AustLit

''In the 20th century the ekphrastic conversation between seeing and saying, betwern opis and lexis, really begins to swing (and I use the jazz metaphor advisedly).

'Both visual and literary artists experimented with new languages, languages of fragmentation and reassembly born of cinema and experimental photography, telegraphy and radio, newspapers and advertising, of the shocking impact of industrial weaponry during the Great War, of the discomfiting interpretation of dreams in psychoanalysis, and of the awful reimagining of the physical universe in Einstein’s theories of relativity. Dada and surrealism’s clipped dialect of collage merged with the literary avant-garde’s symbolist, free verse and stream-of consciousness tendencies to form a coherent (or deliberately incoherent) cultural domain.'  (Introduction)

David Hansen discusses 'the recent abortive sale of Benjamin Law's busts of Truganini and Woureddy and ... the controversy surrounding the promulgation of historical artefacts depicting Tasmanian Aborigines. Dr Hansen deplores the stigma surrounding such works, and is critical of academic and curatorial timidity and silence.'

Source: Australian Book Review, 'Advances', May 2010