Rex Butler

Abbas Kiarostami: the shock of the real

This essay begins by offering a reading of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostamis Certified Copy (2010), in which we are unable to decide whether or not the couple we see there is married. But rather than coming down ourselves on one side or another, we ask why it is that their love for each other might be expressed only through their game-playing. And we follow this confusion between the real and the artificial throughout Kiarostamis career – from the “lie” that structures social reality in Where is the Friends House? (1987) through the character Sabzians “confession” in Close-Up (1990) and beyond. We argue that it is in its putting together of the real and the fictional that Kiarostamis cinema at once continues and marks a break with Italian Neo-Realism and with usual conceptions of the “spiritual.” In Kiarostamis cinema, the spiritual is not to be opposed to the real or the represented, but is only to be seen through them. That other world is here, just as the afterlife is now.

A Chain of Ponds: On German and Australian Artistic Interactions

This essay traces the long artistic history that has existed between Germany and Australia, at least since the middle of the last century. We begin with the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf-educated Eugene von Guerard, who was the first head of an Australian art school and the first director of an Australian art gallery, and end with the Sydney artists Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley’s Freiland (1992–3), a work about the refugee Turkish population in Berlin after the fall of the Wall. What we seek to show here is that a globalised world art has always existed, and that any Australian provincialism was only the correlative of an art history conceived in terms of nation. There never really was—or was only—an Australian art. Indeed, the very idea of an Australian art was only ever possible because of Australia’s relationship to cultures like Germany’s.

Ben Quilty: the fog of war

ABSTRACT This essay looks at the war paintings of Ben Quilty, who in October 2011 was stationed with Australian troops fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan as part of Australia’s Official War Art Scheme. Quilty’s portraits, in fact made back at home in his studio after he returned, show soldiers naked, in pain, reliving traumatic episodes from their war experiences. They have been almost universally praised as providing a new and compelling image of war for those who have not experienced it themselves. We examine these portraits closely, arguing that they express a new post-modern ideology of “interpassivity”, allowing the spectator to exhibit signs of concern for soldiers, without actually doing anything to change their situation. In this we suggest that Quilty’s paintings contain a meaning that goes against the intentions of the artist and the understanding of their audience. Contrary to their dominant reading, they express something about our culture that our culture is unable to admit about itself.

Andy Warhol Ai Weiwei

It was a brilliant idea to put together the American pop artist of the 1960s, Andy Warhol, and the Chinese contemporary artist and dissident Ai Weiwei. Their names in silver on the cover of the catalogue looked like a hip corporate logo. All those As and Ws. All those diagonals moving back and forth. The poster looked great too: one artist in sunglasses and the other holding his eyes open (but this also a sly comment on the stereotypically ‘sloping’ eyes of Asian people). Bringing the two artists together was a way at once of updating Warhol and giving Ai (believe it or not) some art-historical credibility. It was a perfect amalgam of old and new, West and East and twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Strategically, it also allowed the National Gallery of Victoria to be seen to be responding to the pressure that Australian art galleries now feel to be part of the region in the wake of the success of the long-running Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane. It was such a brilliant idea that one walked around the exhibition admiring it. It was a comparison between the artists that was, as it were, bigger and better than the artists themselves. It was a comparison that the work itself seemed to illustrate or, to put it another way, a comparison that seemed to be the real subject of the show rather than the work itself. In a strange sort of way, one wandered through the rooms of the gallery marvelling at the various connections able to be drawn between the two bodies of work, but without actually asking what these connections had to say about the work itself. Andy Warhol Ai Weiwei, that is, functioned as something of an empty signifier that spectators could read as much or as little into as they wanted and that always ended up reflecting them. Like the brand name ‘Coca-Cola’, to which both artists have devoted work, it adds nothing to the objects on display, but paradoxically without it these objects would be nothing. But let no one be mistaken, Andy Warhol Ai Weiwei was an exemplary exhibition of our times, telling us everything we need to know about our current museological condition. It was seamlessly, flawlessly, if ultimately redundantly curated, because contemporary works of art do not need to be curated and do not need to be in museums. What do I mean by this? We might compare Andy Warhol Ai Weiwei to another exhibition featuring two giants of modern art, Matisse Picasso, at the Museum of Modern Art in 2003. In that exhibition, curator John Elderfield could exercise aesthetic discrimination, offer certain formal and stylistic insights into the work. He could speak of the mutual influence

Time after time

Summary This essay is an analysis of a series of writings by the Australian intellectual historian Ian Hunter on the subject of ‘theory’. It examines the methodological issues raised by attempting to write a history of theory. The essay particularly seeks to analyse the various aporias at stake in Hunters project: between the empirical and the transcendental, between history and the event, and between theory and ‘empirical’ history.

Against provincialism: Australian-American connections 1900–2000

Abstract This article offers an analysis and critique of Terry Smiths well-known essay “The Provincialism Problem”. Against Smiths argument for the “subservience” of Australian art vis-a-vis American, we sketch a long history of Australian-American artistic interaction throughout the twentieth century, and indeed the involvement of many highly-placed Australian artists in American art. We suggest that from a “contemporary” perspective not only does a whole new history of Australian art come into view but we can see that the “provincialism problem” never existed.

Everything and Nothing: On Jorge Luis Borges's “Kafka and His Precursors”

Abstract This article is an analysis of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borgess short text “Kafka and His Precursors.” Although appearing to be an example of literary criticism, Borgess essay is in fact the exploration of a certain logical paradox. It is a paradox that is to be found throughout Borgess work, with the result that “Kafka and His Precursors” can be read as a disguised literary manifesto on the part of Borges. I also explore the consequences of Borgess essay for thinking about questions of cultural transmission. I argue that Borges’ work lives on—like those literary, religious and philosophical traditions he admires—because its most profound subject is the relationship it has with the person who reads it.

Stay, go, or come: A history of Australian art, 1920-40

The complementary and parallel account of Australian art, a history of what has been excluded during the period 1920 to 1940 is discussed. The period of 1920 to 1940 witnessed s new alliance of artists of various aesthetic and ideological hues who were able to focus their efforts and cast them against a common enemy.

Curating the World

The Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor is undoubtedly one of the major curators of and thinkers about art in the world today. His 2002 exhibition DOCUMENTA 11—which took up such topics as democracy, truth and reconciliation, creolisation, and the fate of four African cities—has been endlessly discussed and imitated. A show not only about the idea of the world but also introducing a new ‘global’ style of art, it is widely understood to be one of the defining ‘global’ art exhibitions. Enwezor is also known for curating a series of ground-breaking exhibitions of African art and for founding and editing NKA: JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART, published by the African Studies Center at New Yorks Cornell University. Enwezor was kind enough to grant us an interview on 26 July 2008, when he was in Sydney as a guest of the Biennale of Sydney.

'I Am Not Sorry': Richard Bell Out of Context

The issue of appropriation of Aboriginal imagery by white artists is examined with reference to Richard Bells treatment of this problem in his paintings Rational Eyes and Bells Theorem.