Helen Hughes
The historiography of Australian art has, from the very first attempts, been vexed by the notion of ‘Australia’. Like a parasite, this name, which is a metonym for a powerful ideolog...
Anneke Jaspers and Wayne Tunnicliffe, Art Gallery of New South Wales , Lisa Havilah and Nina Miall, Carriageworks, Blair French, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia
The National: New Australian Art is grounded in an ethos of collaboration: between institutions and curators, with artists and writers. As the many participants in this landmark ne...
Anneke Jaspers, Art Gallery of New South Wales
In his last body of work, Home Décor (after M. Preston) (2012–13), the late, great conceptual painter Gordon Bennett looked back to an earlier moment in Australian...
Nina Miall, Carriageworks
In 1900, a year before Federation, the Australian surveyor and anthropologist R.H. Mathews, a contentious figure in this newly emerging field on account of his lack of academic credentials, publ...
Blair French, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia
The artists exhibiting in The National 2017: New Australian Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), while employing a diversity of media and with a si...
Sunil Badami
Like many words, ‘national’ is at once too immense, too diffuse, too complicated and contradictory, and somewhat inadequate. Where d...
Daniel Browning
The nation is a contested site, just as Australia may be a foreign country. It is possible to speak of multiple nations within the Australian state, abutting each other, and ...