Essays

The social gestural of The National

What is contemporary Australian art?

What is close to us

Signs of change: thinking through The National

Your middle c is not my middle c

Bigger than ourselves

Keepawhile (or an imprint for our times)

Idle no more: Confronting colonialism and the art museum

Turning of the Tide

Sharing time with the past and caring for the future

Pushing from the edges

As the second of three planned curatoriums exploring the notion of ‘the national’ in Australian contemporary art, curators Isobel Parker Philip (Art Gallery of New South Wales, AGNSW...

Black box logic

A snapshot of the contemporary moment; a transcript of what felt pressing and critical at the time. Is that what The National: New Australian Art is? This series of three biennial exhibitions ha...

Dark sunshine

What I prefer, about postcards, is that one does not know what is in front or what is in back, here or there, near or far, the Plato or the Socrates, recto or verso. Nor what is the most importa...

The third space

Around the same time I was invited by Anna Davis and Clothilde Bullen to conduct an interview, I picked up a book of poems called False Claims of Colonial Thieves (2018). A collaboration between...

The puzzle of representing the problem

When art wants to rub up against the world, there’s always a choice to be made of how to go about depicting the problem and making trouble for it. Artists often set to thinking through mak...

Future, past, present

The box is surprisingly heavy when I lift it onto the table in front of me. It has been closed a long time and the tape that seals it is brittle and yellow with age. Printed on the side is an il...

Camping in the shadow of the racist text

Ali Gumillya Baker presents a call to action to undo past wrongs, to question how our stories are told and to understand their impact on future generations. These are traumas that are deeply roo...

Upside down/right way up: Historiography of contemporary ‘Australian’ art

The historiography of Australian art has, from the very first attempts, been vexed by the notion of ‘Australia’. Like a parasite, this name, which is a metonym for a powerful ideolog...

Curatorial Introduction

The National: New Australian Art is grounded in an ethos of collaboration: between institutions and curators, with artists and writers. As the many participants in this landmark ne...

Past origins, present politics

In his last body of work, Home Décor (after M. Preston) (2012–13), the late, great conceptual painter Gordon Bennett looked back to an earlier moment in Australian...

Anxieties of the self

In 1900, a year before Federation, the Australian surveyor and anthropologist R.H. Mathews, a contentious figure in this newly emerging field on account of his lack of academic credentials, publ...

Through time: Continuity in the contemporary

The artists exhibiting in The National 2017: New Australian Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), while employing a diversity of media and with a si...

That great mythical work

Like many words, ‘national’ is at once too immense, too diffuse, too complicated and contradictory, and somewhat inadequate. Where d...

Unceded: Contesting the national, or Australia is a foreign country

The nation is a contested site, just as Australia may be a foreign country. It is possible to speak of multiple nations within the Australian state, abutting each other, and ...