the art life

We don’t know why we think drinking a lot of beer is a good idea. We don’t know why drinking wine on top of beer is smart and clever and we haven’t the foggiest why we always think we can get away with it the next day.

We drink like there is no tomorrow and ignore the consequences. It’s a cruel lesson that you can’t outrun a hangover and even more cruel when you inevitably end up at the Art Gallery of NSW vying for space in front of a painting with dozens of school kids and Agnes Society people with brutal haircuts and suspicious smiles jostling you out of the way.

Yet we do it every year.

As do the artists. Every year people enter portraits and every year we think that maybe it’s getting slightly worse or slightly better but it’s never quite the way we imagine it should be. For every Wendy Sharpe or Cherry Hood, there’s a Jason Benjamin or a Robert Hannaford.

Let’s talk about the winner. We decided to reserve judgment until we has seen the painting in real life, rather than on the web, and we thought that Craig Ruddy’s work had a chance of winning because of the subject - the choice of subject being probably more important than the way the artist paints it – but let’s say up front that we think the David Gulpilil picture deserved to win. It’s a very handsome drawing on wall paper and the detailing of the way it’s mounted (tacked into the frame) and the show-through of the pattern makes it something really worth looking at. It’s visually interesting and Ruddy’s handling of the charcoal is assured if slightly overdone in the manner of late Brett Whiteley pictures.

Ruddy’s picture’s main drawback is that it’s drawing, not a painting. We haven’t really looked at the rules lately but we thought that this was a competition for painting, right? No matter what qualities the picture may have (or lack, depending on your opinion) it is clearly not a painting. We were wondering if some aggrieved artists might start a class action lawsuit against the gallery to have it awarded to someone who has done an actual painting. Who knows? It could happen. We’re not down on the idea that a drawing can win – we’re happy to see the rules bent in favour of a good work - but it’s just confusing when a cat wins a dog show.

We are also slightly disturbed by white artists doing paintings of Aboriginals. It has never been a particularly equitable relationship. Now, we don’t think Ruddy did the painting from anything but the best of all possible motives, but it’s worrying to see what he had to say to the Sydney Morning Herald: “You can see thousands and thousands of past generations in [Gulpilil’s] eyes…” […] “There’s such an amazing power about him.”

It’s superficial to think that the Gulpilil picture is somehow intrinsically ‘meaningful’ even if the title is David Gulpilil – Two Worlds. It’s just another painting by a white artist of an Aboriginal subject and all the good will in the world won’t change that. The conceptual link between the subject and the European wall paper is too pat to be particularly telling or significant and in the end it’s just something that hangs on a wall. There’s always a fog of emotion around pictures like this and although we think that, considering the generally duff quality level this year, it was worthy if not particularly convincing outside of its technique.

But it could have been a lot worse. Benjamin’s portrait of John Olsen is just horrible in real life. It looks as though the painting was done a la one of those card board cut outs they used to have at Circular Quay of Ronald Regan where you stood next to it and had your photograph taken and it really looked like you were with the President. We’re guessing that if you have your photo taken in front of the painting it’ll look like you’re there with Olsen but Benjamin’s painting is completely 2D, flat, poorly coloured and just nasty. The irony of this painting is how redundant it is now that Benjamin and his former gallerist Tim Olsen (son of John) have parted company – reportedly because the artist has failed to “progress”. Wasn’t that evident from the start?

Danielle Bergstrom’s Franco Belgiorno-Nettis – larger than life was the second place getter this year and earned the artist a highly commended certificate. It’s also a warning against going out in the sun without proper protection as dear Franco has skin that is reminiscent of a pizza supreme. As a painting it’s pretty much a disaster – multiple panels always appears to us as a failure of nerve and Bergstrom’s picture is overwrought, over painted and too, too much. Hold the cheese.

There’s a nice painting by Kevin Conner that’s almost overlooked and we applaud it - (We honestly never thought we’d say that as we once saw Conner’s naked arse on the roof of the art school building and we’re still in therapy about it) - and Carolyn McKay Creecy’s portrait of Bruce Spence is good for a laugh although we wondered what the actor might have thought about its Dorian Grey qualities – it’s one thing to paint your subject au naturel, it’s another to make the subject uglier than they are in reality.

Perhaps McLean Edward’s painting isn’t as good as we thought it was and maybe we were rash picking it as a winner, but as a title Martin Browne art dealer is the cheekiest in the show – maybe the artist should have added the gallerist’s address and hours of business as well? Michael Zavros is an interesting artist too – his small scale works are brilliant. And we liked his painting Portrait of Stephen Mori with Wyn Schubert and my greater Kudu, but at n square meters by x square meters it looks as though Zavros may be tipping over into chocolate box stylings and, at that size, we broke out into a cold sweat.

Then we remembered we were hungover and not having a heart attack after all. Everything was OK. We hustled out to the Photographic Prize.

There is a Wall of Shame in this year’s photo competition, three tedious and overdone photographs hung side by side that are a microcosm of the hip and conceptually obvious school of Australian Art Photography.

On the left is Polixeni Papapetrou’s Olympia as Lewis Carol’s Xie Kitchin as a Chinaman (off duty). What is wrong with this picture? Everything! Taking a photo of someone against a painted backdrop is a tired high art cliché and Papapetrou does absolutely nothing new with it. The creep out of a woman using her daughter to “investigate” Lewis Carol is just… creepy, and the racial stereotyping is only just got away with by virtue of the fact the kid in the photo is under 10. This is all just so wrong on so many levels we are considering calling in DOCS.

Next to Papapetrou’s freak out is an Anne Zahalka picture. Again, a painted backdrop, this time some people familiar from television – the Sandman, Tony Squires – and some others who look like you should know who they are. The title is Novocastrians, Stockton Shore, Lower Hunter. You may have missed the subtlety and nuance here – the picture is a parody of a painting whose title we have already forgotten. It’s incredibly obscure and the AGNSW have put up a reproduction of the original reference so that we all get the joke. Zahalka should be rightly aggrieved that Tracey Moffatt is more rich and famous than she is when she’s been doing work just as artless and obvious for years. What a rip off!

The Wall of Shame is completed with a self portrait by Gareth Sansom. Had this photo been done by any other middle aged guy who has just bought himself a camera it would’ve hit the reject file in no time at all. It’s rubbish.

This might give you the idea that the Australian Photographic Portrait Prize is bad. It’s not. It’s very good. The AGNSW have seen fit to hide this triumvirate of shame behind a wall. A wise move.

Elsewhere, Aaron Seeto’s self portrait Untitled printed on an egg is sublime – an assured and intelligent meeting of materials and subject that is the essence of good contemporary art. So are Concettina Inserra’s picture of Jane Burton and Bronwyn Rennex's Stella In Red. Petrina Hick’s photo of an insolent school girl called Kirtsin is a show stopper. The overall quality of the The Citigroup Private Bank Australian Photographic Portrait Prize is so high, it makes you marvel at the consistency and popularity of photography in general. Where only the occasional contemporary falvoured painting gets into the Archibald proper, all the real action is now in the photographic section.

The Wynne Prize for landscape painting has always been the poor cousin of the three competitions. Artists like Aida Tomescu have been raising the tone over the last decade or so and it’s good to see she’s there again. Peter Kingston, similarly, is a mighty fine painter and his joyous seascape Friday in February is an exultant bilge of briny spume and crème toppings. It’s so green you can smell the harbour. We are also quite keen on John Wolseley as well, although we weren’t big fans, mainly because he includes birds (and won the prize for watercolours – a prize that looks pretty much uncontested) and ditto to Peter Hickey’s collection of cows at dusk called Twilight Gathering because we are partial to cows.

It was also charming to see Vince Vozzo and one of his sculptures included in the show. He does gently surrealistic works in the style of Hans Arp and it always makes us feel better every time we see them. There’s a certain amount of guilt behind that sentiment tho’, because, way back in 1981, we stole Vince’s drawing board at art school and have felt bad about it ever since. One day, we pray, he’ll win the damn Wynne and we can wash our hands this nagging guilt.

Noel McKenna does whimsy better than anyone by avoiding cheap sentiment. His big painting Big Things Australia is a like a school project with all of the country’s real (and imagined) big things mapped out with helpful illustrations, many in colour. From a purely diagrammatic point of view, McKenna has made an interesting collection of images that shows that down south big things tend to be objects (big cans, big Captain Cook), while, as you move north, they become big Fruits and then, as you go west again, become big crocs and bottles. What a pleasant visual experience.

We were on a bit of a high, a belated energy surge from carrying our hangover around into the next room when we were shocked to our boots by the inclusion of a Euan Macleod painting in the show. Never has an artist of such marginal talent been hoisted to such lofty heights. Macleod proves the point that art in this country is a truly egalitarian pastime – anyone can do it and now they are. His Archibald prize winning self portrait of 1999 tested the limits of credulity – its scrappy, crappy application of paint, its absurd expressionistic stylings, the inclusion of dolphins with the ominous half moon of the artist’s face –finally, here was an artist who was willing to take the images from the back of his high school exercise book and put them on a canvas, irony free!

So prepare yourself because we are about to play with your mind. Are you ready? Macleod has done a painting called Outside In and he has painted a room with clouds and a blue sky inside. Like, what you would think of as the sky, IS IN A ROOM! Man, that must be some strong shit! It’s worth checking out Macleod’s work to see a painting that fails on every level – execution and concept hand in hand, a total dribbly failure. Incredible.

Labels: Archibald, competition, public galleries, reviews

The real show every year is The Sulman Prize for Genre Painting. Since no one is really certain what a “genre” painting is, it’s a total up-for-grabs fun fest that’s more about what’s happening in Australian art than anything else in the country. It’s also only judged by one person – an artist – and it makes for an eclectic mix but a generally much higher quality of finalists than the perverse Archibald. This year it was Aida Tomescu and the finalists ranged from eternal bridesmaids Joe Furlonger and Rodney Pople to Victor Rubin, Wendy Sharpe and Adam Cullen.

The good news about Sharpe is that she’s stopped using red in her paintings and now they are great. She has a suite of pictures in the Wynn that are excellent but her Rainy Night in the Sulman is fabulous. Gareth Sansom is also in the Sulman and proves that he was always a great painter, showing the young guns how to do grunge with a surface that looks like it was painted with Taubmans gloss and has a junk attached into a vaguely figurative work called Head With Stethoscope.

The real disappointment in this selection is Cullen’s Australian Nude (Social Benefit). It’s an OK picture but nothing like his recent best work which features similar Betty Page style nudes and pin ups done in horror show greens and blues. This work is just a little bit tame and disappointing. Must try harder.

McLean Edwards painting Epicem (Narcotic #1) is a brilliantly realised picture. His recent work has tended towards crowded picture planes and compressed, claustrophobic compositions. His early more popular work that featured sparser areas of solid colour and amusing bodies (faux portraits, kids picture book stuff) had given way to a restless, difficult period where Edwards experimented with colour and backgrounds, piling up his images one on top of the other. In Epicem, things seem to have settled down into a more complete and finished work. We loved the big festering blob of black paint in the top right corner, looking more like nasty spill than something deliberate.

The Sulman selection has been moved downstairs to Level 2 this year and we accidentally walked into what our companion called the “bought paintings” section of the gallery. We had been ruminating on the popularity of Gerhard Richter in Australian art because here was a picture that looked exactly like a Richter when it was pointed out that it was a Richter. Oops. What we need was coffee and a sugar hit. Maybe Allan Mitleman’s winning Sulman pictures reminded us of cake, but we were hitting that point in the hangover where you need something to eat, now.

Labels: Archibald, competition, painting, reviews

How dare reality intrude on our fantasy world?!! We knew full well that trying to predict the winner of the Archibald Prize for Portraiture is virtually impossible, especially considering the fickle and perverse tastes and decisions of the Art Gallery of NSW Board of Trustees. So we may have been way off with our pie in the sky prediction of a McLean Edwards win, but we did narrow the field from 40 to 3 possible winners and get Craig Ruddy in our sights! So fair’s fair.

But it’s a nonetheless sobering moment when AGNSW über publicist Jan Batten leaves a note on The Art Life comments page to say “It's no good trying to predict an Archibald!!! There's no 'form guide' this year from either the SMH or The Australian” and “Evert Ploeg's portrait of Jana Wendt is definitely a finalist (with 39 others) in this year's Archibald.”

Too true Jan and we respect your authority. We don’t know what went wrong with the Sydney Morning Herald this year and the missing Archibald “form guide” left a gaping hole in our lives. Perhaps it’ll make a return next year. We had to content ourselves with the plethora of “last minute entries” stories leading up to the prize (an annual newspaper tradition that goes back to the 1950s, probably further) and the coverage of the prize on the TV that always makes us glad that these kinds of events are the exception rather than the norm – imagine if Peter Harvey was covering art all the time instead of just the annual Archibald? Sweet Jesus?!!

Many years of thankless effort as the political correspondent for your newspaper/TV network will earn you a dotage of arts reportage. Who cares if you don’t know anything at all about art and just recycle the same cynical, world weary anti-art attitude? No one is taking you seriously so you can say anything you like!

Harvey was covering the award as he does every year and managed to make fun of both the Sulman and Wynne prize winners and be culturally offensive to boot! You have to admire his sheer nerve. Harvey was seen looking aghast at Allan Mitleman’s Sulman-winning painting (white flecks on a black background) and then at Makinti Napanangka’s Wynne canvas (white patterned dots on a black background) before tiresomely pointing out that both paintings were titled Untitled. “Yes,” he said, “You fill in the dots…” Harvey was then seen sitting on a chair next to Tony Oursler’s video installation Mo 2003 with a stupid, mock-disgusted look on his face. Modern art horror!

We think he meant to say “You connect the dots” but we were so enraged by his default attitude of “modern art is bullshit” we nearly attacked the television. It’s all very well to say you don’t get it – and to be fair Mitleman’s painting looks like a giant chocolate brownie - but playing to your viewer’s worst prejudices is just moronic. It would be about as smart as working from the position in political reporting that all politicians are corrupt, vainglorious bastards out for nothing more than self promotion (actually, now that we come to think of it…). And one last point about Harvey’s story – the Oursler video was not actually part of the Sulman exhibition, it was just next door in the contemporary collection. They just couldn’t resist the cheap shot.

Over on the ABC, Geoff Simms did the coverage. You may remember the posh-toned Simms from his many years of duty as the ABC’s foreign correspondent in the UK during the 1980s and his many positive (not to say downright arse licking) stories on Margaret Thatcher and Her Majesty The Queen.

Naturally, on his return to Australia, Simms got the lucky job of doing the soft touch human interest stories like lost dogs and the Archibald. Although we were fully prepared to be outraged, Simms story was a model of journalistic integrity and was respectful, intelligent and informative. Unlike Harvey, for instance, Simms told you things like how the Trustees narrowed the finalist to Ruddy, Robert Hannaford and Jenny Sages. You know, information.

In the newspapers The Australian treated the award as a news story and was covered by Rosalie Higson:

It’s black, it's loud and it's proud.

Craig Ruddy's Two Worlds, a portrait of actor David Gulpilil, is the winner of this year's $35,000 Archibald Prize.

Among the scrum of media and enthusiastic art fans at the Art Gallery of NSW, the 35-year-old Ruddy stood beaming yesterday as the crowd acknowledged his win from a record 732 entries.

Gulpilil, who returned to his home in the Northern Territory after performing his acclaimed one-man show Gulpilil for the Adelaide Festival earlier this month, is internationally recognised for his movie roles, from Walkabout in 1971, when he was just 16, to his most recent role as The Tracker in 2002.

Ruddy said he had long admired his subject: "He has such a strong, powerful image, and I was fascinated and intrigued by his ability to move between two different lifestyles — from living traditionally with his people, to Hollywood, the film world."

You see – more information, details, numbers, awards... Further on Higson gave some background to the work itself.

“The resulting work is more than 2m square, with the bold graphite and charcoal image worked over a textured 1880-designed William Morris wallpaper, to point up social and racial tensions between the two worlds Gulpilil inhabits.

Gulpilil has invited Ruddy to Arnhem Land to draw him in his traditional milieu, which he discussed at length with the actor. "He's a very different person when he's on the land to when he's on stage or working in the film industry, and I'm very keen to get out there," Ruddy said.

Critics inevitably pounce on the Archibald winner, but this was a crowd favourite.

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Naturally, the Sydney Morning Herald covered it as lifestyle, which is pretty much how they cover everything these days, so they called in Sharon Verghis, a specialist when it comes to visual art and a journalist who can reduce anything to marshmallow-like goo:

”Craig Ruddy’s hands told an eloquent story of their own as he was announced as the winner of the 2004 Archibald Prize yesterday.

“White-knuckled and tense, they wrestled with each other as he got up to make his speech. Clasped together tightly afterwards, they formed a fragile chest-level barrier against the crush.

“Then, as the Sydney artist and erstwhile bodysurfer got used to the idea of the win - and the accompanying $35,000 cheque -they slowly relaxed, unknotting themselves finger by finger. The rest of his body then took over.

“He posed uncomfortably in front of his winning portrait of actor David Gulpilil, blinking nervously, shuffling his old, neon-orange sneakers and occasionally grabbing at his stomach like a man with creeping indigestion as the cameras flashed, and the crowd, including actor Bruce Spence, barrister Tom Hughes, and broadcaster Margaret Throsby, pressed in.”

Gosh, it’s just like being there! Such description, such vivid prose - Verghis’s debut novel can’t be too far away.

The winner in all this – and by that we mean the media scrum – was that affable, unflappable, always quotable Edmund Capon, director of the AGNSW. He had his lines worked out in advance and he delivered them with aplomb to each and every microphone shoved his way. Watching him on TV we found it difficult to concentrate on what he was saying about the winning picture – something about sensitive lines – because of the flashy mandarin collared jacket he was wearing. What a guy.

Labels: Archibald, art prize, old media, painting

We wondered last week why media coverage of an artist’s entry into The Archibald Prize meant that there was then no chance of that artist winning. It’s The Curse of The Media. We also speculated that Evert Ploeg might not even get his portrait of Jana Wendt into the hang since it had arrived at the last minute still wet.

Well, it turns out that Ploeg had anticipated just such an objection and cannily framed his oil painting behind glass. Smart man. Sadly he still wasn’t chosen as a finalist as he fell afoul of that other great Archibald Curse known as The Packing Room Prize, the ‘award’ given out by the fellas at the AGNSW’s loading dock who have to unpack the arrivals. As the press release from the Art Gallery of NSW explained:

”Evert has been a regular entrant in the Archibald prize. His first entry (1997), Bananas in Pyjamas, caused a huge stir. Other subjects include Para Olympian Louise Sauvage, singer Ben Lee, fashion identity Peter Morrissey and actor Richard Roxburgh. In 1999 Evert won the People's Choice award in both Sydney and Melbourne with his portrait of actress Deborah Mailman…

“This is the Gallery's head storeman Steve Peters 20th Archibald Prize. He has seen it all and maintains that he can select a winner in 30 seconds. Steve controls 51% of the vote. Open to bribery and corruption, he says on both counts he is still waiting. This is the Prize the artists love and dread - never has the Packing Room Prize coincided with the judges decision!”

If Ploeg can just beat the Packing Room hoodoo and maybe punt for the most popular vote again, it might take the sting out of the fact he gets a measly $500 for his efforts. The frame probably cost more than that.

Labels: Archibald, art prize, old media, public galleries

God, how we love that racing analogy! Way, way back in the early 90s the whole Archibald-as-horse-race thing got started and every year the Herald gives odds on who are the favourites and who are the long shots. We predict (with no odds) that they’ll have done it again no later than Wednesday this week.

The major problem with the analogy is that while it seems strangely apt, there’s actually nowhere you can place bets, nor are there scratchings and the track always remains the same; heavy. The Archibald is antithetical to light and breeze and Cherry Hood and Adam Cullen’s wins are the exception to the rule because for the most part it’s the turgid application of big paint and heavy, gilt frames and worthy subjects that rule the day rather than paintings that are actually any good.

Never mind, because this year things are different! There is an excellent portrait of Martin Browne Art Dealer by McLean Edwards that’s different enough to stand out yet traditional enough to keep the “contemporary is shit” grumblers happy. It’s a fine looking picture and has all of the artist’s trademarks - puppy dogs, toy aeroplanes, crowded frame – but judging from the repro on the AGNSW web site, it’s finely balanced too. We’re going way out on a limb here, but we reckon Edwards is gonna win this thing! (Maybe).

We gently chastised Henry Mulholand for his self promotion but that’ all forgotten now because his picture of Nicky Meyers isn’t half bad – not half bad at all. We’re also attracted to Rodney Pople’s Self Portrait After Henry Raeburn, that pictures the artist in Old Sydney Town gear ice skating opposite the Sydney Opera House. We like the style and we like the clothes. Pamela Tippet’s Self Portrait is in a similar retro style, and we applaud the backward looking nature of a contemporary portrait that acknowledges the history of the genre while still managing to get some element of modern intimacy.

There are some shockers too. David Bromley’s portrait of McLean Edwards is terrible, illustrative in a bad way, looking as though it belongs in the 1980s (the bad 1980s, not the cool 80s) and we’re not just saying that because we had David Bromley mixed up with David Bromfield (which we did and we apologise – they can’t be more different – one is a painter from South Australia and the other is a flat cap wearing, ex-pat Englishman who tirelessly complains about Australian art). Henry Van den Wildenberg The Story Teller – Mem Fox is the kind of art you see in framing shops and would someone please give Kerrie Lester a prize so she’ll stop entering the friggin Archibald?

Upset victories for the prize may come in the form of Nicolas Harding’s Studio Visit: Rusty drops by with Blade & Tony (lots of paint, worthy subject matter), Craig Ruddy’s David Gulpilil, Two Worlds (just worthy, nothing else good here) and Geoffrey Dyer’s Graeme Murphy (although we had predicted pre-entry media coverage would disqualify it and we stand by our rash claims!). Cullen’s Margaret Throsby is a good looking painting but it’s hard to imagine that the judges would give it to him again when his much earlier entry of Mikey Robbins in 1999 was very similar. A painting has to look like a painting to win!

Then again, someone else may win it.

Labels: Archibald, art prize, painting, public galleries

We promised ourselves when we started this diary that we weren’t going to get too self reflexive. We’d just talk about what was interesting to us and hope people would come along for the ride. So far, The Art Life has been doing very well. We’ve been able to glean from the blessed site counter widget over there on the right hand side of this page that the page hits here are very healthy and we have visitors from all over the world including someone who came to us from a military web address. We salute your efforts!

The mail we’ve been getting has been mostly positive and people are curious as to who we are. J.V. Adams wrote to us:

Just set my eyeballs loose on your blogspot and they liked what they saw. who are the precious jerks of art behind this site? or is it secret squirrel?

Call us precious jerks, will ya! J.V. has a point about us being jerkish but to be honest, we always preferred the Nutty Squirrels to secret squirrels. As to our identity, it’s never been a secret, it’s just that we’re not going around advertising it. All will become clear in time.


Meanwhile, others have written in to say… well, check it out:

...what you do is really prosaic, its neither here nor there just waffling crap Its a weird passive aggressive unclear ramble about really boring things that are happening here - and your complaints are banal to say the least is this all you can dredge up - critique on uncomfortable seats, personal comments about artists and prejudging things before they happen, and dumb and uninteresting dribble about magazines everyone knows are crap…

Stop denigrating other peoples genuinely difficult and innovative initiatives to play out your smug little insecurities.

im sick to death of this vile, infantile, conservative dreary little art scene.and what you are doing just adds to the whole mess

Check out warhol's diaries why dont you/ or read a bit of matt collings and see how they lay "gossip" over genuinely conceptual frameworks. Too hard i guess.

You should be ashamed of yourself, and i guess if I told anyone i saw this, theyd say its stupid why worry about it. But I DO NOT see why we have to put up with lies especially from something that seems to be written by artworld people. You expect it from the newspapers but this is shameful.

If you have been asking, “how can I get involved in the whole Art Life experience?” an answer is here. The little comments tag at the end of each story is a clickable popup where you can leave comments, thoughts, or a bitch about the blog. You don’t have to leave your real name or address as you can put anything in those fields you want. You can also email us at [email protected].

Labels: reader comments, site news

So we’re bohemian after all! Perusing the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald we discovered an item headlined Bohemian Rhapsody Puts Economy on song in which the following claims were made:

Richard Florida rates cities on a “bohemian index” and he reckons that by his measure Sydney is up there with the top two cities in the US.

Professor Florida, an economist, academic, best selling author, developed the index as a benchmark of creativity, counting a city’s artists, poets, musicians and thinkers. Sydney he says, “rates off the chart.” Even he admits the measure is a bit rough and ready but economists like to have such numbers.

Professor Florida's more serious message is that creativity will drive economic growth in the post-industrial economy, not stores of resources such as coal and iron ore. It is a message that is being heeded by governments, planners and corporations around the world, as they grapple with the factors that will drive economic growth and put their city or nation ahead in the global economy.

We think this is lovely. In fact, when we say the story we thought, “How lovely that finally someone has officially recognised that Sydney is bohemian.” We also knew that at last we were more obviously bohemian than Melbourne because even if they have all the good music, they can’t be boho since there are no gay people living there. Everyone knows that. It’s a fact.

And we were also thrilled to bits that the Professor had an index. It makes a huge change from people coming to Sydney and saying that it isn’t nearly as bohemian as they thought but having nothing but airy fairy opinion to back up their opinion. Now Sydney residents can point to the index and say, rightly, that they have the empirical data to prove their boho worth.

We became concerned as we read the story that Prof Florida’s message may not be getting through. It’s all very well to say that his ideas are being taken up by “government”; it’s another thing altogether when you discover exactly what the book is being used for.

Florida met senior Carr Government ministers, who wanted to hear what the Professor of Economic Development at Carnegie Mellon University had to say.

Florida was in Sydney for the Year of The Built Environment 2004 Lecture and was being glad handed all over town. Up in Macquarie Street, meanwhile, Deputy Premier Andrew Refshaugue was using the book to take the piss out of Premier Bob Carr, the government’s “boring egg head” who uses weekly Labor party caucus meetings to urge his fellow and less abstemious MPs to read instead of grogging on.

Professor Florida says that more than 50 per cent of Sydney's population is engaged in the creative economy already, and it is a city which is home to artists, scientist thinkers, musicians. He says he has also found a strong correlation between places with a large gay population and cities that attract high-tech industries.

"Our first theory, which wasn't great, was that the 'gay fixer-upper' theory - that the gays were doing up the buildings -was attracting the creative workers. But through interviews with people who live in these creative hot spots, Professor Florida has concluded that it is rather about cities with a "vibe" - and which are inclusive, tolerant, open and open to immigration.”

There you have it people, the Gay Led Recovery theory; students move into a rundown residential or light industrial area (cheap rent, lots of space); a few years down the track you have cafes and galleries and bookshops where there was once just butcher shops, old barbers and a pub or two. Fast forward a few more years and the gay men move in as the students move out, do the place up and, a year or two later sell out to would-be bohemians moving in for a bit of the “vibe”. The galleries close (or become crap), the bookshops go mainstream and the vibe dies faster than you can say "Backyard Blitz".

In the same way that Newtown was once boho and now isn’t, in the same way that St. Kilda was once boho and now isn’t, or indeed, the way Paddington in Sydney was once boho and now no one can remember when you could buy actual groceries on Oxford Street, the inevitable shift from run down bohemian ghetto to up market swankathon is unavoidable.

If you’re curious as to what this index actually looks like, Florida has a good example at The Washington Monthly, featuring the classic subhead The Rise of The Creative Class: Why Cities Without Gays and Rock Bands are Losing The Economic Race

Labels: bohemia, old media

We have been having a lot of thoughts recently about the nature of obviousness. Is it good to be obvious? Is it bad to be obscure? Could we formulate a unified theory of “getability”? We weren’t sure and confused and fuelled by some better than decent port after a sumptuous lunch, we got in the schwimmerwagen and went on a gallery crawl.

First port of call was Kaliman Gallery. There are two shows on there until the end of March, Raafat Ishak has some paintings and Kate Rhode has some installation type thing going on featuring stuffed animals in museum style glass boxes. In one instant we got the idea of what one artist was doing straight away and are still pondering the other.

Rhode’s work is a fairly ambitious project which seems to mostly succeed. The room has been set up to look like a natural history museum complete with wood paneling, flooring and picture rails. There are paintings of wild animals that look like they have been copied from National Geographic photos, and in various glass cases of different sizes, are taxidermied specimens arranged in poses. Only the animals are all fake, hybrid beasts somewhere between cute, Japanese anime style creatures and real animals. The fur is fake fur and the eyes are too big to be real, the grasses and rocks in the cases are rudimentary papier mache constructions and the greenery looks like it was cut from felt samples.

We pretty much understood what Rhode was doing – nature versus anti-nature, simulation versus reality, museum versus gallery, specimen versus imagination. In some ways, the works are overloaded with ideas that teased you with their implications. But what struck us about the work was how we “got it” almost immediately. We liked it. And we weren’t the only ones. The show was a sell out and Vassily Kaliman was pulling works by Rhode out of the storeroom and selling those too (plinths extra). It seemed all good for Kate Rhode.

But the troubling factor about these works is that they were pretty rudimentary. They weren’t as good as finished museum objects that you would see at The Australian Museum and, to us, that’s the standard by which these things should be judged. You could argue that the people who bought the works liked the idea better than the aesthetic qualities of the actual objects, but was it the slight crapness of the execution the real charm here? We were confused. Maybe this is the artist’s style or something? We just didn’t know and we’re still pondering whether they could have been done a lot better or were just fine the way they are.

In the large room at Kaliman are works by Raafat Ishak and there are no questions about the execution of the works. They are flawless little gems of paintings that are also completely lifeless and dull. The works feature bits of architecture, coloured blobs over the top and crazed, raised surfaces of paint, all lovingly laid down on miniature rectangles of MDF. You could imagine them on a t-shirt or in a magazine and they would look just fine there, but there was little to keep your attention. Clearly, we’re more inclined to a good idea done in a slightly shit way than something that looks decorative.

Labels: commercial galleries, reviews

Over at Roslyn Oxley Gallery we went to see the Tracey Emin show and we were curious, especially after all the nasty things we said about her. We had never actually seen anything by her in the flesh (so to speak) and were intrigued to see what it was like in RL.

Let’s also state up front that we are disposed to like Emin’s work. We actually find her drunken, sluttish behaviour aappealing and when we sit back and remember ourselves at our worst, most hyper-emotional state, we feel nothing but sympathy for her. It could be us falling over and making a spectacle of ourselves in public. It could be us signing beer coasters in pubs, it could be us with a cast on our wrists and a broken finger, drunk on British TV, slobbering on about wanting to be with our friends. Besides, it’s not every day you can go to a Sydney gallery and see a serious show by a big name international artist.

Only that wasn’t quite what we got. The Emin show is a rag tag bunch of prints, framed Polaroids and stuff she threw together for Oxley dating back to 1997. It’s not a cohesive show in any way, but there are things in there that are brilliant and things that are incredibly shit.

On the plus side are the drawings and the watercolours. Yes. Very nice. The appliqués are kind of funny and we really, really like all the bad language and shouty stuff in the text.

“DON’T LOOK FOR REVENGE, it just happens, if you don’t like it then go an fuck your self don’t take it out on me.”

Or

“Is Anal Sex leagal”

There’s a fluidity and honesty to Emin’s work that makes you blush. She really means it and we have to respect that level of hysterical exhibitionism. On the down side is her adoption of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. This is clearly a mistake. Munch, for all his ahead-of-his-time qualities, has been consigned to the same embarrassing teenage bedroom wall of history as Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and that photo of the tennis player woman scratching her naked arse. Emin’s attempt to draw some kind of parallel between her crazy, fucked up life and her abortions with Munch’s painting is just embarrassing (see her video installation of a work called Homage To Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children, the walls of the second exhibition space at Oxley painted blood red!). In another work, the paucity of Emin’s aesthetic sense comes into full view; badly done painting; Munch’s The Screamfrom a calendar pinned next to it; in front, a school chair and a gas mask; on the wall, a lithograph and a Polaroid. Holy cow!

The curious thing about Emin’s work is how much it fits in with Australian art of the last decade or so. Jenny Watson’s Ballroom Series came to mind, and a couple of Emin’s works on canvas have a passing resemblance to the text pieces of Adam Cullen (circa 1997). But the interesting thing to note is that Australian Grunge proves itself to have been (and continues to be in the work of Cullen and Hany Armanious) a highly aesthetisized approach to art making. Emin, on the other hand, is just really, really bad at making objects.

We are not against the idea that art could be purely the product of an idea. Visual aesthetics don’t have to enter into it. But they inevitably do because, aside from some curator deciding that a particular work of art is important and buying it for a museum, the career of an artist is largely driven by someone liking their aesthetic vision, ie, buying it. It’s the only way you can live with art. It has to continue to seduce and surprise you.

At this point we belched and realised we had been suffering from indigestion and gas. It was time to leave.

Labels: commercial galleries, personalities, reviews

As we traveled down to Artspace, we considered the fact that Tracey Emin is obvious. She makes obvious statements and we like that because why waste a lot of time trying to figure something out? We could just as easily pay someone to explain it to us if it was too difficult. The other plus factor for Emin is that she has virtually no subtext – it’s all WYSIWYG.

We are also pro-Artspace. Always have and always will be. But it’s just such an unforgiving gallery. Artists really struggle to work with the space and nearly always fail, those dammed pillars in the way of your sight lines, heavy roof weighing down on you, hardly any natural light and when you really look at it, not that much wall space. Art yes, space no.

Still, they try and we give them points for that

Let’s quickly dispense with the work of Adam Donovan, not because it was bad, but because it appeared to be broken. There were some gizmos in the room, a dish and a tripod and a projector throwing up an image of a mixing desk on the wall. There was an electronic whining sound as well, but we thought that maybe that was coming from our prosthesis. When we walked into the room, the dish moved a little bit and the sound changed. We moved again and nothing happened. We stepped back and forth for awhile and still nothing happened. We decided it must be broken.

Then we remembered Donovan’s work at the last Primavera show at the MCA. There was another darkened room and a 3D image on the wall of what looked like a window. There was a antennae array that tracked us as we came into the room but it didn’t seem to affect the image. Oh well, we thought, it’s busted. It was only later that we met a friend who told us we should have been looking at the work with Monster from The Black Lagoon 3D glasses on and it all would have made sense. We were also told that the MCA staff should have been handing them out. We remembered seeing some guy sitting in the corner of the room reading a paperback, but he wasn’t handing out anything, he just looked bored.

At Artspace, there wasn’t anyone around so we went into the next room to have a look at the work of Mark Titmarsh. In a show called The Thing, Titmarsh was doing an experiment in expanded painting. We read up on the work in the catalogue notes and discovered that what was happening here was that the artist was removing the limits of painting until “the withdrawal of painting leaves an open space in which all the unstated rules of the art world begin to become apparent.” What we had were coloured resins on the floor and orange and white string hung in big hoops from the ceiling.

Titmarsh is an avid theorist/practitioner of the old school and his work over the last decade has concentrated on the examination of artistic gestures – the sorts of things that make up the grammar of visual language. Where you might see three bottles of bleach stuck to a wall, we see a riff on repetitious gestures; where you might see a toy bunny stuffed in a box, we see sculpture at its essence. String? The outline of gesture. Paint on the floor? Pigment freed from the frame.

In many ways, Titmarsh embodies the yin and yang of the obviousness/ambiguous duality. His works skirt explication, only to dive down into a strange particularity that is hard to decode. His works have the frisson of visual pleasure, but the cloud of oblique theory. We “got” the work because we are familiar with the work.

What we didn’t know that there was another part to the show that wasn’t working. Idling next to the counter looking at the catalogue we noticed three portable TV’s. On two TVs were images of Titmarsh’s paintings and on the other some footage of the war in Iraq.

We asked a friendly gallery assistant if the TVs were part of the work and apparently they are. She explained that Titmarsh had planned to put them on the walls around the installation but the batteries ran out after two hours and they didn’t pick up the wireless remote transmission from the VCRs anyway bacuse, she said, “there’s a weird magnetic field in here”. And what was the deal with the Iraq war footage? "Oh, that was a mistake," the assistant said as she retuned the TV so there were some pleasant orange paint just like the other two screens.

In the last room was a huge video installation by TV Moore. The only way to deal with Artspace is to dominate it. Fill it up. Moore’s The Neddy Project is a huge multi screen installation piece and even the occasional blank screen and DVD AV1REPEAT+PROGRAM text that popped up couldn't detract from the sheer visual thrill of the piece.

Conflating the story of Ned Kelly and Arthur “Neddy” Smith was a stroke of eccentric genius. Now, we’re not saying we got it exactly or what, if anything, the artist was trying to “say” (as they say) but we instantly liked it.

A dwarf shaking hands with Neddy (not sure which one) against a line up of cops and a Tactical Response Group van (made out of cardboard) reminded us of some favourite scenes from Blue Murder. We were also reminded of iconic Australian paintings featuring Ned Kelly. There was also a very playful and effective use of mirroring and doubling as a visual motif throughout the works. Drawing together Ned and “Neddy” made for effective parallels without pedantically overstating the case. Is TV Moore a pseudonym? It should be. We want more TV more.

We began to put together a formula for the success of a work of art based on the artist (A), the work of art (A2) and the multiplication and division of its “getability” (G) by the skill of the execution (ske) equals the level of success. Just as we were imaging how you would write that down, a guy in a wheelchair and holding a video camera was wheeled into the room documenting the installation. We’ll have to leave these thoughts for another time.

Labels: installation, new media, reviews, video art

It’s that time of year again with the return of the Archibald Prize for Portraiture for 2004 and another raft of stories about artists getting their entries in on time. But if you’re an artist and you’re entering a painting into the competition, any media interest in your work will disqualify you from winning.

If there’s a camera anywhere near you, run for the hills. With 7.30 Report camera crews roaming the streets looking for artists with a canvas or two, ABC radio talking to regional artists and the Sydney Morning Herald wringing as many features out of the annual extravaganza as they can, you’d think someone would pick a winner.

Laura Matthews, for instance, was photographed with her subject Bettina Arndt in the Herald and the odds are very long that she’ll even get in, let alone have a chance of winning. Media coverage of your work is the kiss of death. We don’t know why, it’s just the way it is.

At least Matthews had a decent subject for her portrait as many artists don’t seem to be able to even understand the rules. One hapless artist was photographed arriving with a pop art style portrait of Colonel Sanders, willfully ignoring the fact that the Archibald rules stipulate that the subject of the painting be both living and Australian, known to the artist and that the subject "is aware of the artist's intention..."

The SMH also covered the arrival of Evert Ploeg’s portrait of Jana Wendt which, it claimed, was still wet, the artist staying up late into the night to finish it. Unfortunately for Ploeg, the artist who won the 1999 People’s Choice award for his portrait of Deborah Mailman, the gallery may actually insist (as they do in the rules) that paintings arrive dry.

Self-aggrandisment can also gain a bit of media coverage for your entry, such as with artist Henry Mulholland who is no slouch in coming forward to big-up his own annual entries. Mulholland, who talks good art talk to that insufferable bore Sally Loane, just happened to mention on Loane’s 702 mid morning radio show that he was entering a portrait of AFI Award winning film editor (The Boys, The Bank) and Surry Hills identity Nicky Meyers. Mulholland’s chances of getting in are slim, let alone being hung, but we celebrate his entire back catalogue, such as this mention on the late (and unlamented) The Arts Show.

The ABC also sets up shop at The Archibald with radio host and giggle-on-command expert Richard Glover moving his mic down to the Art Gallery of NSW. It’s fun for the whole family.

But the prize for the funniest coverage of the prize, however, goes to ABC Radio Gold & Tweed Coasts Queensland for their coverage of an entry by Brendan Abbott, AKA The Post Card Bandit (immortalised in a TV movie of the same name by Tom Long) of his lawyer Christ Nyst (part time lawyer, novelist and full time self publicist).

Although Adam Cullen had entered a portrait of Mark ‘Chopper’ Read a couple of years ago, this was the first time AGNSW director Edmund Capon could remember an entry into the prize by someone who couldn’t attend the opening due to their incarceration at Her Majesty's Pleasure.

"I don’t know that we’ve had many Archibald submissions emerging from the penitentiaries yet.” But Capon sees no reason why there shouldn’t be more. “I’m absolutely sure being in jail is no impediment to your artistic genius. After all, you know, if you’re going to be locked up, what better thing to do than paint your fellow inmates?"

Labels: Archibald, art prize, old media, painting, personalities

Is it "junk", "modern mish-mash" and "the product of a sick mind" or an astutely curated collection that snared many works by the now famous artists Patricia Piccinini, Tracey Moffatt, Howard Arkley and Bill Henson?

So began Lauren Martin’s story on the “revolt” by Federal MPs over the Parliament House art collection. It was the ‘feel good’ story of the week – if only because it made you feel vindicated in your prejudices that conservative MPs were hankering for the days of Hans Heysen and that gallerist Darren Knight is a good bloke.

As Martin continued:

Either way, the future of the $85 million Parliament House art collection has been cast into doubt, with MPs considering proposals to curb purchases of works by emerging artists, stop temporary exhibitions, cut staff and hire a part-time corporate art curator. After Government backbenchers' complaints that there were not enough "traditional" landscapes on offer to decorate their offices, the former National Gallery of Australia director Betty Churcher was engaged to review the collection last year.

Her report went to MPs just before Christmas, with a covering note from the Speaker of the House, Neil Andrew, and President of the Senate, Paul Calvert, highlighting the idea for a program to commission artists "to celebrate important events in Australia's history. Mrs. Churcher also suggested compiling an "alternative" collection of reproductions of works from the Australian War Memorial and National Library. The review would ditch the policy of collecting living artists, preferably on "first sale" so that funds contribute to artists' livelihoods.

The presiding officers say scrapping this rule would allow the acquisition of "appropriate historic Australian works. Proceeds from the Parliament House shop - about $100,000 a year - fund the acquisitions. A Sydney gallery owner, Darren Knight, said: "That is certainly in keeping with the mindset of this Government –it’s really backward-looking."

Ah, it makes the heart feel glad.

The SMH had found a “glass artist” from Canberra who had experienced the unfamiliar tingle of cash after a vase had been purchased for the collection from her Canberra School of Art graduating show, while Tolarno Galleries Jan Minchin pointed out that Patricia Piccinini’s Psychogeography had “appreciated about 1000 per cent since [the purchase]”.

"I love colonial paintings but they were purchased when those were the significant artists of their time,” Ms. Minchin said.

“Mrs. Churcher surveyed more than 100 MPs or their staff, who were divided between enthusiasts for the collection – which ranges from portraits of explorers to Wedgewood china to cutting edge photography – and those who “passionately opposed” the way that it represented Australia.”

We are truly living in an era of wild claims. First you have conservative MPs claiming that the Parliament Collection "represents" something, then we've got Jan Minchin claiming that Piccinini's work is worth 1000 per cent more than when it was bought (that can't be right, can it?) and that paintings by colonial masters were purchased when they were "significant"! If that last claim were true, then Heysen and all the rest would have been significant in the late 1980s... So much for Juan Davila eh?

Labels: art politics, secondary market

The collapse of Craftsman House saw the sale of its two prime mastheads, Art Asia Pacific and Art & Australia . AAP went offshore to New York while Art & Australia stayed at home. With both magazines now out with relaunch issues, it makes for interesting comparative reading.

The new Art Asia Pacific,if only on the evidence of its first issue, is simply terrible. Reading more like a student effort and featuring obvious choices like Takashi Murikami (issue one cover) and Yoshitomo Narra (on the cover of issue two), the text is double spaced to take up more room and the writing is decidedly amatuerish.

Interestingly, the new publisher, Gang Zhao, has an eclectic range of Australian contributors including Felicity Fenner, ‘editor-at-large’ Adam Geczy and Charles Merewether. Even more curiouser is the inclusion on the masthead of “Associate Editor Benjamin Gennochio", former art critic for The Australian and partner to the recently relocated Melissa Chiu, herself a former contributor and guest editor at AAP, former director of Gallery 4A and now the toast of New York It’s good to see that all bridges haven't been burnt.

A&A;, meanwhile, was sold to new publisher Eleonora Triguboff who drafted in the services of former AAP editorial assistant Claire Armstrong as the new editor.

Judging by their first efforts, it’s business as usual at the longest running art magazine in the country. With a slight design rejig and a new logo (lower case art, upper case Australia, ampersand & in-between) the latest edition has a handsome cover by Cherry Hood. Inside, academic articles on artists, some reviews, boring book reviews (by the insufferable Andrea Stretton) and advertising by the good, the bad and the fugly of the Australian gallery scene.

In her first editor’s letter, Armstrong informs her readers that the new A&A; will continue the grand tradition of the Australian art world’s “journal of record”.

At a time when much visual arts writing is focused on the monetary value of art, Art & Australia is dedicated to publishing rigorous, informed essays, articles about art that engages, inspires, overwhelms, challenges and provokes…

What an odd thing to say – “focused on the monetary value of art” ? Whatever can she mean? Especially when the magazine carries a 12 page section dedicated to the art market with collector profiles, articles by art market veteran Terry Ingram and another one of Roger Dedman’s insightful analyses of the secondary market?

The fact that is being skirted here is that A&A; has been in strife ever since the arrival of Australian Art Collector onto the art magazine publishing scene. Slicing up the already limited art advertising dollar meant that the two magazines would inevitably go head to head.

A&A; blinked first, introducing collector profiles as AAC’s hold on the advertising dollar started to tell, and the venerable institution tried to lure back many readers who had only ever been buying A&A; for the pictures. It cost them a talented editor too, Hanna Fink reportedly resigning rather than stoop to copying AAC’s formula. Sadly for A&A;, their parent company Craftsman House was already on the chopping block, outstanding writer’s fees making for juicy art world gossip stories in the Sydney Morning Herald (here's a good example of their woes, reported back in 2002 when Rhonda Fitzsimmons bought Craftsman House and Fine Art Press.)

While we’re totally in support of A&A; and hope for them nothing but the best (it being the journal of record and all), we can’t help but wonder if this isn't going to end in tears – from a purely pragmatic business point of view, isn’t the ‘new’ format just a repeat of the very format that lost Craftsman House money? And while we’re asking the tough questions, isn’t it just a little disingenuous to suggest that rival magazines are “focused on the monetary value of art” when they are doing exactly that in their art market section? Just because you hive off the mention of dirty commerce to a 12 page section printed on different coloured paper – away from all the apparently ‘proper’ writing on art – doesn’t mean that you aren’t actually doing it yourself.

Anyway, we wish them luck.

Labels: art magazines, art market, art politics

The Art Gallery of NSW organised the screening of Matthew Barney’s entire Cremaster Cycle. It was no mean feat. Barney is notoriously reluctant to allow his films to be seen divorced from the usual accompanying exhibitions of photographs, drawings and sculptures. It’s a little bit like a passion play that has to be accompanied by the essential votive objects, and Barney likes to keep tight control over how his work is seen.

But somehow AGNSW Curator of Contemporary art Wayne Tunnicliffe arranged for all the films to be screened on a single day, on two Saturdays this month. In fact, the two all-day sessions were completely sold out and a third screening for this weekend has been hastily added to the schedule.

We don’t know how long the Domain Theatre at the AGNSW has been able to screen films in 35mm, but the quality of the projection and the sound were both very good. The only major drawback to the event was the fact that while the projection facilities may have been upgraded, the seating hasn’t. If they are expecting you to sit through seven and a half hours of surrealism, they could at least hand out a few cushions.

Rising and arriving at the AGNSW at the obscenely early hour of 10.30am for the screening of Cremaster 1, we were sitting near the back watching the assorted art crowd arrive and fight over seats.

The AGNSW certainly know their audience, the screen showing a slide for the gallery’s Contempo art society, the groovy club for art lovers in their 20s and 30s. Although that ruled out The Art Life straight away, we noticed that the average age of the Cremaster screening would fit in nicely with the demographic and would probably join up if it weren’t for the fact that Contempo sounds like a piece of furniture from IKEA.

Sipping on our take-away coffee, we noticed a lot of fresh young faces – people who looked eerily reminiscent of art world identities 10 or 20 years their senior. Thus we saw the new Gary Warner, the new Richard De Souza, the new Zwinead Roarty. Then we saw the real Zwinead Roarty and realised the entire world was at the screening.

Roarty, one time curator of The Lizard Lounge art exhibitions at the Exchange Hotel, was joined by assorted luminaries such as tactile RTA sculptor Richard Goodwin; experimental filmmaker and title design boffin Janet Merriweather; a contingent of MCA people including curator Russell Storer and perpetrator and sculptor Andrew Sunley Smith; that nice young man with the cricket pad fetish from the Wild Boy art crew; veteran film writer Tina Kaufman; and artists Tony Schwensen and Justene Williams. Acknowledged by Tunnicliffe in a pre-screening thank you, were AGNSW patrons who had helped finance the screenings, Jeff and Viki Ainsworth.

Along with the notables were notables of tomorrow – various callow young men, girls with Lulu haircuts and guys with heads shaved because they choose to shave their heads, not because they have to. Sitting next to The Art Life was a young man with a shaved head, topknot of hair, ear-piercings you could fit a dinner plate in, tattoos and a leather notebook in which he was writing, “Flesh remembers, my flesh remembers…”

Before we could read any further, the lights went down.

Labels: cinema, personalities, public galleries

The Art Gallery of NSW has a screening of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle – something of a first – and how do the ‘quality’ broadsheets react? They get out their big guns.

Over at the Sydney Morning Herald, the editors were no doubt scratching their heads and wondering who they could possibly get to cover this important event. Obviously the name of their most respected arts writer sprang to mind, a person with weight, authority and experience; the sort of writer who could give credibility to both the article and the newspaper as a whole, someone who would know how to string a series of a mindless descriptions together into one long sentence until it’s like washing day at Adjective University. Who should they get to preview the Barney Screening? Why, it’s the return of Lenny Ann Low! And where should they put this masterful work of journalism? Let’s put it in 48 Hours, the section of the Herald reserved for trivial bullshit…

“Judging by the cycles varied content, Barney’s artistic interests also lie in pristine, athletic women, death metal music, murderers, bees, fashion, fantasy, Mormonism, the Freemasons, twisted dentistry, violence, slapstick comedy, car culture and the ability to gross people out.”

We can’t be bothered to go on with Low’s piece, let’s just say that it continues her high standards of rewriting press releases with a good dose of her own school-girlish excitement mixed in. So Barney is interested in “violence” and “the ability to gross people out.”? She could be just as well talking about American Pie...

At The Australian, there were no deliberations. They had Sebastian Smee’s phone number.

American writer Janet Malcom once said that the spell of any work of art can be shattered by the sound of a nasty little voice in one’s head ‘But this is ridiculous.’ In front of the work of Matthew Barney, there’s no doubt this little voice can be unusually persistent…

So began Smee’s preview of the Barney screening. You’d be forgiven for thinking that by this opening Smee would go on to explain why this ‘nasty little voice’ should be so persistent in front of the work of Barney. But no, it’s really just a cynical opener for what is otherwise an uncritical interview with the artist.

Smee does talk about people in the art world talking about Barney; that the consensus is that he is “on par with the most famous living artists.”

The films have been screened at selected venues on special occasions (Cremaster 2 was shown at the Sydney Biennale in 2000, but during the screening I went to it had to contend with a persistent heckler). But even in the art world, most people who whisper about Barney’s genius have not yet seen his work.

Compounding the oddness has been Barney’s insistence that the five films are only one strand of a project that he sees as essentially sculptural, and that al the different elements of his work ideally need to be seen as one. The critical consensus, however, has been that the drawings, photographs and sculptures (made from Vaseline and other materials) are simply not as interesting as the films and that the exhibition of all the elements combined diluted the impact of the latter.

While Smee – a writer who trained at the Sydney Morning Herald and was a protégé of John McDonald – is much admired by fellow journalists for the clarity of his prose, his conservative opinions shine through. In fact, his use of classic right wing “straw men” as a driving rhetorical device puts him more in the tradition of the dreaded Giles Auty than McDonald.

Why is this nasty voice so persistent? Who are the people who are “whispering”? What "critical consensus" that says the other work “simply isn’t as interesting”? Who is saying this? How about a reference or two?

Don't expect answers to these questions - it's a standard ploy of writers like Smee who lead with their opinion and unverified "facts" and then place them in the way of the reader. As you bump into them, you get the sense that the writer doesn't really like what they're covering but are too chickenshit to either say so or find a decent source who will do the dirty work for them. Barney is too hard and too contemporary and too hermetic for a lightweight like Smee to really say anything at all. What you get in place of a properly reasoned argument is snivelling cyncism that's symptomatic of the Young Fogey approach to art writing.

The suspicion is that Smee doesn't really know what he's talking about. He refers to a screening of Cremaster 2 that was spoiled by a persistent 'heckler'. You'd think by that inclusion in his article that there are people out there who really agree with Smee's unfounded assertions, that some unnamed "consensus" secretly believes that Barney's work is just "ridiculous"...

The Art Life was at that screening and stayed all the way to the end. When the lights came up it became apparent to everyone at the cinema that the "heckler" was in fact a mentally disabled adult in the company of his mother.

Where was Sebastian Smee?

Labels: art criticism, cinema, old media, public galleries

We slighted the talent of Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber a couple of weeks ago and now we’re paying the price. As has been pointed out to us by A Reader, Chess had its lyrics written by Lloyd Webber associate Tim Rice but its music was written by Benny and Bjorn of ABBA fame. Further, Miss Saigon was conceived and had its original French lyrics written by Alain Boublil, its music and co-conception mastered by Claude-Michel Schonenberg and the English lyrics were penned by Richard Maltby Jnr. Clearly, Lord Webber had nothing to do with either. We fully apologise for this egregious error. Although we were down in the dumps about our mistake, A Reader also said that the Lord of Music had written Phantom of The Opera, Starlight Express and Jesus Christ Superstar, so we shouldn’t feel too bad about it.


The Walls Are Talking: Man Ray, A Slight Return

Well, we liked it. We said so and we’re sticking to our story. Unfortunately some people aren’t so impressed and just don’t think the exhibition is all it could be. They are the sort of people we should be listening to because, let’s face it, their opinions matter. We are talking about students at the University of Technology newspaper Vertigo.

All through this exhibition I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something disingenuous about the way the exhibition had been put together. The walls told us all the time of Man Ray’s Dadaist spirit, his association with Duchamp and Breton. It just seems there is something strange about this kind of art being so appreciated by the nice Sydney arts crowd. Dadaists were punks. Many of the artists involved in the surrealist movement were revolutionary not just in their approach to art, as Man Ray certainly was, but also had a revolutionary political vision. Andre Breton’s struggle for a libertarian form of Communism is testament to this.

I don’t think this radical, playful aspect was really relevant to this exhibition. The works were positioned in a tasteful and orderly fashion. The exhibition hardly bucks against the conventions of the gallery. But I get the feeling that maybe the curators were a little scared of doing something daring with Man Ray’s works and wanted to simply let the art speak for itself – which it definitely does. So in the end, maybe it was a good thing, that even today, the art establishment is a little scared of artists like Man Ray.

We were saddened to discover that the author of the review had forgotten to put their name on it, for if they had we could have sought them out, put a friendly arm around their shoulder and said something like, “Young man, let your uncle take you to the bar where he’ll buy you a drink and set you straight.”

We have no idea what the author means when they go on about ‘libertarian’ Communism, or how the resolutely middle class Breton “struggled” to do anything. We resist mentioning that the real Communists were more than a little bemused at their adoption under the second Surrealist Manifesto “Surrealism at The Service of The Revolution”, or that the author is confusing Dadaism and Surrealism. No. We are just wondering what they are talking about when they say that the show doesn’t “buck against the conventions of the gallery”??? Maybe they want all the pictures turned against the wall – would that have been punk enough for you?

Labels: corrections, site news, student media

You may recall last week's discussion on The Art Life about the story of John Opit and his claims of owning a hitherto unknown painting by Paul Cezanne which he additionally claimed was worth $50 million and that it had be 'stolen' by 'thieves'.

The Sydney Morning Herald ran the story on the front page of their February 27-28 edition with a picture of Opit looking as though he's seen too much, man, under the headline Off with the Butterflies - his prized Cezanne.

The SMH played it for laughs and we all had a good chuckle. Then the Herald started to think that perhaps it had gone too far. For some obscure reason known only to themselves, the editors decided in their infinite wisdom to lecture their readers by way of the Editorial in the March 6-7 edition:

In the rush to judge a painting few have seen, other elements jostle the real and reasonable doubts. Academics are rarely pleased by the idea that somebody may know something that they don't. They do not see Mr. Opit as someone with the credibility in the world of art attribution. He would like the painting to be worth $50 million, but he also says he sees art as something more than tradable commodities. What's more, he is a 53-year-old man who lives outside the city, throws three-day parties and whose ex-partner has written a book about bunyips. He is an outsider. Like Albert Camus's Meursault, whose failure to cry at his mother's funeral convinced the court of his guilt in the murder of an unnamed Arab, Mr. Opit's differences from the norm mark him off from much of the art world.

The Art Life knows that there are more than a few writers at the SMH who like to break up their days with a long, liquid lunch at the pub or sneak a crafty joint on the roof garden during breaks. Thus we are wondering in reference to these startling comparisons to Albert Camus and the fictional character of Meursault (the last time we looked we thought John Opit was real) - what are the authors of this editorial on? It's like being at some pretentious dinner party where your host starts quoting some book they read in University ( or worse, just the movie or, ugh, the song by The Cure) when someone mentions some current event, that maybe, tangentially relates to the topic, and draws some very heavy and portentious meaning from the allusion.

We are left to wonder what the SMH is getting at. Perhaps by this unexpected literary reference they are seeking to imply that like Meursault, Opit is being judged on apprearances rather than on the facts. But for anyone who has actually read the book, you would know that Meursault did actually shoot the Arab in question. So although he was guilty, he was judged so for the wrong reasons? Like Opit is guilty of... what exactly? The Sydney Morning Herald is twisting our melons... Man, this shit is strong! Phew!!

More crucially, however, the SMH seemed to forget that they were the ones who started all the farcing on Opit in the first place. Maybe someone pointed out they were being bastards?

Labels: art theft, old media

Beating up on curators is like being a school bully. They are the weakest members of the art world with few friends, lots of enemies and hardly anyone who really understands what they do.

The Art Life, as a rule, thinks that the curatorial profession is misunderstood. We think that way because, if a show is done well, it seems self evident. You walk away from a show thinking it was really good and further, of course, it had to be that way didn’t it?

A bad show, on the other hand, seems clearly the fault of someone – firstly the artists cop the blame, and then it’s the curators. What were they thinking?

There have been some stinkers in Sydney over the last few years, but let’s not get into bagging them now. It’s all water under the bridge.

The funny thing about curatorial practice is that, in many ways, it ends up being irrelevant to the punters who go to the shows.

People like the work of Tracey Moffatt (for example). All her work was in one place at the MCA and you could go and see it. Who cares that much about how it was put together, or the logical (or illogical) progression from one series of works to the next? We also remember having a go at MCA curator Rachel Kent for the sheer conceptual obviousness of her Japanese show a few years back and yet, when we got down to the show and had a look at the work, we had completely forgotten about the hackneyed theme of “the city”. We were just glad to see a bunch of good art in one place.

We are very much of the school that thinks a show of recent works by artists unencumbered by an artificially concocted theme is the best way to go. The 2000 Sydney Biennale was the best example of how that approach can work.

The Biennale is a special case of course, being an experimental hot house where an idea, no matter how far out it seems, gets a go. How else can you explain crap Biennales of the 1990s like Boundary Riders, Every Day and, our anti-favourite, Jurassic Technologies Revenant? Richard Grayson’s (The World May Be) Fantastic was a throw back to earlier curatorial strategies, but it was so eccentric you were more inclined to forgive its formal repetitions than shows where you couldn’t even understand the titles, let alone the art in the shows.

Last month, the artists for the 2004 Biennale of Sydney were announced to the media and were sent out along with a page or two by curator Isabel Carlos explaining what the show will be about:

The theme, On Reason and Emotion, emerged from my reading of a thought-provoking book called “Descartes’ Error” by António Damásio. Damásio analyses a number of neurological case studies to show that emotion is crucial to human intelligence. Rather than the restrictions of the traditional “cogito” (I think, therefore I am), one can now say “I feel, therefore I am”.

Another point of departure was considering Australia as one of the southern-most continents. As a European, I have certain associations when I think of Southern cultures, and usually we connect the South with emotion, yet I have discovered Australia has much in common with the Anglo-Celtic culture of the North.

We don’t know about you, but we feel weird about European artists talking about us Southerners like that, behind our backs and, what’s more, making pretty sweeping statements about our emotional lives! For all of us who are not Anglo-Celtic, perhaps, it might even be considered completely inaccurate. But hey, everyone is entitled to their opinion and it’s good to see that Carlos has done some reading.

In the end, however, we suspect that the theme of On Reason and Emotion for this up-coming Biennale will be pretty irrelevant once you’ve dragged yourself all over town to see the art. You’ll barely remember who António Damásio is, let alone what relevance his neurological case studies have to do with the work of Joan Grounds, you’ll just remember if you liked the art or not.

Speaking of Joan Grounds, the Australian artists announced for the Biennale are an interesting lot – people who have been (mostly) untroubled by large scale institutions and exhibitions: Pat Brassington, Carolyn Eskdale, Joan Grounds & Sherre DeLys, Gordon Hookey, Derek Kreckler and Susan Norrie. If nothing else, the 2004 Biennale will give some Australian artists the chance to rub shoulders with international artists of similar (or lesser) stature to themselves.

Labels: Biennale of Sydney, press releases, public galleries

A new form of literalism has taken over the art world: artist’s projects operating on the basis of “what you see is what you get”. Gone are the days of complicated conceptual gambits, grand theorizing of new movements and seismic shifts in the art world – now we're seeing artists taking baths and making drawings on photos! Wooh!

In The Bath is exactly what it says it is – artists taking artistic photos of themselves in the bath and shower. It’s all fairly tame at the moment, but we encourage it!

Meanwhile, Oxygen - the designer magazine with the hole in the middle where its mind should be - has undertaken the staging of a bunch of “online exhibitions”. Forget the web as place for hyper complexity, interlinking of multiple nodes of information – how about some faux primitive drawings plastered over a bunch of holiday snaps? We have absolutely no idea what this is supposed to be but when we get an email that starts “To My Real Friends…” we are suckered straight away. Concrete Muffin anyone?

Labels: site news

John Opit owned $67 million worth of art that he kept in his studio in the town of Limpinwood, 80 kilometers from Murwillimbah. He had a painting by Paul Cezanne, called Paul Cezanne’s Son in A High Chair. He also had pictures by Winslow Homer, John Peter Russell, Arthur Streeton, Norman Lindsay and John Glover. Some thieves broke in a stole them. According to Opit, the thieves “knew what they were doing”.

You may have read the story, it was on TV and in all the papers – it made the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian and it was on NineMSN as a breaking story – although at first, the website just printed the AAP wire copy and reported that the alleged Cezanne painting was bona fide. Hastily reposted 20 minutes later, NineMSN were then saying that “doubts had emerged” over the painting’s authenticity:

Police said the theft occurred between 9pm (AEDT) on Saturday and 1.30am (AEDT) on Thursday, when the thief or thieves knew the owner or residents were going to be away for a number of days.

This allowed them to do that (steal the works) with some success. Certainly at this stage it would appear as though it's a reasonably professional job," Sergeant David Rose told Sky News.

"An entry was forced to the property. I understand that a security system there had been disabled, again an indication that these people probably knew what they were after."

Our favourite part of the Sydney Morning Herald’s coverage was some priceless quotes from Opit when confronted with experts who were saying the painting was a phony:

And last night, after spending the day avoiding the media, an angry John Opit hit back at the art world’s skepticism in an interview with the Herald.

"Who are these so-called experts?" he said. "Of course the painting has no provenance; it was a painting of his child. I can prove it’s real; it has an insignia. Ask them about that."

"It was absolute bullshit if they say they can tell from a photograph whether the painting is real."

How did he judge its value at $50 million? "Check the Sotheby’s records. See what a Cezanne canvas three feet by two and a half is worth. It’s worth $50 million."

Now call us cynical, but a possible give away that the Cezanne picture was a fraud may be the fact that it is called Paul Cezanne’s Son in A High Chair? Wouldn’t Cezanne have called it something else? Like My Son In His High Chair or even This Painting Was Done By Me, Paul Cezanne of Tahiti! ???

The Herald also unearthed an art 'expert' named Lou Kelpac who described finding an unknown Cezanne in some bloke’s studio as like “finding a crocodile in the Antarctic.”

Oh, how we laughed. Then we had a chill – it’s not entirely impossible that a painting by Cezanne could turn up in Australia (although you would be hard pressed to believe that Opit’s painting is the real deal – unless it comes from Cezanne’s notorious Shit Period paintings). Just going by the laws of probability, it’s not impossible that there’s a Cezanne lurking somewhere, just very, very improbable.

As Kelpac told NineMSN:

Mr Klepac suggested if the painting did not appear in a comprehensive catalogue by Cezanne scholar John Rewald, who died in 1994, then it was unlikely a true Cezanne.

"But again you never know, there are things that have slipped through the net and people find works by Van Gogh and so on still," Mr Klepac said.

"There are still a few things to be found, and this could be one of them."

He said the 1873 date of the painting fitted because Cezanne's child, Paul, was born in 1872.

The fact is, we may never know if it was real or not because the chances of Opit’s paintings being found again are virtually zero. Back in 1999 Justice Murray Wilcox’s country house was burgled by art thieves who took off with (real) paintings by John Coburn, Leon Pericles and Norman Lindsay. In 1998, Tom Mathieson Gallery had its doors busted down and a Norman Lindsay sketch and painting taken. They are all still missing. The Australian Federal Police don’t even have the power to investigate run–of-the-mill art theft, only “national treasures” like Aboriginal artifacts coming under their remit.

It’s a pity Opit didn’t have the money to insure his treasure trove of paintings – there’s no way the cops are ever going to find them.

Labels: art theft, auction market

We want to put this on the record – we have nothing but warm and friendly feelings towards Mary Lou Pavlovic, her gallery and her attempts to promote artists and pundits like rock stars. Her tour of Matthew Collings was a welcome appearance for the writer and TV presenter guy and a nice change from the usual British refugees who make it to Australia.

Still, we were a little perplexed to find out that Jake Chapman was being touted around for pre-tour interviews. According to Goldsmiths College alumni, it’s Jake who is the brains behind the operation and is reportedly the best public speaker, leaving brother Dinos back in Blighty to take care of business. But Jake without Dinos is like Kruder without Dorfmeister or Sly without Robby. It’s all part of the act that is the Chapman Brothers Touring Band.

PavModern, Pavlovic's gallery, has joined forces with Modular (her brother Steve's record company and home to The Avalanches (among others)) to take Chapman on an Australian tour.

We were disconcerted to learn that Pavlovic had booked Chapman not for the two, modest personal appearnces that Collings had done on his Australia 2002 tour, but four shows, two in Melbourne and one each in Sydney and Brisbane. While the Sydney show is scheduled for the "intimate" (778 seat) York Theatre (site of the recent Tracey Emin 'performance'), Pavlovic had Chapman making two appearances at Melbourne’s Capitol Theatre, seating capacity 644. Two shows, 1,288 people?

So it is with some sadness that we report the following:

PavModern and Modular people regret to advise that the Jake Chapman lecture scheduled for 18th March 2004 (at the Capitol Theatre Melbourne) has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. The planned lecture for the 19th March 2004 will proceed.

Tickets purchased for 18th March 2004 can be exchanged for 19th March 2004 or refunded in full at point of purchase.

We are very sorry for any inconvenience.

Oh well. Let’s hope we can still get some Chapman Brothers T-shirts.

Labels: press releases

We would spend hours idling at Lamella Books, checking out the new imports, coveting super-expensive Japanese editions on Shinro Ohtake and thinking that surely, if we just committed ourselves to buying a copy of Charles Jencks’s What Is Post Modernism?, we’d be totally set up to deal with the zeitgeist. It was a big, glossy tome that had a lot of pictures and it even had a flow chart or two. We could walk around with copies off Zoneor Semiotext(e) in our pockets to whip out on the bus and, when people came over for dinner, they would see the big Jencks book sitting on the bookshelf. Thus, we too could be Post Modern. If only it could have been that easy.

We were prompted to these memories by the discovery of a spread on Jencks in the March/April 2004 issue of Vogue Living The article, an eight page spread wedged between the magazine’s usual fru-fru and chintz, was a photo story on Jencks’s Garden of Cosmic Speculation, a massive landscape art piece that he built in Scotland. A wild mixture of Alice in Wonderland shapes and forms spread over the property of the Keswick Family, the garden is an artwork that takes cosmology as its inspiration and features paving, ponds, hills and huge staircases that double as symbolic representations of theoretical space/time.

It’s kind of nutty, kind of mad and that’s exactly the kind of art that we like. Try as we might, we couldn’t find anything on line but did find a handy definition from a gardening books web site on Jencks himselfand some decent pictures at Amazon.

While discussing the garden with a friend who also happens to be a landscape architect specialising in water features, we were told that Jencks’s garden is not only famous in these circles but also notorious. Some of the garden features which include some spectacular artificial hills built Capability Brown-style for the design, are rated at about 70 degrees from the horizontal. The hills are so steep that the gardeners who maintain Jenck’s design have to use ropes to get to the top. And how do they mow the lawns? They use flo-mo mowers lashed to ropes dangled down the slopes of the hills to cut the grass at right angles to the ground.

We knew that Jencks was a celebrated architect, author and academic, but we had no idea he was so literally carrying on the best of post modernism – beauty combined with profound impracticality.

Labels: old media, outdoor art, sculpture