By Laura Duffy
http://www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au/filething/get/9212/NewPsychedeliaInterpretiveResource.pdf
Artists: Belle Bassin, Damiano Bertoli, Geoff Kleem, Nike Savvas, Nick Selenitsch, Kate Shaw, Noel Skrzpczak, John Young
7Th May – 3rd July 2011
In the hopes to ‘enhance audience understanding’ this slick online catalogue serves in conjunction with the exhibition New Psychedelia at The University Of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane.
It does what any publication wishes to do, it hopes to ‘enhance audience understanding’. It does this by giving each artist a page, with colour images and providing information about the artist and their work in the exhibition. At the end of the text on every page the catalogue invites the reader to answer some focus questions. Split into two sections of resolve and develop. I’m not entirely sure who the focus questions are questions to? But I assume for outsiders of the art world or high schoolers. Nevertheless I found it an interesting way to engage with the work. At times when visiting galleries with friends or family they’ve expressed a frustration at the idea of trying to “get” something – this is an inclusive way for anyone to be able to think about the work and enter a new way of looking and thinking. As well as being inclusive, I find the focus questions would be helpful for an artist studying similar theory yet struggling to get started into the making process.
Online publications are always great in terms of accessibility as well as cost effective; I always think it’s amazing how I can access something for free from another country. I didn’t actually see the show in real life. The publication doesn’t give much evidence to the exhibition, I would be interested in how it ran and was laid out.
Transcending the constraints of contemporary consumerism and technological constraints, a bridge between inner and outer worlds, the terrestrial psychedelic imagery challenges the viewer to make connections between colour, texture, art and spirituality. “If consumer society seeks to understand and control the unconscious through market research, opinion polling and other tactics, then psychedelia is its opposite – a weapon that blasts the inner policeman out of our heads.” This catalogue took my mind into interesting new places.
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