
NGV Triennial 2020
With a mix of eye-catching works, the second NGV Triennial blends the avant-garde with the populistDecember 2005 - January 2006
Arts & Letters
‘Vulture’; ‘Sunday Arts’; ‘The Movie Show’ on ABC-TV
Any poet could have told the ABC that with a name like Vulture its new arts program was bound to get negative feedback. A vulture is an ugly, disgusting creature whose presence lets you know your death is imminent.This may be why one blogger, having watched the first episode, said it made him lose the will to live. It’s all over for the year now, and it wasn’t that bad really. But Vulture did get eviscerated early on after attracting savage responses to its comedy sketches – the very thing that was supposed to make the show new and different. This left it with the panel-of-experts format, but expertise doesn’t necessarily translate into good screen presence, as anyone who’s seen the movie Broadcast News should know.
Good arts TV is more likely to feature artists producing art than talking heads discussing it, hence the inclusion on the ABC’s Sunday Arts of artists’ workshops and poets in residence. Even The Movie Show’s David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz are essentially performers, acting out the personae they have developed over the years and delivering set-pieces to camera. They break up the chat with clips and interviews, and they don’t talk at or over the top of each other to the apparent exclusion of the viewer.
NGV Triennial 2020
With a mix of eye-catching works, the second NGV Triennial blends the avant-garde with the populistHealing story
Bangarra Dance Theatre’s ‘Spirit’ pays tribute to collaborators‘Jack’ by Marilynne Robinson
History and suffering matter in the latest instalment of the American author’s Gilead novels‘The Dry’ directed by Robert Connolly
Eric Bana stars as a troubled investigator dragged back to his home town in a sombre Australian thrillerBlue is the colour
The idiosyncratic work of Yolngu artist Dhambit MununggurrDividing the Tasman: ‘Empire and the Making of Native Title’
Historian Bain Attwood examines the different approaches to sovereignty in the New Zealand and Australian settlementsShirley Hazzard’s wider world
The celebrated Australian author’s ‘Collected Stories’ sets private desperation in the cosmopolitan Europe she reveredCitizen plain: ‘Mank’
David Fincher’s biopic of Orson Welles’s collaborating writer favours technique over heart‘Jack’ by Marilynne Robinson
History and suffering matter in the latest instalment of the American author’s Gilead novels‘The Dry’ directed by Robert Connolly
Eric Bana stars as a troubled investigator dragged back to his home town in a sombre Australian thriller‘The Living Sea of Waking Dreams’ by Richard Flanagan
The Booker Prize winner’s allegorical new novel about the permanence of loss‘Kajillionaire’ directed by Miranda July
A family of con artists are the American writer-director’s latest offbeat protagonists in a surreal but heartfelt filmNGV Triennial 2020
With a mix of eye-catching works, the second NGV Triennial blends the avant-garde with the populistHealing story
Bangarra Dance Theatre’s ‘Spirit’ pays tribute to collaboratorsDeep cuts: ‘Small Axe’
Black solidarity is a palpable force throughout Steve McQueen’s five-film anthologyDistortion nation
Why are we more outraged by cheating cricketers than alleged war crimes in Afghanistan?
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