focus on contemporary australian art
In the introductory essay to Interesting Times: focus on Contemporary Australian Art, curator Russell Storer quotes Ingrid Periz on Adam Cullen, one of the seventeen artists in this group show: ‘Art doesn’t make things better, it just makes them bearable’.1 To this cathartic view, I would pose psychologist James Hillman’s remark that ‘Therapy doesn’t heal, it intensifies’.2 Probing and illuminating injustice and discomforting truths does not always offer a sense of relief. It is when one knows this dilemma that the courage, and conceptual and artistic intelligence of John Barbour, Adam Cullen, Neil Emmerson, Merilyn Fairskye, Pat Hoffie, Ricky Maynard, Freddie Timms and their colleagues in Interesting Times, come to the fore.
In a post-September 11, 2001 climate, and with Documenta 11 still in mind, art museums appear more ready to gather in those artists who either directly document sites of conflict and trauma or who in elliptical ways express unease and anxiety. All art is political (it may after-all stand for conservative values) but not all is concerned with the social role of art as a lever for possible change. Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 reflected a very different tenor to the strident and energetic polemics of Lucy Lippard and like-minded activists of the late 1960s and 1970s, when there was an optimistic belief that collective art action could help turn the tide. And sometimes it did (think feminism). By comparison, Documenta in 2002 embraced many artists who projected their socio-political concerns in an individualistic, sly and seemingly dispassionate way. The cool directness of Doris Salcedo’s disfigured metal chairs and barriers evoked perverse forms of human alienation, resonating more with viewers of today than the equivalent