ANTHONY WHITE - Artist - What is the Role of Artists in Society?

What role do the visual arts play in drawing upon history, activating democracy, and asking questions about what culture can do?

Australian artist Anthony White lives and works in Paris. White’s artistic work revolves around the notion of reclaiming the act of dissent through the production of cultural objects. His research is situated at the intersection of several fields in the social space including, politics, human rights, and postcolonialism. His practice is centered around concepts of design and its history as a form of social and political expression. He works with painting, drawing, collage, and printmaking. Through this practice, he tackles relevant questions to our time, to encourage emancipation and new ways of thinking.

Anthony White’s artwork has been exhibited in Australia, Europe, and Asia. He has received support through cultural agencies such as The Trust Company Australia, The National Association for the Visual Arts,(NAVA) and The Copyright Agency Limited (CAL). He has also received critical acclaim by recognition in the form of art prizes and reviews most notably The Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (2007) The Creative Art Fellowship at The National Library of Australia (2020) and acknowledgements in The Australia Financial Review, Art Collector Magazine Australia and also Elle Décor US edition. His exhibition Manifestation is on show from the 12–30 of July at Lennox Street Gallery, in Melbourne.

"It's about finding form through using your body. You can see throughout history that uh, repeated like with artists like from the Gutai Movement in Japan after World War II, when they used actual performances in mud and throwing themselves through rice paper barriers and doing performances around these things. And also other artists actually that use a lot of gestures and bodily movements. Artists like Emilio Vedova, the Italian artist, Venetian. He did a lot of work, and he said that art that was abstract had to be political, which was interesting because you'd actually think the opposite.

You would think that art would have to have a subject matter that related to some obvious political reference, whether it be an image of a protest or an image of a battle or a massacre or something that related to that. But no, his stance was the fact that his work was a resistance and he was involved in a resistance group during World War II."

www.anthonywhite.art
www.instagram.com/anthony_white_paris/
www.metrogallery.com.au/exhibitions/manifestation

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast