Wes Hill | Southern Cross University (original) (raw)

Books by Wes Hill

Evoking a level of animosity from a bygone cultural moment, the hipster belongs to a time when th... more Evoking a level of animosity from a bygone cultural moment, the hipster
belongs to a time when the economic advantages of cultural innovation in
the arts were seriously believed. What that time was, and where we are
now, is this book’s subject, examined through the lens of art history and
the creativity hype of neoliberalism. Having been associated with post-
World War Two bebop and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in
the early 2000s as a form of generic individualism that was easily identifiable even if endlessly mutable. However, in recent years “hipster” has become increasingly impotent as an accusation, shifting in its meaning to refer less to an external identity than to a mode of deflection in which
authenticity and discernment are challenged only to be surreptitiously
reinforced. Marking a transition from a period in Western art when irony
and high-minded nonchalance reigned, the hipster appears in the context
of contemporary art not as a critical standpoint in itself but as the continually deferred subject position of creative practice. Today, ethical considerations of identity overshadow discerning proclamations of cultural taste, making palpable an uncertainty about our capacity to untangle capitalism’s thirst for reinvention from the artist’s thirst for subverting norms.

Although the title Speech Acts evokes postmodern debates about linguistics – specifically the Ame... more Although the title Speech Acts evokes postmodern debates about linguistics – specifically the American philosopher John Searle’s 1969 publication of the same name – this exhibition was conceived with a more basic ambition: to consider the ways in which the British artist Richard Grayson and the American artist Matt Mullican connect speech and action in their selected video works. While Mullican and Grayson have very different practices, they have shared backgrounds in performance and text-based art, as well as a tendency to juxtapose speech and vernacular tropes against universalist frames of reference. Whereas Mullican explores language systems in relation to the human psyche, Grayson often draws
from vernacular culture, with which he contrasts the impersonal and esoteric aspects of religious, scientific and capitalist paradigms. In this exhibition, Mullican and Grayson speak, sing, scream and animate words to highlight linguistic connections between physical bodies, psyches and socio-political contexts, underscoring the liveliness of the video medium and leaving mysterious the artists’ precise relation to the ideas in their works.

Since the 1990s, artists and art writers around the world have increasingly undermined the essent... more Since the 1990s, artists and art writers around the world have increasingly undermined the essentialism associated with notions of "critical practice." We can see this manifesting in the renewed relevance of what were previously considered "outsider" art practices, the emphasis on first-person accounts of identity over critical theory, and the proliferation of exhibitions that refuse to distinguish between art and the productions of culture more generally. How Folklore Shaped Modern Art: A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics underscores how the cultural traditions, belief systems and performed exchanges that were once integral to the folklore discipline are now central to contemporary art’s "post-critical turn." This shift is considered here as less a direct confrontation of critical procedures than a symptom of art’s inclusive ideals, overturning the historical separation of fine art from those "uncritical" forms located in material and commercial culture. In a global context, aesthetics is now just one of numerous traditions informing our encounters with visual culture today, symptomatic of the pull towards an impossibly pluralistic image of art that reflects the irreducible conditions of identity.

Catalogue publication from an exhibition featuring Christopher LG Hill and Matt Dabrowski. Curate... more Catalogue publication from an exhibition featuring Christopher LG Hill and Matt Dabrowski. Curated and edited by Wes Hill. published by Lismore Regional Gallery, NSW.

Catalogue publication from an exhibition at Contemporary Art Space Tasmania, Hobart. 2012. Curate... more Catalogue publication from an exhibition at Contemporary Art Space Tasmania, Hobart. 2012. Curated and edited by Wes Hill

Book Chapters by Wes Hill

Hipster Culture: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives, 2021

The hipster invites analysis across many different fields of research, spanning issues of race, c... more The hipster invites analysis across many different fields of research, spanning issues of race, class, gender, gentrification, consumerism, globalization, irony, subcultures, and the political Left. Despite this promiscuity, the trope is primarily an aesthetic one, functioning, by and large, as an embodiment of discerning yet defective taste. As an aesthetic trope, the hipster has close affiliations with visual art, amalgamating a range of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century "sensitive-to-beauty" archetypes. Specifically, the hipster distorts the Western avant-gardist legacy of flâneurs, aesthetes, connoisseurs, and dandies by transplanting them to the sphere of post-Warholian practice, within the ever-shifting parameters of neoliberal global capitalism. Of course, "art hipsters" might want what hipsters everywhere want: to not be identified as hipsters. Therefore, to name a hipster is to enter into its rhetorical displays of perspicacious appearance. This is essentially what Rob Horning calls the hipster's "taint," whereby "if you are concerned enough about the [hipster] phenomenon to analyze it and discuss it, you are already somewhere on the continuum of hipster and are in the process of trying to rid yourself of [it]" (80). In contemporary art, which notoriously waivers between "hip" and "politically progressive" signaling, the story of hipsters is the story of visually literate creatives who do not think of themselves as hipsters until being named as such by someone assumed to be even more visually literate than them. This one-upmanship is key to understanding the hipster: it is a circular dispute about critical complexity performed through over-determinations of aesthetic taste.

Shapes of Knowledge, 2019

What does it mean for art to be pedagogical? Since the early 2000s, a number of terms such as ‘ar... more What does it mean for art to be pedagogical? Since the early 2000s, a number of terms such as ‘artist educator’, ‘artist activist’, ‘socially engaged artist’, ‘artist researcher’ and ‘curator artist’ have emerged to signal a shift in the direction of critical art practice, revolving around the common question: ‘How are we shaped by what we know?’ This turn towards what I will call ‘socio-pedagogic art’ is the focus of Shapes of Knowledge, an exhibition that reflects on, and stages, the various ways in which artists around the globe produce and impart knowledge. What this exhibition ultimately showcases is the ambitious deployment of hybrid methodologies in art today, involving artists and cultural producers more interested in education than transgression, in productive dialogue rather than denunciation.

Emily Floyd: The Dawn, 2014

Journal Articles (edited C1) by Wes Hill

Artlink, 2022

As soon as it was published, ‘Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings’ seemed a vital resource for anyo... more As soon as it was published, ‘Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings’ seemed a vital resource for anyone interested in Australian postcolonial art history, or simply good art. Since his death in 2014, Gordon Bennett has become a legendary figure whose reputation is likely only to grow; ‘the first artist to explore our Indigenous past using conceptual art techniques’ according to his gallerist, the incisive Josh Milani. Foregrounding his critical voice, Bennett was a driving force behind Brisbane becoming what used to be called the ‘urban Aboriginal art capital of Australia.’ He inspired a generation of artists after him to speak back to the art-historical discourses and art-institutional divisions limiting Indigenous representation, embodying what Terry Smith calls ‘a shout from the silenced.’

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2021

The American philosopher Graham Harman is one of the more lucid writers associated with the 'mate... more The American philosopher Graham Harman is one of the more lucid writers associated with the 'material turn' in humanities scholarship over the last twenty years. Identified with Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and Speculative Realism-distant cousins of the likes of New Materialism, Thing Theory and New Realism-Harman is part of a broader movement of theorists who, in the words of Steven Shaviro, are interested in how 'things are active and interactive far beyond any measure of their presence to us'. While their common ground is much disputed, if there is such a thing as 'theorists of the material turn' the de-privileging of human-world relations is key; they advocate not critical modes of debunking, to discover 'where subjectivity begins and ends', but more speculative inquiries into non-human agency and the nature of things independent of thought. Like the French sociologist Bruno Latour (whose 2005 slogan 'Back to Things!' anticipated this ontological flattening of subjects and objects, turning all into actors), Harman thinks that art plays a valuable role in the contemporary rethinking of things. He states that, when it comes to OOO, 'aesthetics is first philosophy'.

Artlink, 2021

Thanks to Erik Jensen’s 2014 book, Acute Misfortune, and its film adaptation of the same name—dir... more Thanks to Erik Jensen’s 2014 book, Acute Misfortune, and its film adaptation of the same name—directed by Thomas M. Wright and released in 2018—the legacy of Adam Cullen, and his Gen‑X revanchism, have crept back into the Australian artworld of late. Both Jensen’s biography and Wright’s biopic are ambiguous, even ambivalent, about Cullen’s actual work. They don’t so much re‑examine his practice as situate it in the background of his embittered, self‑dramatized life, illuminating secrets rather than talents. Jensen concludes that Cullen was likely a closet bisexual with severe mummy and daddy issues; his complicated neediness communicated through lies, innuendos and between bouts of grievous bodily harm caused to himself and those around him.

Art Monthly Australasia, 2021

In Max Weber’s assessment, twentieth-century modern life was confronted by the spread of ‘disench... more In Max Weber’s assessment, twentieth-century modern
life was confronted by the spread of ‘disenchantment’
– from the German Entzauberung, which literally
translates to ‘de-magic-ation’. Borrowed from Friedrich
Schiller, disenchantment describes the negative effects
of scientific reason and bureaucratic regulation,
which fail to bring about superior knowledge of the
conditions under which one lives. In contrast to Marx,
Weber held that modernity could be an ‘iron cage’
precisely because of its success. This has less to do
with class inequality or alienation than with how the
processes that allow the human intellect to soar are the
same ones that produce meaninglessness; rationalisation
dispirits as it uplifts. The specialised self-regulating
structures of twentieth-century life were, Weber
thought, ill-equipped to handle older human needs
for spiritual closure, for taking positions on rhetorical
unrationalisable questions of self-worth. Morality, myth
and happiness are tempered by the calculability of everything,
which may not be a completely bad thing for
those whose public duty is to represent heterogenous
moral and political ends. In a pithy iconoclastic tone
redolent of Marshall McLuhan, Weber states: ‘Today the
routines of everyday life challenge religion.’

Artlink, 2020

Strange to think of Gordon Bennett as an almost classical figure in contemporary Australian art. ... more Strange to think of Gordon Bennett as an almost classical figure in contemporary Australian art. After years of critiquing art-historical standards, Bennett has himself become the standard bearer. Six years after his death at the age of 58, his practice represents a canon that future generations of artists will be both motivated and shadowed by. In this, his first homegrown retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), some of Bennett’s most well-known series are framed by seriality itself. At the centre of "Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett" – its beating heart – is a freestanding display of numerous works on paper, establishing how the Queensland-born artist obsessed over his ideas in multiple drawings, watercolours and revisions, in constant dialogue with his own visual vocabulary as much as he was with those whose works he appropriated.

M/C Journal, 2020

In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated... more In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism's transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: "a work needs only to be interesting".

Artlink, 2020

Untitled (Clock) (2014) by the Perth‑born, Melbourne‑based artist Stuart Ringholt is modelled on ... more Untitled (Clock) (2014) by the Perth‑born, Melbourne‑based artist Stuart Ringholt is modelled on an antique mantelpiece clock, stands three metres high, and completes a minute in forty‑five seconds. I’ve only ever experienced the work as part of Today Tomorrow Yesterday: the almost absurdly lazy four‑year‑long exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, running from September 2016 to July 2020. Because of the sculpture’s prominence in a show catering mostly to drop‑by tourists wandering around Circular Quay, I usually see the work incidentally, on my way to other shows in the same building. In my mind, at least until the exhibition closes later this year, Ringholt’s clock is a permanent public‑art object, heavy with everyday context yet recurrently passing its 18‑hour days as if in a zone of its own.

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2018

Since the late 1990s, the work of the New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson has centred on reconst... more Since the late 1990s, the work of the New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson has centred on reconstructed historical objects that resemble artefacts from archaeology, anthropology and material culture disciplines. As part of a broader sensibility of twenty-first-century ‘archival,’ ‘archaeological’ and ‘historiographic’ art, Stevenson and his peers have prompted much discussion about the legacy of 1970s institutional critique on post-1990s practice-based treatments of history and museology. What makes Stevenson so interesting within this lineage is his inclination to research relatively overlooked past events in order to problematise a clear line between historical perspective and aesthetic experience. Although Stevenson's work conjures the empiricism of the social sciences and the reflexivity of institutional critique, its nostalgic, fragmented, and multi-temporal characteristics hint at a contemporary treatment of the romantic ruin. Fascinated with the intersections of cultural and economic histories yet sceptical of periodisation, his locating of nostalgia within critical practice reveals the struggle to grasp one's present, endowing viewers with the capacity to reconstruct for themselves the significance of his own reconstructions.

Media Culture Journal, 2018

The American artist Ryan Trecartin makes digital videos that centre on the self-presentations com... more The American artist Ryan Trecartin makes digital videos that centre on the self-presentations common to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Named by New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s” (84), Trecartin’s works are like high-octane domestic dramas told in the first-person, blending carnivalesque and horror sensibilities through multi-layered imagery, fast-paced editing, sprawling mise-en-scène installations and heavy-handed digital effects. Featuring narcissistic young-adult characters (many of whom are played by the artist and his friends), Trecartin’s scripted videos portray the self as fundamentally performed and kaleidoscopically mediated. His approach is therefore exemplary of some of the key concepts of automediality, which, although originating in literary studies, address concerns relevant to contemporary art, such as the blurring of life-story, self-performance, identity, persona and technological mediation. I argue that Trecartin’s work is a form of automedial art that combines camp personas with what Sianne Ngai calls the “zany” aesthetics of neoliberalism—the 24/7 production of affects, subjectivity and sociability which complicate distinctions between public and private life.

Electronic Melbourne Art Journal

What is a hipster, and why has this cultural trope become so resonant of a particular mode of art... more What is a hipster, and why has this cultural trope become so resonant of a particular mode of artistic and connoisseurial expression in recent times? Evolving from its beatnik origins, the stereotypical hipster today is likely to be a globally aware " creative " who nonetheless fails in their endeavour to be an exemplar of progressive cultural taste in an era when cultural value is heavily politicised. Today, artist memes and hipster memes are almost interchangeable, associated with people who are desperate to be fashionably distinctive, culturally literate or as having discovered some obscure cultural phenomenon before anyone else. But how did we arrive at this situation where elitist and generically " arty " connotations are perceived in so many cultural forms? This article will attempt to provide an historical context to the rise of the contemporary, post-1990s, hipster, who emerged out of the creative and entrepreneurial ideologies of the digital age – a time when artistic creations lose their alternative credence in the markets of the creative industries. Towards the end of the article " hipster hate " will be examined in relation to post-critical practice, in which the critical, exclusive, and in-the-know stances of cultural connoisseurs are thought to be in conflict with pluralist ideology. Hipster Aesthetics: Creatives with no alternative Although the hipster trope is immediately recognisable, it has been allied with a remarkable diversity of styles, objects and activities over the last two decades, warranting definition more in terms of the attempt to promote counter-mainstream sensibilities than pertaining to a specific aesthetic as such. People rarely identify themselves as hipsters, and the term itself has long been contested, a generic signifier for those who embody both a generic brand of artiness and a pluralist cultural ideal. While more specific terms such as " twee " , " health goth " , " normcore " , " lumbersexual " and " yuccies " (young urban creative yuppies) describe a range of hipster subgroups, the currency of the term " hipster " has hardly diminished, remaining relevant, perhaps, by virtue of its totalizing sensibility – a shorthand term for people we can easily identify but also find difficult to define without implicating our own tastes. Fundamental to the hipster trope then is the very perception of what a hipster is, as if entailing the processes by which displays of progressive outlooks are denounced in the name of even more progressive outlooks. But why has the hipster become such a dominant marker of twenty-first-century life in the first place? Where did it come from and where is it going? Writing for the New York Times in 2013, Steven Kurutz has observed that there no longer appears to be any clothes or hobbies that one could wear or participate in to avoid the hipster label, asking: 'has there ever been a subculture this broadly defined?' 1 He writes: 1 Kurutz, 2013:

Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty

The pejorative term 'hipster' has been prominent in popular culture since the early 2000s, typica... more The pejorative term 'hipster' has been prominent in popular culture since the early 2000s, typically used in reference to connoisseurs, elites, poseurs, or anyone who is unaware of their own pretentiousness. As cultural stereotypes, hipsters have been allied with a striking diversity of aesthetic forms over the last twenty years, so much so that the trope has less to do with a specific aesthetic style and more to do with the attempt to foster a counter-mainstream sensibility. In this article, I provide an historical backdrop to the rise of the post-postmodern hipster, locating its emergence in the global spread of culture in the 1990s. I argue that the current pervasiveness of so-called 'hipster hate' – visible on the Internet and on social media platforms such as Twitter – is exemplary of a post-critical perspective, where the hipster stereotype serves as a point of distinction that reinforces the ideologies of cultural pluralism.
Keywords: hipster post-critical aesthetics pluralism post-postmodern connoisseurship

Hipster Culture: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives, 2021

Shapes of Knowledge, 2019

Emily Floyd: The Dawn, 2014

Artlink, 2022

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2021

Artlink, 2021

Art Monthly Australasia, 2021

Artlink, 2020

M/C Journal, 2020

Artlink, 2020

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2018

Media Culture Journal, 2018

Electronic Melbourne Art Journal

Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty

Essay on Australian artist Archie Moore. Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA), Darwin.

Art Guide Australia, 2022

Archie Moore’s works are true to life, and life, as we know, is like a box of chocolates. An exhi... more Archie Moore’s works are true to life, and life, as we know, is like a box of chocolates. An exhibition by Moore is, in the words of Djon Mundine, “always special, and different.” You never know what you’re going to get. Yes, specific taxonomic themes run through his career—an interest in how personal memories are classified alongside more official histories of discrimination and injustice—but they are also undercut by phantasmal sensations. Like his childhood obsession with astral travelling, art might be Moore’s way of trying to get out of his body only to show us how bodily, visual and cognitive experience are so profoundly intertwined.

Frieze, 2022

Titled ‘rīvus’ (Latin for ‘stream’ and the root of ‘rivalry’), this year’s Biennale of Sydney inv... more Titled ‘rīvus’ (Latin for ‘stream’ and the root of ‘rivalry’), this year’s Biennale of Sydney invokes flows across artistic, ecological, sociological and philosophical contexts, with Colombian artistic director José Roca and his Australia-based curatorium – comprising Paschal Daantos Berry, Anna Davis, Hannah Donnelly and Talia Linz – highlighting artists from 30 countries whose practices foreground sustainability perspectives. Across the biennial’s five main sites, works touch on ancestral responsibility, pan-Indigenous mythology and slippages between subjects and objects, linking artmaking to practices of care.

Art and Australia, 2019

Problems, problems, problems. You don’t have to be Einstein—or Jerry Saltz—to know the term ‘outs... more Problems, problems, problems. You don’t have to be Einstein—or Jerry Saltz—to know the term ‘outsider art’ is fraught with problems. It’s a superfluous category, not least because the contemporary art world already sees itself as inclusive, extolling the aesthetics of difference alongside capitalism’s thirst for the new. Throw in intersectional identity politics and the issue of demarcating ‘insiders’ from ‘outsiders’ becomes even more complex, turning one person’s marginality into another person’s privilege.

It’s for these reasons that an alternative term, ‘outlier’, has gained traction in recent years. In his 2008 book 'Outliers: The Story of Success,' the New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell used the term to conceptualise the variables underpinning atypical individuals and events. In short, Gladwell’s ‘outlier’ stories about Bill Gates, the Beatles and mathematical geniuses are not triumphant sui generis narratives about talent but look instead to the data behind the anomalies, seeing his subjects through the lens of the unpredictable, coincidental and entangled effects of culture, geography, community, family and genetic lineage.

Art Monthly Australasia, 2019

Bright tubular polka-dot textile sculptures inserted into found gloves. Hanging chains and handhe... more Bright tubular polka-dot textile sculptures inserted into found gloves. Hanging chains and handheld fans made from blue and pink metallic fabrics. Collaged quilts with screen-printed black and white images of female poseurs, noiresque femme fatales and defaced archaic artefacts. This is the work of Sydney-based artist Sarah Contos, but it could just as easily be the output of a precocious teenager from an imaginary Sofia Coppola film – an eccentric bedroom artist, perhaps, whose paeans to history span the domestic, the cinematic, the erotic and the nostalgic. Contos’s work, like Coppola’s, hinges ultimately on desire, combining adolescent intensities with aesthetic sophistication. In particular, she harbours a penchant for 1930s- and 1980s-style seductions, creating a cosmology in which Surrealist design fuses with the Memphis Group; Hollywood elegance with shabby chic; German expressionism with zine aesthetics. Everything seems slightly unhinged, but glamour, no matter how unconventional, somehow always prevails.

Artforum, 2019

LIVING AND WORKING in a remote Aboriginal community in central Australia, Vincent Namatjira may s... more LIVING AND WORKING in a remote Aboriginal community in central Australia, Vincent Namatjira may seem an unlikely oracle for the degenerative condition we call neoliberalism. Yet his paintings representing world leaders and the social elite possess a discerning frankness that exposes the paragons of power as hapless frauds.

Art Monthly Australasia, 2018

South Korean artist Haegue Yang is busy. Yayoi Kusama-busy. Her first solo exhibition for an Aust... more South Korean artist Haegue Yang is busy. Yayoi Kusama-busy. Her first solo exhibition for an Australian institution, at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA), comes on the back of contributions to the 21st Biennale of Sydney, the 10th Liverpool Biennial and her first career retrospective, ‘ETA’, at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, presented as part of Germany’s prestigious Wolfgang Hahn Prize. The title of Yang’s retrospective, an abbreviation of ‘Estimated Time of Arrival’, is indicative of how the artist’s nomadic lifestyle is crucial to her practice, which operates between Seoul, Berlin and any number of temporary jaunts in the international art world. At the IMA, ‘Triple Vita Nestings’ continued Yang’s now familiar treatment of ‘ready-to-hand’ materials, creating multimedia assemblages that act as portable partitions in the gallery space. Atmospheric and effortless, playful and melancholic, antisocial yet longing for connection, the exhibition presented itself as the work of someone who, always on the go, has long since departed for other horizons.

Artlink, 2018

Some part of me wishes I was profoundly moved by Richard Mosse’s video installation, Incoming (20... more Some part of me wishes I was profoundly moved by Richard Mosse’s video installation, Incoming (2014–17), at the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2017 Triennale. Although most viewers were captivated by it, I felt uncomfortably cynical, not indifferent to the suffering it purported to show but to its overt use of theatrics. While I can appreciate Mosse’s ghost‑like imagery of refugees who appear at once distant and intimate, I think the emotional core of the work owes more to collaborator Ben Frost’s lively electronic soundtrack, which is ultimately manipulative in its effect. This is the dilemma of politically‑motivated, pathos‑laden work: how do we negatively judge something that has such a good heart? Confronted with Mosse’s images of a child’s autopsy whose body has decomposed, it is hard not to feel callous when judging such things based on formal superficialities.

Artforum, 2019

To simply say that the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) is an event that showcase... more To simply say that the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) is an event that showcases contemporary art from Asia, Australia, and the Pacific islands would fail to convey the sheer vitality of its many iterations since 1993, which, more than any other recurring exhibition, have shaped Australia’s cultural identity in the digital age. Its ninth installment, led by Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art’s director Chris Saines and Asia-Pacific curatorial manager Zara Stanhope, appears more assured than ever. In this outing, which includes more than eighty artists and collectives from thirty different countries (and, notably, offers nearly equal gender representation), art-historical continuity is favored over disruption, and nuanced engagements with the particularities of artistic practice supplant prior emphases on multiculturalism.

Artforum, 2018

JAPANESE-BORN MAMI KATAOKA, chief curator at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum since 2003, is the artistic ... more JAPANESE-BORN MAMI KATAOKA, chief curator at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum since 2003, is the artistic director of the 2018 Biennale of Sydney, the first Asian curator to be appointed to the role in the event’s forty-five-year history. While her selection reflects the undeniable influence of Brisbane’s Asia Pacific Triennial (inaugurated in 1993) on the national scene, this turn to Australia’s neighboring regions feels so overdue that praising it here hardly seems justified.

Artforum, 2018

For an institution with a reputation for blockbuster exhibitions and kid-friendly programming, th... more For an institution with a reputation for blockbuster exhibitions and kid-friendly programming, the Gallery of Modern Art made an unusual choice when it decided to mount a Gerhard Richter retrospective—his first in Australia.

Artlink, 2017

Clement Greenberg, writing favourably on Anne Truitt’s work in a 1968 essay, accused her minimali... more Clement Greenberg, writing favourably on Anne Truitt’s work in a 1968 essay, accused her minimalist peers of having overtly “masculine” traits, claiming that artists such as Donald Judd repressed their latent “feminine sensibilities” in an effort to be seen as “aggressively far out.”1 This uncharacteristic reflection on the macho politics of art in the 1960s reveals a critic grappling with the times, writing at a moment when feminism, along with civil rights activism of a more general kind, were gaining mainstream recognition in the West. In Australia, Greenberg’s formalism had not yet become representative of the old guard, informing instead the National Gallery of Victoria’s The Field exhibition, which Terry Smith cites in his well‑known 1974 essay as a starting point for thinking about Australian art’s “provincialism problem.” A decade later and it would be expansionist rather than reductionist practices that registered the political and cultural upheavals of the late 1960s and 1970s in Australia. Formalist tendencies, even of the Susan Sontag variety, would morph into the expanded fields of sculpture and performance, as art became aligned with subcultural activities invested in the politics of representation. Embroiled in these shifts as they happened, Jenny Watson’s work revealed itself less as a triumph of feminist politics than of anti‑essentialism. So much is evident in Watson’s energising retrospective at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, The Fabric of Fantasy.

On Claire Bishop's 'Digital Divide'. Broadsheet, 43.2, 2014

Carolyn Christov-Barkargiev's Documenta 13. Broadsheet, 41.2, 2012

Frieze, 2019

Soon after Henrik Olesen’s mid-career retrospective opened at the Reina Sofía, sad news emerged t... more Soon after Henrik Olesen’s mid-career retrospective opened at the Reina Sofía, sad news emerged that critic Douglas Crimp had died. This, combined with the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall the month prior, made Olesen’s exhibition especially timely in its reflection of gay activist history and queer legacy. Olesen draws from post-minimalist and conceptualist treatments of the body to examine the sexuality, psychology and de-legitimization of non-normative identities. He undeniably advances a queer aesthetic, but his practice is also gloriously nebulous: an ongoing experiment with the point at which ‘queer’ becomes inscrutable.

Artforum, 2020

In this retrospective, “Strange Ways,” Anne Wallace’s oil paintings of mostly white middle-class ... more In this retrospective, “Strange Ways,” Anne Wallace’s oil paintings of mostly white middle-class people in noirish scenarios turn up the dial on the repertoires of Edward Hopper and Alfred Hitchcock. Adding to the history of antipodean surrealism in this country, Wallace’s northern-hemisphere aesthetics are recurrently punctuated by indigenous anomalies.

Artforum

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2014

Frieze

Frieze, Issue 161, 2014

Artforum

Artspace exhibition, Sydney

Artforum

Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, exhibition review

Frieze

Issue 154, Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery

frieze online review, 2012

Frieze

Frieze issue 145, 2012

Interview with Brisbane artist with Joseph Breikers, Issue 75. 2012

Art Monthly Australia, Jan 1, 2011

In a 2012 Artforum essay titled " Digital Divide: Whatever Happened to Digital Art? " Claire Bish... more In a 2012 Artforum essay titled " Digital Divide: Whatever Happened to Digital Art? " Claire Bishop, the well-known art critic and associate professor of art history at the City University of New York, asked: " While many artists use digital technology, how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital? " Bishop's essay, which provoked much criticism from digital art advocates, reflected on contemporary culture's pervasive interest in " the analog, the archival, the obsolete and predigital modes of communication, " as signified by the proliferation of retro or vintage aesthetics. Limiting her argument to mainstream contemporary art, Bishop suggests that, over the last 20 years or so, the artworld has shifted its perspective on digital art – from the hype about virtuality in the 1990s, to the current situation where contemporary artists are more inclined to employ digital media as discrete tools within their installation or sculptural practices. The proposed paper will detail these issues pertaining to Bishop's essay, in attempt to provoke discussion about the nature of contemporary digital art, and its relation to outmoded forms and technologies.

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art

The American philosopher Graham Harman is one of the more lucid writers associated with the ‘mate... more The American philosopher Graham Harman is one of the more lucid writers associated with the ‘material turn’ in humanities scholarship over the last twenty years. Identified with Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and Speculative Realism— distant cousins of the likes of New Materialism, Thing Theory and New Realism—Harman is part of a broader movement of theorists who, in the words of Steven Shaviro, are interested in how ‘things are active and interactive far beyond any measure of their presence to us’. While their common ground is much disputed, if there is such a thing as ‘theorists of the material turn’ the deprivileging of human-world relations is key; they advocate not critical modes of debunking, to discover ‘where subjectivity begins and ends’, but more speculative inquiries into non-human agency and the nature of things independent of thought. Like the French sociologist Bruno Latour (whose 2005 slogan ‘Back to Things!’ anticipated this ontological flattening of subjects and objects, turning all into actors), Harman thinks that art plays a valuable role in the contemporary rethinking of things. He states that, when it comes to OOO, ‘aesthetics is first philosophy’. Published in 2020, Art and Objects is the first book to address in detail the place of aesthetics in OOO’s perceptual schema. Unsatisfied by explanations of engagement that focus on subtractive ‘internal’ qualities or imbricated ‘external’ relations of things, OOO instead delivers the world to us as two kinds of objects [O] with two kinds of qualities [Q]—real and sensual [R and S])—thus four separate classes of aesthetic phenomena: RO-RQ, RO-SQ, SO-SQ, and SO-RQ. Whether living, nonliving, natural, artificial, or conceptual, according to OOO all things can be treated as objects whose sensual qualities exist only as translated emanations of some inaccessible real object anterior to presence. From the beginning, Harman makes it clear that his book is not intended as a survey of contemporary art practices. Instead, it reads as an exercise in revitalizing the almost embarrassingly anachronistic subject of beauty under the banner of OOO, defining art as ‘the construction of entities or situations reliably equipped to produce beauty’ (xii). So, what is beauty? Harman’s delectably concise definition is ‘the theatrical enactment of a rift between a real object and its sensual qualities’ (140). As alluded to in the title, Michael Fried’s seminal 1967 essay Art and Objecthood is a key point of comparison throughout. He joins Fried in advocating absorbed and anti-literalist encounters, asking readers to reconsider formalist

Frieze Contemporary Art and Culture, 2014

Artforum International, 2012

Abstract: The lie and contribution of Andy Warhol, a renowned artist to the field of contemporary... more Abstract: The lie and contribution of Andy Warhol, a renowned artist to the field of contemporary art is discussed. Details of the first major Australian retrospective of Warhol's work held in Brisbane are highlighted. ... To cite this article: Hill, Wes. Andy Warhol in Brisbane [online]. Art ...

Artforum International, 2013

Art Monthly Australia, Mar 1, 2010

The exhibits at the 13th Art Berlin Festival held between 24-27 September, 2009 are reviewed. The... more The exhibits at the 13th Art Berlin Festival held between 24-27 September, 2009 are reviewed. The main section of the fair focused entirely on galleries who sell post-60's art. The AFB had over 130 galleries, with a majority being from Germany. There was a ...