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Rauschenberg and Johns: Striking Against the Old Guard:

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  We gave each other permission – Robert Rauschenberg (1) In New York, 1953, Robert Rauschenberg, then 28-years old, produced one of the most defiant art works of the twentieth century. He approached the well-established abstract painter, Willem De Kooning, and asked for a drawing, which the younger artist intended to erase. De Kooning gave him a piece which he would miss, one which he also thought would be almost impossible to erase. Rauschenberg rubbed away for months, with a variety of erasers, until almost every trace of the drawing had been removed. The result, ‘Erased De Kooning Drawing’, stands as a kind of Oedipal moment, whereby the old guard is literally and figuratively erased by the next generation. It marks the symbolic erasure of the hyper-masculine, ‘heroic’ scene of the Abstract Expressionists by a young gay artist who could never fit into that stifling, macho milieu. Rauschenberg’s lover at this time, Jasper Johns, had the drawing framed in gold, and added an ‘offici
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Gareth Sansom: An Old Man's Mixtape

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                             Drover Looking for Spot , 2002/03. Oil and enamel on linen, 122 x 122cm. Gareth Sansom's exhibition, An Old Man's Mixtape is at Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, March 1st - March 28th,2024. This essay was written to accompany it:   ---------------------------------------------   Gareth Sansom is one of Australia’s most highly regarded artists. His work is held in major public and private collections throughout the country and internationally. He has created works of major significance within contemporary Australian art. Eclectic and wide-ranging in his approach, he references both high and low culture, forming charged connections via artful juxtaposition.    Sansom draws inspiration from a wide range of sources, including art history, popular culture, religion, cinema, sexual identity, and direct personal experiences. His media includes painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, photography – often in combination. So unique is his visual language tha
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The Ghost of Fathers Past

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I received an email from a dear friend in London, who happened to mention his fraught relationship with his father (a subject that we had spent many afternoons discussing, throughout the pubs of the East End). It made me think once again of the arid, increasingly violent relationship that I had with my own father. Over the years, it has become clear to me that the difficulties which grew between us with each passing year were because of my homosexuality, which became obvious to him as I stumbled through my childhood - even before it became obvious to myself. He never forgave me for abjuring sport of every kind. He could not bear it that I would rather read a book than kick a ball. He was nonplussed by my passionate interest in Art, and my self-taught knowledge of art history, which he claimed was a waste of time.   There were practical jokes brought to bear upon me during my childhood, in which the level of spite and passive aggression masked a deeper, Freudian animosity
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Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art (for VAULT magazine 2017)

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  Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art , at Heide Museum of Modern Art, reveals how Constructivism has influenced the work of certain Australian artists from the 1930s to the present. This is the third in a series of exhibitions focusing on Modernist art movements and their impact on Australia; the previous being: Cubism and Australian Art (2009–10) and Less is More: Minimal and Post Minimal Art in Australia (2012). Constructivism began in Russia around 1913. It morphed out of Russian Futurism, alongside its austere, antagonistic brother, Suprematism. Central to the Constructivist Movement was Vladimir Tatlin, who had been enthralled by Picasso’s Cubist reliefs, which he had seen in Paris. Tatlin wanted to make art relevant to modern purposes and fit for the rigours of the oncoming Communist Revolution. Constructivism had the urgency and vigour of all cultural revolutions. As it developed, the movement had a number of permutations and eventually sever
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