Ruth Mackenzie’s Adelaide Festival of Arts has two heavyweights, performance artist Marina Abramović and avant-garde artist and musician Laurie Anderson.
It’s often implied that violent art means something sinister about its creator – most recently, in news stories about ‘scary’ kids’ drawings of death. But the history of modern art suggests otherwise.
Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles is one of Australia’s most famous cultural acquisitions. When Mike Parr lay supine before it, streaked with his own blood, he offered a new way of looking at the act of painting.