Cover image of the review
Jo Lloyd, Death role, 2021, single-channel video with stereo sound, costume, reproduction of Elektra backdrop. Photo: Zan Wimberley

From Impulse to Action; A Park is Not a Forest


23 Apr 2022
From Impulse to Action, 29 Jan - 12 Jun 2022 A Park is Not a Forest, 24 Mar - 30 Apr 2022

Last week I was discussing “the canon” with my students. For them, the canon was a Western construct, which in Australia simply reflects the tastes and hierarchies of its settler society. My students were moved to raise a series of worthy questions: Do we seek to renovate the canon? Or do we instead opt out of it and locate different ways of appearing in, and making, art history? These questions struck me as having a renewed relevance in contemporary art discourse today. The weekend before my class I’d visited the newly established Bundanon Art Museum, located near the South Coast region of New South Wales (Wodi Wodi and Yuin Country). At the core of the Museum’s mission, and its inaugural exhibition, is a reckoning with Arthur Boyd, one of Australia’s most revered, and canonised, artists.

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