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Absolutely Revolting

November 2006, no. 286

Welcome to the November 2006 issue of Australian Book Review.

David Hansen reviews ‘Juan Davila with Guy Brett and Roger Benjamin’ by Juan Davila
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Contents Category: Art
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Article Title: Half-breeds and go-betweens
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Juan Davila is a major figure in contemporary Australian art. His fluent appropriations of other artists’ styles and motifs (all neatly numbered and labelled), combined with an assertive iconography of sexual desire and transgression (all bare thighs and thrusting tongues and mutant genitalia), made him one of the most interesting painters of his generation – the postmodern, theoretical, Art and Text push of the 1980s. He has represented his country in northern hemisphere exhibitions from Paris to Banff, and has maintained strong connections across his native Latin America. The New South Wales Vice Squad’s infamous impounding of Stupid as a painter in 1982 cemented the artist’s ‘bad boy’ reputation with the general public, as well as within the art industry, while his painting of a semi-nude, hermaphrodite Simón Bolivar giving the finger actually created a full-scale diplomatic incident involving Chile, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. Davila’s regular output of polemical essays, his gloriously rude lampoons of political leaders and his more recent, sober protests against refugee detention have ensured his work has a place in public discourse. A comprehensive survey is long overdue.
Book 1 Title: Juan Davila with Guy Brett and Roger Benjamin
Book Author: Juan Davila
Book 1 Biblio: Miegunyah Press/Museum of Contemporary Art $59.95 hb, 254 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Juan Davila is a major figure in contemporary Australian art. His fluent appropriations of other artists’ styles and motifs (all neatly numbered and labelled), combined with an assertive iconography of sexual desire and transgression (all bare thighs and thrusting tongues and mutant genitalia), made him one of the most interesting painters of his generation – the postmodern, theoretical, Art and Text push of the 1980s. He has represented his country in northern hemisphere exhibitions from Paris to Banff, and has maintained strong connections across his native Latin America. The New South Wales Vice Squad’s infamous impounding of Stupid as a painter in 1982 cemented the artist’s ‘bad boy’ reputation with the general public, as well as within the art industry, while his painting of a semi-nude, hermaphrodite Simón Bolivar giving the finger actually created a full-scale diplomatic incident involving Chile, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. Davila’s regular output of polemical essays, his gloriously rude lampoons of political leaders and his more recent, sober protests against refugee detention have ensured his work has a place in public discourse. A comprehensive survey is long overdue.

Read more: David Hansen reviews ‘Juan Davila with Guy Brett and Roger Benjamin’ by Juan Davila

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Contents Category: Biography
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Article Title: Matters of life and death
Article Subtitle: The return of biography
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Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure. In a move that’s perhaps indicative of this revival, the British bookseller Waterstones recently placed their biography section at the very front of their stores, renaming it boldly, LIFE. Biography has similarly taken prime position in our nightly television, with programmes such as Dynasties, Australian Story, Talking Heads and Enough Rope. It has bagged the front stalls in our cinemas, where the lives of Casanova and Kinsey, of Truman Capote and Elizabeth I, of Johnny Cash and Alexander the Great are played out on the big screen. In our public libraries, readers huddle over computer terminals, busily researching their family genealogies. The National Library of Australia is now constructing its new coordinated online resource for biographical researchers, the People’s Portal, and has recently launched its latest publishing venture, a series of titles devoted to (what else?) Australian Biography.
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Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure. In a move that’s perhaps indicative of this revival, the British bookseller Waterstones recently placed their biography section at the very front of their stores, renaming it boldly, LIFE. Biography has similarly taken prime position in our nightly television, with programmes such as Dynasties, Australian Story, Talking Heads and Enough Rope. It has bagged the front stalls in our cinemas, where the lives of Casanova and Kinsey, of Truman Capote and Elizabeth I, of Johnny Cash and Alexander the Great are played out on the big screen. In our public libraries, readers huddle over computer terminals, busily researching their family genealogies. The National Library of Australia is now constructing its new coordinated online resource for biographical researchers, the People’s Portal, and has recently launched its latest publishing venture, a series of titles devoted to (what else?) Australian Biography.

That very word ‘biography’ has gained in the past few years a new and interesting inflection, as seen in such titles as Peter Ackroyd’s London: A biography (2000), or Colin Jones’s Paris: Biography of a city (2006), or John Lewis-Stempel’s England, the Autobiography: 2000 years of English history by those who saw it happen (2006) – a collection which begins with Julius Caesar’s account of the Roman invasion of Britain in 54 BCE and ends with Jonny Wilkinson’s reflections on kicking that famous last-minute goal against Australia in November 2003. More daringly still, there is Jack Miles’s God: A biography (1995), Fran Beauman’s The Pineapple: King of fruits (2005) – ‘an engaging biography’, writes the TLS reviewer – and Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A biography (2005) – not to be confused with Denis Brian’s similarly titled The Curies: A biography of the most controversial family in science, also published in 2005. As a publisher friend of mine recently remarked, if The History of the Potato were to be published today, you’d have to call it The Potato: A biography. While it is tempting to dismiss such titles as simply reflecting the whims and fashions of retail marketing, I doubt that the word ‘biography’ would have been viewed as such an attractive, all-purpose seller just ten or twenty years ago; its adoption now does seem to indicate a significant change in public perception; a new sense even of what biography may do, and what, essentially, it’s about.

Read more: ABR/La Trobe University Annual Lecture, 2006 - Ian Donaldson

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Contents Category: Poem
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Article Title: Bestiary in Open Tuning
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Blessings and praise

to the dark entanglement of caught branches

I continue to see,

after years of crossing the causeway,

as a black swan

holding her place in the current, her head

held resolute and serene,

her cygnets the shadows that advance and recede

in the eddies she makes going nowhere.
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Blessings and praise
to the dark entanglement of caught branches
I continue to see,
after years of crossing the causeway,
as a black swan
holding her place in the current, her head
held resolute and serene,
her cygnets the shadows that advance and recede
in the eddies she makes going nowhere.

Read more: ‘Bestiary in Open Tuning’ by Anthony Lawrence

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Bruce Moore reviews English: Meaning and culture by Anna Wierzbicka
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Contents Category: Language
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At the heart of Anna Wierzbicka’s book is the argument that what people now call World English is not culturally neutral; that it has embedded in it the Anglo values of its origin. Wierzbicka points to many seemingly ordinary English words, words that we would never suspect of being culturally distinctive, that have no equivalents in other languages. Anglo speakers will be surprised to discover that the values these seemingly commonplace words carry are not universals. Good and bad are universals, but right and wrong are not; the concept of fairness is Anglo, and most other languages do not have words that correspond to fair, fairness and unfair. Even at the level of verbal phrases such as I think, I guess and I believe, and in English’s proliferation of adverbs such as probably, possibly, apparently and conceivably, English differs from all other languages.
Book 1 Title: English
Book 1 Subtitle: Meaning and culture
Book Author: Anna Wierzbicka
Book 1 Biblio: OUP, $55 pb, 352 pp
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At the heart of Anna Wierzbicka’s book is the argument that what people now call World English is not culturally neutral; that it has embedded in it the Anglo values of its origin. Wierzbicka points to many seemingly ordinary English words, words that we would never suspect of being culturally distinctive, that have no equivalents in other languages. Anglo speakers will be surprised to discover that the values these seemingly commonplace words carry are not universals. Good and bad are universals, but right and wrong are not; the concept of fairness is Anglo, and most other languages do not have words that correspond to fair, fairness and unfair. Even at the level of verbal phrases such as I think, I guess and I believe, and in English’s proliferation of adverbs such as probably, possibly, apparently and conceivably, English differs from all other languages.

Read more: Bruce Moore reviews 'English: Meaning and culture' by Anna Wierzbicka

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Free Article: No
Contents Category: Poem
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Article Title: Hands
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Custom Highlight Text: The body’s peasant workers – hands –
daily toil in the fields of light.
They never question our wishes.
They can fail, but not misunderstand.
They are our strangeness that we are blind to.
At night they lie like maimed spiders
or star fish swept to shore. They know
about love as much as mouths and eyes.
Throughout the day, they give the mouth
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Read more: ‘Hands’ by David McCooey

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