- Julie Ewington, ‘Introducing Optimism’, in Contemporary Australia: Optimism (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2008), 25.
- Camille Morineau, ‘Elles@centrepompidou: Addressing Difference’, in Elles@centrepompidou: Women Artists in the Collection of the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre de creation industrielle (Paris: Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 2009), 16.
- This review was written in 2010 when the Indigenous wing opened. Since then, the hang has slightly changed and there has been a second Indigenous Triennial.
- The total space of the new building is 9,727m2. The new display space is 2,424m2 and provides approximately 40% additional display space. http://nga.gov.au/AboutUs/building/index.cfm.
- Ron Radford, ‘Opening Speech’, National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra, 30 September 2010).
- Michael Pickering, ‘We Do Things Differently Here’, in Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route (Canberra: NGA, 2008), xiii.
- See Howard Morphy, Becoming Art: Exploring Cross- Cultural Categories (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008).
- James Gleeson, in Genesis of a Gallery Part 2: A Touring Exhibition from the Collection of the Australian National Gallery (Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1978), 70.
- Wally Caruana, ed., Windows on the Dreaming: Aboriginal Paintings in the Australian National Gallery (Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1989).
- Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Indigenous Art, Securing the Future: Australia's Visual Arts and Crafts Sector’, 20 June 2007, www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/ecita_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/Indigenous_arts/report/index.htm.
- ‘Let's Talk Recognition: Reconciliation Week Forum’, NGA, 3 June 2011).
- Much has been written about Papunya, most recently Vivien Johnson, Once Upon a Time in Papunya (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010); and Judith Ryan, Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2011), www.ngv.vic.gov.au/tjukurrtjanu.
- See Fred Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (New York: Duke, 2003), 5.
- Most of the NGA's Papunya collection was acquired from the Peter Fanin Collection of Early Western Desert Painting in 1998).
- Ron Radford, ‘Sharing Our Commonwealth: Acquiring and Presenting Aboriginal Art in Art Museums: My First 30 Years’, Sharing Our Common Wealth (41st Annual Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 19 November 2010); published in Journal of Art Historiography, no. 4 (June 2011), http://arthistoriography.wordpress.com/number-4-june-2011/.
- The poles were made by forty-three artists, male and female, primarily from Ramingining and several surrounding communities in Central Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia. http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=77568.
- See www.iconophilia.net/the-stones-are-part-of-the-earth/.
- Franchesca Cubillo, ‘Annual Lecture 2011’, School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra, 5 October 2011).
- Julie Gough, Tayenebe: Tasmanian Aboriginal Women's Fibrework (Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2009).
- Franchesca Cubillo and Wally Caruana, eds., Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art: Collection Highlights (Canberra: NGA, 2010).
- Melinda Hinkson, ‘For Love and Money: Aboriginal Art in 2010: A Different Way of Seeing’, Arena, no. 109 (2010): 17–21
- Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 30 July 2010–26 January 2011). More than 150,000 people saw the exhibition.
- Patrice Riboust, talk to students and professionals, NGA, Canberra, 28 September 2011).
- See Nicholas Rothwell, ‘The United Colours of Bennett’, The Australian, 15 February 2010).
- Howard Morphy, ‘Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery’, Humanities Research 8, no. 1 (2001), www.anu.edu.au/hrc/publications/hr/issue1_2001/article05.htm.
- Richard Bell says, ‘our art, incorrectly I believe, is called Urban Aboriginal art. It is work that often speaks of contemporary injustices against our people. Liberation art is a far more accurate term that may also help to discourage the perpetual attempts to ghettoize us.’ In Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial (Canberra: NGA, 2007). See also Who You Callin’ Urban? Forum, NMA, 6 July 2007, www.nma.gov.au/audio/series/who-you-callin-urban-forum.
- Brenda Croft, quoted in ‘Whitefella Dreaming’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 November 2003).
- Ron Radford, ‘Aboriginal Art in Museums’, 10.
- Brenda Croft, ‘Cannot Buy My Soul’, in Culture Warriors, xxvi.
- Ibid.
- Wally Caruana and Nigel Lendon, eds., The Painters of the Wagilag Sisters Story 1937–1997 (Canberra: NGA, 1997); Alison French, Seeing the Centre: The Art of Albert Namatjira 1902–1959 (Canberra: NGA, 2002); and Susan Jenkins, ed., No Ordinary Place: The Art of David Malangi (Canberra: NGA, 2004).
- Even the ‘contemporary art’ label is becoming dated. Jessica Morgan, curator of international art at Tate Modern, noted this in her talk, ‘What's the Future for the Blockbuster?’, ABC Radio National, 26 June 2011, http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/artworks/whats-the-future-for-the-blockbuster/3658124. She said, ‘Of course modern used to be contemporary. I'm waiting for the moment where contemporary becomes again another point in time, and we move on… of course contemporary from the 1970s is also beginning to sound a little “off”.’ Morgan goes on to say that, despite this, the dividing line between the modern and the contemporary is ‘a rolling ball’, not an immutable standard.
- Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents, 8.
- At the outset of What Is Contemporary Art?, Smith dismisses postmodernity quite perfunctorily, if not obscurely: ‘The counters posed by postmodernity have become consumed in self-fulfilling prophecy’, 2.
- Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?, 7; Contemporary Art: World Currents, 11, 65–70.
- Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?, 265.
- Ibid.; Contemporary Art: World Currents, 75–9.
- Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?, 7.
- Ibid. The progression through the books is not incidental. Smith regards postcolonial art as a differentiating commitment. In What Is Contemporary Art?, he notes that, while the group associated with the journal October has challenged ‘narrow views of modernism’, it has shown little ‘interest in art that has resulted from the postcolonial turn’. Ibid., 252.
- Ibid., 256–7.
- Ibid., 5.
- Ibid., 264, original emphasis.
- Smith insists we need this ‘expanded’ definition to encompass ‘the play of multiple relationships between being and time,’ which is why he opts for ‘contemporaneity’. Ibid., 255. Although this term has been also been around for a while, it is still somewhat awkward. Nevertheless, it is meant to signal something other than just being ‘now’. See also his explanation, ‘Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity’, Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 681–707.
- Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?, 268.
- Ibid., 246, original emphasis.
- Nikos Papastergiadis, ‘Can There Be a History of Contemporary Art?’, Discipline, no. 2 (Autumn 2012): 154.
- At the outset of What Is Contemporary Art?, Smith includes a dedication to John Joseph Wardell Power, artist, doctor, and philanthropist, and to ‘the ideal of practice to which he was committed, as am I’ (xii). Given Power's definitively modernist practice, it is difficult to conceive how they could share such a mutual commitment, considering the argument of Smith's book.
- Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?, 2.
- Ibid.
- Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents, 9. Anthony Gardner and Huw Hallam's review of Smith's 2009 book cites a definition found in Giorgio Agamben's essay, ‘What Is the Contemporary?’: ‘an untimeliness that opens out the contemporary to thinking meta-critically on it’. Whether this resolves anything is contentious. Gardner and Hallam, ‘On the Contemporary—and Contemporary Art History’ [review of Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?], Journal of Art Historiography, no. 4 (June 2011): 1.
- It is odd because this appears to be the logical conclusion to draw from Smith's avid praise of Okwui Enwezor's conception of Documenta 11 (2002), which, in Smith's own words, forges ‘imaginative and concrete links within the various projects of modernity’. The exemplary value of Enwezor's Documenta therefore was its ability to conduct ‘a rethinking of modernity based on ideas of transculturality and extraterritoriality’. Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?, 261; ‘Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity’, 694. The latter is of course a reprise of a theme developed by Siegfried Kracauer and, to an extent, Walter Benjamin also to describe modernity. The insistence of a complete break from modernity, however, renders somewhat problematic or redundant Smith's promotion of Enwezor's project as an exemplary model.
- See his writings in the journal Other Voices and art criticism of the time.
- David Lodge's definition is cited in Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 74. Eysteinsson's study accounts for myriad, often- incompatible definitions of modernism without achieving a final consensus, bar the idea that modernism amounted to a ‘paradigmatic shift’ or revolt against ‘the prevalent literary and aesthetic traditions of the Western world’ in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Clearly, Smith is seeking to outline a similar ‘paradigmatic shift’ for contemporaneity.
- In his essay ‘Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity’, Smith equates modernity with only the worst: ‘cultural imperialism’ and ‘a kind of ethnic cleansing… of unmodern peoples into past, slower, or frozen time’ (702). He then goes on to say that any attempt to use the term as ‘a current world description’, no matter how conditionally, will miss the point in the same way fundamentalisms do.
- For example, in The Concept of Modernism, Eysteinsson complains that in heralding a break, modernism's characteristics of disruption tend to be appropriated in the name of that which is said to overturn modernism. For him, this was particularly true of postmodernism. In the process, modernism becomes recast as a conservative aesthetic project that more closely resembles the academic art it sought to overturn. While Eysteinsson tends to overlook the degree to which modernist works became conventional, he is nonetheless correct in noting that many of the grand claims associated with its overthrow too often rely on a superficial historical or analytical understanding of what is said to be overturned (namely modernism in its full complexity).
- This last claim is one that most people do not ordinarily associate with modernist culture, but György M´rkus is adamant that it is one of its core features: ‘Cultural modernity is a culture which knows itself as culture and as one among many.’ M´rkus argues that this produces two cultures within one: a generic, mutually shared culture and a competing critical, ‘autonomous’ sphere tolerating and promoting creativity, challenge, and innovation precisely because a modernist culture is not ‘simply natural, or God-ordained’, but ‘something man-made’ and therefore (potentially) capable of being remade. The result, M´rkus adds, is not some uniform, top-down, consensus model usually identified with modernist culture, but instead something more paradoxical: a ‘close association of incomparables’. György M´rkus, ‘A Society of Culture: The Constitution of Modernity’, in Rethinking Imagination, ed. Gillian Robinson and John Rundell (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 15–6.
- Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?, 8.
- Pablo Picasso (1964) cited in Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 44.
- Terry Smith, ‘Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity’, 688.
- Geeta Kapur, ‘Curating: In the Public Sphere’, Asiart Archive, 2006, www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/CollectionOnline/SpecialCollectionItem/2995, 6.
- The other two exhibitions are Magiciens de la Terre, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, curated by JeanHubert Martin, and The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, Hayward Gallery, London, curated by Rasheed Araeen.
- Okwui Enwezor, ‘Curating Beyond the Canon: Okwui Enwezor Interviewed by Paul O'Neill’, in Curating Subjects, ed. Paul O'Neill (London: Open Editions, 2007), 112.
- In her contextualising essay, editor Rachel Weiss points out that the Second Havana Biennial trumped Magiciens's claims to be ‘the first world-wide exhibition of contemporary art’ by three years. For discussion of the claims of Magiciens de la Terre, see Rasheed Araeen, ‘Our Bauhaus, Others’ Mudhouse’, Third Text 3, no. 6 (Spring 1989): 3–14.
- This quality of openness is discussed in Sarat Maharaj's keynote address to the first ‘Former West’ congress, which includes a detailed consideration of a series of diagrams from the Havana Biennial catalogue. See ‘Small Change of the Universal’, www.formerwest.org/Contributors/SaratMaharaj.
- Lilian Llanes Godoy, ‘Catalogue Introduction’, Making Art Global (Part 1), 178.
- Geeta Kapur, ‘Contemporary Cultural Practices: Some Polemical Categories’, Making Art Global (Part 1), 194.
- Gerardo Mosquera, ‘The Third Bienale de la Habana in Its Global and Local Contexts’, Making Art Global (Part 1), 76.
- Andrew McNamara, An Apprehensive Aesthetic, 14.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 26.
- Ibid., 56.
- Ibid., 60.
- Ibid., 25.
- Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993); Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2003).
- Ibid., 40–1.
- Friedrich Schiller, ‘Second Letter’, in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (in a Series of Letters), trans. and ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
- Andrew McNamara, An Apprehensive Aesthetic, 47. See György M´rkus, ‘A Social of Culture: The Constitution of Modernity’, in Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, ed. Gillian Robinson and John Rundell (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 15–29.
- Andrew McNamara, An Apprehensive Aesthetic, 60.
- Ibid., 66.
- Ibid., 76.
- Ibid., 107.
- Ibid., 146.
- Ibid., 148.
- Ibid., 156.
- Ibid., 188.
- Ibid., 196.
- In a 2012 Art Association of Australia and New Zealand conference keynote, Thierry de Duve reiterated his position on the connection between art and social or political change. For him, aesthetic judgement does not have a direct connection to politics or the social good, although it may have an indirect one.
- Ibid., 211.
- Ibid., 262.
- Ibid., 286.
- Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘The Art of Not Describing: The Detail and the Patch’, History of Human Sciences 2, no. 2 (1989): 161.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling, 1.
- Ibid., 35.
- Andre Green, quoted in ibid., 44.
- Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling, 67.
- Ibid., 88.
- Ibid., 47.
- Robert Morris, in ibid., 12–3.
- Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling, 47.
- Thierry de Duve, in ibid., 66.
- Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling, 114.
- Ibid.
- Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, in ibid., 117.
- Ian McLean, ‘What the Anthology Does’, in How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art, 13.
- Ibid., 15.
- Ibid.
- Ian McLean, ‘Aboriginal Art and the Artworld’, in ibid., 47.
- Ian McLean, ‘Futures’, in ibid., 317.
- Terence Maloon, quoted in Richard Haese, Permanent Revolution, 1.
- Bruce Pollard, ‘Australian Art Scene in the 1970s’, Art and Australia 18, no. 2 (1980): 134.
- Richard Haese, Permanent Revolution, 2.
- Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Washington: Bay Press, 1983), 6.
- Richard Haese, Permanent Revolution, 65.
- D.H. Lawrence, Pornography and Obscenity (London: Faber and Faber, 1929), 7.
- Terry Smith, in Permanent Revolution, 240.
- Richard Haese, Permanent Revolution, 217.
- Ibid., 221.
- Simon Pierse, Australian Art and Artists in London, 1950–1965: An Antipodean Summer, 45.
- Ibid., 50.
- Bryan Robertson, ‘An Artist in Our Time’, The Listener, 22 June 1961: 1079, original emphasis.
- Bernard Smith, The Age, 1963, quoted in Simon Pierse, Australian Art and Artists in London, 125.
- Kenneth Clark, quoted in ibid., 6.
- Simon Pierse, Australian Art and Artists in London, 232.
- Hans Heysen, in Heysen to Heysen, 4.
- Sallie Heysen, in ibid., 234.
- Hans Heysen, in ibid., 32.
- Nora Heysen, in ibid., 33.
- The Age, 6 October 1962, cited in ibid., 17.
- Sydney Morning Herald, 21 January 1939, cited in ibid., 104.
- Nora Heysen, in ibid., 105.
- Ibid., 101.
- Ibid., 57.
- Ibid., 116.
- Ibid., 177.
- Ibid., 76.
- Ibid., 124.
- Kerry Stokes, Larrakitj: Kerry Stokes Collection, 7.