back issue

Dressed in black leathers, armed with a shotgun and accompanied by a trusty blue heeler, Max Rockatansky continues to stalk our dreams. This lone figure first loomed on the horizon in George Miller's seminal sci-fi film Mad Max (1979), and over thirty years later, Max's world of barely controlled environmental, physical and emotional chaos bears an ever-closer resemblance to our contemporary reality. As a future-dwelling avatar or herald of the apocalypse, Max is the perfect guide, then, to take us through the cacophonous, often cataclysmic and sometimes faithful art of this Summer issue.
He is there in Eleanor Heartney's prescient take on the visions of environmental Armageddon foreshadowed by a current crop of international artists. And he is just as present, in spirit and form, in the sometimes terrifying wreckage of Richard Goodwin's auto sculptures. Scorched and sparsely populated with feral outlaw gangs, Max's dystopian landscape might be evoked by Lindy Lee's recent fire paintings or prefigured by the toxic plumes of Stephen Bush's painterly vision. Barren yet fecund, it might also give birth to the alien life forms of Shen Shaomin's bonemeal sculptures, in which the skeleton of a chick might emerge from a cabbage. And in such a primordial setting, where better to place the powder-pink monoliths of Franz West, totemic and utterly beyond words? In contrast to these more silent oracles, words are all we get in the often incoherent Generation Y narratives of Ryan Trecartin. But in the neurotic tics and stutters of his humorously scrambled confessional videos, we also sense a more general anxiety at play: how to imagine our future when often the present doesn't seem real?
When, in September 2010, the New Zealand city of Christchurch experienced the first of two crippling earthquakes, an ominous future seemed nigh. But from the rubble, artists such as Joanna Langford have slowly begun to build, if not a future, then at least a present. And so in 'The High Country', Langford's artist project which accompanies this Summer issue, and in the bolstering presence of these urgent voices, we bring beauty and hope in these sometimes troubling times.
As the year draws to a close we would also like to take pause to remember the achievements of two admirable Australian women, Ann Lewis and Margaret Olley, whose artistic contributions go beyond words, and to wish our readers all the best for the season.
Vol 49 No 2 Summer 2011