Editorial: Everybody walk the dinosaur? MAURICE O'RIORDAN
I’m struck by an image of dinosaur-headed protesters in business attire on the lawns of Australia’s Parliament House. Almost farcical – the gaping, razor-toothed mouth could be laughing – the look is effective, orchestrated by a coalition of environment, union and welfare groups to remind the Senate to evolve into a greener future by passing the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation, debated as AMA goes to press. The issue is rife with politics but the image remains – the aptness of visual metaphor.
Can such agency for climate change be claimed for the art and words at Floating Land 2009? – an event to which we’ve given a good run these past few months, partly because of its association with our inaugural Emerging Arts Writers’ Award. Two of the Award’s entrants, the winner Nick Tapper and Ilka Nelson, and co-judge Tamsin Kerr deliberate on this and other questions in this month’s interview. Published alongside is the Award’s Highly Commended article by Canberra’s Yolande Norris, on how interactive digital animation by emerging artist Talbet Fulthorpe can preserve the memory and history of a place, as well as articulate loss. This month we also launch our 2010 Emerging Arts Writers’ Award, with the theme Art + Community.
Ian McLean’s ‘The magician’s hat’ comes fresh from the catalogue for this year’s Togart Contemporary Art Award in Darwin, the source of this month’s cover image (nicely contrasting with the back cover!) and about which McLean portends, ‘here is the crucible in which the future of Australian culture is fermenting’.
It took more than a magician’s hat to produce Sydney’s newly opened White Rabbit Gallery, a home to display Judith Neilson’s superb collection of post-2000 contemporary Chinese art and a significant gift to the art-loving public. A brief response to its opening is complemented by Sophie McIntyre’s review of the Australian public collection which most closely accords with Neilson’s, that of Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) and its recent three-part China Project exhibition.
Ashley Crawford and David Pestorius, not surprisingly, raise a few bones of contention: Pestorius, in praise of the Gallery A commemorative exhibition but with a plea to revisit the titling of Ralph Balson’s paintings; and Crawford on three bodies of work which seem to gain through re-installation across the continent, from Melbourne to Perth. Still in Perth, Terry Ingram’s Auction Notes touch briefly on the city’s ’80s corporate ghosts while Kate Vickers attempts to don the ‘yellow vest’ (rather than a rubbery dinosaur head-piece) in her elaboration on Fremantle Art Centre’s Yellow vest syndrome: recent west Australian art exhibition. I say ‘attempts’ as Vickers’s piece, while taking on the exhibition’s motif for a resource boom state – the yellow vest as symbol of work/progress – is also a critique of art reviewing. If the vest fits, wear it.
Peter Anderson’s ‘The Numbers Game’ questions some timely statistical spin on arts practice in Australia, and why likely support services and policy-makers seem to have missed the picture. Equally, Patrick Filmer-Sankey, in defence of a diverse cultural ecology, argues against governmental policy craze for ‘convergence’.
This month’s editorial image, Tobias Richardson’s Pit of Death (also from Togart 2009), with its concoction of deadly reptile and circus references returns me to Parliament House, and also to Prue Gibson’s taste for the Intensely Dutch exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW with its spotlight on Europe’s CoBrA Group (1948-51), an abbreviation of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. It got me thinking of an Australian equivalent for a movement involving, say, Darwin, Hobart and Perth – PeDaH, DaPeH, HoPeD? Hmm, perhaps DaHoP, which might suit street artist Stormie Mills, from Perth, profiled by Urszula Dawkins in this issue though his influences are apparently more Flemish than rap.
Finally, on a few more Awards. AMA’s 21st anniversary print by eX de Medici, It’s a global world, is a finalist in this year’s Geelong and Fremantle print award exhibitions (opening 12 September and 25 September respectively; thanks again, eX and the Australian Print Workshop). We’ve decided to extend the deadline for subscribers to our digital edition (to be in the running for this print) to 31 December 2009. And, in an email recently circulated by Tracey Moffatt, in awe of Floating Life, a survey exhibition of Indigenous fibre art curated by QAG’s Diane Moon, she asks pertinently: ‘Dear Everyone connected with the Australian art world – are there awards for curators here?’
Yours (with a boom boom acka-lacka lacka boom1)
Maurice
Notes
1. Lyrics from Walk the Dinosaur, 1988, by Was (Not Was), chanted at the Parliament House protest.
