Memory Holloway, Guest Lecture 1989

Art historian Memory Holloway gives a lecture about the life and career of Pablo Picasso and Australian art. Holloway reflects on Picasso’s practice focusing on his drawings, sculptures, paintings, and printmaking. Holloway draws from the ways in which his friends, models, lovers, everyday objects, politics, and the landscape are just some of the themes that have influenced his work. Holloway states that she sees Picasso as a voyeur. Holloway questions what the relationship is between what she sees and what she can do. For Holloway, looking also operates as a transgression, because when we see something, we possess something. Aboriginal Australian art is also a topic Holloway covers, Holloway talks about the black artist tradition in Australia which goes back 40 thousand years, versus a white tradition in Australia which only goes back 200 years. Holloway ends her lecture by talking about landscape painting in Australia. How it has become mythologized and how it has also developed a harshness and inaccessibility to it.