back issue

The much mythologised artist Ian Fairweather graced our inaugural 1963 cover, and he does so again just over 45 years later. Reconstructed by New Zealand-German artist Michael Stevenson as The gift, 2004-05, Fairweather's raft is a potent symbol of creative transmission and exchange. To dedicate this latest issue of Art &Australia to 'influence' is not to look at a static thing but, rather, an ongoing creative dynamism. We see influences threading through time, looping back on themselves and unravelling into still unknown possibilities. In these pages we witness the little-known outsider artists who triggered the self-destructing machines of Jean Tinguely, who in turn inspired the contemporary practice of Michael Landy. Inspiration may be cross-cultural, as Kirk Huffman discovers with his feature on Vanuatu art, or across gender as Luke Scholes documents in his essay on the new generation of women painters from the Western Desert community of Kiwirrkura. Rex Butler and A. D. S. Donaldson's exciting extrapolation on Ian Burn that modernism wasn't so much received in Australia as gleaned or appropriated is subtly illustrated by Tracey Lock-Weir's essay on Max Meldrum. Dinah Dysart's defining interview with Daniel Thomas, meanwhile, shows the power of a singular voice to shape our understanding of art.
Vol 46 No 3 Autumn 2009