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· 2025
Memo is Australia's leading magazine of critical writing on contemporary art and culture-rigorous, provocative, and essential for those who take contemporary culture seriously. In issue 3 we present a focus on Maria Kozic, whose work has long unsettled the artworld's uneasy relationship with pop culture. Three deep-dive essays unpack the irreverent, uncompromising, and sometimes graphic logic of Kozic's art, whose work refuses easy categorisation, forcing pop into stranger, darker territory. Issue 3 also includes a special Art & Crime focus, bringing together leading critics and artists confronting how stolen wages, incarceration, and colonial violence shape Australian art. Elsewhere, Catherine Liu, one of the world's most unsparing critics of cultural gatekeeping, dismantles the moral posturing of "political" message art, and provocative philosopher Slavoj ¿i¿ek unravels Donald Trump's viral generative AI video "Trump Gaza" posted on Truth Social last month. Dale Frank's slippery persona and autistic mythos come under scrutiny, while Apple's "smooth aesthetic" design empire reveals an unexpected link to the writhing figures of the ancient sculpture Laocoön and His Sons. Wang Bing's latest film expands his brutal factory-world saga, and in fiction, Biddy Mahy follows an art history student watching his first love resurface-this time as Larry Gagosian's teenage muse. This issue also features pieces on D Harding, Mark Rothko, Madonna Staunton, Sidney Nolan, reviews from across Australia, and much more.
· 2018
This publication gathers together 18 essays about the Kunsthalle Bern as a role model and a place for artistic intervention and production, elaborating the examinations to which numerous international artists have subjected the building itself.