Visual Arts

I find myself going to view Nan Goldin’s legendary series of photographs, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, with trepidation. Lying at the heart of these works is a renowned image, Nan after being battered, 1984. Taken by her friend, Suzanne Fletcher, it shows a youthful Goldin with big 1980s hair, dangling silver earrings, a necklace of pale beads. She gazes into the camera, her left eye swollen and bloodshot, her right eye framed by a half-healed bruise.

As the self-proclaimed home of Australian modernism, Heide Museum of Modern Art is largely known for its exhibitions focusing on the story of the Heide circle and the interactions between Heide founders and patrons John and Sunday Reed and the group of artists, including Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, and Joy Hester (to name but a few), now referred to collectively as the Angry Penguins.

Radical Utopia: An archeology of a creative city, curated by Harriet Edquist and Helen Stuckey, is a maximalist experience. Even the title itself is a little unwieldy.