Art-attack

September’s Art Monthly Australia includes celebratory reviews of Michael Stevenson’s This is the Trekka exhibit at the Venice Biennale, and the Stedelijk Museum’s Colin McCahon retrospective, currently showing in Melbourne. Louise Tegart on Stevenson: “This is the Trekka brings together a number of disparate objects to examine NZ’s industry and culture in the Cold War period, and opens up debate about the state of the visual arts in NZ today […] The new national economic project for NZ is to use art to place NZ on the world stage.” Mary Eagle on McCahon: “Any viewer, of whatever persuasion, who stops and looks is hit with a wham, for McCahon easily achieves his goal that the ’emotion of a painting should fill a room’ […] Fuchs and Bloem [Stedelijk director and curator] say the voice spoke to them in Amsterdam from a dark corner of the Pacific and colonised their global sensibility.”