Laura Fisher: Aboriginal Art and Australian Society: Hope and Disenchantment

Review article

'Sheer Pleasure' by

Tim Rowse

Sydney Review of Books 28 March, 2017

'Her book is a superb demonstration of the value of Bourdieu’s concept of field in describing a sensibility as complex as settler-colonial auto-critique.'

 

Aboriginal Art and Australian Society: Hope and Disenchantment
by Laura Fisher
Anthem Press
312pp
Published May, 2016
ISBN 9781783085316

 

 

'Like any tightrope walker, Laura Fisher has a finely attuned sense of balance. Her clear-sighted analysis of the historical record takes her beyond the moral high ground and ideological posturing that for decades have stifled intelligent discussion of the mixed blessings of Aboriginal art’s success. This book should be essential reading for anyone to whom Indigenous art is more than a just a pretty picture.'

—Vivien Johnson, former NewSouth Global Professor, University of New South Wales and author of 'Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists'

http://www.anthempress.com/aboriginal-art-and-australian-society 

A photograph never stands alone: Teju Cole

'All images, regardless of the date of their creation, exist simultaneously and are pressed into service to help us make sense of other images. This suggests a possible approach to photography criticism: a river of interconnected images wordlessly but fluently commenting on one another.'

'A photograph can’t help taming what it shows. We are accustomed to speaking about photographs as though they were identical to their subject matter. But photographs are also pictures — organized forms on a two-dimensional surface — and they are part of the history of pictures. A picture of something terrible will always be caught between two worlds: the world of “something terrible,” which might shock us or move us to a moral response, and the world of “a picture,” which generates an aesthetic response. The dazzle of art and the bitterness of life are yoked to each other. There is no escape.'

Teju Cole, The New York Times Magazine 14 March 2017

Australian women Impressionist artists

Jane Sutherland

The mushroom gatherers (c 1895), oil on canvas, 41.8 x 99.3cm

Iso Rae 1860 -1940
Australian War Museum

A Devil, Étaples (1915) 42.4 x 26.7cm
L: charcoal and pastel on grey paper.
R:coloured chalks and watercolour on brown paper

Dinosaur prints

Huge dinosaur footprints found near Broome
Ben Collins, ABC Kimberley 27 March 2017

• A number of 1.7m-long dinosaur footprints have been found north of Broome
• The dinosaur that left the prints was the largest member of the sauropods, which includes dinosaurs such as the brontosaurus
• The area was a large river delta 130 million years ago, with dinosaurs crossing wet sandy areas

Richard Hunter lies next to a 1.7m dinosaur footprint belonging to a sauropod.

(Supplied: Steve Salisbury)

Katherine Routledge

Links
The Mystery of Easter Island
https://archive.org/details/mysteryofeaster00rout

Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Ph.D.
Writing Routledge: Her Field Notes and Their Value to Science

 http://www.eisp.org/818/

Ilana Halperin

Geological Intimacy (Yo no hana)

'This project marks the first time Halperin has exhibited in Japan and Aberdeen and continues a historical narrative between Kyushu and Aberdeen which began with the 19th Century ‘Scottish Samurai’ merchant Thomas Blake Glover.
For 20 years, Ilana Halperin dreamt about Beppu. In 1995, back in the urban geology of New York City, she found a book on the street about volcanoes. A chapter on Beppu featured – with photographs of children cooking eggs on the streets, steam coming through every crack in the sidewalk, and a pool as red as blood. In New York, steam vents erupted at every corner, but these were industrial rather than natural. She imagined a correlation between her home city and Beppu, a place with steaming vents and boiling springs, where daily life was lived and informed by a direct relationship with geothermal phenomena.'

Opening: Thursday 30th March, 6-8pm.
Exhibition runs: 31st March – 29th April 2017
Location: Peacock Visual Arts
21 Castle Street
Aberdeen
AB11 5BQ
Curator’s tour: 22nd April 2017, 3pm

Martu story of nuclear test

Lynette Wallworth and Martu elder Nyarri Nyarri Morgan

VR filmwork

Collisions 

at PICA

Nyarri reclining. Photo Credit: Piers Mussared.

Collection point for nuclear testing in Australia

Film Australian Atomic Confessions
(c) Gregory Young, Katherine Aigner, New South Wales Film & Television Office, 2005



Living with the legacy of British Atomic testing: Bobby Brown

 Silent Storm

Liz Tynan, Sixty Years on, the Maralinga bomb tests remind us not to put security over safety, The Conversation

Liz Tynan, Dig for secrets: the lesson of Maralinga's Vixen B, The Conversation

The poison crown, the charcoal ground. National Archives of Australia

Women art historians

Artsy's list of 8 historians of note:
Lucy R. Lippard - papers / 2009 Tate Papers
Kellie Jones - Art does change things
Hayden Herrera - Frida
Deborah Willis - website
Linda Nochlin - biog
Svetlana Alpers - biog
Nada Shabout - biog
Tanía Caragol - interview
Eileen Chanin - book review of Awakening: Four lives in art, with Steve Miller
Anna Gray  - biog

John Shuttleworth

Link to youtube radio The Shuttleworths 1997 ( Graham Fellows)
Follow John Shuttleworth and Ken Worthington through their day to day adventures in Sheffield and beyond ( not far beyond) with occasional appearance by Mary Shuttleworth.

L'internationale Europe

Constellation of European museums
with publications
Decolonising museums

Decolonising archives

Kate Tempest

Kate Tempest

YouTube channel

Soundcloud

Jimmie Durham

Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World
Showing a the Hammer Museum Los Angeles
Review here

You got here when..?

Link to Australian Geographic 8 March 2017 Gemma Conroy
on more proof of connection to country... 50,000 years proven through DNA of hair samples


“These findings confirm what the Aboriginal community have known all along - that their deep ties with country stretch back thousands of years,” said study co-author Raymond Tobler, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Adelaide.

Link to Australian Geographic 23 Sept 2011
'researchers found that the ancestors of Australian Aboriginals had split from the first modern human populations to leave Africa, 64,000 to 75,000 years ago. Dr Joe Dortch, a scientist at UWA, says the discovery turns on its head the existing theory that Aboriginals arrived here less than 50,000 years ago. The findings are detailed today in the journal Science.'

Map of field stations visited from 1921 to 1965. (From South Australian Museum Archives Norman Tindale Collection)

The Right to Offend is Sacred

Brook Andrew at National Gallery Victoria,
3 March - 4 June 2017
NGV Australia at Federation Square
The Right to Offend is Scared

NGV Screen grab of Key Works