Holy Grail by Holy Grail

WARNING: This book contains passion and art.

5-6 Post-Modernism 7-8 Grayson Perry 9 Damien Hirst 10 Marina Abramovic 11 Subjective Framework 12 Picasso’s Geurnica 13 Heather Day 14 Vibes 18 Structural Framework 19 Vivian Maier 20-21 Mrs. Peterson’s Pottery

22 Sidney Nolan 23 Cultural Framework 24-27 Frida Kahlo 28 Constructing Gender 29 Polly Norton 30-31 Vivienne Westwood 31 Rosalie Gascoigne 35 Rollin Schlict 36 Feminist ART and the Double Standard 37 Womanhouse 40 Australian Artisit’s

41 Margaret Olley 42 Howard Arkley 43 Del Kathryn Barton 44-45 Ben Quilty 48-49 Cindy Sherman 52 Jess Cochrane 54 Bryan Lewis Saunders 55 Daneil Kornrumpf 57 Ai WeiWei 58-59 DADA: Anti-art 60 Conceptual Framework

CONTENTS

And revolt and disobedience at it’s finest WHAT IS IT?

WHAT DOES POST-MODERNISM LOOK LIKE?

The term post-modernism, was first used in around 1970. As an art movement post-modernism to some extent defies definition – as there is no one postmodern style or theory on which it is hinged. It embraces many different approaches to art making; and a host of art groups and movements from the 1960s onwards can be described as post-modernist. It is therefore perhaps easiest to define post-modernism by looking at its main characteristics. Anti-authoritarian by nature, it refuses to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be. It collapses the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture and it tends to get rid of the boundary between art and everyday life. Resultantly, postmodern art can be characterised by its self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, and an eclectic mixing of different artistic and popular styles and media.

Because post-modernism broke the established rules about style, it introduced a new era of freedom and a sense that ‘anything goes’. It is often funny, tongue-in-cheek or ludicrous; it can be confrontational and controversial, challenging the boundaries of taste; but most crucially, it reflects a self-awareness of style itself – often consciously borrowing from a range of styles from the past.

CHARACTERISTICS OF POST MODERNISM

Post-modernism reflects a widespread disillusionment with life, as well as the power of existing value-systems and/or technology to effect beneficial change. As a result, authority, expertise, knowledge and eminence of achievement has become discredited. Artists are now far more wary about “big ideas” (e.g. all ‘progress’ is good). The era of “postmodernist art” has coincided with the arrival of several new image-based technologies (e.g.. television, video, screenprinting, computers, the Internet) and has benefited hugely from them. Mixing of Genres and Styles, Post-modernist Multiple-Meanings, Meeting consumer needs, instant meaning, art can be made from anything, the idea matters more than the work itself.

WHEN DID IT FIRST HAPPEN?

Post-modernism was a reaction against modernism. Modernism was generally based on a utopian vision of human life and society and a belief in progress. If modernism was based on idealism and reason, post-modernism was born of scepticism and a suspicion of reason. It challenged the notion that there are universal objective certainties or truths that will explain everything for everybody. Postmodern art advocates that individual experience and interpretation of our experience is more concrete than abstract principles and is the best way of understanding and responding to reality.

GRAYSON PERRY: PORTRAIT OF A TRANSVESTITE POTTER

Grayson Perry is the ultimate cool. Often declared a national treasure, the post modernist was born in Essex, United Kingdom in 1960 where his childhood was a major influence on his work to date. Coming from a working class family, his father was described as a ‘weak and narrow-minded man’ and his mother alike, suffering from mental illness and a volcanic temper informing her eternal disappointment. When Perry was four, she ran off with the milkman, his step father also being a violent and intolerant man. In an attempt to escape his difficult family situation, he would often retreat to his father’s shed where he would engage in a fantasy world with his teddy bear, Alan Measles, whom he has described as: “surrogate father, rebel leader, fighter, pilot and undefeated racing driver.” Alan is a frequent feature in much of

Perry’s work. In his teenage years, the artist explored his transvestism in expressing his sexuality and gender to the wider social world. Ousted by his stepsister and further repressed by his father, his alter ego Claire hid until his university days encouraged him otherwise. The artist studied at the Braintree College of Further Education in Essex and at Portsmouth Polytechnic in Hampshire, but was not until the early 80’s that he returned to serious study of ceramics in evening classes. At this point Perry was living in a squatter’s community in London, appearing in performances pieces and art films - nursing his own aspirations as a filmmaker. 1984 saw his first solo exhibition of his own ceramic works, pottery becoming his main art form.

A contemporary of the Young British Artists (YBA) he has exhibited his works internationally since the early 1990s. He was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize in 2003 and in 2011 combined his own works with historical artefacts from the British Museum collection. He has made numerous television appearances, hosting his own Channel 4 series In the Best Possible Taste – Grayson Perry in 2012, then Grayson Perry: Who Are You? In late 2014, along with his solo exhibition on the theme of portraiture and British identity at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Most recently ‘Grayson Perry: My Pretty Little Art Career’ was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Sydney, Australia in 2016.

Grayson Perry is interested in the explicit; sexual perversion, sadomasochism, bondage and transvestism being among the finer thematic points explored in his works. These themes being a reminisce of his unusual childhood, making his work both highly biographical and personal. His THEMES are essentially what makes this artist such a post modernist: his imminent shock value. Consecutively, Perry exploits the forever history of society and culture. His work mobilising ‘taste’ variables between the classes– exploring the unconscious consumer driven lifestyle and in turn its effect on our behaviours in society, culture, and politics. His works ranging from discussing the political, the art world, Biblical stories, the royal family, and images of warfare and sexual fantasy.

Perry’s use of MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES employs traditional materials and techniques, and only his subject matter does he defer from conventional disciplines of art. Perry works within a range of multifaceted media namely ceramics, etchings, and tapestries – each being traditional crafts in themselves. Grayson Perry takes the traditional form of ceramics in classical pot shaping, and transfigures them in context and subject matter to elaborate on his post-modern juxtaposition of aesthetic. His urns are inhabit an inextricable master-craft, each surface elaborately textured from designs scratched into the clay, followed by intricate and complicated glazing, and photo-transfer techniques. His works are highly planned, which underlies the intricacies and incomprehensible skill and technique exhibited in his etchings. Furthermore, evidence of Perry’s highly planned technique is evidential in ‘The Walthamstow Tapestry’ 2012, in which the artist has digitalised complete coloured sketches in order to print the epic tapestry.

Perry challenges perceptions of who is the artist and the validity of the artist’s work. Documented in the 2012 documentary series ‘All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry’, Perry explores male and female culture by living among the ‘classes’, in which he then draws heavily from photographs: ‘Here’s how I work as an artist: I take a lot of photographs which I will use to form the basis of my tapestry designs’ these sketches in turn illustrate the people and things he’s encountered, which are translated using Photoshop to design the finished images and tapestries printed by a company in Belgium. Perry has taken a traditional methodology art practice and re-contextualised it utilising modern technology and available resources within his PROCESS. Though he outsources companies to materialize his work, this is merely in assistance and does not effect Perry’s role as the sole artist. Perry’s primary medium, ceramics, exists like Kahlo on a completely individual process; each artist creating their work self-sufficiently. The artist in unison with sketches, on some level works off a stream of consciousness – interpreting and using words or images he hears via the media and what he sees within his social world.

‘The Upper Class at Bay’ 2012

The tapestry picturing the deer as a symbol of the dominance of white upper class males in politics, in which is always being challenged and rallied against by the disparities of the lower classes - depicted through the attack of violent red creatures. Perry uses the vulnerable deer as a political commentary on the patriarchal dominance of British politics.

THE PHYSICAL IMPOSSIBILITY OF DEATH IN THE MIND OF SOMEONE LIVING

Damien Hirst scares me, and probably you. The gruesome, yet intriguing artist is one of the most controversial painters and sculptors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The British artist, now richest man alive, deemed ‘doctor death’ is literally obsessed with it. His highly post-modern works identifying the human fascination with death. The question however, becomes what it means to the viewer, as each is left to interpret his work in their own interpretation rather than what the artist dictates. Cleverly, he also manages to discuss the nature of relationships through his re-occuring media of dead animals - portraying a sanctity of motherhood whilst questioning a physical division of relationships.

The artist continues to be unique and explore a post-modern style through his use of media. The 1991 work ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (pictured below), accentuates the choice of significantly unconventional use of materials, i.e. Silicone, mono-filament, shark and formaldehyde solution that are used to create the installation piece. This form of sculpture takes a planned method, taking time and multiple sources to assemble for exhibition. From the artists use of physical animals in many of his pieces, it reflects his want to explore the extremities of what is considered art through radical and unconventional material that will be scrutinized by its audience. Hirst very obviously uses his choice of materials and techniques as a way of conveying the complex and explicit reality of his pieces and in turn thematic choices.

Can what isn’t done by the artists own hand still be considered art? This concept is demonstrated in Hirst’s work through is overt use of “collaboration” and lack of perceived skill; challenging its means and worth. For example his 2012 Tate Retrospective was installed on site, a process which totalled four years in the planning and installation. Once again, the artist limiting the use of his own hand and taking highly collaborative measures to produce a collection of works which themselves defy conventions of artistic license. His army of assistants taking on the roles of creating many of his ‘dots’ series, a notion assessing worth and orthodox notions of an artist’s studio, questioning the sphere where tangible work is produced.

‘What constitutes an amazing artwork, is

surely in the eye of the beholder’

It is not uncommon that this sentiment has become somewhat of a controversy in the 21st century art world, as a radical questioning of what constitutes art has been continually tested by the often extremes of Post Modernism. As opposed to the ‘old masters’, there is no doubt that perhaps the value society has placed on art has altered ever so significantly. Via the extremities of postmodernism, artists have been able to explore their talents in an unrelenting manner; straying from the traditional sense of ‘acceptable’ art forms into often questionable, strange, yet elusive forms that test boundaries placed by their predecessors. Post-Modernism as it may be, by definition coveys a sense of revolution. Revolution in form, in exhibition, in desire, in perspective - post-modernist artists are the revolutionaries of our time; testing boundaries and morals to such an extreme the audience is left only with one question: how is this art? Yet by popular conclusion, this question has only been limited by preconceived ideas of art that have dominated minds for generations. MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ is no doubt a perfect example of a questionable, yet undeniably seminal artist of the 20th and 21th centuries. Born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Abramović began her career in the early 1970’s, becoming a pioneer in performance and body art as a visual art form. The artist is unrelenting in her quest to explore the physical and mental limits of her being, through endurance of pain, exhaustion, and danger in a search to fulfil emotional and spiritual transformation. Like many before her, she is concerned with creating works that identify the simplicity of everyday life like sitting, lying, dreaming and thinking; essentially trying to manifest a unique mental state. In response to the values of post-modernism and conceptual art, Abramović accentuates the qualities which are now regarded to be those of perplexing art form.

From 1976 to 1988, Abramović lived and worked with Ulay as a couple; generating a series of performance art pieces under the contract of “Vitale Art, no fixed abode, permanent movement, direct contact, local relation, self-selection, passing, risk tolerance, portable power. - No trial, no predictable end, no repetition “. These years produced a series of unique works such as 1977’s ‘Breathing in - Breathing out (Death Itself)’, where the couple ventilated for 40 minutes with a closed nose from mouth to mouth and others that explored energy and similarity in naked and queer rituals of sort.

More recently, ‘The Artist Is Present’ March 2010 exhibited at MoMA, was a retrospective of the Marina Ambramovic’s prolific career. With over 50 works spanning over four decades, the exhibit contained multitudes of her early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances, and collaborative performances made with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). “In an endeavour to transmit the presence of the artist and make her historical performances accessible to a larger audience,” the exhibition included live re-performances of her works by other people; taken in a museum setting. This in itself is a highly contemporary exhibition and large scale performance piece. This exhibition also gave light to a new original work, which was performed by Abramović - marking the longest duration of time she has performed in a solo piece.

SUBJECTIVE FRAMEWORK Through this frame, art may be thought to be about and represent deeply felt and sensory experience, human consciousness, intuition, imagination, originality, creative expression, and the aesthetic response. Meaning is understood in relation to the inter-subjective experiences afforded to the maker and viewer.

PERSONAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIENCE Through this frame, art may be thought to be about and represent deeply felt and sensory experience, human consciousness, intuition, imagination, originality, creative expression, and the aesthetic response. Meaning is understood in relation to the inter-subjective experiences afforded to the maker and viewer. This frame allows you to develop personal responses to artists and artworks that are highly significant to your own experience and emotions. It provides the scaffolding to explore artworks as expressive and unique objects, developing notions of individual styles, and interpreting the world and the influence of those artists who are of great personal interest to you.

GUERNICA Pablo Picasso, if not, is one of the most artistic figures in history. A prodigy from a young age, the Spaniard began exhibiting a variety of works at the age of 13. Picasso is a strong example of an artist whose work reflects aspects of the world around them. “Guernica” 1937, oil on canvas, is Picasso’s personal interpretation of the horror inflicted during World War II; made as an initial reaction to the bombing of a small Spanish town who was methodically bombed by the Germans for over 3.5 hours, obliterating the town almost entirely. “Guernica” explores not only the human effect the bombing had on the town, but also the devastating effects it had on the agriculture.

This is shown through the abstract representations of numerous bull and horse shapes that have been purposely fragmented to reflect the disturbing results of the bombs. The animal faces show distraught wails and looks of terror that are further heightened by the separation of the background by the extensive tonal use and matte blocks of grey tones. This sense of disembodiment being repeated in the human figures seen to be fleeing to the left hand side of the artwork. Geometric shape is also another structural technique that adds to the highly thought out composition of each element/figure. It is appropriate in showing the separation and chaos within the scene whilst also reflecting Picasso’s abstract and cubist style. Through the use of suppressed colour and transparent shapes, not only the audience, but also the personal fears of the artist himself are being communicated. Although living in Paris at the time of the event, Pablo Picasso created this artwork to emulate his anger and connection to the bombing of Guernica, he being Spanish himself. “Guernica” 1937, most veraciously depicts the time in which it was made.

HEATHER DAY “I travel seeking stories of all kinds—stories behind people, places, sound, and nature—and bring them home to my Oakland studio to create an interpretation. Each of us sees the world differently through a screen of personal experiences. I choose to communicate my interpretations through layers of overlapping paint, expressing moments at every seam, edge, and line. Each mark represents my language of dynamic motion, allowing compositions to read like handwriting—from one side to another.

Day grew up in Hawaii and along the east coast of the United States, finally moving to San Francisco after graduating from Maryland Institute College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting and art history. Her background in travel and culture encouraged her to see more of the world, where she discovered a connection to nature—her main source of inspiration. Day grew up in Hawaii and along the east coast of the United States, finally moving to San Francisco after graduating from Maryland Institute College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting and art history. Her background in travel and culture encouraged her to see more of the world, where she discovered a connection to nature— her main source of inspiration.

Working primarily with paint and non-traditional materials, my recent work is a reflection of travels in nature. I spend time collecting moments from wooded areas, agitated rivers, and panoramic views of the ocean and convey them through medium washes and emphatic marks. Color is used like punctuation—as a means to control the energy and direct the eye. My process demands motion, requiring the entire body, not just the hand.” - Heather Day’s blog

Day’s art is a form of visual storytelling interested in conveying moments of interactions. She works primarily with paint and non-traditional materials, and is known for her murals. The philosophy that everything is a product of an experience frames each work, conveying stories of movement and ideas of color through seams,lines, and layers.

Artists use their work to refleand communicate various thoughts, emotions, and in many cases events which helped to shape their understanding of the world and that of those around them. Throughout the social, cultural and political histories of humanity, artists have been renowned for interpreting and documenting significant events. German artist Kathe Kollowtiz, through her highly emotional art, captures the world in which she was living. As a sculptor and printmaker she worked closely with expression of the human form and concept of human realism through the subjective and cultural frameworks. Her prints becoming raw representations of the time she was living in; the pre and post war period of working-class Germany. They depict the plight of women and the desperation of conflict, with Kollowitz drawing from personal experience to formulate her art. The 1903 etching “Woman with dead child” being just one example of her prints that reflect the grief of human relationships. The figures themselves emulate a universal image of a mother, grasping her child to the point of no air – communicating the sense of desperation for life and grief being experienced. The “dead child” is notably lighter than the rest of the image, it’s body almost ghost like, no longer an entire being. In this, the feeling of melancholy heightened by the use of raw line and heavy tonal contrast around the heads of both figures. This also becomes Kollowitz’s symbol for death. Emotionless and still, the “dead child” shows the brutal reality of death and trauma experienced within familial loss. “Woman with dead child” is based

off the artist’s personal fears and threat of loss of her son in the early 1900’s from the contraction of diphtheria, showing her own vulnerability in the face of death. To a great extent does the work of Kathe Kollowitz reflect the world in which she lived in; her prints exploring working class Germany and the threat of disease felt by her people.

VIBES

Francisco Goya is one of the most prolific painters of the 19th century. A Spanish artist, Goya was the official court painter of the Spanish Monarchy known for documenting the corruption within and being nicknamed the “watchdog” of the courts. He was a painter of the Romantic period (circa 19th century), which was reflected through many of his works. “The Third of May, 1808” 1814, is a primary example of art that captures significant historical events and aspects of the world in which they were made. The painting depicts the massacre inflicted by the invasion of Napoleon troops into Madrid a few days after their invasion.

The work itself is an incredible sized work; over 2.5m x 3.5m, the sheer size of the canvas communicates the widespread effect of the event and also the social, cultural and political importance of event

in Spain’s history. Romantic conventions are integrated through symbols of heroism and strength, both in a highly dramatized manner. Goya has done this through the figure on the left hand side, bathed in a clear white light symbolizing the idea of innocence and purity of the civilians. This also brings a familial religiouelement into the painting; with the man becoming a Christ like figure – a stance similar to that on the cross, this idea is also emulating a sense of courage and virtue, him being the only man left standing. Interestingly though, the large church in the background is in a contrastingly low light; hinting that the church is in the dark during times of war. Francisco Goya explores the “battles of humanity” and it is artists like him that document the world in which they existed.

STRUCUTRAL FRAME

The structural frame is the use of visual and technichal techniques that are used to communicate a visual language within an artwork. Those that know about and make use of a formalist language that exists outside of themselves and who represent ideas as a system of signs that communicate meaning through this frame. Symbolic objects that operate within the conventions of a visual language, material forms, motifs representing ideas, communicate meaning. codes, symbols and conventions form a commonly understood visual language that acts as a referent of the world.

e.g. Vivian Maier

VIVIAN MAIER When we talk about street photography, most of us think of names like Robert Frank, Diane Arbus or Garry Winogrand; are the iconic names, the photographers you go to when you want to see great examples of that genre of photography. There is another name, however, that is coming up more and more often, which, up until three years ago, was never heard before in the world of photography: Vivian Maier. Her photographs have won critical acclaim and are excellent examples of what street photography is all about – the images are honest, have impeccable timing, and the detail, light and composition all work beautifully together to create wholly compelling images. All the more remarkable is the fact that she rarely shared that gift with anyone.

Although it seemed every spare moment was spent wandering the streets and shooting (whether in her own Chicago neighborhoods or her travels around the world), these photographs never really saw the light of day. The Gensburgs said they did see some of them, but they were never given away. “If you wanted a picture,” Nancy (the daughter of the family) said, “you had to buy it. Someone had to want it more than she wanted it. It’s like an artist who would paint something and then hate to get rid of it. She loved everything she did.” Her photographs are an honest portrayal of people on the street. When you see her photographs, you know she was not trying to please anyone. These photographs were solely for her, whether for her amusement or enjoyment. There isn’t a frenzied, rushed look about them. They were shot by someone who was taking their time and enjoying the process. This was a woman passionate about photography exhibited and came through as a master.

The story began to unfold a few years ago when John Maloof, a Chicago real estate agent, bought a box full of negatives at an auction in 2007. He wanted them because he was working on a book about Portage Park (a neighborhood in Chicago) and he noticed these negatives seemed to have various Chicago neighborhoods in them. He was hoping he would be able to use some of them. Although none ended up being usable for his book, what he did find has changed his life. The box turned out to contain over 30,000 negatives. As he started looking through them and scanning some onto his computer, they spoke to him and began to create a portrait of the photographer who took them. He began to get curious. Who was the photographer? Could he find out? Through months of scanning negatives, processing film, interviews with people who knew her, and the limited papers he was able to find; we now have a sketchy image of the photographer behind these images.

Brianna Peterson of Mrs. Peterson Pottery, is truly lovely. After spending one sticky summer’s day g with this loveable, free-spirited artist, pretending to be an intern, there was no doubt that I had became an undying fan. Perhaps it was her charming studio situated in the Blue Mountains, the tarot cards pinned to wall, the fairy lights (hanging oh, so daintly) or perhaps the trays of soon to be glazed buttons; but everything just felt enchanted, much like her pottery. Coming from a blood line of red headed potters, the artist creates a variety of hand crafted porcelain jewellery. Among her creations are pendants and necklaces, brooches, earrings, home-wares, rings and bangles - each a unique creation designed with a touch of simple elegance and quirk. Her designs range from hand-painted animals on bangles and brooches, to delicately coloured clouds and tiny little birds.

What inspires you? I love the idea of making and wearing pieces that have power and meaning to you. Sometimes my favourite pair of boots can give me confidence, or a sentimental ring can help me through the day. I just made a black porcelain ring of the starry night sky and set it in sterling silver, to remind me of that feeling I get when I look up at the starts, the feeling that I am so small and yet the the world is limitless beyond my comprehension. That ring helps to remind me of that everyday. So i guess I am inspired by bringing the magical world into our everyday lives, I’m inspired by the idea that a ring, or a pendant can summon great power in us to help us through our day.

How did you start making jewellery? I’ve made many kinds of beaded/polymer clay jewellery since I was young, but the ceramic jewellery really didn’t happen until I bought myself a bag of porcelain and started making on the kitchen table in 2009. One of my ceramic teachers was against me using porcelain because it was ‘too unforgiving and quite expensive’ and she said I couldn’t make jewellery in her class (she thought the small pieces would stick to the kiln shelves), so I quit and bought my own set up.

Do you collect anything? In some kind of OCD way, when I get ‘into’ something, I really go for it, so over the years I’ve collected many, many things, but at the moment, it’s crystals, boots (my collection is kick-ass), and jewellery, always jewellery. What is to you is most important in your art making? The whole process is so important, even the ‘bad’ parts like failure and doubt. So I think the reverence around the entire creative process is so important, I don’t think you can be a creative robot and not go through some kind of up and down with your art. But what I really value is the alone time to be completely absorbed in my process without distraction. I am at my creative best when I am ‘in the zone’ and i completely forget what time is it or that I need to eat. That experience is total freedom to me. What’s your favorite memory as an artist? Ok, here’s a freaky one, when I was at art school we were painting self portraits and the two portraits I painted in one day were completely different to one another. One girl was kind, soft and doe-eyed, and the other was fierce, cold and a little scary. When I showed the paintings to a close friend of mine she pointed out immediately that these were the two parts of myself that I had been talking about that week, the naive one and the total ‘don’t f with me’ badass. I was trying to merge the two I guess. I had no idea what I was doing when I was painting them, but when I looked at them later, it was clear as day. I think I realized that for me, art is some freaky kind of communication with a part of myself that knows more than I do. Do you have any weird/supers$$ous rituals you go through when designing a piece? Ha ha, coffee, a good podcast/music or silence, fairy lights on (always), phone on silent, and I just say to myself, “Ok, let’s do this”.

Do you believe in fairies? I like fairies, I like the idea of fairies (though I reckon they are sometimes nasty little critters), but I’ve never actually seen a fairy, so until I do, they will forever remain a mystery, and if a fairy ever reads this and becomes angry that I may disbelieve they exist, then to that fairy I say “show up and prove me wrong”. Whats your catch phrase? SO many. I call everyone “man’ and ‘dude’ I’m sure it annoys everyone, I say ‘wicked’ all the time and I use to say ‘totes’ as a joke 8 years ago and now it’s crept in as a solid part of my vocabulary which still appalls me every time I say it. I also ‘swear like a dirty trucker’ as my husband puts it. Inventing new swear words is one of life’s little pleasures for me. It can get pretty dirty, I can out dirt the boys anytime. And.... I always say “I love shoe” to my man, because it sounds like you’re saying I love you, but you’re really just saying how much you love shoes, and I do, I really really love shoes. Why this, why ceramics? Because my little fingers can’t stop making stuff! and it’s one of the more simple, ancient forms of making. It’s literally mud being squished in your hands and what you can make from that is utterly mind-blowing. Plus, my Nanna who is now 96, was a potter for over 25 years, and she was obsessed with porcelain, so when I became totally hooked I realized there must be the potters gene running through my blood. What is your favorite thing you’ve ever made and why? Weird little hand carved wisdom teeth from porcelain. I pressed the letters of an old typewriter into the roots of the teeth and spelled out words of wisdom. They sit in a jar in my workshop and when I feel like it, I pull out a tooth with my message for the day. Creepy and fun... and they look like real teeth.

SIDNEY NOLAN In 1961, Sidney Nolan told the writer Colin MacInnes that the main ingredients of the ‘Kelly’ series were ‘Kelly’s own words, and Rousseau, and sunlight’. 1 This characteristically pithy one–liner sums up the engagement with Australian history, Australian landscape and European modern art that led Nolan to create these iconic paintings. Kelly’s own words: At the first exhibition of the 27 Kelly paintings (at the obscure Velasquez Gallery in Melbourne in 1948), the catalogue included quotations taken from a variety of historical sources. Kelly’s own words, the most celebrated record of which is the quasi–political, quasi– personal recital of grievance known as the ‘Jerilderie Letter’, fascinated Nolan with their blend of poetry and political engagement. Throughout his life Nolan was interested in literature and the visual arts and in many of his works sought to bring verbal images and pictures together. Despite the fact that this historical grounding accompanied the paintings when they were first exhibited, the series was not intended as a literal illustration of the story. It appears rather as a meditation on the circumstances of Nolan’s own life at the time and on the way in which the actions of one person could ‘change the world’. Coming as they did from an immediately post–war milieu, Nolan’s paintings had a particular and personal urgency. Originally, too, some of the paintings were reflections of a world of violence (although Nolan remarked that after a number of decades the paintings did not look particularly violent any more). The series weaves biography and autobiography together, but we can only guess at the details of the autobiographical dimension. The narrative is strongly present, beginning with a scene–setting painting which shows an empty landscape lit by an eerie light from the horizon. The paintings take us through the main events of the story of Ned Kelly and his gang – the shooting of police constables at Stringybark Creek, the ensuing police chase, the activities of the police spy Aaron Sherrit, the siege of the hotel at Glenrowan and the trial which ended in a sentence of hanging for Ned Kelly.

CULTURAL FRAMEWORK Through this frame art may be thought to be about and represent the collective interests of cultural groups, ideology, class, politics, gender, and the celebration of spiritual and secular beliefs, events and objects. From this view, meaning is understood in relation to the social perspective of the community from which it grows.

FRIDA KAHLO Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon, as her name appears on her birth certificate was born on July 6, 1907 in the house of her parents, known as La Casa Azul (The Blue House), in Coyoacan. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo (1872-1941), was born Carl Wilhelm Kahlo in Pforzheim, Germany. Frida’s mother, Matilde Calderon y Gonzalez, was a devout Catholic of primarily indigenous, as well as Spanish descent. Frida’s parents were married shortly after the death of Guillermo’s first wife during the birth of her second child. Although their marriage was quite unhappy, Guillermo and Matilde had four daughters, with Frida being the third. She had two older half sisters. Frida once remarked that she grew up in a world surrounded by females. Throughout most of her life, however, Frida remained close to her father. Kahlo contracted polio at age six, which left her right leg thinner than the left, which Kahlo disguised by wearing long skirts. It has been conjectured that she also suffered from spina bifida, a congenital disease that could have affected both spinal and leg development. In 1922, Kahlo was enrolled in the Preparatoria, one of Mexico’s premier schools, where she was one of only thirty-five girls. Kahlo joined a gang at the school and fell in love with the leader, Alejandro Gomez Arias. During this period, Kahlo also witnessed violent armed struggles in the streets of Mexico City as the Mexican Revolution continued. After the accident, Frida Kahlo turned her attention away from the study of medicine to begin a full-time painting career. The accident left her in a great deal of pain while she recovered in a full body cast; she painted to occupy her time during her temporary state of immobilization. Her self-portraits became a dominant part of her life when she was immobile for three months after her accident. Frida Kahlo once said, “I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best”. Kahlo was deeply influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, which is apparent in her use of bright colors and dramatic symbolism. She frequently included the symbolic monkey. In Mexican mythology, monkeys are symbols of lust, yet Kahlo portrayed them as tender and protective symbols. Christian and Jewish themes are often depicted in her work.

THE TWO FRIDAS (LAS DOS FRIDAS) 1929

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH THORN NECKLACE AND HUMMINGBIRD, 1940

Although this painting has a small size (about 16x24), it contains so many aspects which are symbolic to Frida Kahlo. Kahlo faces the viewer with background of large green leaves and a yellow leaf right behind her. The thorns are around her neck like a necklace which is held by a black monkey. These aspects of the work link directly to her Mexican heritage in which she was especially interested and created allusion to throughout her work. She was not painting a realistic scene but using these symbolic elements to express her feelings. In this painting the humming bird is black and lifeless. This being a symbol of Frida herself. She spent so many years bedridden and cannot bear any children. This is a painting about her suffering and her solemn endurance throughout her life.

This double self-portrait is one of Kahlo’s most recognized compositions, and is symbolic of the artist’s pain during her divorce from Rivera and the subsequent transitioning of her constructed identity. On the right, the artist is shown in modern European attire, wearing the costume she donned prior to her marriage to Rivera. Throughout their marriage, given Rivera’s strong nationalism, Kahlo became increasingly interested in indigenism and began to explore traditional Mexican costume, which she wears in the portrait on the left. It is the Mexican Kahlo that holds a locket with an image of Rivera. The stormy sky in the background, and the artist’s bleeding heart - accentuating Kahlo’s personal tribulation and physical pain. Symbolic elements frequently possess multiple layers of meaning in Kahlo’s pictures; the recurrent theme of blood represents both metaphysical and physical suffering, gesturing also to the artist’s ambivalent attitude toward accepted notions of womanhood and fertility.

Discovery of the creative process is one which is realised through personal reflection and documentation of the artist’s feeling, reflection, and stream of consciousness. The most prolific Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, essentially reflects this idea through the biographical text “The Diary of Frida Kahlo, An Intimate Self-Portrait” composed and translated by Carlos Fuentes and Sarah M. Lowe. The diary itself is an embodiment of the artist’s mind in a textual sense, giving the reader an in depth understanding of Kahlo’s realisation of creative discovery whilst communicating the complexity of creativity. The diary stresses an inexplicable sense of self reflection of her art and figuratively the ways in which it is in effect to her; communicated on page 52, Kahlo has depicted a haunting duplex image of herself that in hindsight recalls one of her earlier paintings “The Two Fridas” (1939). The drawing is a combination of underlying ink writing and layered shading of coloured pencil which overlap into an androgynous representation of herself; in relation to “The Two Fridas” the image is obviously a reflection of the previous painting. The duplicity of both images arguably representing the nature of her sense of self; whilst capturing a feeling of nostalgia and time through the evolution of the faces with the use of abstraction. Later on in the text, Kahlo reveals also the origin of “The Two Fridas” as a memory from her childhood, thus also showing reflection as a part of the artist’s creative process. It is also evident throughout the diary, through her use of abstract, colourful, and complex imagery the extent of her imagination, and how this allows her to discover herself and her tempestuous thought to a point that is identifiable and resolved. The idea that the creative process is intertwined with an emotional experience/discovery is sprung from a stream of consciousness is also highly reflected throughout The Diary of Frida Kahlo. “Who gave them the absolute “truth”? This nothing absolute – Everything changes, everything moves” (59) In this statement, a broken up, however almost constant kind of poetic line and stream of consciousness is apparent within the artist’s mind; “resonating on a psychological level, resisting logical explanation” (page 234). There is a clear sense that the diary itself is a vessel in which Kahlo uses to explore her identity and one which allows her to stimulate ideas, speculate, and re-discover, in a sense, her emotional relationship and artistic states.

In relation to her obsession with fellow artist and husband, Diego Rivera, her necessity and understanding for/of him is reflected in the abundant letters addressed to him throughout the text. “My Diego. I’m no longer alone. Wings? You keep me company. You lull me to sleep and make me come alive” (112) Through the highly evocative nature of the language and the sense Rivera is vital to her being,

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Kahlo’s devotion is likened to the natural force of life, and the wings as “an omen of things to come” (page 260). For example, her obsession is also reflected and further explored in paintings, such as her 1947 work, “August Heaven the earth Me and Diego”, which depicts Kahlo embracing a baby Diego. This work is also one of the few initially conceptualised in her diary which was then transferred into a full scale oil painting; perhaps reflecting its level of significance to the artist herself.

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CONSTRUCTING GENDER The ways we behave and express ourselves are shaped by the cultures in which we participate. Since the mid twentieth century, philosophers, social scientists, and historians have theorized that gender—the roles, characteristics, and activities that distinguish men from women—are not innate but socially constructed. Behaviors thought to be feminine or masculine differ from one culture to another and across time periods. Many artists have used their work to examine, question, and criticize the relationships between gender and society. As the feminist movement gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, artists began to challenge traditional roles of women, addressing topics such as women in domestic and public spheres, and the conventional standards of beauty. Artists have also addressed masculinity, investigating how societal pressures and mass media inform and shape our expectations of men. While many artists have tackled the social construction of gender over the last fifty years, they were not the first to do so: In the first half of the twentieth century, artists such as Claude Cahun and Frida Kahlo made self-portraits that emphasize the fluidity of gender, refusing to adhere to statically masculine or feminine.

Following a worldwide feminist movement in the later 20th century, women became a renewed topic for art and art history, giving rise to gender analysis of both artistic production and art historical discourse. Gender is to be understood as a system of power, named initially patriarchal and also theorized as a phallocentric symbolic order. A renewed and theoretically developed as well as activist feminist consciousness initially mandated the historical recovery of the contribution of women as artists to art’s international histories to counter the effective erasure of the history of women as artists by the modern discipline of art history. This has also led to a rediscovery of the contributions of women as art historians to the discipline itself. Gender analysis raises the repressed question of gender (and sexuality) in relation both to creativity itself and to the writing of art’s necessarily pluralised histories. Gender refers to the asymmetrical hierarchy between those distinguished both sociologically and symbolically on the basis of perceived, but not determining, differences. Although projected as natural difference between given sexes, the active and productive processes of social and ideological differentiation produces as its effects

gendered difference that is claimed, ideologically, as “natural.” As an axis of power relations, gender can be shown to shape social existence of men and women and determine artistic representations. Gender is thus also understood as a symboli dimension shaping hierarchical oppositions in representation in texts, images, buildings, and discourses about art. It is constantly being produced by the work performed by art and writing about art. Feminist analysis critiques these technologies of gender while itself also being one, albeit critically seeking transformation of social and symbolic gender. Women, having been excluded by the gendering discourses of modern art history, have had to be recovered from an oblivion those discourses created while the idea of women as artist has to be reestablished in the face of a an ideology that places anything feminine in a secondary position. Women are not, however, a homogeneous category defined by gender alone. Women are agonistically differentiated by class, ethnicity, culture, religion, geopolitical location, sexuality, and ability.

“I draw women and devils”

POLLY NORTON’s female characters are as 21st century as they come: fun-loving, unabashedly sexual, and doing whatever the hell they want, whether that is hanging out with devils, being devils, lazily sex surfing, or having some fun with lava lamps. The illustrator, who goes by Polly Nor, often uses nude and pastel hues to depict her characters, which seem equally vulnerable and strong. Each is drawn lovingly, but with a healthy dose of satire. And the savvy titles of her illustrations—“Nm Rly Wbu,” “Shh bby no more tears over boyz” and “We In Luv And Live Very Fabulous Lifestyles”—underline their roots in the online world.

What informs your work? Why so many devils? The devils represent the darker side of my characters. I collect a lot of old images of Halloween, as well as vintage devil posters and tattoo art. My dad also makes lots of devil masks and giant devil puppets; his studio is full of them. I guess, subconsciously, I inherited the devils from him.

Your illustrations are also pretty sexual, what makes sex a good subject matter? Sex is a subject matter that everybody can relate to and connect with on a very intimate level. The ease with which we are now able to access— increasingly hardcore—porn has become formative in the sex lives of young people, complicating an already very complex issue. This makes it Other than that I’m really into a particularly relevant and Japanese Shunga [erotica] and interesting subject matter to spend way too much time on me. the Internet, which has really influenced my work. Not to I also think the changing sound like a total creep, but my relationship people have with phone is full of screen shots of sex and images of sex is really other people’s selfies, memes interesting. Kids are learning and break-up Tweets. I draw a how to be sexual from an lot of inspiration from them. industry that is created almost entirely by men, for male pleasure alone. Through this

very warped representation of sex and relationships, young girls are being taught that they are submissive, sexual objects for men to leer over, use and control, and led to believe that their value lies wholly in how sexy they are. But then, to make things even more confusing, our society also teaches females that being too sexual is shameful and vulgar. What reactions do you get from people seeing your drawings? I find it really cool when random teenage girls comment “ME” or “SAME” when I post my illustrations online, because they are totally meant to be them. I’m glad they get it and can relate. Although having said that nothing can beat an occasional “OMG WHAT?!”

Vivienne Isabel Swire was born on the 8th of April 1941 in Tintwistle, Cheshire (now Derbyshire), England. Now known as Vivienne Westwood, she one of the most RADICAL British fashion designers and businesswoman basically ever. 430 KINGS ROAD is where Westwood’s story began; with SEX. SEX was the boutique that one could describe as the beginning of a majesty of clothing, of chaos, of rebellion and punk aesthetic. Opening in 1974, Westwood began designing clothing as a favour to Malcom McLaren - a boutique which became known for its ability to synthesise clothing and music which shaped the 1970’s UK punk scene.

The Pirate Collection of 1981 and years until 1987, marked the first of many catwalk shows by Westwood and McLaren. This offered a romantic look which burst onto the London fashion scene and ensured this collection’s place in history. This collection was essentially the first of many revolutionary collections which ultimately have shaped social, cultural and political status of the fashion industry today. Among the most significant collections of her time; is THE PAGAN YEARS. Westwood’s icons changed in this period from the previous overwhelming nature of punk rock and bondage inspired models, to ‘Tatler’ girls wearing clothing that parodied the upper class. Sporting Harris Tweed and other classic British fabrics, she encapsulated her inspiration for the 1987 Autumn/Winter collection:

1993 – 1999 Westwood was inspired by historical clothing; taking care to tailor and appropriate into a combination of ww design and proporation to French the charm of the English country side. This was: ANGLOMANIA Among the most frequent customers were the original four members of the SEX PISTOLS, with their name being apart of the promotion for the stores opening. Most shockingly however, the shop specialised in FETISH and BONDAGE wear, as well as the store front having designs confronting social and sexual taboos. Now the known as the GRANDMOTHER OF PUNK ROCK, Westwood continues to design and shock the fashion industry.

“My whole idea for this collection was stolen from a little girl I saw on the tube one day. She couldn’t have been more than 14. She had a little plaited bun, a Harris Tweed jacket and a bag with a pair of ballet shoes in it. She looked so cool and composed standing there.”

2000 – present Anglomania was put to one side, so the designer could return to a more asexual cut in which is ‘exploring the natural dynamic of the fabric by treating it like a living mass.’

ARTISTS PRACTICE: Rosalie Gascoigne; 1917-1999 Gascoigne’s unusual art career did not begin until her mid 50’s, after he move from New Zeland to Australia with her husband. Originally she was an English teacher working locally until her interest in art was sparked by the rich bushland that sorround their home; providing her with an abundance of raw material to use for her art. The artist had no formal art training, with her own interests and motivations accessed through the reading of art journals, contacts with local artists, and trips over seas. 25 years, during which time her work was exhibited widely in both Australia and Internationally. Her sculptures embody an ecovative, personal sense of memory, as they document and have been influenced directly by her sorroundings. The range of sculptures, installations, and wall pieces each an unique exploration of her move to Australia and life that was forged around it. Her work illustrates clear themes of the Australian landscape and its unique colour and spirit that is found in no other landscape. Gascoigne uses a contrast between man-made objects and things discarded from nature to comment on humanity’s impact and relationship on our environment. In a sense her work can be identified as nationalistic, the obvious representation of typical Australian rural landscapes, evoking a feeling of patriotism that reflects our national identity. Gascoigne fossicks in bushland, along highways – looking for discarded junk by the roadside . Her local tip additionally being able to provide more specific items. Once collected, the objects are cleaned and scrubbed but are essentially left as they have been discarded; nothing is added. Her desire to collect particularly old objects discarded by the environment and humans has always been at the foundation of her work. The collecting habit comes her from heritage in NZ, excursions to beaches where she would wander, picking up old objects, shells. She arranges, places and cuts her media into grid like forms that are highly organised, reflecting her spatial awareness skills.

ROLLIN SCHLICHT Schlicht’s work with the geometric abstractions sprung from the heady days of the Central Street Gallery period through to the lyrical colour field and figurative works of the 1970s. Patrick McCaughey, a leading art critic of the time deemed Schlicht the “most accomplished and versatile of the young and skilled hard edge painters working in Sydney” making Australian art “look less tired, almost exiting and certainly much more hopeful”. In 1970, Schlicht created the masterpiece work Nabis - a diffusion of light, colour and decorative form in homage to the Nabis artists of the nineteenth century. Attaining such intensity in production throughout this phase, Schlicht was considered to be one of Australia’s most prodigious artists of that period.art gallery

return to painting until the late 1990s, after he had secured a residence and studio in the bush land suburb of Mount Kuring-gai, located on the outskirts of Sydney. Within this setting, Schlicht’s strong impulse to paint led him to working in the studio most days, resulting in a highly productive and flourishing period. Investing fresh ways of using abstraction as a means of bridging the lacuna between the regional and the universal - in a complex synthesis of ideas and approaches gathered over a lifetime - these later paintings signify the artist’s finest and most compelling works. Rollin Schlicht has left an important legacy within the schema of Australian art and cultural history. As part of the Central Street core, Schlicht was instrumental in bringing international ideas to Australian shores in the 1960s, through his work as both an artist and architect.

Yet by the 1980s, Rollin Schlicht retreated from painting to pursue his original training as an architect. He did not

FEMINIST ART and the double standard Introduction to feminist art In 1971 the art historian Linda Nochlin published a groundbreaking essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? In it she investigated the social and economic factors that had prevented talented women from achieving the same status as their male counterparts. By the 1980s art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker were going further, to examine the language of art history with its gender-loaded terms such as ‘old master’ and ‘masterpiece’. They questioned the central place of the female nude in the western canon, asking why men and women are represented so differently. In his 1972 book Ways of Seeing the Marxist critic John Berger had concluded ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’. In other words Western art replicates the unequal relationships already embedded in society.

If you want to see feminism at it’s finest and are completely okay with identifying as one, the Guerrillla Girls are your go to artists. For over 30 years, the Guerrilla Girls have been exposing sexism and racism in the art world, politics and pop culture. Disguised in gorilla masks, these anonymous artists and activists challenge stereotypes and the status quo with no-holds-barred honesty and wit. Their posters, billboards, books, videos and live lectures make you laugh while making you think. The Guerrilla Girls have been keeping it real (in fake fur) for three decades. And as long as inequality exists in the art world and culture at large, they’ll keep dishing out their furry, funny brand of justice.

The development of feminist art Feminist art followed a similar trajectory to feminist theory. In what is sometimes known as First Wave feminist art, women artists revelled in feminine experience, exploring vaginal imagery and menstrual blood, posing naked as goddess figures and defiantly using media such as embroidery that had been considered ‘women’s work’. One of the great iconic works of this phase of feminist art is Judy Chicago’s: The Dinner Party, 1974–9. Later feminist artists rejected this approach and attempted to reveal the origins of our ideas of femininity and womanhood. They pursued the idea of femininity as a masquerade – a set of poses adopted by women to conform to social expectations of womanhood.

“There are various ways to take a position in any kind of revolution. Feminism itself has taken different tracks at different times…For a while you were told ‘my goodness, painting is for men, why do you paint?’ Of course, now that men don’t want to paint…” - Joan Semmel

ORGINAL WOMANHOUSE CATALOG ESSAY BY JUDY CHICAGO AND MIRIAM SCHAPIRO, CO-DIRECTORS AND THE FEMINIST ART PROGRAM Womanhouse began early in the fall of 1971, Paula Harper, art historian in the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts, inspired us by suggesting the idea. The Program was just beginning again after an experimental year at Fresno State College. We became very excited about the possibility of starting the year with a large-scale collaborative project, rather than with the extended consciousness-raising sessions that had been held when the Program was in Fresno. There the women students had spent a lot of time talking about their problems as women before they began to do any work. We wondered if those same problems could be dealt with while working on a project. On November 8 1971, 23 women arrived at 533 Mariposa Street armed with mops, brooms, paint, buckets, rollers, sanding equipment and wallpaper. For two months we scraped walls, replaced windows, built partitions, sanded floors, made furniture, installed lights, and renovated the 75-year old

dilapidated structure. One of the goals of the Program is to teach women to use power equipment, tools and building techniques. The House provided a natural context for the women to learn these things. When we found that we had to replace 25 broken windows, five women went to Redondo Beach, where the father of one of them owned a hardware store. All of the banisters in the stairway had been pulled out by vandals. The women laid in 330 dowels, then painted and varnished each one. At first the neighbors were shocked to see women in work clothes and boots sawing two-by-fours on the porch and carrying sheets of plywood up the steps. They thought that they were being invaded by hippies and they complained to the school about all of the “longhairs.” The school explained that the women usually wore their hair long. The neighbors replies: “If they’re women, why aren’t they wearing brassieres?” We know that society fails women by not demanding excellence from them.

We hung in there. We assured them that they could do it, that the House would be a success, that they were angry because they were being forced to work harder than they ever had before…that it was worth it. In the end, they came to agree with us, and they developed real pride in achieving what was, individually and collectively, an incredible feat. Each of the women, working singly or together, had made rooms or environments: bedrooms, closets, bathrooms, hallways, gardens. The age-old female activity of homemaking was taken to fantasy proportions. Womanhouse became the repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away. When you start a project like Womanhouse, especially when you’re a young woman art student, it is often difficult to take your fantasies and dreams and enthusiasms and turn them into a work of art. Our students were learning how to concentrate their energies and “push all the way.”

AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS

MARGARET OLLEY The painter Margaret Olley is noted for her colourful still life paintings and intimate interiors. Not easily swayed by changing fashions and movements of the art world, Olley chose to paint her immediate world, immersing herself in everyday subjects that reflected her interest in the personal and the intimate: The art of Margaret Olley is the art of deliberate choices. The same could be said of Olley herself, who dispels all theories of Australia’s isolation, repression of women and fashion following. She persists in painting that which is around her; one reason for this is loathing of pretence, of adopting ways of thinking that are not true to the reality of self. Margaret Olley is also known for her friendships with important Australian artists including William Dobell, Russell Drysdale - external site, Donald Friend external site and Jeffrey Smart - external site. Olley is regarded as a generous benefactor having donated many works to the Art Gallery of New South Wales - external site. Olley’s generosity to the gallery was celebrated in its Great gifts, great patrons exhibition in 1994.

She donated works of Donald Friend, Arthur Boyd, Walter Sickert, Edgar Degas - external site, Duncan Grant and Matthew Smith for this exhibition.

Margaret Hannah Olley was born on 24 June 1923 in Lismore, New South Wales. After spending some of her childhood in remote Upper Tully, south of Cairns, Queensland, the family moved to Lower Tully where her sister Elaine and brother Ken were subsequently born. However, it was not until she attended Somerville House - external site, a Brisbane girl’s boarding school, in 1935 that her talent for painting and drawing started receiving encouragement. Olley’s art teacher at Somerville House persuaded Olley’s parents to send Margaret to art school. In 1941, she started at Brisbane Central Technical College. The next year Olley moved to Sydney and enrolled at East Sydney Technical College, where her boarding school friend and fellow artist Margaret Cilento also attended. Olley graduated in 1945 with A-class honours. After graduating, Olley quickly became involved in the post-war Sydney art scene. In the late 1940s, she and Donald Friend became some of the first artists

to spend time painting in the Hill End external site area of New South Wales. William Dobell painted an Archibald Prize-winning portrait of Olley in 1948In 1949, Olley took her first international trip. She stayed in France and travelled extensively to parts of Spain, Brittany, Venice, Lisbon and London. When her father died in 1953, Olley returned to Brisbane where she designed sets - external site for the Twelfth Night Theatre - external site.

Olley travelled through north Queensland with Donald Friend in the early 1950s, and following this trip she went to Papua New Guinea. She held an exhibition of her paintings of this period in the Macquarie Galleries in 1955 to mixed critical acclaim. After the 1955 exhibition, Olley returned her focus to drawing. In 1959 she gave up alcohol, which marked the beginning of a decade of success with collectors: The colour in her work became more confident, and underpinned by stronger compositional design, although over the years a concern for the flat picture plane would become progressively supplanted by one for the form and weight of objects set within threedimensional space.

‘Triple fronted’ is an iconic example of Howard Arkley’s distinctive airbrush style. It demonstrates his preoccupation with the Australian urban landscape since the 1980s. The painting depicts the exterior of a suburban house made ultra-new and ultra-modern in its dayglo colours (Juliana Engberg, 1988). Yet beneath the dazzling finish, a sense of detachment permeates the image.

from outmoded photos from glossy magazines or real-estate brochures, Arkley would outline the composition, project the crisply defined drawing directly onto the canvas, and then paint the broader areas in flat colour. Later he would tape smaller cut-outs or stencils onto the canvas, suggesting textures and patterns which became integrated into the overall picture.

Howard Arkley is renowned for his representation of the Australian suburbs; transmuting ordinary, everyday subjects into the extraordinary. Drawing upon the visual language of advertising and home decorating magazines, his work employs techniques and colour ranges of popular culture. It reveals his abiding fascination with pop art, underpinned by a sense of deadpan humour, irony and pathos.

With their fuzzy, dreamlike quality and tonal after-effects, the airbrushed lines stylised the final look of the painting. The results were always exuberant: ‘I like the fact that the imagery looks like it’s printed; it looks like a reproduction of a painting, rather than a painting’ (Arkley quoted by Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar, 1997). The artist captured the Australian suburbs on canvas as a new zone of aesthetic inspiration. He transformed the suburban home into a new icon, suggestive of the soullessness of the Australian suburban sprawl, which became a defining feature of the Australian way of life with the post war spread of suburbia.

Beginning as an abstract painter in the 1970s, then turning to figurative painting in the 1980s, Arkley reconciled the two tendencies in his distinctive take on the suburban motif. Starting with preliminary rapidograph pen drawings, sourced

HOWARD ARKLEY

DEL KATHRYN BARTON Before she won the Archibald Prize for portraiture twice (2008 and 2013) and became famous as a painter, Del Kathryn Barton was known for her erotically charged ink and watercolour drawings. In her solo exhibition, pressure to the need, Barton exhibits ten new drawings which virtually snap, crackle and pop with the electrical buzz of overt sexuality. Although her drawings and paintings cover similar territory, Barton’s works on paper convey a raw, almost sinister and vaguely threatening sexual power that is somewhat obscured in her paintings by the sheer excess of decorative detail that she applies. While Barton’s canvases are overflowing with colour and smothered by beautification (including row after row of intense, obsessively dense dots which sit on the surface of the paintings like bedazzled jewels giving them a seductive tactile quality) her almost monochromatic drawings have a clean, surgical precision that is so sharp it feel dangerous. Most of the figures Barton draws are recognisably female, if not entirely human (several seem to have sprouted dark feathered wings). The solitary male figure (to find rest into that river, 2013) bears an uncanny resemblance to Barton’s 2013 Archibald Prize winning portrait of Hugo Weaving. In fact, although Barton’s drawings more closely resemble the work of Austrian painter Egon Schiele, they also owe something to 19th-century English illustrator’s linear dexterity and the kinky, cheekiness of his vision.

Born in 1973, Quilty grew up in the outer suburbs of north-western Sydney, where his youth typified the selfdestructive character of Australian masculinity: drugs, alcohol, and recklessness. Quilty was a willing participant in this risk-taking and destructive behaviour, but always questioned it.

Ben Quilty is an Australian artist producing rich visual images which have earned him a national reputation. Acclaimed as a portraitist, Quilty creates thickly impasto-ed canvases using vibrant colours and broad brush strokes that build up layers of paint. He works in a wide range of genres, including portraits and still lifes, but also landscapes that reflect his fascination with Australianness, a passion which has its origins in Arthur Streeton’s edict that Australian artists should look to their own backyards for inspiration.

After high school, Quilty followed his interest in art and obtained a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts. He also undertook a Bachelor of Visual Communication from the University of Western Sydney, which included a unit in women’s studies. “I became very aware that to understand [the] strange role that I was playing as a young man in my society … I had to understand contemporary feminist theory.”3 He also took a course in Aboriginal studies at the University of Melbourne.

“Every so often when I was drinking and taking drugs to the point of getting violently ill with my mates, I’d start asking them, ‘Why are we doing this?’”2 He was flirting with death as a young Australian, which he has often embodied in his artwork with images of skulls, Holden Toranas, and drunken mates.

After winning the 2002 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, Quilty went on to be a finalist in the prestigious Wynne and Archibald prizes. He won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2009 with a portrait of Jimmy Barnes; his portrait of artist, friend and mentor, Margaret Olley, won the Archibald Prize in 2011. In November 2012 he was appointed a trustee to the Art Gallery of New South Wales Trust. In October 2011, the Australian War Memorial commissioned Quilty as an official war artist in Afghanistan to interpret the experiences of Australian Defence Force personnel participating in Operation Slipper.

During the late twentieth century, non-essentialist feminist and cultural theory arguing that gender is a sociocultural construction began to emerge. As a part of this, the art historical canon was heavily criticized for its lack of female artists and widespread use of stereotypical images of women. Feminist de constructionists argued that such pictorial representations have perpetuated Western society’s conventional understanding of femininity. At the forefront was Simone de Beauvoir, who believed that gender and female identity are not the expression of biological sex, but rather are constructed within a particular cultural framework. Some female artists began to use their work as a means of re-representing female identity and de-constructing prevailing cultural expectations of femininity. One of these was contemporary media artist Cindy Sherman who, in her photographs, assumes the role of various female identities found throughout Western culture. Although Sherman asserts that feminists do not inspire her photographs, many have adopted her works as the visual manifestation of their social constructionist tenets. These photographs portray struggles over women’s identity and the way we come to know and understand ourselves through cultural mediation, and can be critically analysed using feminist social constructionist theories that challenge the notion of a fixed femininity. Sherman’s career was launched with her Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980). The series features Sherman posing as various female stereotypes from generic black and white Hollywood B films of the 1950s. She is unrecognisable from one photo to the next, changing her appearance as she tackles the different identities, each an illustration of a cultural representation of women. In Untitled Film Still #2 from 1977), Sherman plays the role of a young woman studying her own reflection. The photo visually portrays a woman assembling her identity, caught in the act of construction. It implies the lack of a fixed

identity. Though Sherman is both the woman in front of the lens and behind it, she appears masked through make up and costume, disguised to resemble familiar female stereotypes; her women are images of women, “models of femininity projected by the media to encourage imitation and identification”. Because Sherman’s tableaux are so detailed many viewers are fooled into believing that the photographs are imitations of existing movie stills. In reality, each one is completely invented by the artist. Drawing out this idea, Judith Williamson argues that Sherman’s photographs are simultaneously “a witty parody of media images of women” and “a search for female identity”. Perhaps not surprisingly then, viewers tend to project stereotypical female qualities onto the women in the photos in accordance with the costumes and surroundings chosen by Sherman. Viewers are thus able to create their own fantasies by drawing on the way women are portrayed in Hollywood movies. Popular culture has the ability to define our understandings of femininity; however these are nothing more than constructions, a series of performative acts. Feminist social constructionists are heavily indebted to Simone de Beauvoir’s famous observation that one “is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one”. Beauvoir’s distinction establishes a difference between biological sex and gender, suggesting that while biological sex is stable, femininity and masculinity are ambivalent. For Beauvoir, cultural understandings of femininity are imaginary constructs. She foreshadows Jacques Derrida’s argument that language structures are thought through a series of dualities so that concepts arise not by virtue of anything intrinsic to themselves but in relationship of difference to one another . For Beauvoir, the gender binary positions the male as the subject and the woman as the “other.”

CINDY SHERMAN PORTRAITURE:

SAINT SIMEON (under your skin) what art is supposed to do versus what it can do 50

JESSICA COCHRANE is an Early Career Artist from Canberra and currently in Sydney, Australia. Her work is a reflection upon the relationship between society and the consumption of Pop Culture, often with a focus on beauty, through painterly application over photographic images. Jessica is currently studying a BCA at University of Wollongong and working in her studio in town while simultaneously drinking an unhealthy amount of coffee. In 2014 Jesssica’s body of work ‘Pretty Ugly’ was nominated for the National Graduate Show at PICA, Perth and is regularly exhibiting work at various galleries in NSW and the ACT. 52

BRYAN LEWIS SAUNDERS Almost 20 years ago, Bryan Lewis Saunders resolved to make a self-portrait every day for the rest of his life. While such a claim could easily be dismissed as a trite conceptual gesture or publicity stunt, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s kept it up thus far, filling rows of sketchbooks with his own likeness in various media, styles, and states of mind over the years. Not every portrait is available online, but the artist has assembled albums that trace themes of love, anger, or pain over his life, that were made while on drugs, or while hiking the Appalachian trail (where, apparently, he did not see a mirror for some time).

DANIEL KORNRUMPF is a true master with â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the needle. Massachusetts based fiber artist and painter has a BFA from Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Daniel creates extraordinary embroidered portraits that look a lot like real paintings. Kornrumpf delicately threads natural skin tones and shades to replicate the organic human appearance. His attention to detail is exquisite, and each thread constitutes the unique texture and characteristic of the portrait. The intricacy and beauty of the material is a testament to the skill that Kornrumpf is able to fabricate with his approach. Even more surprising is the size of these amazing artworks. While they may look like giant paintings, in the close-up photos, in reality they are smallish creations, set against a large white background. His work has been exhibited across the northeastern US states including shows at the Cambridge Art Association and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum.

Art critic Alison Kubler argues that “It is difficult to get a sense of an artist’s practice on the basis of one work.” Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei is not a boring guy. In fact, his practice is an array of multi faceted skills, media, processes and themes which work together to create his highly political and socially and culturally relevant works. The diversity of his art, including sculpture, installation, architecture, curating and photography, reflect the need to evaluate the greater body of his works in order to get a sense of his art practice and its unique qualities. As a post-modernist like others before him, commonly questions the creation of artwork by the artists own hand – instead using collaborative and outsourced methods to create the desired effect and impact of the work. Ai Weiwei’s 2010 Sunflower Seeds is a vast installation pieces which exemplifies this notion entirely. The installation at the Tate gallery, London, is a mass assembly of porcelain seeds that were hand crafted in small scale workshops, delicately hand painted and created by traditional methods of Chinese artisans. His process in this sense is not of his own making, thus emphasising his unusual practice unassumed by his audience. ‘What you see is not what you see, and what you see is not what it means identifies the sense of realism involved in the mass scale work and the impact of first impressions in art. Sunflower Seeds like a majority of Ai’s works is a cultural commentary on the revolution of the 1960’s -70’s, where Mao was characterised as the sun and the sunflowers his faithful followers. The installation encapsulating the distinct association of the period with hopes and savage disappointments of the time, this emotive element heightened by the sorrow and stillness that is supplementary to the exhibition of the work. Table and Pillar is a 2002 sculpture by Ai that is part of his extensive ‘furniture series’ that features reconfiguration of furniture from the Ming and Qing Dynasty’s. Table and Pillar demonstrates different elements on the artists practice in comparison to Sunflower Seeds 2010. The sculptural work defies logic as it is comprised of a cylindrical wooden pillar embedded into the surface of a table; the skilful manner and fundamental construction of the sculpture demonstrates its engagement with China’s cultural past and the decimation from culture to the city. Conceived by Ai it is constructed by his studio assistants similarly to Sunflower Seeds and is also linked through the cultural elements explored in each work. Though there are evidential similarities to his body of works so far, the inherent differences are primarily the media and exhibition of the work. Yet still from solely looking at Table and Pillar it is impossible to understand the richness of his art making practice. His practice again is evidently interchangeable in Coloured Vases, 2008. Here Ai is a collector of 22 Neolithic vases from the Han Dynasty which have been pooled with contemporary fakes and rimmed with industrial paint. The question of what is authentic and what is fake in this circumstance, begins to question the status and worth of an object. Conceptually however the piece becomes authentic in itself as a work of contemporary art, with a focus on the pure form and beauty of the object. The process of attaining these vases, as well as the finality of painting them differentiates them from his previous works; adding to the notion “It is difficult to get a sense of an artist’s practice on the basis of one work.”

AI WEIWEI

DADA

ANTI-ART WORLD WAR I AND DADA ART Dada emerged amid the brutality of World War I (1914–18)—a conflict that claimed the lives of eight million military personnel and an estimated equal number of civilians. This unprecedented loss of human life was a result of trench warfare and technological advances in weaponry, communications, and transportation systems. For the disillusioned artists of the Dada movement, the war merely confirmed the degradation of social structures that led to such violence: corrupt and nationalist politics, repressive social values, and unquestioning conformity of culture and thought. From 1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, New York, Cologne, Hanover, and Paris declared an all-out assault against not only on conventional definitions of art, but on rational thought itself. “The beginnings of Dada,” poet Tristan Tzara recalled, “were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust.” Photograph of The International Dada Fair of 1920. Reproduction from the book Dada Almanach; im Auftrag des Zentralamts der Deutschen Dada-Bewegung, by Richard Huelsenbeck The climax of Berlin Dada was the International Dada Fair of 1920, the central symbol of which was an effigy of a German officer with the head of a pig that hung from the ceiling.

Dada’s subversive and revolutionary ideals emerged from the activities of a small group of artists and poets in Zurich, eventually cohering into a set of strategies and philosophies adopted by a loose international network of artists aiming to create new forms of visual art, performance, and poetry as well as alternative visions of the world. The artists affiliated with Dada did not share a common style or practice so much as the wish, as expressed by French artist Jean (Hans) Arp, “to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order.” THE ROLE OF VISUAL ART IN DADA For Dada artists, the aesthetic of their work was considered secondary to the ideas it conveyed. “For us, art is not an end in itself,” wrote Dada poet Hugo Ball, “but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.” Dadaists both embraced and critiqued modernity, imbuing their works with references to the technologies, newspapers, films, and advertisements that increasingly defined contemporary life. They were also experimental, provocatively re-imagining what art and art making could be. Using unorthodox materials and chancebased procedures, they infused their work with spontaneity and irreverence. Wielding scissors and glue, Dada artists innovated with collage and photomontage. Still others explored games,

Höch’s darkly playful Dada Dolls are quite distinct from any work created by the others in the Berlin group of Dada artists with which she was affiliated early on. Given that the Berlin chapter of Dadaists only formed in 1917, these small-scale sculptural works suggest her awareness of Dada ideas more generally from its inception in 1916 in Zurich. She was likely influenced by writer Hugo Ball, the Zurich-based founder of Dada, given Höch’s doll costumes’ resemblance to the geometric forms of Ball’s own costume worn in a seminal Dada performance at the Swiss nightclub Cabaret Voltaire. Ball achieved notoriety for his declamation there of sound poetry, which he recited while wearing a mechanical looking outfit comprised of geometric shapes.

experimental theatre, and performance. A central figure, Marcel Duchamp, declared common, manufactured goods to be “readymade” artworks, radically challenging the notion of a work of art as something beautiful made by a technically skilled artist.

The costume can be read as a commentary on contradictory feelings held towards developing technology. Technology was both revered and feared at this time, since it both aided social and economic progress but also threatened humanity with its destructive power. A common belief among Dadaists was that technology caused humans to become more machine-like themselves. One intent of the Dada movement was to use art as a satirical critique of such elements of culture that were both intimidating and absurd. As Paul Trachtman has portrayed it, in a description that is apt for both Ball’s and Höch’s work: “When Dadaists did choose to represent the human form, it was often mutilated or made to look manufactured or mechanical. The multitude of severely crippled veterans and the growth of a prosthetics industry struck contemporaries as creating a race of half-mechanical men.”

The CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK is essentially a structure, hence framework, that allows you the student to look at artworks and understand them in the context of a number of relationships. These relationships are those that have been identified as existing between an artwork, the artist, the audience and the world. Artists do not necessarily think in these terms, but produce works that can be viewed, analysed and understood in these contexts. However, they will often be aware of their audience and the contexts for exhibiting works, and can be informed by, or respond to, these contexts along with events in the world etc. Unlike the ‘frames’ that are focus oriented, the Conceptual Framework is a more generalized, umbrella viewpoint, that is holistic in it’s spirit. ARTIST WORLD Who / where / when Context Perceptions / stereotypes of Physical world artist Virtual world Individual / collaborative Imaginary world Ideas / concepts Historical world Materials / techniques Future world ARTWORK Ideas / concepts Media / techniques Permanent / non-permanent Physical / virtual / conceptual

AUDIENCE Art literate e.g. critics Non art literate Context for viewing Changes in views over time Personal views / agendas etc brought to viewing by audience

In art, you conceive beauty.