Charles Green
I am Professor of Contemporary Art in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Author of Peripheral Vision (Craftsman House, 1996), The Third Hand (U Minnesota Press, 2001), I completed a history of biennials in contemporary art, Biennials, Triennials and Documenta (Blackwell Wiley, 2016), with Professor Anthony Gardner (Oxford University), then When Modern Became Contemporary Art: The Idea of Australian Art, 1962-1988 (London: Routledge, 2024), with Dr Heather Barker
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green have worked in collaboration as one artist since 1989. We are based in regional Victoria. Our works are included in most of Australia’s public art collections and many private and corporate collections. In 2007, we were Australia’s Official War Artists, deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and between 2011 and 2019 worked on follow-up collaborations with artist Jon Cattapan (assisted by two Australian Research Council Discovery Grant) about the aftermath of Australia’s wars since Vietnam, which the three artists exhibited in Melbourne across two galleries in late 2014, accompanied by a book (Framing Conflict: Contemporary War and Aftermath, Macmillan, 2014). Dr Lyndell Brown is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Visual Art at the University of Melbourne.
Phone: +61 3 8344 4000
Address: Professor Charles Green,
Art History, School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010 Australia
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green have worked in collaboration as one artist since 1989. We are based in regional Victoria. Our works are included in most of Australia’s public art collections and many private and corporate collections. In 2007, we were Australia’s Official War Artists, deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and between 2011 and 2019 worked on follow-up collaborations with artist Jon Cattapan (assisted by two Australian Research Council Discovery Grant) about the aftermath of Australia’s wars since Vietnam, which the three artists exhibited in Melbourne across two galleries in late 2014, accompanied by a book (Framing Conflict: Contemporary War and Aftermath, Macmillan, 2014). Dr Lyndell Brown is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Visual Art at the University of Melbourne.
Phone: +61 3 8344 4000
Address: Professor Charles Green,
Art History, School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010 Australia
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Papers by Charles Green
The exhibition contains a work by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
1788–1960, and 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary. The article explores what changed in these years when art historians, critics, and curators, albeit belatedly and reluctantly, finally began to acknowledge the great contemporary Aboriginal painting that had long been in many artists’ sights as inspiration and model, and in plain view on display in the so-called primitive cultures’ sections of state museums. It argues that this was because it did not seem part of the national story of art.
The exhibition contains a work by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
1788–1960, and 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary. The article explores what changed in these years when art historians, critics, and curators, albeit belatedly and reluctantly, finally began to acknowledge the great contemporary Aboriginal painting that had long been in many artists’ sights as inspiration and model, and in plain view on display in the so-called primitive cultures’ sections of state museums. It argues that this was because it did not seem part of the national story of art.
art. It explores how and why writers and artists in Australia argued over the
idea of a distinctively Australian modern and then postmodern art from 1962,
the date of publication of a foundational book, Australian Painting 1788–
1960, up to 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentennial.
Across nine chapters about art, exhibitions, curators and critics, this
book describes the shift from modern art to contemporary art through the
successive attempts to define a place in the world for Australian art. But by
1988, Australian art looked less and less like a viable tradition inside which
to interpret ‘our’ art. Instead, vast gaps appeared, since mostly male and
often older White writers had limited their horizons to White Australia alone.
National stories by White men, like borders, had less and less explanatory value. Underneath this, a perplexing subject remained: the absence of Aboriginal art in understanding what Australian art was during the period that established the idea of a distinctive Australian modern and then contemporary art.
This book reflects on why the embrace of Aboriginal art was so late in art
museums and histories of Australian art, arguing that this was because it was not part of a national story dominated by colonial, then neo‑colonial dependency. It is important reading for all scholars of both global and Australian art, and for curators and artists.
rative practices that have more recently shaped the communication of the climate emergency. It explores the iconographies that artists and filmmakers have used in the shift from representing contemporaneous and local environmental challenges to depicting the future consequences of climate warming, including widespread biospheric change. The authors sketch the shifting screen media formulations that imagine climate catastrophes, observing how both documentary film, television and contemporary art draw on popular and professional media practices, including news formats and visual effects.
With a comprehensive global array of case studies seamlessly connected through shrewd narrative analysis, this innovative new book will be essential reading for curatorial and museum studies students and scholars, aspiring curators, gallerists, and all those interested in the exhibition of contemporary art.
Available through Wiley-Blackwell, May 2016
The progressive Australian art of the 1970s - often deliberately ephemeral and confrontational in nature, and as a result often neglected in art museums and histories -is reappraised. The 1970s work of artists such as Mike Parr, Bonita Ely, Aleks Danko, Domenico de Clario, Vivienne Binns and Robert Rooney provides the background against which subsequent developments are discussed. In the ensuing decades a diversity of styles, media and ideas have flourished, coexisting to create the stimulating and complex Australian art scene of today.
As they did in the 1970s, theoretical writings continue to play a large part in raising and elaborating the issues taken up by artists. The relevance of postmodern and postcolonial ideas within an Australian context is discussed, with reference to local artists including Imants Tillers, Juan Davila, Susan Norrie, Narelle Jubelin, Tim Johnson and Pansy Napangati. Peripheral Vision steers the reader through the fascinating field of recent Australian art, with detailed description and analysis of works, including paintings, photography, performances and installations.
The progressive Australian art of the 1970s - often deliberately ephemeral and confrontational in nature, and as a result often neglected in art museums and histories -is reappraised. The 1970s work of artists such as Mike Parr, Bonita Ely, Aleks Danko, Domenico de Clario, Vivienne Binns and Robert Rooney provides the background against which subsequent developments are discussed. In the ensuing decades a diversity of styles, media and ideas have flourished, coexisting to create the stimulating and complex Australian art scene of today.
As they did in the 1970s, theoretical writings continue to play a large part in raising and elaborating the issues taken up by artists. The relevance of postmodern and postcolonial ideas within an Australian context is discussed, with reference to local artists including Imants Tillers, Juan Davila, Susan Norrie, Narelle Jubelin, Tim Johnson and Pansy Napangati. Peripheral Vision steers the reader through the fascinating field of recent Australian art, with detailed description and analysis of works, including paintings, photography, performances and installations.
As they did in the 1970s, theoretical writings continue to play a large part in raising and elaborating the issues taken up by artists. The relevance of postmodern and postcolonial ideas within an Australian context is discussed, with reference to local artists including Imants Tillers, Juan Davila, Susan Norrie, Narelle Jubelin, Tim Johnson and Pansy Napangati. Peripheral Vision steers the reader through the fascinating field of recent Australian art, with detailed description and analysis of works, including paintings, photography, performances and installations.
As they did in the 1970s, theoretical writings continue to play a large part in raising and elaborating the issues taken up by artists. The relevance of postmodern and postcolonial ideas within an Australian context is discussed, with reference to local artists including Imants Tillers, Juan Davila, Susan Norrie, Narelle Jubelin, Tim Johnson and Pansy Napangati. Peripheral Vision steers the reader through the fascinating field of recent Australian art, with detailed description and analysis of works, including paintings, photography, performances and installations.