Tony Bond, artistic director of the recent Sydney Biennale suggests that since the staging of the first Biennale in 1973 sculpture and other three dimensional art have been actively promoted in Sydney.
1993 is the 20th annniversary of Sculpturscape '73 an outdoor exhibition that happened in Mildura, a small city on the Victorian side of the Murray River, distant from the state capitals of eastern Australia.
This article is about sculpture in Western Australia and how efforts have been made in the recent past to establish the nature of its practice and the identity of its practitioners.
Sculpture is not like painting because it is not flat and does not raise the question of mimesis in the same way. A theory of sculpture must therefore be, somewhere at its deep foundations, different from a theory of painting. Not just a bit different: a lot different.
You could say that much of the most interesting and demanding artwork being done today is being done by women....There are many new languages in the work of contemporary women sculptors. Important overview of the Mildura Sculpture Triennials in terms of women's representation. Great photos!
With commissions over the past year at Southgate, the Great Southern Stand at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Swanston Walk and others, Melbourne's image is undergoing change. Renowned for its Victorian buildings and innumerable memorial sculptures of kings, queens, politicians and military leaders, Melbourne is now seeing contemporary sculpture in unexpected places. (Ken Scarlett)
Minimalism is still misunderstood, not only because its manifestations are so various as to strain the word's usefulness as a blanket term, but more importantly because it stood at the confused fissure between modernism and post-modernism; from this stems the lively contradictory implications of Richard Dunn's art practice.
Darwin has a burgeoning arts community which produces a unique body of visual art related to festivals and events. Aboriginal culture and proximity to Asia and the Pacific have influenced the work being produced by these artists.
This special issue does not attempt to be a national survey of sculpture. It has focussed on various centres and given others less attention, partly to balance previous material in earlier issues of Artlink of which the following are notes by way of summary.
Examination of the role of dance masks in Papua New Guinea culture. The author was in the area to invite 2 Sulka men to Adelaide to dance hemlaut and susu masks at the Pacific Arts Symposium in April 1993. Coloured photos of the dance masks.