Lisa Jervis, editor
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The National Gallery of Australia has more than 100,000 works in its collection - from decorative arts to photography and sculpture - but only a fraction of these can be exhibited at one time. In this series of micro-docs, former director of the gallery Betty Churcher presents an insider's guide to some of the "hidden treasures" that are rarely on public display. From her unique vantage point, she makes intriguing connections between a range of artworks and artists. These are fascinating tales - about the works themselves, the people who created them and the challenge of preserving them - and a tantalising look at some of the ideas and influences that have shaped modern art across the globe.
http://www.filmaust.com.au/hiddentreasures/2006, 15 x 5 minute episodes
http://www.filmaust.com.au/showcase/default.asp
The Holland Paper Biennial will be held for the sixth time from 10 June - 10 September 2006 and will be exhibited at two museums: Museum Rijswijk and the CODA Museum, Apeldoorn.
A wide selection of works by 22 artists will be on show throughout the premises of Museum Rijswijk, while large-scale work, installations and artist’s books by 20 artists will be exhibited at the CODA Museum.
The artists selected for this Holland Paper Biennial all work closely with the material paper. For some the starting point is pure fibre, while others make their own pulp from a mixture of fibres. A number of artists use handmade or industrially produced paper, which is worked by means of presses, perforations, folding or cutting.
It is hoped a series of tiny dots will protect thousands of Australian Indigenous artworks and artists from fraud and exploitation.
Former Northern Territory government minister Peter Toyne is an executive with Alice Springs-based company IdenteArt, which developed the technology alongside the CSIRO.
The artwork is protected by microscopic dots that stores information about the artist and the gallery or art centre where the work was made.
The information will then be stored on a national database held in trust by the Federal Government.
The dots are either sprayed onto a tamper-proof label or directly onto the works themselves.
Dr Toyne says about 12,000 Indigenous artworks are in the process of being protected by the dots.
"The glory of it is that it's so flexible that you can actually spray this code onto basketware or pottery or boomerangs or didgeridoos as well as embodying it into a label attached to the back of paintings," he said.
Dr Toyne says the industry had to develop a solution to the unethical practices in the Indigenous art world.
"There'll be a fence line thrown up around 3,500 artists and 12,000 Indigenous works of art initially, and that fence line defines safety and fair returns for their work compared to the rest of the market, which will have all of the collection of ethical and unethical trading," he said.
He says the initiative also aims to employ Indigenous workers.
"[It will] create about 125 jobs for Indigenous people, largely in remote communities," he said.
"[They will be] actually putting the authentication on the works and registering the works on a national and international database that will support the tracking of these works through the market."
For the 6th international Biennial of Engraving, 65 participants were chosen out of 500 files and 50 different countries. The expansion to some regions never represented so far, strengthens the international position of this Biennial : 22 countries will be represented by one or more artistic ambassadors. The admission, without age limit and open to all technics permits the presentation of a wide panorama of the art of printmaking as it is practised today, through 400 works on paper exhibited at the MAMAC.
The Festival of Engraving, proposing about thirty activities, testifies of the vitality of the art of printmaking and confirms at the same time a well anchored tradition in the Liege region since the 16th century.
http://cabinetdesestampes.be/spip.php?article53
Author: Dr Juliet Peers, feature
The image used on the poster for Alexis Hunter's show Radical Feminism in the 1970s seems almost a parody of aggressive masculinity.
It's a side-on shot of a male torso, naked from the waist up, leather trousered below, hand on hip holding a cigarette, New York's twin towers in ghostly shadow behind.
Treating the male as a sexual object was unusual in the early 1970s when the photo was taken.
"There is always a journey to making a piece of work," says Hunter, now back in her home in Camden, London, after spending the summer in New Zealand.
The photos were source material for a photo-realist painting now owned by the Auckland City Art Gallery, and on loan to a survey of feminist art touring North America. Her original impetus was a study of European tattoos embarked on when she arrived in London in 1972, after studying painting at Elam.
"I heard a lecture at the Royal Academy which described tattooing in a very denigrating way - that it was primitive. I was angry because I know from New Zealand culture that tattooing was a very important part of Maori social structure.
"After the lecture I decided to go out on to the street and take photos of people with tattoos, and ask why they had them. That was the project. Sometimes you do something because you are interested, and the art comes later."
When she showed the tattoo photos, she was challenged for taking sexist photos of men.
"That's because when you take a close shot of an arm by the side, you take in the pelvis. I thought, how can you take a sexist picture of a man if men have that power in society? Sexism comes from being in a position to look at a person and make them into an object. Art history does that to women."
Hunter looked further at the new feminist ideas about what words like sexism mean.
"It was just at the beginning of talking about those things. A lot of us were working in the dark. People think you get art from ideas but the fact is the art is the idea. Sometimes the painting is the theory. The way people look at it completes the theory."
Interest in early feminist art has prompted requests for Hunter to dig into her archives.
"There was a lot of interest a couple of years ago in early conceptual art, so the feminist art came just after that and is seen as part of that movement," she says.
"In the 1970s we felt empowered to change society, and thought we could do so by making art. People now don't feel that, and they want to learn how we did it."
Part of how Hunter did it was remembering the lessons of her tutor and mentor at Elam, painter Colin McCahon.
"Though my work does not look like his, I think it follows his ethics in the sense that you have to see yourself as a social being in society and that you have responsibilities as an artist."
She says the Art of the Feminist Revolution show, which opened in Los Angeles last month, "has people so excited because the work is so raw, so hard, so to the point. Some of the stuff cannot be surpassed in the way of bravery or breaking taboos".
Artists like Hunter used themselves as raw material to explore how the culture controlled how women could look and behave. "We were ridiculed in the press. We couldn't get work."
She says friends coming to the end of tenured careers in art schools have offered her sorts of apologies for not getting her jobs. "They said, 'We couldn't, you were a feminist artist'."
She also encountered problems getting her images printed, including one of a woman cutting her nails with a razor blade and another of a woman burning a pair of silver high heel shoes.
"A few were out of focus because I was using focus to suggest intellectual awakening. When I took them to the printer, they would refuse to do them because they suspected they were feminist work. They would claim they could not print out of focus work. I would have to take the manager out for a drink and get them done at night."
The Whitespace show is a small selection from a large survey last year at the Norwich Gallery in England.
What: Radical Feminism in the 1970s, by Alexis Hunter
Where and when: Whitespace Gallery, 12 Crummer Rd, to April 14
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=544&objectid=10432382
Who would have thought that Australian women had the vote 60 years before the UK and USA? Similarly, Australian women artists have led the way in feminist art.
Culling materials and subjects from the streets, Swoon creates paper cutouts and installations that re-envision the experience of urban life. Inspired by historical sources ranging from German Expressionist woodblock prints to Indonesian shadow puppets, this New York–based artist has covered the city streets with her work for over six years. She has exhibited most recently in P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center’s Greater New York 2005. In the summer of 2006, she participated in the “Miss Rockaway Armada” on the Mississippi River.
Introductory music by the Miss Rockaway Armada band: Download MP3 file (12 min/12MB)
Presentation and conversation: Download MP3 file (76 min/70MB)
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