By Eloise Grills — 2 July, 2019
In the pre-Jackie period, when I was on Tinder, my friend and I engaged in a contest to see how many people we could sleep with. I only amassed four bedpost notches before I quit. I am a bad dater. I hate going out, sleeping in beds that aren’t mine. …
By Neha Kale — 21 June, 2019
PARADISE Nightclubs are places, but they are also ideas. For 50 Cent, ‘the club’ is the logical nexus of hedonism and capitalism (You can find me in the club/ bottle full of bub). Kendrick thinks it’s a bad habit (Don’t say I didn’t tithe for you/ or push the club to the side for you)….
By Amelia Zhou — 18 June, 2019
I am dancing in the club and thinking how many times I’ve gone out wishing I’d stayed in. Earlier, I read Summer Kim Lee’s article on obliged forms of sociability. Her conception of ‘staying in’ is a refutation against the exhaustive demand to be active in any given moment. It can be a politics of…
By Tyler Patterson — 11 June, 2019
On the first day of spring in 1914, a train tore through the Australian countryside en route to Toowoomba from Brisbane. Belching smoke and swallowing shovelful after shovelful of coal, it carried the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who was touring Australia with the British Association for the Advancement of Science Congress, and his childhood friend—the artist-playwright…
By Paul Kelaita — 10 May, 2019
Carnivals are loud, busy, frenetic places where there seems to be too much to do and too much to see. The rowdy sound of games, rides and children yelling; the wafting smell of quick and greasy food; the flash of lights and costumes. It is a sensorium of plenty, and of abandon. Tom Polo’s exhibition…
By Hannah Jenkins — 3 May, 2019
The difference between light and truth: Photography captures light and shadow. The camera captures what’s there in front of it, so, for a time, photography was near synonymous with truth. Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer’s black and white photography tears apart this assumption with both clinical precision and grotesque abandon. His portraits and still lifes appear to show…
By Chelsea Lehmann — 12 April, 2019
‘Judge me, please don’t judge me’ is the subtitle of Manuela Ammer’s catalogue essay on the topic of eccentric figuration, which accompanied the exhibition Painting 2.0: Expression in the information age (2015/16) at the Brandhorst Museum. In this essay, Ammer frames a discussion of Nicole Eisenmann’s work around the concept of the painted body as…
By Barnaby Smith — 10 April, 2019
For Lawrence English, sound is seeing. Or to put it more accurately, his work is predicated on the belief that analysing, repurposing, and even distorting sound can reveal hidden or obscured patterns behind cultural phenomena. Sound is a tool for searching. This thinking has always informed his varied (and consistently collaborative) career as an avant-garde…
By Amelia Zhou — 5 April, 2019
What does home teach us? This is the question that consolidates in my mind after a five-hour train ride from Sydney to Cootamundra, the plains as unfamiliar to me as I am to them. The landscape is dominated by yellows and greens dulled by the sun; the roads are double the width of those in…
By Prue Gibson — 29 March, 2019
Artist Janet Laurence’s multi-species survey exhibition has now launched at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Having exhibited work for over thirty years, Laurence presents a kind of secret charm that is difficult to define. It’s a combination of serious earnestness, childlike joy and fearful knowing. By this I mean that she has read the…