Junk for Code

Urban culture

I've had a terrible time these last few days with a wave of spam comment attacks, lost posts (Wednesday and Friday) and dialup internet not working. It is also difficult to run this blog when I'm on the road, since it requires time for image searching and a high speed broadband. Dialup makes it all too difficult.

Things are looking up. I've been able to recover an image from the lost post of last Wednesday:

Robert Boynes, In the Moment, 2000

And the image from the lost post on Friday:

Robert Boynes, Black Neon, 2000

However, I've lost all the written material on urban culture in Australia. I was trying to argue that a modernist, urban visual culture arose from film and montage, from Dada and surrealism, from Duchamp and Braque.

Boynes comes out of a cool ironic pop senibility in Australia with its hint of the unusual or disturbing in the common life.

Robert Boynes, Leisure Machinery, 1968

Pop art, as an expression of the urban culture of New York, never really caught on in Australia. It was overwhelmed by the romantic suburban character of Australian society. For a brief moment then was a radicalized urban culture:

Robert Boynes, Lets Make Things Perfectly Clear, 1975

Probably the most well known Australian painter of the urban is Geoffrey Smart who started out painting bleak industrial settings in Adelaide then shifted to modernist alienation:

Jeffrey Smart, Cathedral Street, Woolloomoolooo.

You get the general idea from this portrait of Smart:

Greg Weight, Portrait of Jeffrey Smart, 1992

Though Smart broke with the preoccupation with the landscape in Australian art, the work reached a dead end:

Jeffrey Smart, Second Study for House at Intersection, 1977

He didn't really engage with the consumer culture and the society of the spectacle . He seemed to remain in the time warp of the 1950s.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 27, 2004 03:33 PM | TrackBack