AWAPAs WINNERS│HIGHLY COMMENDED│ENTRIES 2021
BEST BOOK PRIZE
$1,000 sponsored by Professor Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA
Judges Emeritus Professor Helen Ennis FAHA and Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin
WINNER
Christina Barton, Billy Apple® Life/Work, (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2020)
From the judges Barton’s consideration of Billy Apple’s career and its significance is rigorous, sustained and satisfying. The extent and originality of the research are outstanding as Barton charts Apple’s contributions to the conceptual art movements in London, New York, as well as New Zealand. The text is informed by Barton’s in-depth knowledge of Apple and his work, but successfully maintains a critical perspective throughout. An exemplary monograph that is engaging and highly accessible. Richly illustrated with colour, and black and white images, the publication is beautifully designed with outstanding high production values.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Anthony White, Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism, (New York: Routledge, 2020)
From the judges A fascinating study that focuses on three artists, Fortunato Depero, Scipione, and Mario Radice, who worked during the Fascist age in Italy. White successfully overturns prevailing ideas about 20th century art through his examination of the complex relationships that existed between Italian modern artists and Mussolini’s regime. Extensively researched and innovative in approach.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Stephen H. Whiteman, Where Dragon Veins Meet: the Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020)
From the judges A work distinguished by its exceptional scholarship and illuminating interdisciplinary approach that uses art history, architectural history, garden and landscape history, historical geography and digital mapping to reconstruct the Mountain Estate as it evolved under Kangxi. It explores the ways ideology is expressed through landscape and, while focusing on the early Qing dynasty, develops an approach that is more broadly applicable. Beautifully produced with stunning illustrations.
BEST ANTHOLOGY PRIZE
$500 sponsored by the Australian Institute of Art History, University of Melbourne
Judges Associate Professor Robert Gaston and Dr Sheridan Palmer
From the judges Entries for this year’s prize attest to the high-quality anthologies published by scholars based in our region during 2020. This type of publication has remained central to scholarship in art history and art-related fields, and includes edited, book-length volumes containing multiple essays composed by different authors, usually grouped around a broad topic, although some are more tightly focused studies dealing with a single group of artists or an individual.
All the authors, editors, publishers, and designers involved in the production of the texts entered for this year’s prize are to be congratulated for their efforts. Nevertheless, one publication stood out and in making this assessment, the judges took into consideration criteria such as scholarly rigour, contribution to knowledge, impact, significance, production quality, and clarity of exposition.
WINNER
Tony Bennett FAHA FAcSS, Deborah Stevenson FASSA, Fred Myers, Tamara Winikoff (eds), The Australian Art Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions (New York and London: Routledge, 2020)
From the judges A powerful, carefully structured collection of essays, some originating in recently funded research projects, others commissioned to deliver sharply focused contributions that unfold the complex issues addressed in this substantial volume. The preface explains that the collection “articulates a conversation between sociologists, anthropologists, art historians, policy analysts, art activists and artists” arising from project workshops in 2014 and 2017. The latter, What Value The Arts, took place “when the spectre of a completely neoliberal or market-defined articulation of the value of the arts held increasing sway in Australia. That time is still very much with us …” Of necessity a politicised series of discourses challenging current understandings and methodologies, it is also a precious record of life experience in the Australian art field. The diversity of viewpoints is itself testimony to the fiendish complexity of the field under investigation. There are frank expressions of exhaustion and anger throughout the volume, where contributors explore such issues as professional training in art schools and universities, Indigenous curatorship and the Indigenous art market, community arts programs, funding systems and prizes, exhibiting and collecting, both public and private. Gender and race are two prominent concerns. Desirability of internationalising artists’ work and the beneficial consequences of group activity across the field is highlighted, as the field itself expands its digital capacities. Global entrepreneurship offers fresh opportunities, and creative collaboration. Yet the “Australianness” of the Australian art field becomes an ever more contested phenomenon as Indigenous and immigrant artists re-define ways of living, making and working in a rapidly changing Australia. This volume, with its high production values and notable scholarship, represents a watershed of critical thinking, where the deeply personal, often painful accounts of the training and working histories of seven, now successful artists, complete the book’s theoretical structure with revealing honesty.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Annika Aitken, Isobel Crombie, Megan Patty, Maria Quirk and Myles Russell-Cook (eds.), She Persists: Perspective on Women in Art & Design (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2020)
From the judges This book is a strong collection of research, global in reach and broad in historical range, that as the Introduction claims, offers ‘thirty-four pivotal perspectives on moments in, and key contributions to, the field of art and design by women.’ Organised under the themes of Ambition, Perseverance, Activism, Feminisms and Identity, and illustrated almost exclusively from the holdings of the National Gallery of Victoria, the volume represents a resilient platform of exemplary work by prominent authors in the field. Much of the evidence has been hard-won, requiring fresh investigation into both familiar but underexplored archives and probing inquiry into works in an impressive range of media, large and small, allowing the reader to enter the art, craft and design worlds of some extraordinarily gifted but neglected artists. The theoretical foundations of the collection are universally sound. Many challenging and complex issues arising from feminist and Indigenous studies pertaining to women’s historical inability to project their artistic and intellectual capacities in the visual arts field across multiple cultures, are thoughtfully explored in this substantial volume. It will doubtless serve as a valuable book of resources for researchers interested in a global and interdisciplinary approach to women’s art and art history.
BEST ARTIST-LED PUBLICATION: ESSAY / CATALOGUE / BOOK PRIZE
$500 supported by Monash Art Design & Architecture, Monash University
Judges Dr Verónica Tello and Bryony Naiby
WINNER
Angela Goddard and Tim Riley Walsh (eds), Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings (Sydney: Power Publications and Brisbane: Griffith University Art Museum, 2020)
From the judges Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings is impressive for its robust and timely approach to the archive of Australian art. Diligently researched, Selected Writings brings together an array of Bennett’s published and unpublished writings, statements and interviews, as well as providing glimpses into his personal notebooks, letters and sketches. Thoughtfully structured in four parts – In his own words; In response; In conversation; and On reflection – the editors, Goddard and Reilly, bring to the fore Bennett’s astute analysis of his art, and more broadly Australian art’s dialogues with contemporary politics and colonial aftermaths. The editors’ own texts/essays helpfully introduce and frame Bennett’s writings via-a-vis Australian art discourse, illuminating their value for a new generation of researchers, artists and curators.
Selected Writings is an accessible and valuable resource for a wide range of readers invested in understanding the legacies and futures of Bennett’s art. The publication is elegantly designed, and restrains its use of imagery to effectively emphasise the text, or Bennett’s own words.
Overall, the publication represents an important methodological approach for Australian art history: engaging with the archive to foreground the voices of significant artists who can help expand the limits of the discipline and forge new vocabularies, epistemologies and frameworks.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Drew Pettifer, A Sorrowful Act: The Wreck of the Zeewijk (Perth: Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 2020)
From the judges An impressive artist-led research project, A Sorrowful Act: The Wreck of the Zeewijk, led by Drew Pettifer, returns to a marginalised queer history bound to the colonial history of Australia (in particular the Dutch voyage, and shipwreck, of the Zeewijk in 1727). The catalogue carefully documents the research process for A Sorrowful Act, traversing through Pettifer’s engagements with museum archives, kin, memory and speculation to animate a queer history (two lovers/Dutch sailors sentenced to death after being discovered “committing with one another in a god-forsaken way the gruesome sin of Sodom and Gomorrah”). The commissioned essays, by Amelia Barrikin, Michael Kirby and Dennis Altman, Diederick Wildeman, Corioli Souter, Shelly McSpedden and Ted Snell, offered a considered and interdisciplinary framing of the stakes of the project, which culminates in a significant contribution to artist-led queerings of Australian colonial histories. We would like to commend Pettifer for his exemplary archival methodology, generating a poetic and affective encounter with the intimacies and conflict, between colonial violence and queer love.
BEST ART WRITING BY AN INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN
$500 prize money + new writing commission supported by Art Monthly
Judges Dr Fiona Foley and Michael Fitzgerald
WINNER
Danie Mellor, ‘Speaking of an Unquiet Country’ in Tony Bennett, Deborah Stevenson, Fred Myers, Tamara Winikoff (eds), The Australian Art Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions (New York and London: Routledge, 2020)
From the Judges In his essay ‘Speaking of an Unquiet Country’, Danie Mellor weaves in and out of landscape, history and life in higher education at art schools in Adelaide, Canberra and Sydney. One of the rare occasions where I’ve read of the legacy of Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative in the 1980s and this ‘dynamic new pathway in the field’ we now take for granted. The essay moves into more nuanced thinking around ‘landstory’ or country and traditional landowners pertaining to a tract of land that is now contested Crown land in rainforest country. There is a hint of recognition of the violence of land theft in Queensland’s historical past. The memory of culture is scattered throughout Mellor’s practice from his mezzotints to his recent works using infrared photography.
Fiona Foley, Best Art Writing by an Indigenous Australian recipient 2020
‘Speaking of an Unquiet Country’ is a carefully considered, thoughtful and generous exploration of Danie Mellor’s journey as an artist that pauses to note (among other things) the impact of art schools within a university system, the global migration of ideas, and the myopia surrounding the Stolen Generations, before opening out to address ‘multiple kinds of perception and understanding around landscape’ that shed light and meaning – not only on the artist’s own particular and important contemporary practice, but on Indigenous art in general and the necessary coexistence of commonality and difference.
Michael Fitzgerald, Art Monthly Australasia Editor
BEST ART WRITING BY A NEW ZEALAND MĀORI OR PASIFIKA
$500 sponsored by Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
Judge Associate Professor Ngarino Ellis
WINNER
Eugene Hansen/Maniapoto and Jenny Gillam (eds), Te Manu Huna a Tāne. (Auckland: Massey University Press, 2020)
From the judge Te Manu Huna a Tāne is a beautifully presented investigation into the significance of kiwi for Maori, past and present. Co-edited by Eugene Hansen (Maniapoto), the book centres on a series of four wananga (workshops) where the knowledge of preparing huruhuru manu (bird feathers) for different woven textiles was taught. Six short essays enable a variety of perspectives about this relatively unknown aspect of cloak-making to come through, and gives us a sense of the importance of relationships between people, iwi (tribes) and government departments. Particularly refreshing was the balance between description and personal reflection, as in the essays by Toi Te Rito Maihi and Matariki Williams, and the book had a suitable finish by Hugh Rihari in Te Reo (Maori language). Overall the book reflects the value of community-driven research which is by, for and about Maori.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Ana McAllister, ‘The Angry Brown Woman: My Issues with Art Schools’, The Pantograph Punch, 27 February 2020
From the judge For her hard-hitting and well-needed critique which will sound familiar to Māori and Pasifika students at art schools (and indeed universities).
BEST SCHOLARLY ARTICLE IN THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART
$500 sponsored by the Power Institute, University of Sydney
Judges Dr Helen McDonald and Emeritus Professor Richard Read
WINNER
Jesse Adams Stein, ‘When Manufacturing Workers Make Sculpture: Creative Pathways in the Context of Australian Deindustrialisation,’ ANZJA, 20: 2 (2020), pp. 189-212
From the judges While several essays in both issues are likely to be essential contributions to their fields, we are unanimous in declaring the winner to be Jesse Adams Stein, ‘When Manufacturing Workers Make Sculpture: Creative Pathways in the Context of Australian Deindustrialisation,’ ANZJA, 20: 2 (2020), pp. 189-212. A model of measured, critical maturity, Stein’s essay demonstrates a flowing ease of exposition in linking oral histories of workers once employed in the relatively obscure and now obsolete profession of patternmaking who, in adopting a second career in sculpture, pitched their manual skills against the technologies that had made them redundant. Complicating without obliterating the art/craft binary, through a subtle theorisation of Australian class structure, masculinities and educational opportunities that takes full account of the stereotypes concealing fluidity and change, these life stories – selected from a larger archive and framed within global comparisons – cogently explain the intricate variety of their subjects’ technical achievements, motivations and degrees of personal fulfilment. The essay concludes as a finely nuanced period history that brings into reciprocal relationship the previously conflicted values of art and industry, in ways that define the relative social positionings and mutual biases of art worlds, shopfloors and government policies. By illuminating the alterity of changing professional lives with empathy and respect, the essay highlights a major transition in Australian industrial conditions that shows how creativity emerges within workforces instead of assuming it can only be imposed from without.
BEST UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
$1000 sponsored by University Art Museums Australia
Judges Professor Andrew McNamara and Sarah Pirrie
WINNER
Hannah Mathews and Melissa Ratliff (eds.), Agatha Gothe-Snape: The Outcome Is Certain (Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art and Perimeter Editions, 2020)
From the judges Agatha Gothe-Snape: The Outcome Is Certain is an insightful example of a survey exhibition publication of a practicing artist. With a generous breath of accumulative perspectives the complexities of Gothe-Snape’s practice interlock and unfold. Her observations, improvisations and collaborations (three clear areas of practice) are exemplified and explained through various methods including Choreographic (Jenn Joy) and Collaborative (interview with Anneke Jaspers). Of particular note is the personal foregrounding of writing as a creative act by Erik Jensen and Gemma Weston’s ‘Spooky Action at a Distance/Case Studies in Thick Situations’. This excellent collection of essays provides a comprehensive cross-reference between performance and visual arts fields.
Beautiful in the use of gloss and matt paper stock, Agatha Gothe-Snape: The Outcome Is Certain is itself a collaboration with artists. This co-designed publication by Ella Sutherland and Agatha Gothe-Snape interlink essays between ‘to scale’ text based practice in a “dossier style using A4 manila folder” providing conversations between readings, practice and artworks.
BEST LARGE EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
$500 sponsored by the Australian Institute of Art History, University of Melbourne
Judges Dr Joanna Barrkman and Dr Wendy Garden
WINNER
Zara Stanhope, Abigail Bernal, Simon Wright, J Faith (Kapwa) Almiron, Tim Riley Walsh, Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, 2020)
From the judges This year’s recipient of the large exhibition catalogue award is the publication Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett. The catalogue accompanies the first major survey exhibition of Bennett’s practice since his untimely passing in 2014 and makes an original contribution to the understanding of the practice of this important twentieth century Australian artist. Bennett, of Anglo-Celtic and Aboriginal heritage, received critical attention for his uncompromising critique of Australia’s race relations and his scrutiny of colonial and postcolonial history. The contributors to this publication each approach Bennett’s practice from different perspectives, including the artist’s methodology, studio practice, recurring themes and iconography as well as distinctive periods of his creative output.
The catalogue is notable for its perceptive and sustained scholarship that provides fresh insights into some of his most well-known paintings, works on paper, installations and rarely exhibited working drawings and pencil sketches. Other essays explore the artist’s synthesis of key influences including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jackson Pollock and Frank Stella amongst others. The essays are authoritatively written while also accessible to a broad readership. They provide new observations not only into Bennett’s practice but also the man behind the work, providing the reader with a deeper understanding of the artist.
Richly illustrated with large colour plates of Bennett’s work, alongside his concept drawings, notes, work-books and diaries, the publication also includes personal photographs of Bennett in his studio, installing exhibitions and at openings. Another commendable attribute of the publication was the colour thumbnail image that accompanied each entry in the List of Works.
This publication presents comprehensive, detailed and thoughtful perspectives into the processes and motivations that fuelled the art of Gordon Bennett.
BEST MEDIUM EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
$500 sponsored by the Australian Institute of Art History, University of Melbourne
Judges Dr Karen Hall and Dr Sally Quinn
WINNER
Ken Hall with Haruhiko Sameshima, Hidden Light: Early Canterbury and West Coast Photography (Christchurch: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, 2020)
From the judges This publication is commendable for the way in which it brings to light hitherto unpublished images and new research on nineteenth-century New Zealand photography. While the opening essay by Haruhiko Sameshima provides important historical and contextual information, Ken Hall’s series of essays piece together, in meticulous and fascinating detail, the activities of photographers from the 1840s to 1900 in Canterbury and West Coast regions who were part of a global spread of new photographic technologies. Notable also is the high quality of the photographic reproductions achieved in this publication, including both landscapes and portraiture.
The catalogue presents important foundational research, and is sure to be a key source for future studies in the field.
BEST SMALL EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
$500 sponsored by the University of Melbourne
Judge Dr Chari Larsson
WINNER
Stephen Jones, Cognitive Dissidents: Reasons to be Cheerful (Brisbane: Griffith University Art Museum, 2020)
From the judge The strength of Dr Stephen Jones’s essay made this catalogue a clear winner of the small exhibition category. The essay contextualises the history of video art in Australia and how it was taken up as an experimental art form by practitioners from the 1970s through to the 1990s. This will become an indispensable resource for scholars researching video art’s history as it systematically charts the birth of a new medium and its own unique history in Australia.
The catalogue is attractive, with high quality reproductions from each of the individual works in the exhibition. Following on from the introductory essay, each practitioner is allocated personal biographical information, a paragraph describing the work and sound and production acknowledgement.
The catalogue will also form an important resource for scholars researching individual artists whose reputations were established in more traditional disciplines.
AWAPAs Entries 2021
About the Publications
A Sorrowful Act: The Wreck of the Zeewijk
Agatha Gothe-Snape: The Outcome Is Certain
Cognitive Dissidents: Reasons to be Cheerful
Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings
Hidden Light: Early Canterbury and West Coast Photography
Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism
The Australian Art Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions
She Persists: Perspective on Women in Art & Design
Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett
Where Dragon Veins Meet: the Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe
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