The Walls of The Heart: The Life and Work of David Rankin

Introduction -

    My first visit to Rankin's oeuvre was in his summer studio on Shelter Island - a large, unadorned, barn-like loft overlooking a bay full of summer craft.  That night I scribbled a note and threw it into a file of other hasty notes:

        How the Australian artist soaked the canvas; relished its vertical-seeming grain; got into his materials to expel his deep feeling - bones, earth, mortality - that knows not a name: a hope, a wager, an impossible...

Abstracting the Political

Introduction -

    The interview took place in Brisbane on 18 June 2001

Image and Identity: Mexican Indians and Photographic Art

Introduction -

    After being given my third body search of the day I am allowed to pass.  squeezing my way through the tri-pods and people, I find a more or less unobstructed view.  Few people talk and those that choose to, do so in hushed tones.  Here in the press enclosure, journalists, film crews and photographers check their tape-recorders, microphones and, of course, cameras.  Behind us six thousand people wait in growing anticipation for the arrival of twenty-three Indians and one mestizo.  The crowd will be many times bigger in Mexico City, the squash that much more unsettling, the moment perhaps even more historic, but here on the top of a hill-side in rural Michoacan, the welcome for the comandancia is special.

Mona Hatoum: Exiled Art and The politics of Resistance

Introduction -

    One of the most poignant imagines of the recent past is the death of Muhammad al-Durra, a Palestinian child killed at Netzarim Junction in Gaza, a victim to history's unrelenting claims over exclusionist identifies set within contested boundaries.  other victims followed, on both sides, Israeli and Palestinian, in a cycle of unrelenting violence, where the politics of revenge came to extinguish any hope of dialogue.  Bearing witness to the act, the onlooker within the global public sphere has her own memories, her own associations.  She remembers the children of Soweto in 1970s apartheid South Africa and the might of that regime pitched in battle against a population under siege.  These are images of violence and exclusion.  Only now, the place is elsewhere.  It is yet another corner steeped in the politics of hatred and denial.  the conflict analyst who writes of violence and peace, knows all too well that hers is yet another rendition, yet another narrative told.  It will be placed within an interpreting public sphere that has its own realm of meaning, its own witness narrations.

Untitled art Relations

Introduction -

    I have just bid for a painting through a silent auction on the web.  The artist is Pong, a Thai abstractionist still young in his career.  His acrylic strokes compose the challenging Untitled 2000.  Pong's is the classic street rags to brush story of a Haring or a Basquiat.  A seemingly derelict orphan found wandering the streets of Bangkok is 'discovered' sketching on abandoned factory sites.  A year later, his work shows at Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) alongside other impressive pieces by fellow n'er do well (until now) compatriots.  Barney's, the famous up-market clothing store in New York, feature some of these paintings in a recent window display.  Other pieces are auctioned at Christie's for a total of US$75,000.  Thailand to New York to Sydney to the world-wide web: untitled international relations of art.

A Real Utopia? Anne Dangar at Moly-Sabata

Introduction -

    Ann Dangar is a little-known Australian artist who left Sydney in 1930 to become a disciple of French cubist painter Albert Gleizes.  Dangar came to a small town called Sablons in central France where Albert Gleizes had established an artists' cooperative on the banks of the Rhone.  the house that Gleizes initially rented was a derelict eighteenth century customs house called Moly-Sabata.  Moly....

Painting, Palimpsest and Politics in The Moor's Last Sigh

Introduction -

    Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh revolves around the Bombay of Morates (Moor) Zogoiby as well as his mother Aurora (who is Portuguese Catholic) and his father Abraham (who is Cochin Jewish).  Rushdie once again has chosen his protagonists deliberately to broaden the concept of what is appropriately considered Indian.  He also has once again intermixed family stories with political history, as Abraham's ancestry traces back to the Moor of Grenada himself, while the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gamma looms in Aurora's background.  The activities of the family members reflects current Indian social and political history.

Close Encounters of the Colonial Kind, or Looking for Colonel MacKenzie's Pandits

Introduction -

    In 1816 Thomas Hickey, an English colonial painter, painted a portrait of colonel Colin Mackenzie, the first surveyor general of colonial India.  Mildred Archer, an expert on Indian colonial painting, describes Hickey as 'a weak painter, a painter of moderate attainments', who 'was brilliantly skilful in the capture of likeness.'  Hickey was seventy five when he painted Colonel Mackenzie who in 1871, a year later, became the first Surveyor General of India.  Mackenzie was sixty seven, when, I assume, he posed for the portait.  In the portrait he doesn't look that old although tinges of grey inn the hair betray the age somewhat, but there is no doubt that he has been painted to be the central figure of the portrait.  In fact without him it would be hard to imagine if this painting would have even been painted.  His red tunic, the ceremonial sword and shining black boots, his eyes looking straight at you, indicting a presence imbued with power.