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Memo Magazine No. 1 2023/24
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Issue 1 of Memo’s first glossy annual magazine features an extended artist focus on Archie Moore, the 2024 Venice Biennale Australian Representative, with essays by Rex Butler, Tara Heffernan, Tristen Harwood, and Hilary Thurlow.

Audrey Schmidt unveils a covetous history of tall-poppy takedowns in the Melbourne art world. Philip Brophy rips into Hollywood’s shallow art-world playbook, while Cameron Hurst checks-in with the once-celebrated Spike magazine cultural critic, Dean Kissick, in his post-zenith era. The Manhattan Art Review’s Sean Tatol visits the Dutch artist group, KIRAC, reporting on their legal woes with French literature’s ageing enfant terrible, Michel Houellebecq.

We also have essays and reviews on art from all around Australia and the world. Amelia Winata turns up the heat on Melbourne’s public museums as Callum McGrath uncovers a typically Eurocentric failure at the heart of British art historian Claire Bishop’s recent Artforum essay on research-based art. Helen Hughes writes on Helen Johnson’s The Birth of an Institution (2022) and Chelsea Hopper and Shaune Lakin on Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993). Stars like Isa Genzken, Royal Academy graduates like Anna Higgins, cult-favourites like Jas H. Duke — Memo features all this and more.

Texts by Adam Ford, Aimee Dodds, Amelia Winata, Anastasia Murney, Andrew Harper, Audrey Schmidt, Callum McGrath, Cameron Hurst, Camille Orel, Chelsea Hopper, Darren Jorgensen, Gemma Topliss, Giles Fielke, Helen Hughes, Hilary Thurlow, Lévi McLean, Loren Kronemyer, Maraya Takoniatis, Paris Lettau, Philip Brophy, Rayleen Forester, Rebecca Edwards, Rex Butler, Sam Beard, Sean Tatol, Shaune Lakin, Susie Russell, Tara Heffernan, Tristen Harwood, Verónica Tello, Victoria Perin.

256 pages, 16 x 25 cm

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Venus in Tullamarine: Art, Sex, Politics and Norman Lindsay
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PRE-ORDER ONLY/ SECOND EDITION COMING SOON

Norman Lindsay (1879–1969) was a prolific, popular and controversial Australian artist. He is best known for his children’s book The Magic Pudding and his skilled prints, which mostly draw on Greek and Roman mythology and nineteenth century literature and philosophy. The Australian cultural consciousness is indelibly marked by Lindsay’s output, his prominence in the Sydney bohemian intellectual scene and by The Magic Pudding, which entrances the imagination of generation after generation of Australian children. This consciousness is marked too by the paradoxical conjunctions of Lindsay’s life: artistic bohemia and fascistic tendencies, avant-gardism and a fervour for the rule of law, libertinism and conservatism, worship and denigration.

This collection of essays examines Lindsay’s current position in Australian art history. The authors’ opinions are erudite, varied and often incendiary; few figures are as divisive as Lindsay.

Film critic Adrian Martin writes alongside Ian McLean, the Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne, art historian Cameron Hurst, and literary critic Jeremy George. Art historian Soo-Min Shim responds to a video work by artist James Nguyen.

The project develops research conducted during an exhibition of the University of Melbourne’s Norman Lindsay collection, also titled Venus in Tullamarine, held at the George Paton Gallery in 2022.

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Everyone’s a Critic Cap
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Critic Cap by Memo Review. Back due to popular demand!

Low profile six panel cap, curved peak. Adjustable fastener with metal clasp, tonal under-peak lining;
Light weight. 100% cotton. One size. Black

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Memo Review 2021
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What is it like to make art the way the world is today? What is it to write about art? Every review you read in 2022 will attempt to answer these questions, whether it knows it or not. You can see it if you look hard enough. And in thinking about this we perhaps hold a candle to the darkness, or perhaps these questions are the light that allows us to see the darkness around us. Thank you for reading Memo lit by the world’s candlelight.

Featuring A. D. S. Donaldson, Adelle Mills, Amelia Winata, Amy May Stuart, Anna Parlane, Audrey Schmidt, Babs Rapeport, Cameron Hurst, Chelsea Hopper, David Wlazlo, Diego Ramírez, Francis Plagne, Giles Fielke, Hilary Thurlow, Jarrod Zlatic, Léuli Eshrāghi, Luke Smythe, Matt Marasco, Michelle Guo, Miriam La Rosa, Paris Lettau, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler
Sofia Skobeleva, Tara Heffernan, Tara Mcdowell, Timmah Ball, Ursula Cornelia De Leeuw, Victoria Perin, and Vincent Le.

softcover, 241 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm. Published by Memo Review Inc.

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Memo Review 2020
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There is no getting around it: 2020 was the year of COVID. It was something that all kinds of cultural activities tried to make sense of. We could quote, to show it has all apparently happened before, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year at you. Or, like everybody else, you could read some prominent philosopher or cultural theorist try to make sense of it. Slavoj Žižek wrote no fewer than two books on the subject during the year, which made us realise that at least he was doing what he usually does during lockdown.

And we for our part at Memo Review also did what we usually do. Here are the forty-seven reviews we published during the year—a year when virtually every show we reviewed was only available online.

English, softcover, 269 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm. Published by Memo Review Inc.

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Memo Review 2019
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After three years of writing weekly reviews of the art made in and around Melbourne, it is possible that Memo Review has found its voice. Or voices. Regular readers might have started following the writers who speak most to them. There have been repeated mentions of the artists who speak most to our reviewers. Altogether we hope we have created something of a “scene”—a sensibility shared by certain writers and artists that might point to something more general about the particular time and place in which both are working.

softcover, 241 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm. Monash Art Projects / Memo Review Inc.

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Memo Review 2018
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These are the reviews from 2018, the second year of Memo Review. As readers engage with this second year of reviews, they might see a group of art writers coming to grips with the particular limitations and opportunities of the weekly review format and even the particularities of its online delivery. Some will track the successive mentions of the same artist or gallery space, seeing what different writers make of them. Others will follow the progress of individual writers, finding and developing their own style and argument.

2020, English, softcover, 241 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm. Monash Art Projects / Memo Review Inc.

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Memo Review 2017
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The first hardcopy Memo publication, collecting the 52 reviews from 2017 published by Melbourne’s Memo Review. Memo Review is Melbourne’s only weekly art criticism, publishing reviews of “a broad variety of art exhibitions at public art museums, commercial galleries and smaller artist-run spaces in Melbourne, offering new critical perspectives from an up-and-coming younger generation of Australian art scholars, writers and artists.”

208 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm, Softcover, Monash Art Projects, 2019, ISBN

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Ernst Jünger: Philosophy Under Occupation
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More than twenty years after Ernst Jünger’s death in 1998, the controversial German writer’s work continues to compel the attention of readers, critics, and scholars. In early 2019, Jünger’s diaries, the Strahlungen, written while he was an officer in occupied Paris during World War II, were published in English to wide acclaim.

These intimate accounts, of high literary and philosophical quality, reveal Jünger negotiating compliance with acts of subversion and resistance against the Nazi regime. His life is evidence that history can be both real and unrealistic at once, crystallising something essential about a twentieth century that witnessed the rise of total mobilisation, global war, and unprecedented technologies of mass extermination.

This volume presents four new essays by established and emerging scholars on Jünger’s work and legacy. Together, they provide biographical, philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic access-points to a major twentieth century German intellectual who, like few others, invites us to investigate the ambiguities, constraints, and imperatives of our own times.

Editors: Justin Clemens and Nicolas Hausdorf

Contributors: Justin Clemens, Nicolas Hausdorf, Birgit Lang, Marilyn Stendera, Giles Fielke.

English, softcover, 196 pages, 17.8 x 11.2 cm, ISBN 978-0-6451060-2-2

Published by IndexPress

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Elizabeth Newman: Texts
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Elizabeth Newman is best known as a visual artist whose practice encompasses a variety of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Writing, too, is central to her art.

Edited and with an introduction by David Homewood. Designed by Robert Milne. Published by Discipline, 2019, 192 pages, 108 × 177 mm, Softcover, Edition of 400, ISBN 978-0-9945388-2-6.

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The Importance of Being Anachronistic: Contemporary Aboriginal Art and Museum Reparations
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Published by Discipline in collaboration with Third Text Publications, an affiliate of Third Text journal. Edited by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll; with essays by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Julie Gough, Dacia Viejo-Rose, Ellen Smith, and Christoph Salzar; photographs by Mark Adams; a foreword by Nicholas Thomas; copyediting by Paris Lettau and Ella Cattach; project management by Ella Cattach; and proofreading by Kate Lindesay. Designed by Robert Milne and set in Victor designed with Fabian Harb; cover photograph by Christoph Balzar.

The Importance of Being Anachronistic: Contemporary Aboriginal Art and Museum Reparations focuses on the role of time in contemporary art and introduces anachrony as a method for subverting the colonial archive.

216 pages, 120 x 184 mm, Softcover, ISBN 978-0-9945388-1-9

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Thinking Cap
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Memo Review “idea” cap by Giles Fielke.

One size.