Art + Australia Issue Five (55. 2): Brutalism

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Art + Australia is Australia's longest running art magazine, with its precursor Art in Australia established in 1916. Art + Australia is a publishing and research body that focuses on contemporary art and its relationship to broader theoretical, social and geo-political contexts. Based at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), University of Melbourne, and living intimately with the vibrant pulse of its art school host, Art + Australia presents a rigorous and uncompromising perspective on what might constitute both art and Australia in the twenty first century. The stark, raw truculence of the post–World War II architectural style of severity dubbed brutalism has been enjoying a renascent taste. Countless images of bunker-like and helmet-like megaliths of social housing, immobile monoliths of governmental inscrutability, and mammoth corporate hubs tiered like Aztec pyramids that might have sacrificial blood running dark in their guttering now spill across Tumblr, Instagram and coffee tables with the ubiquity of food pornography. But there's clearly something about the pugnacious strong-man allure of this mode of monumentality and its ruin-value ostalgie that goes beyond the architectural example. Dr Edward Colless is editor of the prestigious journal Art + Australia and senior lecturer of Critical and Theoretical Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.