National Anthem / A New Order

Celebrating its first anniversary, Buxton Contemporary showcases Michael Buxton’s extraordinary gift to the University of Melbourne with two collection-based shows—National Anthem curated by Dr Kate Just and A New Order curated by Linda Short, Friday, March 8-Sunday, July 8, 2019. 

National Anthem
Presenting a cacophonous array of artistic voices and perspectives, National Anthem brings together 24 artists, from a range of generations, who critically address Australian national identity. Built around key works in the Michael Buxton Collection, together with works sourced from beyond the collection, this project reflects on the ways that the desire for a singular national identity often excludes Indigenous histories and denies the multiplicity of voices, cultures and experiences that enrich, contest and enhance Australian life. 

Channelling humour and satire and engaging in tactics such as play, intervention and confrontation, the artists in National Anthem seek self-determination and collectively hold a mirror up to contemporary Australia, prompting new representations of who we are or who we might aspire to become. 

Artists: Brook Andrew, Abdul Abdullah, Kay Abude, Hoda Afshar, Tony Albert, Ali Gumillya Baker, Archie Barry, Richard Bell, Daniel Boyd, Juan Davila, Destiny Deacon, Janenne Eaton, Tony Garifalakis, Eugenia Lim, Tracey Moffatt, Callum Morton, Hoang Tran Nguyen, Raquel Ormella, Mike Parr, Steven Rhall, Tony Schwensen, Christian Thompson, Paul Yore and Siying Zhou. 

Curated by Dr Kate Just. 

A New Order 
There are innumerable ways to join the dots and build connections between the works in A New Order, all of which have been selected from the Michael Buxton Collection. Within the exhibition and the work of the 12 artists represented, we encounter many interconnecting styles and themes: a will to order or to react against it, a tendency for systematic and serial methods, a push and pull within processes that favour chance as much as rules. Patterns become structures that can be seen as more than compositions, as intrinsic to the content of a work or even as its central subject. Found materials are repurposed and given new logics, from simple objects to complex systems such as language. Time and space are also used as kinds of ‘assisted readymades’. The cultural matrix of art history is sampled and brought into the present. The immaterial becomes material in works that shift our senses and challenge our perceptions. We might view all of these conceptual and manual activities—even the exhibition itself—as products of a simple starting point: that is, by varying something pre-existing, we set in motion something new.

Artists: Stephen Bram, Tony Clark, Daniel Crooks, Emily Floyd, Marco Fusinato, Rosalie Gascoigne, Diena Georgetti, John Nixon, Rose Nolan, Mike Parr, Daniel von Sturmer, Constanze Zikos. 

Curated by Linda Short.