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Art Sets.

See you at the barricades: Left-wing melancholy

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By the Art Gallery of NSW

These works take up images and materials associated with activism, such as flags, banners and historical photographs. There are two concurrent themes here: the nostalgic lens through which protest is often viewed, and popular culture’s romanticisation of contemporary dissent.

The mood of these works is often melancholy and reflective. When looking back at past moments of protest, the artists seem to be asking whether protest remains viable today. Yet works by artists such as Mathew Jones, among many others, show that looking back might be positive – an attempt to extract something valuable from the past. Theirs is an active remaking: inhabiting the past, identifying a lineage for themselves and investing the facts of history with present day emotion

AGNSW collection Raquel Ormella This dream 2013

AGNSW collection Raquel Ormella This dream 2013

This dream combines three national flags: that of
Australia, Papua New Guinea and the tiny island state of Nauru. When the work was made, these countries were embroiled in the so-called ‘Pacific solution’ – the controversial Australian government policy of transporting asylum seekers to offshore detention centres. In a gesture at once delicate and provocative, Ormella has burned away sections of the flags with lit incense sticks.

AGNSW collection Mathew Jones The New York Daily News on the day before the Stonewall Riot copied by hand from microfilm records 1996

AGNSW collection Mathew Jones The New York Daily News on the day before the Stonewall Riot copied by hand from microfilm records 1996

Following the funeral of gay icon Judy Garland on 27 June 1969, mourners gathered in bars across Manhattan. Later that night, New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay hangout in Greenwich Village, triggering a riot that bolstered the gay liberation movement in America.

This work is a hand-drawn replica of a newspaper printed on the day before the riot. While the work might be read as a homage to the gay liberation movement, Jones has mixed feelings. For him these drawings capture the last moments before gay politics became mainstream.