Arts Features International Online

Arts Features International our arts writing and cultural research media platform has gone online.

It's a nail biting moment taking off and hoping to take flight as we know well at the Daily Fugue.

Will it fly or will it fall, or fail? Will their be a fake crash landing scare, or maybe it's just not that big a deal. Arts Features International is not a new venture, this is its 10th anniversary, so much of the site will be devoted to archives and collecting essays to publish in book form.

Here is a link to a new interview I have just done with Alex Wisser, director of Cementa_13.   http://artsfeatures.com/.  

Let us know what you think!

Ruth Skilbeck

Arts Features International Online

Arts Features International our arts writing and cultural research media platform has gone online.

It's a nail biting moment taking off and hoping to take flight as we know well at the Daily Fugue.

Will it fly or will it fall, or fail? Will their be a fake crash landing scare, or maybe it's just not that big a deal. Arts Features International is not a new venture, this is its 10th anniversary, so much of the site will be devoted to archives and collecting essays to publish in book form.

Here is a link to a new interview I have just done with Alex Wisser, director of Cementa_13.   http://artsfeatures.com/.  

Let us know what you think!

Ruth Skilbeck

'Make Art Not War': What Are We? Asylum Debate and Cultural Identity in Australia

Just as relevant today are the themes of my article, 'Make Art Not War' (2008) a piece of experimental arts writing written in the 'voice' of my alter ego, art critic and abstract expressionist artwork, Rosa Viereck, in a column entitled Pink Oblong (Rosa Viereck is the title of a painting by Vasily Kandinsky), first published in HomepageDaily.com, on Australia Day 2008. I wrote this piece after interviewing refugee poet-musician Mohsen on his experiences of exile and  his life after detention in Australia. In what I term the fugal modality of writing the 'voice' of the text is dissociated from the author (me). The fragmented voice of Rosa Viereck, abstraction personified, drew a connection between unsettled Australian artists, Indigenous women activists, and exiles in detention in the desert.

PINK OBLONG - MAKE ART NOT WAR

Australians recently celebrated another year of one version of an Australian story, and after the first step in the process of reconciliation, ROSA VIERECK considers what it means to be an Australian and looks to Sidney Nolan and indigenous peoples for inspiration.

Australia, or Invasion, Day, makes me think of geometric shapes. Black squares. White cubes. Me. In a gallery. A pink oblong. My own shape. Rosa Viereck: pleased to meet you.

I’m secure in my identity. But sometimes just the sound of the word Australia, let alone its abstraction, can make me question who I am. “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” was modernist artist Paul Gauguin’s heartfelt cry in ‘French’ Tahiti. His painting’s plea becomes an epithet to colonial identity confusion.

Here, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, it’s a black square screen-head. Atop a black rectangle. I am looking at the symbolic shape of what is known as an icon of Australian identity art. Sidney Nolan’s outlaw: Ned Kelly. Riding through a desert. Gun in hand. In reverse. A symbol of quixotic alienation: human form reduced to a black abstraction in the red heart. White settler alienation in a black helmet. What are we? What does it mean to be Australian? It’s a familiar refrain. Can we find ourselves through Art? I am here to tell you, yes, and lose ourselves as well. Look at me! And look at Nolan in the retrospective at the AGNSW.

Looks like he found out a thing or two as he lost himself in a hallucinogenic landscape of his own perception. About the shifting shapes of ‘settler’ identity. The outlaw. The colonial law enforcers.

But things have changed since Nolan painted his Kelly series in the late 1940s. The modern era has shifted to postmodernism. Multiplicity abounds. Polyphony rocks. In the new era of protest, outlaws are replaced by activists. Fighting for social justice for outsiders ‘othered’ by the ex-colonial law makers. Refugees in detention. Indigenous communities. Stranded in 21st century deserts. Deprived of health and education services settler society calls basic. When activists faced charges –later dropped – of helping refugees escape the country to a third country of refuge, writer and refugee supporter Tom Keneally wrote to those facing court: “The better angels of Australia are singing with you.”

My new favourite book. Another Country, writers in detention, edited by Tom Keneally and Rosie Scott. I open at random, and read:

In the midst of the parched desert

no one can come with us

We cannot journey hand in hand

There is no green place to rest the eye

and the scorching wind of destiny lashes at our backs

A call to DIMIA is like the smell of rain in the desert

Hope like black clouds, building in our thirsty hearts

turns quickly into grief

Photograph of Mohsen © Ruth Skilbeck

A cry from the heart from Mohsen Soltany Zand (pictured above). Persian poet, political exile. Four years in detention, in the desert; now a permanent resident.

Photograph of Aunty Shirley © Ruth Skilbeck

More passionate words come into my mind. Aunty Shirley (pictured above), Aboriginal activist, speaking at a 2007 Human Rights Day Rally, in Sussex Street, Sydney.

“Aboriginal women are the backbone that has built this country. They have lain on their backs and been raped and given birth to white fella’s babies and had their children taken away and grieved for their children. And their blood is in this city and in these buildings. We won’t go away. Will we stay around? Come back next year...”

These voices know deep pain, and endurance. They are the voices of suffering and survival. They have travelled a long way through the desert to be here. We are all travelling through this country.

What does it mean to be ‘Australian’? Why not rephrase the question to: What does it mean to be here? Or not. Nolan knew, too. Look at his hallucinatory deserts. Razed red earth. Ribbed chasms like the chambers of a dissected heart. Filled with floating motifs. Falling horses. Leda; the swan. Aliens. Dislocating dreams. From a fractured world. Shifting shapes. Of being/seeing. Nolan said he hit upon the black square, after coming out of the army and the war. When he wanted to do “something that was opposite to the sunlit bush...and would explain something of what was happening to me”. In a landscape of cultural trauma, he saw something sinister and menacing in the gun toting black square. To do with shaken identity.

In the great southern land we are all at heart dislocated, invaded and invaders. Together, we can reshape the future. Through mutual acceptance of many colours and shapes. Reconciliation. Make Art not War.

Copyright © 2008-2011 Ruth Skilbeck

'Gazing Boldly Back and Forward: Urban Aboriginal Women Artists and New Global Feminisms in Transnational Art'

To date, surprisingly little has been published on urban contemporary Aboriginal art in comparison to 'desert' contemporary Aboriginal art. Yet it is a movement - of profound social, political, cultural and artistic significance - that has gained momentum in Australia, and attracted increasing international attention, since the late 1980s. I begin to explore the art and culture of this movement focusing on women artists, in the essay ‘Gazing Boldly Back and Forward: Urban Aboriginal Women Artists and New Global Feminisms in Transnational Art' just published in The International Journal for the Arts in Society. Discussion in the essay focuses on the work of prominent Australian Indigenous artist Fiona Foley's work, including an interview I conducted with Fiona Foley at her retrospective 'Fiona Foley-Forbidden' (2009-10) at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art; the works of artists in the the exhibition Women's Art, Women's Business at Sydney College of the Arts, July 2010; and the context of the Boomali Aboriginal Artist Co-Operative, which Fiona Foley co-founded in 1987. 


I gave a conference presentation based on my research for this paper, at the International Arts in Society Conference at Sydney College of the Arts, last July 2010, which coincided with the Sydney Biennale where Fiona Foley had an installation on Cockatoo Island.

The project was assisted by an Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts New Work grant.

Here's the abstract of the paper:

Gazing Boldly Back and Forward: Urban Aboriginal Women Artists and New Global Feminisms in Transnational Art

By Ruth Skilbeck

Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian women contemporary artists made an important contribution to the foundational impacts and ongoing significance of feminism and the 1970s Women’s Art Movement on all that has followed in international contemporary art. Whereas distance from Euro-centric culture was once lamented by Australian settlers as a tyranny, critical distance from colonial power discourses has functioned as a strength for women artists who use their art to gaze back not only at colonial oppression of Indigeneity, but also at western art’s historical hegemonic male representation of women in the public cultural domain. Women artists do this by representing themselves. Fiona Foley, one of Australia’s foremost artists and a curator, academic and writer, has since the 1980s in her art confronted political issues of Indigeneity and identity as a woman in a cultural history of trauma and dispossession- bearing witness to her cultural heritage as a descendent of the Badtjala people, who were forcibly removed from K’gari or Thoorgine (Fraser Island) in the early twentieth century. The paper applies an innovative multimodal fugal critical analysis – drawing on psychological and musical meanings of fugue – to discuss Foley’s work; the paper draws on an interview the author conducted with Fiona Foley at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, including photographs of the artist and images of her work. The analysis focuses on Foley’s site specific installation at Cockatoo Island at the Sydney Biennale 2010, and her recent survey show at the MCA.

Keywords:

Australian Contemporary Women Artists, Urban Aboriginal Australian Artists, Indigenous Art, Global Feminisms, Fugal Writing

International Journal of the Arts in Society, Volume 5, Issue 6, pp.261-276. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 1.078MB).

'Gazing Boldly Back and Forward: Urban Aboriginal Women Artists and New Global Feminisms in Transnational Art'

To date, surprisingly little has been published on urban contemporary Aboriginal art in comparison to 'desert' contemporary Aboriginal art. Yet it is a movement - of profound social, political, cultural and artistic significance - that has gained momentum in Australia, and attracted increasing international attention, since the late 1980s. I begin to explore the art and culture of this movement focusing on women artists, in the essay ‘Gazing Boldly Back and Forward: Urban Aboriginal Women Artists and New Global Feminisms in Transnational Art' just published in The International Journal for the Arts in Society. Discussion in the essay focuses on the work of prominent Australian Indigenous artist Fiona Foley's work, including an interview I conducted with Fiona Foley at her retrospective 'Fiona Foley-Forbidden' (2009-10) at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art; the works of artists in the the exhibition Women's Art, Women's Business at Sydney College of the Arts, July 2010; and the context of the Boomali Aboriginal Artist Co-Operative, which Fiona Foley co-founded in 1987. 


I gave a conference presentation based on my research for this paper, at the International Arts in Society Conference at Sydney College of the Arts, last July 2010, which coincided with the Sydney Biennale where Fiona Foley had an installation on Cockatoo Island.

The project was assisted by an Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts New Work grant.

Here's the abstract of the paper:

Gazing Boldly Back and Forward: Urban Aboriginal Women Artists and New Global Feminisms in Transnational Art

By Ruth Skilbeck

Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian women contemporary artists made an important contribution to the foundational impacts and ongoing significance of feminism and the 1970s Women’s Art Movement on all that has followed in international contemporary art. Whereas distance from Euro-centric culture was once lamented by Australian settlers as a tyranny, critical distance from colonial power discourses has functioned as a strength for women artists who use their art to gaze back not only at colonial oppression of Indigeneity, but also at western art’s historical hegemonic male representation of women in the public cultural domain. Women artists do this by representing themselves. Fiona Foley, one of Australia’s foremost artists and a curator, academic and writer, has since the 1980s in her art confronted political issues of Indigeneity and identity as a woman in a cultural history of trauma and dispossession- bearing witness to her cultural heritage as a descendent of the Badtjala people, who were forcibly removed from K’gari or Thoorgine (Fraser Island) in the early twentieth century. The paper applies an innovative multimodal fugal critical analysis – drawing on psychological and musical meanings of fugue – to discuss Foley’s work; the paper draws on an interview the author conducted with Fiona Foley at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, including photographs of the artist and images of her work. The analysis focuses on Foley’s site specific installation at Cockatoo Island at the Sydney Biennale 2010, and her recent survey show at the MCA.

Keywords:

Australian Contemporary Women Artists, Urban Aboriginal Australian Artists, Indigenous Art, Global Feminisms, Fugal Writing

International Journal of the Arts in Society, Volume 5, Issue 6, pp.261-276. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 1.078MB).