Ann Stephen

In 1960 at the age of 21, Ian Burn left the Victorian regional city of Geelong to become an artist. Like other young painters in the 1960s, Burn was drawn to London where, in the rich confusion of cosmopolitan Europe, he began to think about the role that language plays in art. By 1967 he was working at the explosive core of early Conceptual art in New York, where he was described as "the only Australian ever to be central to an internationality significant art movement." Burn's origins as an Australian landscape painter always made him an uneasy participant in the New York art world. After a decade of intense collaboration and politics, he eventually quit the metropolis to return to Australia. For more than a decade he juggled work in the local labor movement with writing, before returning to making art. In this the first biography on Ian Burn, art historian Ann Stephen traces his extraordinary body of work from the intimate viewpoint of friend and occasional collaborator. Her account is no conventional monograph, as Stephen approaches and presents Burn's work through a series of imaginary and real "dialogs" with other artists, inspired by his own collaborations and anecdotes. Through these encounters she reveals Burn's concerns with marginal art and the relations between amateur and professional, the politics of place and distance, deskilling, and the concept of originality. With more than 160 images, On Looking at Looking: The art and politics of Ian Burn explores his unique contribution to Australian art as an artist, writer, and curator. Stephen convincingly shows how Burn's work is alive to the most pressing questions facing art and culture today.

The Art and Politics of Ian Burn

On Looking at Looking

Andrew McNamara

Harriet Edquist

Philip Goad

Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond- Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture presents an extraordinary new Australasian cultural history. It is a migrant and refugee story- from 1930, the arrival of so many emigre, internee and refugee educators helped to transform art, architecture and design in Australia and New Zealand. Fifteen thematic essays and twenty individual case studies bring to light a tremendous amount of new archival material in order to show how these innovative educators, exiled from Nazism, introduced Bauhaus ideas and models to a new world. As their Bauhaus model spanned art, architecture and design, the book provides a unique cross-disciplinary, emigre history of art education in Australia and New Zealand. It offers a remarkable and little-known chapter in the wider Bauhaus venture, which has multiple legacies and continues to inform our conceptions of progressive education, creativity and the role of art and design in the wider community. A co-production by MUP with Power Publications http-//www.powerpublications.com.au/

Ann Stephen

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