This collection of 200 papers introduces the ideas of modernism and its influence on Australia. The main players of the time period from 1917-1967 convey in their own words the tensions, aspirations and paradoxes behind the reception of modernism. Each document is accompanied by expert commentaries from the editors. The first anthology covering modernist art, design, and architecture in Australia, it chronicles the dogged institutional resistance that greeted modernism, particularly in the fine arts, and yet reveals a surprising acceptance of modernism in the commercial realms.

Modernism and Australia: Art, Design and Architecture 1917–1967

Arts & Photography

Goad, Philip

McNamara, Andrew

Stephen, Ann

History & Criticism

Miegunyah Press

Surpassing Modernity: Ambivalence in Art, Politics and Society

For the past thirty to forty years, cultural analysis has focused on developing terms to explain the surpassing of modernity. Discussion is stranded in an impasse between those who view the term modernity with automatic disdain-as deterministic, Eurocentric or imperialistic-and a booming interest that is renewing the study of modernism. Another dilemma is that the urge to move away from, or beyond, modernity arises because it is viewed as difficult, even unsavoury. Yet, there has always been a view of modernity as somehow difficult to live with, and that has been said by figures we regard today as typical modernists. 
McNamara argues in this book that it is time to forget the quest to surpass modernity. Instead, we should re-examine a legacy that continues to inform our artistic conceptions, our political debates, our critical justifications, even if that legacy is baffling and contradictory. We may find it difficult to live with, but without recourse to this legacy, our critical-cultural ambitions would remain seriously diminished.
How do we explain the culture we live in today? And how do we, as citizens, make sense of it? This book suggests these questions have become increasingly difficult to answer.

Bloomsbury Academic

The book was awarded The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize in 2010. Art continues to bemuse and confuse many people today. Yet, its critical analyses are saturated with daunting analyses of contemporary art’s exhaustion, its predictability or its absorption into global commercial culture. In this book, the author seeks to clarify this apprehensive perception of art. He argues it is a consequence not only of confounding art-works, but also of the paradoxical impetus of a culture of modernity. By positively reassessing the perplexing or apprehensive features of cultural modernity as well as of aesthetic inquiry, this book rede?nes the ambitions of art in the wake of this legacy. In the process, it challenges many familiar approaches to art inquiry in order to offer a new understanding of the aesthetic, social and cultural aspirations of art in our time.

An Apprehensive Aesthetic: The Legacy of Modernist Cuture

Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

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Books by McNamara, Andrew