Editorial

Aodhan Madden’s reflection on Ella Baxter’s novel Woo Woo, a Melbourne art-world thriller about a successful conceptual artist unravelling before her solo exhibition, turns this suspicion on the novel’s very preposterousness, which he finds exposes a specifically provincial anxiety: the Australian art star as an imported metropolitan fantasy, organised around the desire to be recognised by a centre that may never be looking. That same anxiety gave Guzzler, the Rosanna backyard shed Madden refers to but leaves unnamed, its peculiar international legibility. Its pristine white walls, dirt floor, and appetite for suburban dereliction made its provincial distance a style Europeans could recognise as unfiltered, truthful.

Laura Gardner calls it Melbourne’s “mannerist provisionalism,” forming the backdrop to her account of local DIY fashion magazine Cupboard, which deliberately adopts the high-fashion gloss format combined with a distinct unstagedness in an attempt to “let reality in, carefully if irreverently.”

Trumpian history painter Jon McNaughton relies upon a different supposedly truth-telling style: pictorial realism. Yet, as Philip Brophy argues, this realism is itself a template of stylistic coding that uses the familiar signs of “quality” painting to make Trumpist fantasy appear already real, already historical.

The artist focus on New York–based Marc Kokopeli shows our damaged circuit. George Egerton-Warburton captures it as an ethic of “critique beside itself”: the loss of depth, the illegibility of irony, the collapse of critique and the critiqued, or what he describes as “compression-addled content production.” All these signal a breakdown of the mode of critique on which our comforting superstition is built, and which, in any event, has itself always possessed a superficial quality: the vulgar, the disagreeable, even the plain signal to the critical subject a proximity to darkness, and therefore to interiority and the hidden truth of things.

The issue’s explicit focus on conspiracy brings this interiority to a head. In Audrey Pfister’s conversation with Joshua Citarella, the “tip of the iceberg” becomes an image of the desire to recover a total explanation from beneath the fragments of shared reality. Conspiracy is our degraded “poor man’s” cognitive map, but also our misdirected attempt to name real structures of power. Peel away the mask and you will only find, as Audrey Schmidt does, another mask.

It is perhaps Elizabeth Newman who most clearly captures this as a productive logic, as Helen Hughes recounts, in which art-making is itself a “practice of doubt,” an encounter with uncertainty and lack that might generate desire for art, knowledge, and relation to the Other. Hughes describes it as a movement of thought that must pass from faith to doubt and then to faith again, arresting the oscillation before it collapses into nihilism. Whether one adopts Newman’s mystical formulation, it is difficult to ignore the conspiratorial mindset at the heart of contemporary culture, which everywhere imagines a netherworld, a double, controlling this one.

We enter this underworld as our own world in Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta’s Untitled (2023), as described by Eleanor Ivory Weber. Fallen bollards are buried upside down, leaving only their dark circular openings visible. We peer into those holes and imagine an impossible city extending beneath our feet where there is nothing to uncover, no secret, finally, to expose.

— Paris Lettau