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Books by andrew mcnamara

Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture, Jul 17, 2019

Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture presents... more Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture presents an extraordinary new Australasian cultural history. It is a migrant and refugee story: from 1930, the arrival of so many emigre, internee and refugee educators helped to transform art, architecture and design in Australia and New Zealand. Fifteen thematic essays and twenty individual case studies bring to light a tremendous amount of new archival material in order to show how these innovative educators, exiled from Nazism, introduced Bauhaus ideas and models to a new world. As their Bauhaus model spanned art, architecture and design, the book provides a unique cross-disciplinary, emigre history of art education in Australia and New Zealand. It offers a remarkable and little-known chapter in the wider Bauhaus venture, which has multiple legacies and continues to inform our conceptions of progressive education, creativity and the role of art and design in the wider community.

Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack: More Than A Bauhaus Artist, 2021

Foreword to first English language biography of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack

Migrations: Migration processes and artistic practices in a time of war: From the 20th century to the present (Migracoes - Processos migratorios e praticas artisticas em tempo de guerra: do seculo XX a actualidade), 2017

A signicant number of central European and German refugees and émigrés sought refuge from war an... more A signicant number of central European and German refugees and émigrés sought refuge from war and fascism in Australia during the inter-war and post-World War Two years. While many historical accounts of Antipodean modernism stress its distance from French avant-garde sources, this generation of refugees and émigrés brought local practitioners into direct contact with aspects of the modernist endeavour. In particular, these refugees and émigrés introduced an approach to modernism that was cross- disciplinary and derived its inspiration from a systematic approach to arts education. This conception tended to highlight the common elements between art, design and architecture.While there have been numerous, individual studies of this generation, this paper foreshadows a much larger research project that aims to link these individual histories into one coherent study. In this paper we offer an indicative sample of a select number of case studies in order to highlight some of these commonalities, such as a commitment to reform education, a systemic interdisciplinary approach to modernist art education and, nally, colour-light explorations in art, design and architecture that arise as a consequence of these educational philosophies.

Migrations: Migration processes and artistic practices in a time of war: From the 20th century to the present (migrações: processos migratórios e práticas artísticas em tempo de guerra: do século xx à actualidade), 2017

A signicant number of central European and German refugees and émigrés sought refuge from war and... more A signicant number of central European and German refugees and émigrés sought refuge from war and fascism in Australia during the inter-war and post-World War Two years.While many historical accounts of Antipodean modernism stress its distance from French avant-garde sources, this generation of refugees and émigrés brought local practitioners into direct contact with aspects of the modernist endeavour. In particular, these refugees and émigrés introduced an approach to modernism that was cross-disciplinary and derived its inspiration from a systematic approach to arts education. This conception tended to highlight the common elements between art, design and architecture. While there have been numerous, individual studies of this generation, this paper foreshadows a much larger research project that aims to link these individual histories into one coherent study. In this paper we offer an indicative sample of a select number of case studies in order to highlight some of these commonalities, such as a commitment to reform education, a systemic interdisciplinary approach to modernist art education and, finally, colour-light explorations in art, design and architecture that arise as a consequence of these educational philosophies.

Surpassing Modernity: Ambivalence in Art, Politics and Society , 2018

For the past thirty to forty years, cultural analysis has focused on developing terms to explain ... more For the past thirty to forty years, cultural analysis has focused on developing terms to explain the surpassing of modernity. Discussion is stranded in an impasse between those who view the term modernity with automatic disdain-as deterministic, Eurocentric or imperialistic-and a booming interest that is renewing the study of modernism. Another dilemma is that the urge to move away from, or beyond, modernity arises because it is viewed as difficult, even unsavoury. Yet, there has always been a view of modernity as somehow difficult to live with, and that has been said by figures we regard today as typical modernists.

McNamara argues in this book that it is time to forget the quest to surpass modernity. Instead, we should re-examine a legacy that continues to inform our artistic conceptions, our political debates, our critical justifications, even if that legacy is baffling and contradictory. We may find it difficult to live with, but without recourse to this legacy, our critical-cultural ambitions would remain seriously diminished.

How do we explain the culture we live in today? And how do we, as citizens, make sense of it? This book suggests these questions have become increasingly difficult to answer.

Does heat have a cooling effect on culture? Sweat argues the reverse: culture thrives in the subt... more Does heat have a cooling effect on culture? Sweat argues the reverse: culture thrives in the subtropical zones. While acknowledging that the subtropical generates ambivalence being cast as alternately idyllic or hellish Sweat nonetheless seeks to develop the specific voices of subtropical cultures. The uneasy place of this sweaty discourse is explored across art, literature, architecture, and the built environment. In particular, Sweat focuses on the most commonly experienced situations, the everyday house. While it addresses subjects from Japan, Brazil, and France, Sweat centres on Brisbane, Queensland long in the shadow of Sydney and Melbourne in the Australian cultural psyche due to its enduring and self-conscious attention to subtropical living. Edited by Andrew McNamara, with contributions by Atelier Bow-Wow, Susan Best, Chris Brisbin, Susan Carson, Julie Ewington, Catherine De Lorenzo and Deborah van der Plaat, Tracey Moffatt, Courtney Pedersen, Mark Pennings, Julian Raxworthy, Mark Taylor, and Andrew Wilson

Art continues to bemuse and confuse many people today. Yet, its critical analyses are saturated w... more Art continues to bemuse and confuse many people today. Yet, its critical analyses are saturated with daunting analyses of contemporary art's exhaustion, its predictability or its absorption into global commercial culture. In this book, the author seeks to clarify this apprehensive perception of art. He argues it is a consequence not only of confounding art-works, but also of the paradoxical impetus of a culture of modernity. By positively reassessing the perplexing or apprehensive features of cultural modernity as well as of aesthetic inquiry, this book redefines the ambitions of art in the wake of this legacy. In the process, it challenges many familiar approaches to art inquiry in order to offer a new understanding of the aesthetic, social and cultural aspirations of art in our time.

Richly illustrated and beautifully designed, Modern Times - The Untold Story of Modernism in Aust... more Richly illustrated and beautifully designed, Modern Times - The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia reveals how modernism transformed all aspects of Australian culture across five tumultuous decades from 1917 to 1967. The influence of modernism was far-reaching. "Modern Times" looks at all things modern and as diverse as art, advertising, photography, film, fashion, the body, architecture, interiors, recreational sites such as the new swimming pools and fountains, milk bars and auto culture.Modernism embodied the utopian possibilities of the twentieth century. It transformed Australian cities into complex metropolises and offered access to new cosmopolitan cultures. This is the first time that such diverse material has been brought together in one volume.

This first anthology of modernist art, design and architecture in Australia reveals the raw nerve... more This first anthology of modernist art, design and architecture in Australia reveals the raw nerves that modernism exposed and highlights the role of migrants, expatriates, travel and mass reproduction in the reception of modernism in Australia. In more than two hundred documents—talks, letters, fiery debates, public manifestoes and private—the main players of the time (1917-67) convey in their own words the tensions, aspirations and paradoxes behind the reception of modernism. Each document is put in context and accompanied by expert commentaries from the editors. The collection overturns many key assumptions about Australian culture, revealing not a 'time-lag' in reception, but an up-to-date engagement with the latest overseas trends and developments. It shows a surprising acceptance of modernism in the commercial realms (design, fashion, interior decoration), yet chronicles the dogged institutional resistance that greeted modernism, particularly in the fine arts.

Papers by andrew mcnamara

Institute of Modern Art eBooks, 2010

Peter Lang Publishing eBooks, 2009

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this... more Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at <http://dnb.ddb.de>. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A ...

Who is Erich Buchholz? This might have been the question the Queensland Art Gallery sought to add... more Who is Erich Buchholz? This might have been the question the Queensland Art Gallery sought to address with a major survey of his work, Erich Buchholz-the restless avantgardist. (June-September, 2000) The answer would be that Buchholz was at the forefront of avant-garde art practice in the early years of the Weimar Republic. In the early Twenties, he found himself amidst a flurry of artistic crosscurrents in a volatile Berlin. As the curator, Anne Kirker, was able to show, his remarkable output was truly interdisciplinary for it encompassed painting, printmaking, sculpture, design, installation, architecture, even furniture making. Yet, "interdisciplinary" is an inadequate term because it suggests skipping from one activity to another, whereas Buchholz was intrigued by the formative capacity underlying each of these otherwise separate activities.

A review of the exhibition, ‘Robert Smithson: Time Crystals’, held at the University of Queenslan... more A review of the exhibition, ‘Robert Smithson: Time Crystals’, held at the University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (10 March – 8 July 2018), and Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, until 22 September 2018.

Creative Industries Faculty, 2001

The "vernacular" housing tradition of southeast Queensland is easily identifiable. Its ... more The "vernacular" housing tradition of southeast Queensland is easily identifiable. Its history is more complex. This study seeks to challenge two popular conceptions of the "Queenslander" history by showing that they actually provide contradictory explanations. The aim is to produce a more complex account of local architecture and its historical explanation so that both its past and its present practices can be better understood as a distinctly subtropical idiom. This discussion shows that such practices may respond to common concerns but that are also ever-changing.

Image credits vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction: The surpassing urge l 1 What are we talking a... more Image credits vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction: The surpassing urge l 1 What are we talking about? Narratives of modernity and beyond 17 A landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds 17 Narratives of modern art and life 26 The antinomies of a culture of modernity 34 The ambivalence of surpassing and paradigm shifts: The anti-aesthetic 42 The affirmation of surpassing and paradigm shifts: Contemporaneity 54 Conclusion 61 2 We petty-bourgeois radicals: Reflections on Polke's Wir Kleinbiirger! (We Petty Bourgeois!) 63 J '

Art Monthly Australasia, Mar 1, 2021

Commentary on the evaluation of the arts and humanities in Australi

When does 1960s art begin and end? Certainly, aside from a few affinities, the decade’s artistic ... more When does 1960s art begin and end? Certainly, aside from a few affinities, the decade’s artistic output does not exactly correspond to its popular conception as the ‘Swinging Sixties’. While it was rare that psychedelic art was truly challenging, the decade saw a number of perceptions change regarding the aims, boundaries and possibilities of experiencing art. Thus, this era has come to represent a watershed or crisis in modernist art. While in the Australian context many of these nascent trends were properly realised in the 1970s – with the full force and impact of post-object art – other challenges were first articulated in the 1950s. So, like any other demarcation of a decade, its limits and boundaries are porous.

Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture, Jul 17, 2019

Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack: More Than A Bauhaus Artist, 2021

Foreword to first English language biography of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack

Surpassing Modernity: Ambivalence in Art, Politics and Society , 2018

How do we explain the culture we live in today? And how do we, as citizens, make sense of it? This book suggests these questions have become increasingly difficult to answer.

Institute of Modern Art eBooks, 2010

Peter Lang Publishing eBooks, 2009

Creative Industries Faculty, 2001

Art Monthly Australasia, Mar 1, 2021

Commentary on the evaluation of the arts and humanities in Australi

The Modernist World (Routledge Worlds series), Jun 5, 2015

In a book seeking to redraw the boundaries between interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms... more In a book seeking to redraw the boundaries between interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms, this chapter contributes to the reorientation in modernist studies by revisiting "primitivism." While no one freely identifies as “primitive,” the spectre of primitivism was a magnet of attraction as well as of critical refusal. It resided on the knife-edge of envy and denunciation, as well as for the projection of alternate imaginative utopias and the worst forms of racial chauvinism. This chapter asserts that primitivism endures as a provocation as much as a utopian aspiration, but it also provides a different understanding of cultures on the "periphery", which is how Antipodean art history has understood itself. The spectre of primitivism not only amplifies the quandaries of modernist cultures—both alerting one to the aesthetic alternatives to modernist cultures, yet also highlighting the fate of traditional culture pitted against modernist cultures, it also suggests the quandaries of a peripheral modernity.

Natalya Hughes: The Interior, 2022

In her body of work These Girls of the Studio, Natalya Hughes revisits the famous Expressionist p... more In her body of work These Girls of the Studio, Natalya Hughes revisits the famous Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. In particular, she focuses on his paintings featuring the young models Franzi and Marzella.
Chapter Three of Natalya Hughes: The Interior, ed. Tulleah Pearce, IMA Publications, 2022.

The Dadaist Richard Bell: Inhabiting the Dislocations between Aboriginal Art and Contemporary Art, 2022

Essay for the Richard Bell Reader: documents fifteen Publishers: Griffith University, Queensland,... more Essay for the Richard Bell Reader: documents fifteen
Publishers:
Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
documenta fifteen, documenta und Museum Fridericianum, GmbH, Kassel, Germany

Reviews the travelling retrospective of the indigenous artist, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Also... more Reviews the travelling retrospective of the indigenous artist, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Also examines some of the prevailing discourses on indigenous art

Book Reviews modernism / modernity volume fifteen, number two, pp 393-419.

Does heat have a cooling effect on culture? Sweat argues the reverse: culture thrives in the subt... more Does heat have a cooling effect on culture? Sweat argues the reverse: culture thrives in the subtropical zones. While acknowledging that the subtropical generates ambivalence—being cast as alternately idyllic or hellish—Sweat nonetheless seeks to develop the specific voices of subtropical cultures. The uneasy place of this sweaty discourse is explored across art, literature, architecture, and the built environment. In particular, Sweat focuses on the most commonly experienced situation, the everyday house. While it addresses subjects from Japan, Brazil, and France, Sweat centres on Brisbane, Queensland—long in the shadow of Sydney and Melbourne in the Australian cultural psyche—due to its enduring and self-conscious attention to subtropical living

Realisms of the Avant-Garde, 2020

The historical avant-gardes defined themselves largely in terms of their relationship to various ... more The historical avant-gardes defined themselves largely in terms of their relationship to various versions of realism. At first glance modernism primarily seems to take a counter-position against realism, yet a closer investigation reveals that these relations are more complex. This book is dedicated to the links between realism, modernism and the avant-garde in their international context from the late 19th century up to the present day

A review of the 6th APT focusing on the work and performance of Rohan Weallean

Art History, 2022

There is a tendency nowadays to refer to Modernism with a capital M. The capital letter invariabl... more There is a tendency nowadays to refer to Modernism with a capital M. The capital letter invariably signals a rebuke. It stands for something remote and critically fossilized; a topic to be treated with disdain or at best ironic indifference.
A review of two books: Sascha Bru, The European Avant-Gardes, 1905-35: A Portable Guide (2018) and Eva Forgács, Hungarian Art: Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement (2017).

A review of Paul Wood's Western Art and the Wider World. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Migration Processes and Artistic Practices in Wartime, 2018

A signicant number of central European and German refugees and emigres sought refuge from war and... more A signicant number of central European and German refugees and emigres sought refuge from war and fascism in Australia during the inter-war and post-World War Two years. While many historical accounts of Antipodean modernism stress its distance from French avant-garde sources, this generation of refugees and emigres brought local practitioners into direct contact with aspects of the modernist endeavour. In particular, these refugees and emigres introduced an approach to modernism that was cross- disciplinary and derived its inspiration from a systematic approach to arts education. This conception tended to highlight the common elements between art, design and architecture.While there have been numerous, individual studies of this generation, this paper foreshadows a much larger research project that aims to link these individual histories into one coherent study. In this paper we offer an indicative sample of a select number of case studies in order to highlight some of these common...