Art and Sport Down Under - Uri Tzaig - Tracey Moffatt - Sylvie Blocher - Alan Fleischer - Patricia Piccinini - Rosemary Laing - Lin Onus - Lorrie Graham - art exhibit focussing on art and sports for the Olympic games

Art in America, May, 2001 by Roni Feinstein

Aussie Modern & Contemporary

Several works from Laing's "flight research series" (1998-2000), a captivating group of photographs in which a bride floats magically in the sky, were concurrently on view in "Body Language: art, sport and the cyber conversation" at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery of the University of New South Wales. A fine exhibition, modest in stale, it featured the work of four contemporary Australians--Laing, John E. Hughes, Paula Dawson and Stelarc. The video projection of Stelarc's earlier EXOSKELETON performance was interesting to consider in relation to the Olympics, as it offered the artist's view of a cyborg future. His body was secured within a six-legged, spiderlike machine that hissed, sputtered, twisted and moved jerkily about under his hand-held control (though it often appeared that the machine was controlling him).(5) For "Body Language" he staged a performance titled Extended Arm in which a prosthesis was used to expand (through elongation) and limit (by rendering robotic) the capabilities of his biological arm.

"Urban Dingo: the art and life of Lin Onus 1948-1996," organized by the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, and curated by Margo Neale, was presented along with "Sporting Life" at the MCA. Onus, a recently deceased Melbourne-based artist, was the son of a Scottish mother and an Aboriginal father, a well-known indigenous activist in whose footsteps he followed. In the mid-'80s, Onus developed a distinctive style of art-making in which symbols, patterns and designs taught to him by Aboriginal community elders were introduced into Western-style photo-realist landscape paintings. Witty, irreverent and thought-provoking, Onus's symbol-laden works deal with issues of identity, land rights, the reclamation of culture and racial injustice. A commentary on Australian surf culture and national identity are found in the gouache Michael and I are just slipping down to the pub for a minute (1992), which features two of Onus's favorite indigenous "totems": a dingo, whose coat is striped in the colors of the Aboriginal flag, and a stingray, rendered in the crosshatch pattern known as rarrk. The dingo uses the stingray as a surfboard, riding, presumably to the pub of the title, upon Hokusai's famous wave. (While the artist may not have intended such a reading, on one level, "pub" alludes to Australia's British heritage, while the wave from the 19th-century woodcut can be understood as a reference to the recent widespread influx of Asian immigrants).

National identity was also a focus of the highly touted "Australian Icons: Twenty Artists from the Collection" at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, organized by Barry Pearce, head curator of Australian art. It featured more than 250 works by 20 masters drawn from the museum's extensive holdings. While the idea of such a show was admirable and the work high in quality, the result was flat and uninspired. It began on a high note with galleries devoted to the work of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, key figures in the nationally celebrated Heidelberg School formed in Melbourne in the 1880s, which was dedicated to the development of a distinctly Australian subject matter and style and to plein-air painting. Among the works on view were Roberts's The Golden Fleece (1894), an intimate portrait of labor at a sheep-shearing station, and Streeton's Fire's On (1895), a painting depicting the death of a railway worker in an explosion. The latter work is notable for its total lack of drama, as the accident is subsumed in the landscape's scorching heat and light.