Category: Features & Essays
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Sydney Review of Books | A Common World: Review of Bri Lee’s ‘Who Gets to Be Smart’
When I was a teenager, I was asked to do something no teenager really wants to do: watch my step-cousin perform in her high school production. At my cousin’s school this was called a ‘play’ and we went to the school ‘theatre’. At my school we had the ‘musical’ which happened once every two years…
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Disclaimer | Iterations: John Nixon
Not far from where St Kilda beach forms a firm line against the land, inside the Palais Theatre, which is suspended in the throes of young energy and blatant desire, housing the new strutting contempt of rock’n’roll, John Nixon is watching the Rolling Stones. It’s 1965 and he’s fifteen years old, sitting in the second…
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The Age | Seeing like Jeffrey Smart: how empty streets gave me a new insight
There was both rain and sunshine; buildings and roads appeared brighter than the darkened clouds. In a strange stillness, I was the only figure walking through an awkward meeting point of freeways and overpasses in South Melbourne. It felt entirely real, and unreally cinematic. I thought of two images: the first was a girl in…
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The Age | Artist Danila Vassilieff was selling his house. There was just one catch
When Elizabeth Hamill visited Stonygrad in Warrandyte in 1947, the owner agreed to sell the house on one condition: that he came with it. Danila Vassilieff, a Russian emigre artist, had built the house by hand using rocks quarried from his property in the late 1930s. Hamill was beautiful, intelligent and wealthy. Vassilieff, a flamboyant…
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The Age | Problematic or romantic? Why self-taught artists don’t quite fit
If you ask Julian Burnside – the venerated lawyer, human rights advocate and art collector – why he bought the work of Samraing Chea, there’s a pause. “Well, Samraing’s drawings spoke to me in a way that was interesting,” he explains. “He showed me an idea of the world as he sees it – and…
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The Age | Where intimacy happens
Since art can be a mediating force for how a person can understand themselves and their life, and since life right now involves a perpetually interior existence between three or four rooms, I have lately been imagining myself as one of Prudence Flint’s painted women. Hunched and eating a lonely bowl of soup; completing the…
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Felt Journal |The Sounds of Love
A young singer and musician has recently released her first solo album full of love songs. It is, she says, about “all kinds of love.” The album synopsis signs off: “And really, in times like these, who doesn’t need more love songs?” I kept re-reading this slinky albeit common maneuvering; the way love songs metamorphose…
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Meanjin | Is Art Pop? On Darren Sylvester’s Promises
In the 1997 film The Castle, the obvious-talking young narrator named Dale Kerrigan has a totalising faith in the promise of shared, familial love. Even the threat of potential house demolition, the material site of this ‘togetherness’, merely commits him further to the promise. Yet we only know this promise once it flickers; once it passes to…
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Swampland Magazine | Under the Underground: Audiopollen Social Club
Do you remember T.A.D.? Hanging from the ceiling, swinging from beam to beam, conducting a bizarre aerobic exercise. Some people thought he was going to die: it was thrilling. There was a band playing below—was it Blank Realm? Joel Stern? Or was it simply T.A.D., dangling on his own? Or how about this one: when…
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Difficult Fun | Kylie Minogue: Fragments of a watery icon
A French house-inspired verse shimmers along, gloating with the smoothness of its own repetitive, euphoric possibility; a woman pouts, sending out her songs amongst a strawberry-coloured wash, entirely aglow as she sings only about the sweetness of desire, never the humiliation; another version of this woman, who is an expert in expressions, is clad in…
Tiarney Miekus 