Issue 1 of Memo’s first glossy annual magazine features an extended artist focus on Archie Moore, the 2024 Venice Biennale Australian Representative, with essays by Rex Butler, Tara Heffernan, Tristen Harwood, and Hilary Thurlow.

Audrey Schmidt unveils a covetous history of tall-poppy takedowns in the Melbourne art world. Philip Brophy rips into Hollywood’s shallow art-world playbook, while Cameron Hurst checks-in with the once-celebrated Spike magazine cultural critic, Dean Kissick, in his post-zenith era. The Manhattan Art Review’s Sean Tatol visits the Dutch artist group, KIRAC, reporting on their legal woes with French literature’s ageing enfant terrible, Michel Houellebecq.

We also have essays and reviews on art from all around Australia and the world. Amelia Winata turns up the heat on Melbourne’s public museums as Callum McGrath uncovers a typically Eurocentric failure at the heart of British art historian Claire Bishop’s recent Artforum essay on research-based art. Helen Hughes writes on Helen Johnson’s The Birth of an Institution (2022) and Chelsea Hopper and Shaune Lakin on Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993). Stars like Isa Genzken, Royal Academy graduates like Anna Higgins, cult-favourites like Jas H. Duke — Memo features all this and more.

Texts by Adam Ford, Aimee Dodds, Amelia Winata, Anastasia Murney, Andrew Harper, Audrey Schmidt, Callum McGrath, Cameron Hurst, Camille Orel, Chelsea Hopper, Darren Jorgensen, Gemma Topliss, Giles Fielke, Helen Hughes, Hilary Thurlow, Lévi McLean, Loren Kronemyer, Maraya Takoniatis, Paris Lettau, Philip Brophy, Rayleen Forester, Rebecca Edwards, Rex Butler, Sam Beard, Sean Tatol, Shaune Lakin, Susie Russell, Tara Heffernan, Tristen Harwood, Verónica Tello, Victoria Perin.

256 pages, 16 x 25 cm <br>

Critic Cap by Memo Review.

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Norman Lindsay (1879–1969) was a prolific, popular and controversial Australian artist. He is best known for his children's book The Magic Pudding and his skilled prints, which mostly draw on Greek and Roman mythology and nineteenth century literature and philosophy. The Australian cultural consciousness is indelibly marked by Lindsay's output, his prominence in the Sydney bohemian intellectual scene and by The Magic Pudding, which entrances the imagination of generation after generation of Australian children. This consciousness is marked too by the paradoxical conjunctions of Lindsay's life: artistic bohemia and fascistic tendencies, avant-gardism and a fervour for the rule of law, libertinism and conservatism, worship and denigration.

This collection of essays examines Lindsay's current position in Australian art history. The authors' opinions are erudite, varied and often incendiary; few figures are as divisive as Lindsay.

Film critic Adrian Martin writes alongside Ian McLean, the Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne, art historian Cameron Hurst, and literary critic Jeremy George. Art historian Soo-Min Shim responds to a video work by artist James Nguyen.

The project develops research conducted during an exhibition of the University of Melbourne's Norman Lindsay collection, also titled Venus in Tullamarine, held at the George Paton Gallery in 2022.