print December 2005

Geoff Kleem

Geoff Kleem’s large color photographs are as antiheroic as contemporary art gets. His two-decade-long commitment to images and objects that avoid almost any decipherable intention, whatever the cost, has yielded a series of exquisitely refined exhibitions and earned widespread respect from other photographers. Nevertheless, he’s perhaps the most underrated artist in Australia. This low profile goes with his chosen territory: camouflage, subtle visual conundrums, skewed conceptualism. In the early ’90s, he made large, indeterminate objects on wheels, later placing them on sleds or wrapping them

picks August 08, 2005

Emily Floyd

Emily Floyd makes cute sculptures of smart words. In this ambitious show, the young artist's shiny, black-painted wooden letters sit like obedient pets on the concrete floor, spelling out the words of the exhibition title, “A strategy to infiltrate the homes of the bourgeoisie.” The result looks like a Saul Steinberg map of New York made three-dimensional, a model world. This could be too tricky by half, a one-line, sculpturally elongated institutional-critique gag, were it not for the evocative pathos of almost any text—especially a title as resonant of self-reflexive art theory as

print May 2005

Lee Bul

Art is conditioned by other visual phenomena, and Lee Bul’s creepy sculptures owe debts that this, her first solo exhibition in Australia, can’t acknowledge. The ideal Lee survey would own up to the vertiginous array of fashion, painting, cinema, and architecture that underlies her intensely memorable sculptures rather than repeating lazy, dead words like “subversion” and “cyborg.” For even if avatar presences started out as Lee’s basic modus operandi in works with titles like Cyborg W4, 1998, the most interesting aspect of her practice has long since been its genuine affinity with cinema: her

previews January 2005

Bill Henson

Although Bill Henson's photographs transform fragile teenagers and fraying landscapes into fever-pitch museum art, they've never been seen in any depth outside Australia. A pity, then, that this retrospective of 350 photographs from the past thirty years won't travel to the US or Europe, though the sumptuous publication certainly will.

Although Bill Henson's photographs transform fragile teenagers and fraying landscapes into fever-pitch museum art, they've never been seen in any depth outside Australia. Solo shows at the Denver Art Museum in 1990, the 1995 Venice Biennale, and LA's Karyn Lovegrove Gallery in 1999 haven't compensated for this art-museum inattention, especially since Henson, a viruoso technician, sometimes masses his photographs in vast installations that require museum-size spaces. A pity, then, that this retrospective of 350 photographs from the past thirty years won't travel to the US

print September 2004

Tracey Moffatt

Back in 1992, in a note to an overly earnest museum curator, Tracey Moffatt wrote: “As an artist, I have never been on a mission to educate. If people are racist, sexist, homophobic or out of step with issues I say bad luck. Let them stay dumb. Art exhibitions do not aid in correcting prejudice, not a bit.” Moffatt’s best works—the unforgettable twenty-five photographs that compose the series “Up in the Sky,” 1997, first shown at her Dia Center for the Arts survey that year, and her earlier, breakthrough “Something More,” 1989—are clear-sighted, bleak, and luminously global in conception. They

print December 2003

“The Labyrinthine Effect”

In “The Labyrinthine Effect,” curator Juliana Engberg tracks a genealogy of artists who make mazes, from Bruce Nauman to Francis Alÿs. From time to time, the exhibition implies, certain symbols become important in culture. As Engberg notes in the show’s catalogue, the labyrinth is both a sculptural form and a synecdoche for the walk-in environment. (It’s also the dominating trope in interactive iCinema and games culture.) Almost all of the show’s labyrinths are installations that are at the same time historically self-conscious to the nth degree and irony free. Despite the literariness of her

picks August 17, 2003

Stephen Honegger and Anthony Hunt

Squeezed into this tiny upstairs gallery—one of the most dynamic alternative spaces in a city blessed with many—Stephen Honegger and Anthony Hunt’s Hatchback, 2003, is a full-size model of a 1980s Honda Civic that looks like it just escaped from a cartoon. The sole work on view in this show, it's a deliberately dull, fastidiously generic object, down to the cursory wheels, which lack tires altogether. It’s also surprisingly low-tech, coming as it does from two artists whose video game recently attracted howls of outrage. (In Escape from Woomera, players took the roles of political-asylum

print May 2002

Patricia Piccinini

Patricia Piccinini’s recent exhibition “One Night Love” included a group of the furniture-sized, biomorphic fiberglass objects she calls Car Nuggets and five modular bas-relief wall panels made of plastic and embalmed in layers of glossy, quasi-holographic automotive paint. This year’s line, “Car Nuggets GL” (all works 2001), are almost interchangeable but are distinguished from each other by embossed linear designs and iridescent colors much like the variations offered by car manufacturers from model to model and further individualized by a range of familiar flamelike biker motifs. In the same

print April 2002

Sung Neung-Kyung

Sung Neung-kyung has made deliberately marginal, semiprivate photo installations and performances since the late '60s. The thread that links his works of that time to those of the present-from the land- mark, frequently reconstructed installation Newspapers: From June I, 1974, On, 1974, to Shadows of Distraction 2001—is his consistent memorialization of minute experience in the very process of dismantling his own, always increasing artistic authority. In other words, Sung has deflected attention onto anything and everything, accumulating vast archives of newspaper clippings,bad photographs,

print October 2001

Euan Heng

Unlike other painters who came into vogue in the ’80s. Scottish-Chinese artist Euan Heng made works that, even then, were neither wild nor spectral. For a start, they were self-consciously Mediterranean, in the tradition of Matisse and Léger—but gray. His bewildered but purposeful gentle giants and world-weary office workers, depicted through a synthesis of Christian and Classical heroic models. seemed half-human, half-animal. Though he was loosely associated with the dramatic but now docked expressionist efflorescence in Scottish painting, Heng had been resident in Australia since 1977. Here,

print December 2000

“Papunya Tula”

“Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius” was the first major museum survey to systematically trace the history of Western Desert Painting beginning with its unlikely emergence in 1971 at a hellish, dysfunctional settlement forcibly created by racist government policies. The exhibition focused on a core group of Aboriginal painters who organized themselves into a cooperative called Papunya Tula Artists. Along with artists from other Desert communities, and encouraged by Geoffrey Bardon, a young white artist turned schoolteacher, they rapidly created paintings of enormous ambition on a scale that was

print September 2000

The Biennale of Sydney 2000

THIS YEAR'S SYDNEY BIENNALE was a poignant exhibition. Though mostly a disorganized and unthematized review of the 1990s, featuring such stars as Matthew Barney, Tracey Moffatt, and Jeff Wall, it was also a Noah's ark of gorgeous, visionary works from the decade's grandfather figures (among them Bruce Nauman, Ilya Kabakov, and Gerhard Richter). Sprawled out among two major museums and a few of the city's experimental art spaces, with more than 150 works by 48 artists or artist-groups, the event was aggressively passive in refusing to assume its own agency, even though it presented a lexicon of

Charles Green