another is that at the apparently straightforward level of visitor experience, the vast majority of...
On cultural capital
I'm watching a small child in pink knits shimmy her way across a black and white striped discodelic floor, titled The strokes, 2008 - the work of Scottish op-funk wunderkind, Jim Lambie. Little Miss Pink adds herself to numerous items of fabulous bricolage,...
An enduring dualism: China's contribution to Australian culture
The focus on China during this year's Beijing Olympic Games has presented an apposite time to look at the engagement between Chinese and Australian culture. Following initial discussions with the curator, Dr Zeny Edwards, in collaboration with Jane Watters,...
Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and Art &Australia Emerging Writers Program
For this inaugural Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and Art & Australia Emerging Writers Program review, Toby Miller was mentored by author and University of Melbourne lecturer, Justin Clemens.There was every reason to believe that Scene 1 , 2001-, by the...
ANZ Private Bank and Art &Australia Contemporary Art Award
Melbourne-based artist Ash Keating intercepts and manipulates discarded waste to highlight the ecological fallout of mass-production and global capitalism. Having worked for a waste audit and consultancy company for the past five years, Keating is a...Powered by: 
Subscribers receive up to 20% off the cover price. An Art & Australia subscription is a gift that will keep on giving for 2 years
View Details
Art & Australia
11 Cecil Street Paddington
NSW 2021 Australia
Tel: +61 2 9331 4455
Fax: +61 2 9331 4577
11 Cecil Street Paddington
NSW 2021 Australia
Tel: +61 2 9331 4455
Fax: +61 2 9331 4577
The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or other-
wise used, except with the prior written permission of
Art & Australia Pty Ltd.
wise used, except with the prior written permission of
Art & Australia Pty Ltd.