A few years ago, the curator Russell Storer remarked to me: ‘People often ask me what’s going on now in art, and all I can honestly say is—everything!’ Unhelpful as it may be for anyone attempting a survey of the field, even the most glancing acquaintance with contemporary Australian art would confirm the truth of Storer’s observation.

To enter any of the contemporary art galleries in any of Australia’s major cities is to be confronted by a dizzying array of works. In one, you might find a recognisable yet abstracted horse’s skull, slightly larger than life-size, riveted together from pale aluminium and named Colt, its folded blank teeth at once comforting and menacing, the shadows of its sockets sucking in the idle glance. A few flights of stairs will have you entering to a sequence of large photographs of a young indigenous Australian dressed in an absurd tartan costume with an outrageous false beard, acting out the myth of Isaac and Abraham in a lush European forest. In one photo he stands, arms crossed, by a log against which an axe has been propped; in another, he cowers beneath a luminous parody of a humpy. At the back of a large public gallery, a gargantuan gleaming assemblage of spotlights and speakers like adult Meccano—entirely dominating the large white exhibition space—sporadically erupts with a blinding and deafening violence. In yet another art space, quiet ambient sounds recorded in Iceland and in New York issue from a series of small speakers nestled in the joints of an angular construction of wooden struts, the whole crowned by imageless rectangular cool colour projections above. Another short walk and a lift ride up a few floors will get you into a small darkened room with a looped split-screen projection that splices scenes from the original 1980s Miami Vice TV show on the left, together with scenes from the movie remake on the right.¹