The Long Run #8: Vivienne Binns on asking what art really is
A pioneer in feminist and community driven art, Vivienne Binns talks about 60 years of interrogating what art truly is, and how art is a human activity.
“It’s really about looking at images and putting them together, and looking at how they behave,” says David Noonan in our latest podcast series Artists Abroad, talking with artists who’ve moved to London and what the move has meant for their practice—while also chatting about the art itself.
“I guess that is the thread, that I am very open to influences that come into my life, you know, and I respond to them,” says Suzanne Archer in The Long Run, Art Guide’s latest podcast series featuring interviews with artists who have 60-year practices.
“I decided that art essentially is a communication, so my basis of my work is conceptual,” says artist Bonita Ely, a pioneer in environmental art in Australia, in this episode of The Long Run, a podcast talking with artists who have 60-year practices.
Gareth Sansom talks about ambition, chance and mortality, and what changes over six decades and what remains the same.
Since the 1970s Margaret Dodd’s ceramic holden cars, which are pioneering feminist artworks, have forged pressing questions on femininity, masculinity, sexuality, capitalism and identity.
Whether placing an artwork in his stomach, actualising a body with a third hand, giving his agency over to performance viewers, and rather famously growing an extra ear on his arm, Stelarc has gone to true extremes.
“Black and white photography has always been my…I suppose it’s just kind of my life,” says Mervyn Bishop on his 60-year photography practice.
“Art is this amazing subject,” says Robert Owen. “It comes from different people and it contributes to cultural identity in a way that can question ourselves…”
In the third and final episode of our FEM-aFFINITY podcast, feminist critic and art historian Anne Marsh explains the idea of doing feminism in Australian contemporary art, from the 1970s to now.
Since the 1980s acclaimed American artist Kiki Smith has looked at mortality, sexuality, and nature. Showing magnificent tapestries in the current Biennale of Sydney, Smith has previously shown in five Venice Biennales, and in 2006 was one of the ‘TIME 100: The People Who Shape Our World.’ In our interview Smith talks about the process of making art and being patient in our chaotic world.
Opening today, QUEER is a landmark exhibition bringing together over 400 artworks from the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection that explores queer in political, aesthetic and intimate ways. Four of the exhibition’s curators unpack the stories—from innuendos to pointed subversions to witticisms—behind four key artworks.
Shirley Purdie’s newest paintings at Olsen Gallery are ancestral stories of Country and Ngarranggarni (Dreaming), but also sites and moments that resonate with Purdie, from her birthplace of Mabel Downs Station to her family history.
“It starts with Elizabethan and Tudor period portraits and goes right through to contemporary times.” The National Portrait Gallery in London has loaned 80 works to our National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, capturing portraiture through the ages.
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