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Absolutely Revolting

March 2022, no. 440

As we enter the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, ABR comes to you laden with the harvest from our two months’ absence. There’s a cornucopia of commentary, including Mindy Gill’s analysis of identity politics’ impact on reviewing, three scholars on political interference in research funding, and David Latham on the ‘Fund the Arts’ campaign. Gareth Evans reviews the ambitious new book by the polymathic Andrew Leigh, while Penny Russell examines Anna Clark’s more inclusive vision for Australian history. Peter Rose’s Editor’s Diary records life in lockdown as a publisher and a carer, with Thomas H. Ford providing a diagnosis of the ubiquity of ‘brain fog’. The issue looks at the long careers of Theory and Raymond Williams, while delving into the lives of Charles Lamb and Fyodor Dostoevsky. It also features reviews of new novels by Jessica Stanley, Yumna Kassab, and Hanya Yanagihara, poetry by Gary Catalano and Charles Bernstein – and much, much more!

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David Hansen reviews The Exhibitionists: A history of Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales by Steven Miller
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Article Title: Style and bounce
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The Western, colonial, patriarchal hegemony having eroded somewhat in recent years, the purposes and methods of art and of museum management and curatorship are undergoing fundamental change. Formerly unchallenged Anglophone-transatlantic canons and practices have been undermined by broader international perspectives, by the impact of digital technologies, and by the politics of identity – in ethnicity and nation, gender and sexuality.
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Article Hero Image Caption: US President Lyndon B. Johnson surrounded by security personnel arriving at the New South Wales Art Gallery on a visit to Sydney, 22 October 1966 (photograph: John Mulligan, National Library of Australia)
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Alt Tag (Featured Image): David Hansen reviews 'The Exhibitionists: A history of Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales' by Steven Miller
Book 1 Title: The Exhibitionists
Book 1 Subtitle: A history of Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales
Book Author: Steven Miller
Book 1 Biblio: Art Gallery of New South Wales, $65 hb, 295 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/0JOPV3
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The Western, colonial, patriarchal hegemony having eroded somewhat in recent years, the purposes and methods of art and of museum management and curatorship are undergoing fundamental change. Formerly unchallenged Anglophone-transatlantic canons and practices have been undermined by broader international perspectives, by the impact of digital technologies, and by the politics of identity – in ethnicity and nation, gender and sexuality. The art museum is being transformed from a locus of the national, the classificatory, the educational and the aesthetic to a platform or vehicle for personal and political positioning. More recently, conventional programming has been overturned by the impact of Covid closures and restructuring, while the climate crisis looms threateningly over everything.

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Matthew Martin reviews Daniel Cottier: Designer, decorator, dealer by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Max Donnelly, with Andrew Montana and Suzan Veldink
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Article Title: Realising the ‘home beautiful’
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Among the most celebrated of nineteenth-century British decoration firms, but one that is almost completely forgotten today, was Cottier & Co., founded by the Glaswegian decorator and stained glass artist Daniel Cottier in 1869. The volume Daniel Cottier: Designer, decorator, dealer is the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of this decorator and his eponymous firm. With branches in London, New York, and Sydney, this was a remarkable international enterprise disseminating the principles of Aesthetic interior design, the movement that construed the role of art to be the provision of uplifting delight through visual beauty.
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Alt Tag (Featured Image): Matthew Martin reviews 'Daniel Cottier: Designer, decorator, dealer' by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Max Donnelly, with Andrew Montana and Suzan Veldink
Book 1 Title: Daniel Cottier
Book 1 Subtitle: Designer, decorator, dealer
Book Author: Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Max Donnelly, with Andrew Montana and Suzan Veldink
Book 1 Biblio: Yale University Press, US$50 hb, 260 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/Gjqg7E
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Among the most celebrated of nineteenth-century British decoration firms, but one that is almost completely forgotten today, was Cottier & Co., founded by the Glaswegian decorator and stained glass artist Daniel Cottier in 1869. The volume Daniel Cottier: Designer, decorator, dealer is the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of this decorator and his eponymous firm. With branches in London, New York, and Sydney, this was a remarkable international enterprise disseminating the principles of Aesthetic interior design, the movement that construed the role of art to be the provision of uplifting delight through visual beauty. A series of essays by a group of eminent art historians, including leading historian of nineteenth-century art Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, considers Cottier’s initial training as a stained glass artist in Scotland, the founding of his London decorating firm, the establishment of the New York and Sydney branches of the business, and the influence Cottier’s activities as a dealer had on the art markets in London and New York.

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Curlew, a poem by Eileen Chong
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What is the use of a full moon / now we do not harvest by its light? // There is no one else standing here, / lifting their face to the star-studded sky.
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For M.F.

 

What is the use of a full moon
now we do not harvest by its light?

There is no one else standing here,
lifting their face to the star-studded sky.

Do you see the moon’s craters, its dark side?
It simply hangs there, brilliant white –

*

In the living room the children
and I mime spinning on an axis.

We tread an elliptical path around
the sun of the dying woman. Later,

she gifts me six pieces of gold.
Weight of a blessing from the living:

a Möbius bangle, blue sapphires in bezels.
Her name in Arabic, hanging from a chain.

*

Almásy said, Every night I cut out my heart,
but in the morning it was full again.

Black consumes the luminous orb
even as the girl learns how to spell

gibbous, waxing, waning. Do not swallow
the bright coin we place under your tongue.

*

A bolus of bread. It rises,
it fills with air, it is eaten.

Dust to flesh to dust to dust.
The frozen smiles of family

framed in silver. I draw the curtains.
Moonlight falls across the bedlinen.

Behind your lids, all will fade, and turn to ink.
Outside, a curlew cries. We see the glitter of a scythe.

 

The Almásy in my poem refers to Count Ladislaus de Almásy, the titular character in Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient (Bloomsbury, 1992), where the quote is also drawn from.

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Robyn Arianrhod reviews What’s Eating the Universe? And other cosmic questions by Paul Davies
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Paul Davies, the British physicist who brightened up the Australian science scene when he was a professor at the University of Adelaide in the 1990s, is currently director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. Beyond describes itself as ‘a pioneering center devoted to confronting the really big questions of science and philosophy’. It also aims to present science publicly ‘as a key component of our culture and of significance to all humanity’, something Davies has been doing for thirty years, in popular talks, articles, and books such as About Time (1995).
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Article Hero Image Caption: A composite image of a section of the universe taken by the Dark Energy Camera, part of an astronomical survey designed to constrain the properties of dark energy, dated May 2021 (photograph via National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory)
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Book 1 Title: What’s Eating the Universe?
Book 1 Subtitle: And other cosmic questions
Book Author: Paul Davies
Book 1 Biblio: Allen Lane, $35 hb, 192 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/QOeb7Y
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Paul Davies, the British physicist who brightened up the Australian science scene when he was a professor at the University of Adelaide in the 1990s, is currently director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. Beyond describes itself as ‘a pioneering center devoted to confronting the really big questions of science and philosophy’. It also aims to present science publicly ‘as a key component of our culture and of significance to all humanity’, something Davies has been doing for thirty years, in popular talks, articles, and books such as About Time (1995).

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Gary Pearce reviews Raymond Williams at 100 edited by Paul Stasi and Culture and Politics: Class, writing, socialism by Raymond Williams
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The 2021 centenary of Raymond Williams’s birth was a moment of acknowledgment but also involved some assessment and testing of his ongoing relevance. Williams seemed to live many lives: son of a railway worker in rural Wales, Communist Party member, wartime tank commander, tutor in the Workers’ Educational Association, novelist, author of key texts within cultural and media studies, professor of drama at Cambridge University, founding figure of the British New Left, television reviewer and commentator, socialist activist and Welsh nationalist, cultural and Marxist theorist.
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Book 1 Title: Raymond Williams at 100
Book Author: Paul Stasi
Book 1 Biblio: Rowman & Littlefield, $180 hb, 210 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/WDKNMA
Book 2 Title: Culture and Politics
Book 2 Subtitle: Class, writing, socialism
Book 2 Author: Raymond Williams
Book 2 Biblio: Verso, $39.99 pb, 240 pp
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The 2021 centenary of Raymond Williams’s birth was a moment of acknowledgment but also involved some assessment and testing of his ongoing relevance. Williams seemed to live many lives: son of a railway worker in rural Wales, Communist Party member, wartime tank commander, tutor in the Workers’ Educational Association, novelist, author of key texts within cultural and media studies, professor of drama at Cambridge University, founding figure of the British New Left, television reviewer and commentator, socialist activist and Welsh nationalist, cultural and Marxist theorist.

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