Slide Test Flashcards
1
Q
What Painting is this?
A
The Pioneer (1904)
Frederick McCubbin
Oil on Canvas
- Triptych
- Each panel is read left to right to link the progress of toil on the land.
- Elevates pioneer status to religious stature.
- Format shows the dramatic change to landscape in an extremely short period of time
- Presents tribute to rural labourers enduring poverty and hardship
- Narrative celebrates Australia as a place of pioneers and new beginnings
- Sanitised conflict of nations traditional owners and presents white colonial narrative
2
Q
What painting is this?
A
Murriland! #1 (2015-17)
Gordon Hookey
Oil on Canvas
- Mapping of history and memory of things that Australia would rather, or try, to forget
- Rainbow snake runs throughout the entire piece, acting as a timeline of which smaller illustrations branch off
- Illustrations only are used to represent aboriginal history at the very left, the further along in white colonialism we get the more text is used. The writing becomes smaller and smaller, to fit more text in the painting, overwhelming and covering the illustrations
- Musket shots pierce the aboriginal flag and continue through the entire painting, showing how actions that happened many years ago still continue to affect the traditional owners of the land today
3
Q
What painting is this?
A
New Holland (Not) (2013) Blak Douglas - Adam Geczy Synthetic polymer paint on a wall
4
Q
What painting is this?
A
Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889)
Arthur Streeton
oil on canvas
- Presence of people is extremely subtle, just one person watching over sheep
- Presents the pastoral ideal
- Australian landscape is being tended, being cared for. Its a created landscape, created by pastoralism, by an introduced species in the land
- Lifting the viewer up above the view provides a sense of ownership over the scene
- Colour palette of gold and blue (national colours) national pride
- Reassuring landscape looks very calm, blue mountains in the back hold the landscape. The pastoral land is nestled
- romantic Impressionistic Landscape
5
Q
What painting is this?
A
Yunurr (Spring Creek) (1991)
Rover Thomas
Earth pigments on canvas
- Memory and marking, confident map of the country
- What many settlers aspired to, the sense of belonging in the landscape
- Provides a sense of belonging
- Texas Down station ( where painting is set) and where Thomas worked for many years
- Yellow dots give a general sense of the area
- Bottom right-hand corner, is an explicit reference to a road. Provides a combination of conceptual landscape with moments of the physical landscape
- Ancestral and recent history overlaps, the country bears the marks of the beings that created it and inhabited it
6
Q
What painting is this?
A
At the start of the march 1932 (1944)
Noel Counihan
oil on hardboard
- By the 1930s unemployment was so high, that men were wondering country in search of work
- Conditions fermented dissent, but people couldn’t safely demonstrate in public
- moral public about radicalism, so demonstrations themselves were fraught events
- Peak of misery during the great dippression
- man clustered with his family has to make a terrible choice does he queue with the men in the background and potentially get a couple of hours of work or marches with those who are demanding better hours
- the difficulty of a person trying to make longer-term investments for a better life when faced with short term misery
- theme about struggle, but also solidarity in that struggle
- part of the social realist faction
7
Q
What painting is this?
A
Victory Girls (1943)
Albert Tucker
Oil on cardboard
- Grim perception of the world around him, macabre and pessimistic
- During WW2 all parts of society were encourage to work towards the general goal of victory in second world war
- Image of victory girls (young women whos job it was to dance with soldiers and build morale, also prostitution working underneath all of that)
- Tucker’s point of view is that nightlife of r and r in Melbourne is an overwhelmingly corrupt theme
8
Q
What artwork is this?
A
Embassy (2013-ongoing)
Richard Bell
Canvas Tent
- Queensland based aboriginal artists, recreates the establishment of the aboriginal tent embassy on the grounds outside parliament house
- mobile artwork travels around the world to keep the spirit of that moment alive
- Conversation and ongoing development of the key political ideals from the 1970s into the current time
9
Q
What is this artwork?
A
Collins Street 5 pm (1955)
John Brack
oil on canvas
- Peak hour end of work day rush in melbourne
- Iconic image of Australian urban life
- identical figures heading home after a clearly Delpy satisfying day of work
grim faces dedicated to getting home, getting on the tram, etc - dull colours, urban life draining the soul from those participating in it
10
Q
What is this artwork?
A
Rollascape 2 (1968) Janet Dawson Synthetic polymer paint on composition board
- Undulating Form
- Gestural abstractionism and expressionism to them
11
Q
What artwork is this?
A
The death of my father (1981-2)
Davida Allen
- contemporary artwork
- Concerned with the domestic realm, Allen’s paintings stylistically depict the simplification of figurative forms
- heavily impastoed and gestural paint
- to examine Davida’s image is to come into direct communion with her life
- Painting tracks her grief, demonstrating ritualistic expressions of sorrow
- Untethered figures float through grounds of grey, white, black and blue with occasional flashes of colour, charting the convergence of joy and sorrow
12
Q
What artwork is this?
A
Kangaroo Story at Wantapi (1988)
Michael Nelson
synthetic polymer paint on linen
- Work produced during this time was highly engaged with questions of history, society and cultural conflict
- Distinctive dot painting was becoming a highly valued art style in mainstream society
- Lots of energy is generated through the many different colours of dots
- In the middle is an old kangaroo sitting looking at the kangaroo ‘milk guts’ which are depicted by the central circle.
- Roundels are the camps of the kangaroo ancestors whose spears, shields and stone implements are featured.
13
Q
What is this artwork?
A
Last Laughs (1994) Destiny Deacon light jet print from polaroid original
- Demonstrates that white people will never understand the symbols of racism perpetrated against Blaks embedded in white culture unless they are pointed out to them
- Expressed through silent voice of the black doll, inserted placelessley into whatever scenario racism or bigotry raises its head
14
Q
What is this artwork?
A
Hermit Painting #3 (1999)
John Young
diptych: Vutak digital scan and oil on canvas,
- Work responses to propitiations of post modernism, idea that we could quote from our swear and that appropriation was a valid artistic stratergy
- deeply influenced by conceptual painting like iman tillers
- deeply interested by the work of the post-impressionist artists
- young arrived in Australia from hong kong when he was 11
- A lot of borrowing of imagery in youngs work , juxtaposing generic forms of painting, still lifes, Chinese nature paintings, ect and using digitally enhanced altered background to rearrange images into conversation with each other
- Hermit three is a meditation on the framework of representation, the plight of the asian diaspora, and the role of memory in australian culture
15
Q
What artwork is this?
A
Adut and Bigoa (2015)
Atong Atem
- South Sudanese artist who lives in Melbourne, born in Ethiopia. Spent childhood in Kenya refuge camp
- Explores the experience of south Sudanese immigrants, and how they make sense of the culture around them
- How they build a universe around them and allows them to thrive, one that is welcoming and makes sense to them
- Relationship between public and private spaces
- Colour and patterning reflect the community she lives in, in Melbourne
- The batik fabrics that fill Atem’s improvised studio sets with bright colours, often interpreted as tropes of traditional African dress, are in fact traditional Indonesian patterns, present on the continent only as a result of Dutch colonial trade routes and markets
16
Q
What artwork is this?
A
No Human being is illegal (in all our glory) (2014)
Deborah Kelly
- People have nude portraits taken and would work with the artist to embellish them and collage them
- Legality of refugee arrivals and same-sex, no human being is illegal is an affirmation of beauty in diversity
17
Q
What artwork is this?
A
Vag Dens (1967) Vivienne Binns
- Feminist reference to the physicality of women’s bodies but also the superstition around them, this artwork is one of the earliest examples of this kind of imagery
- Takes a swipe at the fear engendered by female sexuality, evoking the surrealist motif of the early 20th century of the vagina that fights
- Queer comical reference
18
Q
A
Birth Certificate 1962 (1994)
Tracey Moffatt
- Hidden histories that lay below the surface of Australian society
- Refused to be characterised as either a woman or aboriginal artist
- The image is one of shock and pain
- The camera angle is slightly higher than the girl’s gaze, this suggests that the viewer occupies the position of the girl’s mother as she looks down at her daughter
- Image records the trauma inflicted by parents onto children, Moffatt placing them in a documentary-style format
- The journalistic caption is jarringly at odds with the deeply intimate, often painful subject matter.
19
Q
What artwork is this?
A
Bleeding Trees (1979) Jill Orr
- Early environmental work where the human body is used as an emotional barometer
- The naked female body is posed on trees and within the landscape in dramatic ways
- The empathy to the environment enlisted through the viewer is through the identification of the human body
20
Q
What artwork is this?
A
Murray River Punch (1980-1)
Bonita Ely
- Strong connection between environmental and feminist politics
- contamination of the natural environment as part of the patriarchal structure of the world
- used deadpan satirical humour to draw attention to the severely polluted conditions of the murry river
- Ely drew on the relatively new phenomenon of women being employed in large department stores to do cooking demonstrations, assuming the persona in her performance
21
Q
What artwork is this?
A
1-6 Glass / Mirror Piece (1967)
Ian Burn
- Investigation into the looking at artworks
- Burn sought to create artworks that had no meaning beyond the colour and form presented to the viewer
- Connection between art and life, the mirrors are just ordinary shaving mirrors
- Reducing art from something very special and created by geniuses, to something that is ordinary
- When you move along the panels they become less straightforward, looking into a mirror is unthinkingly viewing it reflected back straight away. All these panels however as you move along the sequence, the mirrors become less transparent, becoming more opaque
- As you move along your own face becomes blurred
22
Q
What artwork is this?
A
The Nine Shots (1985)
Imants Tillers
- Appropriated art of Five dreamings by an aboriginal artist, without passion and seemingly no cultural sensitivity, especially damaging as this was a white immigrant artist, without permission
- 91 canvas boards
23
Q
What artwork is this?
A
The Bathers (1985) Anne Zahalka
- Appropriation does minor adjustments and plays around with being non-original
- Charles Meeres original painting shows an almost Aryan super race on Bondi beach that’s being created
- Looks at bondi’s status as a significant cultural site and questions the dominant representations that mythologise and embody it
- In her series Bondi: playground of the Pacific’ Zahalka uses a painted background of a beach, against which she places and plays with the icons of Australian beach culture: the surfers are Japanese; Max Dupain’s sunbather becomes a pale skinny redhead; and the modern ‘bathing beauty’ reclining on the sand is reading Marcel Proust, ‘immersed in a completely different place to the one where she lies’.
24
Q
What artwork is this?
A
Tender (2003-06)
Fiona Hall
- Addresses the complex relationship between the natural world and human systems of value, trade and exchange.
- The work consists of thousands of shredded US dollar bills painstakingly woven into 86 bird nests, each for a different species and following its natural design.
- Duplicating how marvellous each individual nest was
- Hall works talks about our cultural association of money, a currency we use to buy and sell a form of economic value. With “Tender” Hall transforms this economic value to that of an aesthetic one by creating works of art, which can also presumably be bought and sold. She has taken something heartless, money, and changed it into something delicate, something beautiful.
25
Q
What artwork is this?
A
Skywhale (2013)
Patricia Piccinini
- Created a lot of social outrage
- Flying over Canberra, a planned city that’s really tried to integrate and blend in with the natural environment, it makes a lot of sense to make this sort of huge, gigantic, but artificial and natural-looking creature
- What if whales evolved to fly instead of swim in the seas
- Skywhale’s large breasts reflect how whales are mammals and breast-feed their young
