Dimensions
238 x 287 x 21mm
Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories will trace Cattapan's art from his student days to the present. Beginning with the Dadaist grotesquery and surrealist erotica of Melbourne's 1970s punk scene, it traces Cattapan's psychic themes of isolation and longing into later explorations of post-modern cities and global information flows. These culminate in the artist's efforts to reintroduce a political consciousness into his art. Using slow information – the laborious task of painting – he makes painting a way of a thinking, processing and reinvesting ethical positions into art.
Globalism takes Cattapan into disputed territories where national character is debated: border control, ethnicity and community. Paintings of a data-soaked global network of megacities chart the transition from the hard economy of industrial modernity to the liquid state of an information society.
Emerging from the author's 21-year friendship with the artist, this book will include extensive interviews and commentaries from the artist, along with numerous illustrations of his source materials and working processes.
