2018 prizes

2018 Prize winners

Several publication prizes were awarded at the conference, by the outgoing President of the AAANZ, Anthony White.

Best Book Prize – Thomas Crow, No Idols: The missing theology of art (Sydney: Power Publications, 2017)

From the judges: Crow, we felt, broke new ground in his quest for a theology of art that pushed against the prevailing secularism of modernity. In tracking the survival of a religious impulse in art within the context of modernity, that is within art that declares its modernism, he asks to think beyond current paradigms that reduce its secularism to the instrumentalism of positivism or avowedly ideologically-driven ‘isms’. The book is also valuable as it shows what a useful world art history might look like, as its argument is made across regions – three continents – and periods. We particularly liked the way argument proceeded via vivid and important case studies that closely read and examine artworks and with strong enough examples which he believes should force the need to rethink the usual assumption that the western Christian tradition has little pertinence for modern and contemporary art. His examples range from artworks by Chardin through to Turrell, and include McCahon. McCahon’s pivotal role in Crow’s argument makes this a happy coincidence for the Australian and New Zealand art prize.

Judges: Ian McLean and Susan Best

Best Anthology Prize – James Paull and Teri Hoskin (eds.), Thoughtlines: The Art of Ruark Lewis 1982-2014 (Sydney: SNO Publications, 2017)

From the judges: We were very impressed with the evident care and consideration that was given to this publication, which represents a significant contribution to the documentation/interpretation of the more experimental and poetic forms of Australian contemporary art practice. Lewis’ complex and multiform output presents obvious challenges to the traditionally more restrictive and defined parameters of art historical monograph/art museum exhibitions/catalogue. The fact that the publication was sponsored by Sydney Non Objective Contemporary Art Projects is significant in itself and the resulting book is a pleasure to read – multi–layered and truly inter-disciplinary, with thoughtful and searching contributions from a diverse range of perspectives, including that of art history, anthropology, linguistics, etc. It is also produced to a high editorial standard, with excellent illustrations/graphic design qualities that integrate a wide-ranging and diverse set of practices/images into an elegant and consistent whole. As such “The Art of Ruark Lewis” should stand for many years as a significant point of reference for anyone seeking to create a comparable publication dealing with Australian artistic practice along these lines.

Judges: Jaynie Anderson and Christopher Marshall

Best Large Exhibition Catalogue Prize – Lucy Hammonds et al. Gordon Walters: New Vision (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 2017)

From the judges: The result of collaboration between Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, this catalogue is an exhaustive and rigorous testament to a single artist’s career that delivers on the stated aim of sponsoring new research on New Zealand artists. The restrained elegance of design by Neil Pardington echoes the precision and refinement of Walter’s geometric abstraction from the 1950s to the 1990s.

The catalogue contains plentiful high-quality reproductions of Walters’ paintings and drawings, including several fold-out sections, as well as archival photographs related to his life, exhibition history, and images of some never before seen works from the artist’s archive. The substantial tome demonstrates a strong commitment to art historical scholarship; it includes 8 scholarly essays, 3 by the curators, 4 by art history and theory scholars from New Zealand and Australia, and a contribution from eminent U.S. historian of modern art, Thomas Crow.

The publication has the makings of becoming a definitive historical account of Walters’ work and career to be mined by future generations of art researchers and curators. The perspectives of the essays are innovative, questioning tropes of isolationism and provincialism that have in the past framed modernist art of New Zealand (and Australia), while rejecting assessment of Walters’ art in simple nationalist terms. A complex and nuanced assessment of Walters’ engagement with Maori art and design is also performed across its pages, one that takes into account changing cultural and political values in Aotearoa New Zealand during and after the artist’s career. Walters’ art is shown to be inflected by multiple and convergent cultural forms and traditions: European, U.S. and South American modernisms, Pacific and Maori art, Australian Indigenous art, and disparate modernist tendencies in New Zealand and Australia. Viewed in this light, his practice from the 1950s would seem to preempt shifts in modernist art history of recent decades toward ideas of hybrid, polyphonic and convergent modernisms rather than singular lines of modernist origin and value.

Highly Commended:

Angela Hesson et. al., Love: Art of Emotion 1400-1800 (Melbourne: NGV, 2017) 

This is a superbly illustrated, hefty soft cover catalogue with high production values. It is the result of a collaboration between a major Australian gallery and an ARC Research Centre for Excellence (University of Melbourne) project, exhibiting fine historical scholarship and accessible writing in 7 essays by academic experts and NGV curators. It would be good to see more collaborations like this between academic researchers and galleries in Australia. It breathes new life into the gallery’s historical collection, and makes historical art significant for contemporary gallery visitors, with the ‘Love’ theme a savvy crowd puller.

Judges: Toni Ross and Helen Hughes

Best Small Exhibition Catalogue Prize – joint winners – Isobel Crombie and Elena Taylor, Brave New World: Australia 1930s (Melbourne: NGV, 2017); & Lara Strongman with Laurence Aberhart, Aberhart Starts Here (Christchurch: Christchurch Art Gallery / Te Puna o Waiwhetu, 2017)

From the judges: Aberhart Starts Here is an eminently engaging and informative catalogue that commemorates the work of New Zealand photographer Laurence Aberhart. The elegant restraint of the curatorial essay interweaves the artist’s personal commentary with historical insights on the technical evolution of photographic practice beginning with his early years in Christchurch. What is most impressive is the way the intimate and erudite artist statements frame and amplify the photographs of New Zealand’s changing built environment. The images evoke the haunting beauty of a bygone era, capturing the ostensible banality of the local architectural and social landscape to craft a portrait ‘of the vanishing past in an accelerating world…’ that is compelling, poignant and profound.

Brave New World: Australia 1930s is an ambitious and dynamic study that is inclusive of art, design, and performance, and moves across recurring themes of the body, national identity, and cultural tensions between conservative classicism and modernist experimentation without feeling derivative. While the metropolises of Sydney and Melbourne are privileged, the text treats Aboriginal art seriously, and the inclusion of ephemera also adds to the wide-ranging scope of the catalogue. The stimulating collection of academic yet accessible essays provides an impressive quality and quantity of contextual enrichment that makes this book a valuable resource for students and scholars studying this area of art, society, and culture.

Honourable commendations:  

Jamie Tsai and Mikhaela Rodwell, System of Objects (Sydney: NAS, 2017).

Supported by a sophisticated theoretical foundation, System of Objects reflects current concerns in museological practice and critical (feminist) theory, with the relationship between images and texts projecting the interplay between materiality and practice/process. The design is clean and unobtrusive with the considered use of heavy font and foil lettering on the cover investing the words with a presence that matches the works it represents. The concise eloquence of the catalogue entries facilitates multiple authorial voices to spotlight a selection of individual images and objects by eminent contemporary Australian women artists with an illuminating sympathy.

Felicity Milburn et al., Say Something! Jacqueline Fahey (Christchurch: Christchurch Art Gallery / Te Puna o Waiwhetu, 2017).

Say Something! Jacqueline Fahey celebrates the work of New Zealand artist and writer, Jacqueline Fahey. While the catalogue’s colourful design showcases the raw immediacy and vibrant extroversion of Fahey’s paintings centred on the domestic environment and figure, the incisive and immersive curatorial essays situate the works in the cultural contexts of 1970s New Zealand and feminist art, articulating the historical significance and contemporary relevance of Fahey’s art today.

David Homewood and Bronté Lambert, University Construction (Self-published, 2017).

University Construction provocatively blurs the line between exhibition and catalogue, documenting a novel one-day exhibition held in a classroom in the John Medley building at the University of Melbourne. While the austere simplicity of the experimental format evokes the unquiet remnants of the institutional environment, the interrogation of university status and values in the carefully researched essays balances anger and despair with playfulness and gravity, occupying a marginal space in a project that was alert to both large and small histories and politics.

Judges: Karen Hall and Lisa Mansfield

Best Scholarly Article in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art Prize – Alex Burchmore for ‘Negotiating ‘Chinese-Australian’ Identity: Ah Xian’s Dr John Yu (2004) and his China China Series (1998-2004), ANZJA 17.1

From the judges: This essay is well structured, lucid and engaging, and a thoughtful reflection on the chosen works in the light of the research. It is the thoroughness with which the author interweaves personal, historical, material and cultural (‘Chineseness’) themes that demonstrates that a conventional methodology, when well done, has much to offer the reader and the discipline.

Judges: Una Rey and Anthony White

Best Art Writing by an Indigenous Australian Prize – Brenda L Croft, Still In My Mind: Gurindji Location, Experience, and Visuality (Brisbane: UQ Art Museum, 2017)

From the judges: Croft presents her publication ‘Still in my mind’ as a “diptyph, setting side by side texts with different tones and contexts”. They are essentially two different chapters of the same publication that is part of her own ‘personal-political’ practice. One is a book the other is an academic paper derived from the book content and re-edited. This is highly innovative and unique in that she has managed to allow voice for the community in terms of their own voice but framed by herself, also a Gurindji person. Her publication is multi-dimensional and the transcribing of the voice of her community is so very important including the use of and translation of traditional Gurindji language. It a publication that speaks to many contexts, the community, the Australian Arts community but also National and International academics. The publication is very well presented, highly informative and manages to be concurrently wholesome and penetratingly political.

The idea of a diptych of texts, with one ‘academic’ and the other more ‘personal’ shows the slippage between the two styles (and the strengths and limitations of each genre). This stylistic device also allows the text to transcend being a more straightforward artist statement, displaying the confidence to experiment from a mature and established Indigenous writer.

Judges: Steaphan Paton and Michael Fitzgerald

Best Art Writing by an New Zealand Maori or Pasifika Prize (carried over from 2017) – Ngarino Ellis, A Whakapapa of Tradition, 100 Years of Ngati Porou Carving, 1830-1930 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2016)

From the judges: Drilling into 100 years of Ngāti Porou carving, Ellis’ book is all an art historical text should be. It has a specific scope and addresses the issues and ideas surrounding that scope while calling on past scholarship. It is well organised, it is clearly written, it is elaborately illustrated. A Whakapapa of Tradition clearly positions itself as becoming a key text for Māori studies in the future.

One set of important information was the focus on the carvers during this period of time. Not only did she delineate the works of 6 “master carvers”, but also included substantial information about 14 “occasional carvers”; including their genealogies, life histories, and examples of their work.

The new photography by Natalie Robertson creates another layer to the rigour of this scholarship and the timeliness of such a text. Robertson’s photography provides a sense of place as well as an homage to the artists who created these beautiful carved houses. Robertson’s photography ties in with the high production values of the book which make it a delight to read and also enticing for those who do not belong to an art history discipline.

A Whakapapa of Tradition, 100 Years of Ngati Porou Carving, 1830-1930 provides a substantial contribution to the wider field of Māori studies (art, historical, social and political).

Judges: Lana Lopesi and Karen Stevenson

Best Artist Book Prize – joint winners – Lisa Radford, Aesthetic Nonsense Makes Commonsense, thanks X (Melbourne: Surplus, 2016); & Rose Nolan, Big Words (Not Mine) (Melbourne: Negative Press, 2017)

From the judges: Radford’s book Aesthetic nonsense makes commonsense, thanks X is rich and expansive in its attention to the world. It animates an intimacy towards art-making, towards others who make art, and to meaning itself that is as singular as Radford’s oeuvre itself. Designed with elegant economy by Brad Haylock, the book expresses something important about the book itself, the peculiar way that a book is both profoundly public (in its address, scope and dissemination into the world) and intimate (in the encounter it unfolds, in the encounters it reflects). The density of Radford’s thinking articulates something important about the form of a book (its radical compactness, its temporal and conceptual concentration) at the same time that it retains a vital sense of Radford’s playfulness as an artist and thinker. Above all I am struck by the book’s commitment to this: that an art work’s potency and importance is in large part the relations it forms with other art works, with other forms of meaning, and with the profound ramifications of the social nature of our being.

Nolan’s artist book, Big Words (Not Mine) – Read the words “public space”, relocates a one-hundred-metre installation of text into the book format. The text is based on a lecture about the public space by American artist Vito Acconci. The book presents a very simple design and construction; section sewn, exposed spine and soft-cover. Firstly, on the cover, the text is presented as a full paragraph; inside, the same text is shown fragmented through the pages of the book. The codex form extends the possibilities of such text as it obligates the reader to take a much longer period of time to read it. The passing page and such fragmentation, creates an impossibility for the content to be read privately; it seems like it has to be read aloud to maintain its continuity. Noticeably, this feature on Nolan’s book interrogates the relationship between the private and the public space, and at the same time, it exemplifies, very successfully, the ability of the artist book to offer alternatives models of reading.

Judges: Ana Paula Estrada and Tom Nicholson

Best University Art Museum Exhibition Catalogue Prize – Open Spatial Workshop: Converging Time (Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art, 2017)

From the judges: The exhibition catalogue Open Spatial Workshop: Converging Time is an innovative and compelling publication that considers the impacts of human activity on various sites around Australia. A series of engaging scholarly essays, combined with first person narrative, have been organised into five key themes that explore the social and economic history of the development and exploitation of the natural environment. The collection of texts was developed out of research carried out in the natural science collections at Museum Victoria and the texts and images. This catalogue mounts a challenge to traditional historical narratives of human development in Australia by repositioning scientific research, archival photographs, historical documents and popular culture text within the framework of cultural theory and artistic enquiry. The essays and images stretch understandings of time forward and backwards, at times telescoping temporalities beyond periods of human occupation to better convey the connectivity between human actions and the environment. An approach that encourages reflection on the environmental impacts of human industry and progress.

The design of the catalogue is striking. The ochre hue of the cover simply displays the table of contents in plain text, and this layout is suggestive of the way that scientific texts have traditionally been designed to be visually restrained, subdued, conveying their supposed ‘objectivity’. Within the catalogue the layout of texts and images in the catalogue echoes ideas of stratification and juxtaposition that are explored in the essays. A number of pages in the middle of the catalogue are printed on different paper stock and this gives the book a ‘tiered’ appearance, texts on a number of these pages are arranged in parallel columns creating vertical juxtapositions. This layering visually affirms the idea of parallel knowledge systems that exist concurrently and independently, challenging traditional representations of knowledge as straightforward and objective. Overall the catalogue makes an important contribution to scholarly debate and illustrates the way that art can engage in historical investigation and a type of archival archaeology that can challenge traditional representations of knowledge.

The judges would also like to make a special mention of Brenda Croft’s Still in my mind: Gurindji experience, location and visuality. This catalogue examines the ongoing impact of the 1966 Wave Hill Walk-Off and the catalogue draws together personal histories, paintings, archival photos and texts, contemporary photographs to create a rich picture of the history of the Gurindji. The judges commented that it was notable for its powerful storytelling, the multilingual presentation, and allowing the words of the artists to come through clearly.

Judges: Wendy Garden and Katrina Grant

Best PhD Prize – Matthew Perkins, “Restore, Remake, Reference: Curating a History of Australian Video Art” (PhD, Swinburne University of Technology, 2018)

Perkins set up his question clearly and succinctly right at the start at the presentation. He then demonstrated how he resolved the question.  His methodology – ‘restore, remake and reference’ was articulated clearly. Perkins’ excellent use of slides helped to demonstrate the outcomes of his thesis.

Congratulations to all candidates who participated. The standard was incredibly high over a diverse and fascinating range of subjects.

Judges: Chari Larsson, Cathy Speck, and Raymond Spiteri

The AAANZ would like to congratulate all of the Prize Winners and thank all of the prize judges.