Art & Australia

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Art & Design

ART & AUSTRALIA MAGAZINE : Art & Australia vol. 48, no. 1, Spring 2010: Special landscape and environment issue

When has the natural landscape not been rendered, idealised, romanticised? From the ancient rock art of Arnhem Land to Cézanne's beloved Mont Saint-Victoire, which ushered modernism outdoors in search of form, nature's backdrop has been the prime subject of art's search for sublimity, symbolism and subjectivity. Its beauty has never been in doubt, but as the developing world lurches into a new century, as oceans rise or become coated in sludge, its existence has never seemed more precarious. And so we begin this Spring 2010 issue of Art & Australia with a note of some urgency. In a timely collaboration with Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art on the occasion of their survey exhibition 'In the Balance: Art for a Changing World', we give over our Forum section and cover story to artists who sound the environmental alarm. Essays: Richard Flanagan on Tasmanian wildlife photographers Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis; John Barrett-Lennard on the postmodern history paintings of Imants Tillers; Elina Spilia on Gulumbu Yunupingu's ancestral barks; Martin Edmond on the cloudscapes of John Pule; Laura Murray Cree on the elemental meditations of Charwai Tsai; and Lisa Radford and Jarrod Rawlins in a fictional rumination on 'outback denial'.