What is more synonymous with the Australian summer than the beach? It occupies, says Gary Carsley, ‘a singular place in the cultural construction of Australian identity.’ Yet, as Carsley further observed in his lively essay on the work of Daniel Mudie Cunningham (and more broadly, the music video in Australian art practice), it has become a contested rhetorical site. Filmed against the backdrop of Cronulla beach, the topical cover image of the summer issue is a still from Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s reworking of Cyndi Lauper’s 1986 hit True Colors.
The dual catalysts for Rex Butler’s text were a newspaper article about artists finding ‘fame and fortune using social media’ and Robert Leonard’s characterisation of post-criticality in his 2011 essay ‘Michael Zavros: Charm Offensive’. In a characteristically probing essay titled REALLY POST-CRITICAL, Butler considered the tensions, the ‘ambiguities and contradictions’ inherent in the theorisation of post-criticality in relation to the prac
