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We begin with a hallucination, follow with a series of artistic daydreams and reveries, zigzag through time, stop along the way for a dose of everyday surrealism, and find ourselves, at story's end, jolted back in the here and now.

A seamless interweave of dream and reality forms the basis of this Winter 2012 issue of Art & Australia. But whether exploring the kaleidoscopic dreams of artists past and present, as Sebastian Moody recounts in his essay 'Psychedelia now', or the future hopes of a new generation of artists such as Ai Weiwei, as Gregory Burke writes in his propositional text 'Pre-dictions: Art and the future', the binding artistic impulse, it would seem, is the desire for freedom.

We can follow this impulse through the 1960s participatory work of Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, as Susan Best expertly documents, to the mesmeric videos of Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano (the subjects of Geraldine Barlow's monographic essay), to the more frenzied performative gestures of Justene Williams which, as Mark Feary writes, collapse time and artistic convention.

The slippage between desire and reality, meanwhile, is the stuff of Anne Wallace's painted dreamworks, as Morgan Thomas poetically suggests: the 'stardust' of our collective unconscious. And lastly, the large-scale photographic tableaux of Jeff Wall seek and achieve freedom from time, place and a fixity of meaning, capturing a sublime and suspended state of open-endedness. As with the other artists in this issue, Wallace's work achieves its own liberating autonomy, offering us a moment perchance to dream.
Vol 49 No 4 Winter 2012