1st Edition
When Modern Became Contemporary Art The Idea of Australian Art, 1962-1988
Introduction. Part 1 1. 1962. Australian Painting: Reinventing National Art 2. 1967. Notes to a Metropolitan Centre: Professionalising the Australian Art World Part 2 3. 1970. Other Voices: The Failure of Style 4. 1973. Post-Object Art: Modern Becomes Contemporary 5. 1974. The Provincialism Problem: Notes from a Metropolitan Centre Part 3 6. 1976. Lip: Is a Social Art Practice Sustainable 7. 1979. Art Network: Inclusiveness Versus Import Rhetoric 8. 1981. Art & Text: Reading the Room 9. 1988. Conclusion. The Necessity of Australian Art: Pinpointing a New Idea
Biography
Charles Green is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Melbourne, author of Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art (1995), The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (2001) and (with Anthony Gardner) Biennials, Triennials, and documenta (2016). He is also an artist, working in collaboration with Lyndell Brown.
Heather Barker is an independent scholar and artist.
“For years Charles Green has been one of the most judicious and even-handed observers of the Australian art scene, both because of his international experience and his ongoing art practice with his partner Lyndell Brown. When Modern Became Contemporary Art begins with the excellent point that the study of art history has lagged behind artistic practice in contemplating Indigenous art. The book corrects that in the most welcoming way, by bringing hundreds—perhaps thousands—of points of reference, from anthropology, art history, journalism, curating, and the art market, into productive dialogue. Modernism, postmodernism, and Indigenous art are contested in Australia in ways they seldom are in other countries, so it is especially salutary to have guides as balanced, careful, generous, and collaborative as Charles Green and Heather Barker.”
-Professor James Elkins, E.C. Chadbourne Chair of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
“This book is a call to the future. It’s past time we paid more attention to post-1960s critics, for they articulated the new mood brewing, the postcolonial contemporary.”
-Professor Ian McLean, author of Rattling Spears and Double Nation
