On Looking at Looking
The Art and Politics of Ian Burn
Ann Stephen traces the complex life and intellect of Ian Burn and explores the unique contribution he made to Australian art as artist, writer and curator.
Awards
Shorlisted for the 2007 AAANZ Power Institute Prize for Best Book
Opinion
"On Looking At Looking is an absolutely authoritative account of Burn's project in this own terms."
"Stephen nicely captures this inversion of perspective with her notion of 'return', that is the organising principle of the book."
(Rex Butler, Art Monthly Australia, April 2006)
"Stephen has hit upon the ingenious idea of adding to the biography with a series of imaginary dialogues, or digressions, which engage with a number of artists, including Modrian, Pollock and Nolan."
"Ann Stephen's book makes a useful contribution to our understanding of this curiously enigmatic artist."
(Sasha Grishin, The Canberra Times, 15/4/06)
About this Title
"What is held up as originality is a myth, given the degree to which art evolves as a collective enterprise, with artists always building on other artists' work." --Ian Burn
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 lauded as 'the only Australian ever to be central to an internationally 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 of 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.
About the Author
Ann Stephen is an art historian and curator at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. She collaborated with Ian Burn in writing, among other things, The Necessity of Australian Art (1988) and curated Artists Think: The Late Works of Ian Burn (1996). She has also edited numerous other books, including Visions of a Republic: The Work of Lucien Henry - Paris - Noumea - Sydney (2001) and Pirating the Pacific: Images of Travel, Trade & Tourism (1993).
Add to Shopping Basket
How to buy MUP titles