Book Review: Piano Man

Ken Unsworth is one of the great maverick figures in Australian contemporary art. He became an artist almost by accident and never developed a template style. Although he spent much of his life teaching, he has been generally scathing in his assessment of art schools. Throughout his art practice, he has walked a fine line between the more esoteric art forms embraced by the biennale and triennial art circuits, rich in cultural capital, and more democratic art forums, such as Sculpture by the Sea, characterised by its mass appeal and huge audiences. Unsworth’s suspended river stones, Suspended stone circle II, 1974-77, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, remains a great crowd drawcard and one of the most popular works in the gallery’s collection

A Celtic Legacy

Sasha Grishin discusses an exhibition which explores the resilient presence of the Irish here and their influence on Australian lif

A new history of Australian Art: Dialectic between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Art

The recent public advent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and its national and international recognition has lead to a major reassessment to the process of writing Australian art. This major commissioned history is part of that process. Whereas earlier histories practiced cultural apartheid, this one traces the active dialectic between Indigenous and non-Indigenous art forms. Australian Art: A history will fulfil a real need for an inclusive and representative historical account of the development of a distinctive art culture. It also will differ from earlier studies in its adopted methodology for the discussion of Australian art. Traditionally the history of Australian art has been viewed as that of a European outpost which was established in the 18th century and which developed over the subsequent 220 years and it has been discussed mainly in reference to changes in visual culture predominantly in Europe and later in the United States. The methodological contention in this study is that non-Indigenous art in Australia has always been to some extent involved in a dialectic with Indigenous art and that this together with the multicultural composition of the population as well as the country�s proximity to Asia, have all contributed to a visual culture which is unique and distinctive. This book sets out to examine all major expressions of visual culture in Australia � painting, sculpture, the graphic arts, the applied arts, installation art and digital art � in the light of a continuous dialectic between Indigenous and non-indigenous art, one, which it is argued, has continued to a varying extent for the duration of European settlement