AustLit
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Welcome to the “trans” issue as it is cryptically called (meaning across and beyond in Latin). The aim of this issue is transnational as much as transcultural: to explore relations between Indigenous contemporary artists across the world. So focused are we on the Australian context for Indigenous art that when it comes to aligning ourselves with international art, in both historic and contemporary contexts, we too often deprive ourselves of that defining peer‑to‑peer agency that permits new perspectives. When we step outside of this internal viewpoint to project ourselves internationally, as in the occasion of the representation of two high‑profile Indigenous artists in the national pavilions of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand for the 57th Venice Biennale, this rite of passage clearly becomes apparent. It is one well‑served by Tracey Moffatt and Lisa Reihana, whose elegant visual narratives demonstrate a form of this trans‑aesthetic, appropriate to taking on Europe and the world.' (Editorial introduction)
Contents
* Contents derived from the 2017 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
-
The Masque Ball of Tracey Moffatt,
single work
column
(p. 16-21)'One of Tracey Moffatt’s lasting cinematographic memories, as she told me, is of films with harbour scenes, of working ports, rough workmen, the coming and going of exotic people, fogs, and foghorns. Tracey Moffatt’s photographic and film work commissioned for the Australian Pavilion in Venice responds to this landscape of cinematic time.' (Introduction)
-
Into the Transpocene : The Future of Indigenous Art,
single work
criticism
(p. 28-34)'Black Is The New White is Nakkiah Lui’s romantic comedy commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company for the May/June 2017 season. It milks laughs from a stereotypical narrative of a privileged young black woman bringing her inappropriate boyfriend home to meet her parents. The twist— although not much of one these days—is that the boyfriend is white. Black Is The New White is also the name of the 2007 autobiography by African American comic genius Paul Mooney. We can reach further back to the early 1990s: to Gordon Bennett’s sweet watercolours of black angels and his more ghoulish messenger between worlds, the large scarified Altered Body Print (Shadow Figure Howling at the Moon) (1994) with its mashed binaries and grotesque white/black, male/female, human/ animal totemic‑like monster. Before Bennett there was Tracey Moffatt’s sweet black angel Jimmy Little on the royal telephone to heaven, an ironic serenade to her grim horror film, Night Cries (1989), which unsettled normative understandings of black/ white relations with chilling effect.' (Introduction)
-
Emily Kame Kngwarreye : The Impossible Modernist,
single work
criticism
(p. 42-49)'Art critic Robert Hughes made the assessment that Aboriginal art was the last great art movement of the twentieth century.1 It started at the Aboriginal community called Papunya, in which Aboriginal men had been painting on canvas for the outside market with great success since the 1980s. The Papunya art style as it became known, sometimes compared to forms of Western modernism - from abstract expressionism to minimalism and even conceptual art - presented a comparison that was rarely taken literally, although some critics of the 1987 Dreamings exhibition in New York did wonder if the Aboriginal artists had been appropriating New York art. But when it came to the late paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, critics really did start to question the relationship between modernism and Western Desert painting, ascribing to her the genius and expressive freedom associated with the masters of Western modernism.' (Publication abstract)
-
Collisions: The Martu Respond to Maralinga,
single work
criticism
(p. 66-69)'Shaping the globally‑inflected histories of today are endless encounters between worlds. They can be seen across Australia in the exchanges between Aboriginal and settler groups and they paint myriad stories of who we are - some told, many untold. These cross‑cultural collisions are striking motifs for artists and storytellers, running like veins through our collective body, further amplified as the last generation of pre- and first‑contact Aboriginal people pass away. Not only is there a mutual desire to express and to hear these stories but there is an urgency to archive them for the world.' (Publication abstract)
-
Becoming-with and Together : Indigenous Transgender and Transcultural Practices,
single work
criticism
(p. 76-81)'Blak Dot Gallery's Midsumma show 'Tran‑Sational' uses, as one of its key video installations, a montage of archival interviews of trans and gender‑diverse Indigenous community members. The interviews are cut together from footage taken during the Kunghah retreat held in November, a gathering that hosted gender‑diverse Indigenous people from all over Australia and ended on Transgender day of Remembrance. The video installation, much like the event itself, is a reminder that the trans identity is a culturally contingent one; a well‑travelled word. For Indigenous trans peoples, there is a struggle to understand our gendered and sexual identities in relation to colonialism, to our relationships with religion, and our place within the queer community at large.' (Publication abstract)
-
Indigenous Perspectives on Museum Collections,
single work
criticism
(p. 88-91)'I can remember the first time I was taken into a museum storeroom. I remember it being still, organised, open and unashamed. I could see countless rows of shelving stretching from the floor to a ceiling so high that the optical illusion it created masked its vastness. The air was unmoving, the smell musty and organic. When my eyes adjusted to what lay on these shelves I had trouble taking it all in: wood, feathers, stone, bark, ochre worked in countless combinations. I searched for the clues which would guide me to material from north‑western New South Wales, to my Father's country, and my ngurrambaa (Yuwaalaraay) or "family land".' (Publication abstract)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 16 Jun 2017 08:53:06
Common subjects:
Export this record
