Publishing

While artist monographs tend to reflect consistent practices, developed through early, mid, late stages, Gary Willis has eschewed predictability in favour of diverse meanderings through a wide range of media - Performance - Video - Painting - Drawing- Etching - Art theory. For an artist whose career commenced in the late 1960s, Willis is revealed as a seminal figure, charting new ground before moving to fresh creative territory.

Published with the book is a companion edition: BIRD/SONGS, 1973 – an early Willis work, photographed by John Wilson – reproduced by Words For Art as a printed scarf.

Mary Barkas (1889-1959) was a pioneering psychiatrist, physician and author from New Zealand whose career and association with such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Julius Wagner-Juarreg and Ernest Jones are now largely forgotten. Trained as a doctor in London, she worked as house physician at the Bethlem Royal Hospital, being the first woman doctor to occupy the role in the institution’s 600-year history. At the height of her career, Barkas was one of the first four psychiatrists appointed when the Maudsley Hospital opened in 1923. There her work demonstrated her versatility, showing expertise in general psychiatry, child psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

The account of her three months in Vienna, being analysed by Rank and meeting Freud and other luminaries, in 1922, is quite unique. She translated The Therapeutic Value of Artistic Activity, authored by the avant-garde artist and Jewish refugee Arthur Segal, who taught painting as a form of psychotherapy at his Painting School for Professionals and Non-Professionals founded in London in 1937. Her five-years working at the Lawn Hospital for the Insane proved exhausting. Returning to New Zealand in 1933, Barkas spent her later years in relative seclusion, living on a rural property on the Coromandel Peninsula, ‘breeding schnauzers’ and studying Chinese philosophy.

About the author

Clinical Associate Professor Robert Kaplan is a Forensic Psychiatrist, Lecturer and highly sought-after guest speaker. He has been a qualified Psychiatrist for several decades and holds positions at the University of New South Wales, Western Sydney University, Wollongong University and Stellenbosch University.

Dr Kaplan’s expertise includes sleep and pain disorders, neuropsychiatry and psychological aspects of physical disorders and gives regular talks on forensic topics.

The Geoff Raby Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art surveys the art collection amassed by Dr Geoff Raby AO, Australia’s Ambassador to China between 2007 and 2011. Raby arrived in Beijing in the 1980s where he first encountered the emerging contemporary art scene. Recognising that China’s new vanguard of artists were uniquely placed to reflect the unprecedented transformation of China following the Reform and Opening Up period, Raby became a collector, advocate and friend to artists who would go on to attain international recognition.

The collection charts a fascinating journey through the contemporary art of China – from a single early work made in Hotan in the far west of China and dated to 1942, through the early 1980s to the post-1989 period of the Tiananmen uprising and the arrival of the Cynical Realism and Political Pop art movements, and on to the exuberant years surrounding the Beijing Olympics of 2008.

This book is highly illustrated with works from the collection by avant garde artists such as Xiao Lu, Guan Wei, Ah Xian, Chen Wenling and Li Jin. Also featured are artists hailing from distant locations in Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and the southwestern province of Guizhou.

Thematically, the collection embraces such themes as sex, power and politics. Surprisingly, in a country where subjects such as these are routinely sanctioned, it is truly fascinating to see just how frequently these topics appear in the products of both radical art practitioners and in state sanctioned propaganda.

With essays by Damian Smith, Geoff Raby, Nicholas Jose, John McDonald and others, The Geoff Raby Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art is an indispensable reference guide for anyone seeking cultural insight into China in the 21st century. The text is bilingual, in English and Chinese.

Love Which I Experience 21st Century Tarot is a conceptual tarot deck produced by Melbourne-based artist Mia Salsjö.

Museo Italiano, Melbourne, Australia, February -March 2013