Editorial 10 October 2018

As a prelude to our five-hour open conversation, RealTime in real time, as part of the Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, this edition is packed with archival delights.

Liveworks: RealTime in real time

Unfolding over 5 hours on Sunday 21 October at the Liveworks Festival, RealTime in real time will be an open conversation charting the remarkable transformation of the art experience over the last quarter century and our response to it, as writers, artists and audiences.

Living the RealTime life

Kirsten Krauth

Kirsten Krauth vividly recalls her RealTime years 1998-2002, as an evolving writer, Assistant Editor and Editor of the OnScreen supplement, embracing Australian film, hypertext and much more, including a one-off stint as Ivana Caprice, digital porn artist.

A superbly slippery medium: photography in RealTime 2005-2017

Katerina Sakkas

Transformations in documentary photography, the influence of the vernacular shot, photography as history, collaboration and performativity figure in Katerina Sakkas’ survey of incisive, evocative reviewing of images wrought by Pat Brassington, r e a, Christian Thompson, Thomas Demand, Trent Parke, Heidrun Löhr, Robyn Stacey and more in RealTime.

Edited Highlights: The RealTime years

Greg Hooper

Ranging across 20 years of reviewing for RealTime, Greg Hooper selects his best opening gambits and endings, recalls the art that thrilled and did not, being shy with artists, abhoring unethically loud concerts and challenging taste-offended theorists who see in modernism and its heirs the source of contemporary evil.

Welcoming the challenge of the new

Jonathan W Marshall

Jonathan W Marshall probes his reviewing since 1998, focussing on favourite works in theatre and dance (early on in Melbourne in particular), assaying the role of RealTime and reflecting on writing from WA.

Editorial Monday 10 September 2018

Spring brings promise in the shape of highly focused, inspirational arts festivals of the ilk of Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art (image above), Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival and the recent Extended Play Festival of Experimental Music in Sydney. South Australia’s artists and audiences, however, are set to endure a wintry slashing of art funding and unified portfolio support.

Liveworks 2018: It’s Alive! It’s Alive!

Virginia Baxter

Spring for ravenous culture vultures means Liveworks, the annual, two-week feast of seductively challenging live art presented by Sydney’s Performance Space with Asian and Australian artists working side by side.

OzAsia 2018: mutualism & displacement; interview, Joseph Mitchell

Keith Gallasch

Joseph Mitchell’s enticing program features striking works by female Asian visual artists, a Chinese performance about young women living in a social media bubble, theatre from Iran, Syria and Malaysia, dance from Japan and Indonesia, and South Australian-Asian collaborations.

On having no style

Linda Marie Walker

While reflecting on writing for RealTime, Linda Marie Walker had been commissioned by a magazine to write about a visual art exhibition. The magazine’s rejection of her piece threw up for the writer questions around house style, poetic language, the general reader and writing as a way of being in the world.

Vicki Van Hout, dancing on a cultural knife-edge

Keith Gallasch

Vicki Van Hout’s new dance theatre work for FORM Dance Projects, plenty serious TALK TALK, is wickedly funny, existentially intimate, culturally complex, bitingly political and superbly danced beneath an exquisite grass sculpture woven by the artist.