the art life

The streets of Paddington in the morning present a very different kind of reality to the one presented by the well-heeled suburb’s reputation. Oxford Street is cold and unfriendly and you wonder why you left your warm bed for bad manners and crazy people. We were assaulted by some surprisingly off milk at home and so we decided to venture out to for coffee and toast, a small breakfast to get our art adventure off to a civilized start.

Well, we got the coffee and toast OK and we were watching the pretty girls from the surrounding boutiques arrive at the shop for their early morning pick-me-ups, and we saw five children under four years old walking along the street wearing matching green pixie hats – but then we saw a woman wearing a red cardigan, very short black shorts and long red socks and shiny black shoes staggering around outside the Commonwealth Bank. Her legs were mottled and bruised and, although she seemed to be having quite a good time, she seemed somewhat underdressed for the chilly autumn morning. She kept looking back to gaze at someone who was following her and although no one was there, she seemed quite concerned.

We walked down Elizabeth Street to Blender Gallery . Previously the location of Stills Gallery in the 80s and 90s, the former terrace house is now home to a gallery that has a ‘strong commitment’ to new and emerging talent.

By ‘new’ we think they mean people who are new to art, or perhaps new to the art world, as in they have just graduated from art school and are beginning their exciting careers in the art life. And we think that by ‘emerging’ they mean people who have changed profession into art, say from being an accountant or a human resource manager or something from an allied trade, and are doing something a little more than dabbling.

We say we ‘think’ these things because ‘new and emerging’ is one of those vague art world clichés that could mean just about anything. If your father decided to get into art, then he would be “new and emerging” too, just as Joe Blow from art school is new and emerging. Perhaps a butterfly emerging from a pupa is new and emerging, but would it be an artist? Something to consider…

OK, what they mean is, people who are new to the art scene. Take David Cheah for example. He’s an architect, interior designer and has worked in Malaysia, Amsterdam, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney. According to the press blurb his portfolio includes “wall murals, paintings on glass, furniture, MDF, and fabric design for commercial and residential projects.” He’s pretty much a jack of all trades and by the looks of things, a pretty successful one too with successful shows in Europe, Asia and Australia.

Cheah’s works are superficially attractive, looking a lot like a cross between John Coburn and Peter Atkins, although without the sharp formalist aesthetic of the former or the playfulness and intelligence of the latter. Cheah’s a decorative artist and he makes no apologies for it:

“This exhibition explores the use of a form that has been present in his work over the last few years. Derived from overlapping circles, it is symbolic of the overlapping experiences that shape his life. The three main ideas that make up the pulse of the exhibition are the sense of 'belonging', 'becoming' and just 'being'. Like the reciting of a mantra, repetitive forms in a matrix establish a sense of 'belonging'.”

We have been considering for some time what a radically engaged abstraction might look like these days. Would it be something that’s derived from the real world? Or would it be some grand ontological adventure of pure form and colour? And indeed, is either thing even possible now? We were prompted to these ruminations after seeing several abstract works in various recent shows and we’ve decided that it isn’t probable or even likely that these wild postulations could take place. Why? Because it’s extremely difficult to train your eye to understand abstraction in a world that is over run with artists like David Cheah. When you get right down to it, everything is symbolic of everything else. There’s no getting away from that – you could go mad trying to untangle both the intended references and the unintended results of abstract painting. But when the world is all burnt oranges and soft browns, deep blues and glistening turquoises, you’re either in a gallery like Blender looking at a painting by Cheah or in a homewares shop pondering whether this plate will go on that credenza.

Cheah makes nice pictures – utterly undemanding and well crafted. We were taken by the fact that the artist was willing to extend his examination of ‘belonging’, ‘becoming’ and just ‘being’ into attractive throw cushions, coffee tables and a variety of canvases ranging in price from a very affordable $350 up to $1280. They would look good in your holiday house or perhaps in your Walsh Bay apartment.

Blender Gallery has a good atmosphere due to a very nice smelling coffee shop. They also have generous bathroom facilities that they allow one to use in emergencies. Also of note is the fact that the bathroom is full of erotic photographs of naked women. If only all galleries were like this.

Don’t ask the woman on the desk at the Australian Centre for Photography any questions. Don’t ask her, for instance, how the UNSW College of Fine Arts has become involved in the exhibition of Franco Zecchin, or in fact, what they are doing at all because although she says “they sponsored it” her eyes are saying “take a hike bozo”. Maybe she’s rattled by the show inside? We know we were.

In the hallway is the work of Jay Younger, a suite of works called Ulterior from 2002. Based on the patterns in Hawaiian shirts, Ulterior includes tiny, weeny pictures of celebrities from the Fitzgerald Inquiry, cops, crooks and politicians of yesteryear, spangled and dusted with sparkles in gay patterns and designs. It’s a jolly collection of works that seem a bit redundant in Sydney. You see this kind of thing all the time, especially in the windows of clubs on Oxford Street and in galleries around Mardi Gras time, and although they seem nice and fun, they’re also a bit tame. We gave them the once over and went into the main gallery.

This is where Franco Zecchin: Sicilian Chronicles is displayed. We’ve seen plenty of pictures of dead bodies before but this is quite different. Zecchin and his wife Letizia Battaglia, an anti-Mafia campaigner, moved to Palermo in 1975, one of the bloodiest periods of attrition in the war between the authorities and organised crime.

Zecchin was right there, on the spot, taking pictures of corpses in cars, in cafes, at home in their kitchens, slain in the street as they went for a walk or sitting in cafes, kids shot down off their motorbikes and scooters. Most of the time the victims were people who had crossed the Mafia. One incredible photo is of a man sitting in his shop, dead, his head tilted back, a river of blood coming from his face and right next to him is wife, alive and hysterical, crying. The picture looks like it was taken seconds after the shooting.

There other shots too, the collateral damage of the war; drug overdoses, shots of poverty and wrecked streets filled with rubble from bombs that, since Zecchin shot in black and white, make you think that the pictures were taken during World War 2 but actually date from the 1980s.

Zecchin is a photographer with an eye that seeks out startling compositions, moments chosen for their strange beauty and evocation of suffering. It came as no surprise to read in the room notes that the photographer joined Magnum Photo Agency and his work is reminiscent of war correspondents and those creepy death scene shots taken by the police in New York in the 19th century. What is most shocking in this show is the sheer repetition of forms, the way the bodies seem to blur and you are overcome by the number of deaths. This is a powerful show that demonstrates that art can still be socially engaged and banishes our thoughts about David Cheah to the realm of irrelevance.

Next door is the double DVD installation Dead Finks Don’t Talk and Catch (Struggle and Roll) by the Brisbane born artist Gina Torntore. Dead Finks Don’t Talk uses the song by Brian Eno as its title and were were drawn across the room by the song’s chu8nky 70s synthesizers. Anyone who uses early Eno is Ok by us.

The length of the song defines the duration of the work too, clocking in at 4.5 minutes. The images are concise, hands loading a gun, bullets dropping out of a box, a knife cutting a steak, a string being tied to the trigger of a revolver. On the opposite wall Catch (Struggle and Roll) is longer, at 15.5 minutes, it’s a long slow motion shot of two actors rolling down a slope, struggling against the incline. As Dead Finks Don’t Talk cycles around again and Catch (Struggle and Roll) continues, there seemed to be a direct relation between the two works.

We didn’t realise that the works were actually separate pieces, and we had built up in our minds an interesting relational schema between the two screens, remembering works like Shirin Neshat’s Rapture from the 2000 Sydney Biennale that artfully used multiple screens to extend narrative out of a single frame. Well, it was disappointing that they were two works but they seemed to fit so naturally together- and especially considering the installation’s juxtaposition with the Zecchin show and the title referring to dead informers – it all seemed to go together. Tornatore explains in her press blurb that she’s influenced by ‘classici Gialli’ (or Italian detective fiction to you and me) that apparently uses pop images and macabre juxtapositions. Throw in the artist’s love of early Punk and glam and you’ve got something pretty amazing.

On the way out of the ACP we stopped again and looked at Jay Younger’s Ulterior and felt so much better after the carnage in Zecchin and Torntore’s shows. Sure, it’s spangly and fey, but Australian crime seems so much more accessible and friendly compared to the means streets of Palermo. Bring back the green light!

We stood outside on Oxford Street and considered our next move when we saw the woman we had seen at breakfast, the one with the red socks and revealing cardigan. We were stunned to discover that she had gone home and changed, and was wearing a see-through top. Even the junkies in Paddington are fashion conscious.

We try to apply an even level of ignorance to everything we see. It’s like being consistent but it doesn’t demand as much effort. We had gone last week to see Dani Marti’s show at Sherman Galleries but we’d missed it by a week. Instead there was some incredibly dull work that, while nice, there was nothing to say about it. We went down to Watters Gallery to see the Richard Larter show and, again, we had missed it by a week. We blame the Sydney Morning Herald because they like to run stories about shows that are closing the next day, or perhaps we should just read the dates a little more closely.

What we had managed to do was see the Rosalie Gascoigne ‘show’ at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. The show was in the paper – we went to the gallery and the show was on. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. We had completed our part of the bargain, so what about the gallery? There were 25 works in the ‘show’, ten of them hitherto unseen works from 1999 called Earth 1-10. They are in the hands of the Gascoigne family and are only now being exhibited following the artist’s death. Earth 1-10 are large panels of brown and red coloured builders foam board arranged in grid patterns. These works are attractive but are a little atypical of the Gascoigne works that are so hot in the secondary market. They’re also not for sale, apparently the family wants to hold on to them or sell them to a museum (or whoever can buy them as a set).

In the next room are 15 small works that date from the early 1980s up to 1997. They are of various sizes and are made from all sorts of materials and they are – let’s be frank about this – are a grab bag of leftovers from the artist’s studio.

You could speculate on why the Gascoigne estate thought it a good idea to put these works on the market. The ones that sold (about six of the 15 pieces) look the most like the artist’s best loved work from various periods, and although quite reasonable in their own way, are definitely minor efforts. Interestingly, one work called Untitled – a piece that measures just 90x199cms – looks the most like her Schweppes box works and is made from pieces of sawn weathered wood with fragments of white paint on them. The asking price? $130,000. An unkind person might say that the Gascoigne family wanted to clear out the back room and make a bit of money, cashing in on the secondary market prices that put the late artist’s work out of the range of just about all but the most dedicated blue chip investors and corporate collectors. But that would be unkind wouldn’t it? Criticising Gascoigne is like criticising motherhood – it’s just not on.

So what did we see at Watters ? Oh right. There was a show by James Gleeson called Disguised Signals and upstairs was a show by Tony Tuckson called Abstracts, Gouache, Colour. The last time we saw a Gleeson show there was a show by Tuckson as well. It must be spooky to have a show with a dead man every time you’re exhibiting your paintings.

There’s nothing bad taste in saying that, by the way, it’s just a fact. Watters Gallery acts as agents for the remains of Tuckson’s estate and every year they have a show of carefully selected pieces from the warehouse of stuff left behind by one of Australia’s most prolific artists. This year it’s small works on paper and the arrangement of pieces acts like a graph of what people like to buy; at one end of the room are all these little works in red and blue – some just blobs, others drawings of circles and squares in a semi-tribal pattern – and down the other end are darker, monochromatic works that are little gestural abstract masterpieces. Ranging from the late 1950s to the late 1960s the works don’t have titles as such, just a catalogue number. Of course, the red and blue end is all sold out, while the dark end is still available to a discerning buyer.

What can you possibly say about Tuckson ? The man is art history now and the work, with the patina of age and importance, is beyond the critical comprehension of us mere mortals. On their own terms, they are extraordinarily good, and anyone who thought we were too harsh on some doofus with a cartridge pad and some ink should get down to Watters and see how that kind of work is meant to be done.

Downstairs is Gleeson: more roiling cloudscapes, spaghetti marinara monsters, echoes of the biomechanical creatures of Max Ernst and the flat skies of Velasquez via Salvador Dali. We said our piece on Gleason a couple of years ago, but we’ll say this now – he’s the last surviving member of the war against the rational, the artists who stormed the reality studios with pen and ink and oil on Belgian linen. Gleeson and Robert Klippel were the only Australian artists to be anointed by Andre Breton, the Pope of Surrealism. Whatever you make of the artist’s latest works – and there is nothing new here really – you still gotta pay big respect. Aiight!

Relationships are somewhat strained in Paddington. The University Of NSW College Of Fine Arts (motto “The Biggest Little Campus In The World!”) has been battling local residents to develop part of its Selwyn Street campus into what activists are describing as the “third largest art gallery in the state after the AGNSW and the MCA”.

Every one is against it. Clover Moore (Member for Bligh and now Lord Mayor of Sydney) is against it. Michael Lee, would-be Lord Mayoral candidate, is against it. Greens candidate Chris Harris is against it. Everyone is against it. Especially so are the residents, who have put up permanent banners such as COFA=BAD NEIGHBOUR, STOP THE COFA VANDALS, WHAT ABOUT DISABLED ACCESS?

At stake is the very comfortable life style the residents have, what with the secluded streets, village like atmosphere and handsome land prices. What aggrieves the Urban Villagers the most is possibility of 75,000 extra visitors to the area (according to an “independent estimate”) and the destruction of their isolated Shangri-La. So we have a grass roots campaign headed up by doctors, barristers and non executive directors who like bohemia, but not too much of it, creating a nasty eyesore with their banners and their Land Rovers parked in protest on the pavement.

In an apparent effort to get the local community on side, the art school does letter box drops of its 20 page, full colour publication cofa all over the streets of lower Paddington. On one recent field trip, The Art Life observed copies spilling out of letter boxes as far away as Five Ways down Glenmore Road and thoughtlessly discarded editions in Taylor Square, down Bourke Street and even one floating in the pond in Hyde Park.

It’s a handsome publication, letting people know what the staff and students at COFA are up to, with articles by students such as Master of Art Administration student Kate Gardiner having a spew over the thoughtless and careless use of the word “environmental” in connection to art exhibitions, to wit:

“Education can provide a scaffold so that people can better their relationship with society and the natural environment. It is superfluous to tag an exhibition with the term “environmental” when the subject matter presented with the artworks and the exhibition does not inform the viewer beyond the surface of isolated issues like desertification, regional wars, or salinity.”

Consider yourself warned! The publication also lets you know what’s coming up, exhibitions, forums, short courses and so on. The ironic thing (and the reason we quote so freely from Alanis Morissette’s Ironic ), is that COFA’s exhibition space The Ivan Dougherty Gallery is currently running a show called Architypes , an exhibition that looks at how “artists of varying cultural backgrounds perceive and define the impact of architecture on our private and public spaces.” Do you suppose curators Greg Bellerby, Felicity Fenner and Makiko Hara had the situation outside the gallery in mind when they decided on what art to put on the inside? Wouldn’t that have been great? Wouldn’t that have been ironic?

Not a lot of people know that the Ivan Dougherty Gallery is named after the man who invented the semi colon in exhibition titles. It’s that kind of gallery – the exhibitions are curated to the extent that some art does not make the transition successfully, dying somewhere on route to the IDG in the back of a van, alone and afraid and with no one to mourn its passing.

Bellerby, Fenner and Hara have put together a very tight show. As you might be able to tell by the punning title, Architype brings together artists whose work has something to do with architecture – two Canadians, two Japanese and two Australians working in sculpture and wall works.

It should come as no surprise then that Callum Morton is in the show – two big digital prints from his last Roslyn Oxley show in Sydney and the Cottage Industry: Bawdy Nights model from 1999 and last seen at the MCA last year.

You may also remember that Morton had done earlier works in the mid to late 90s that featured isolated architectural features hung way up high on the gallery wall – a balcony, a window or an architrave or some such, sculpted and mounted in lovely white isolation from the world and looking like illustrations out of an architecture text book. Well, the curators should be congratulated for finding another artist whose current work looks just like Morton’s. Kyoco Taniyama’s Stairs (Terrace), Stairs (Entrance) and Stairs (2003) pull exactly the same trick and achieve exactly the same effect. It’s quite uncanny when you find another artist doing the same work as an Australian artist, perhaps with some slight variation, but it must be downright spooky to find someone doing something that is in essence exactly what you are doing. Maybe Taniyama is a Callum Morton stalker?

There are echoes of Morton in Canadian artist Elspeth Pratt and her floor work World Traffic which looks like an architectural model for a modernist style airport. Unlike Morton, whose models are virtually indistinguishable from actual architectural models, Pratts work looks thrown together, a bit ad hoc and much more interesting because of it. It’s like the artist is saying, ‘with a bit of cardboard, wood, Plexiglas and fluorescent lighting, you too can have a model of the airport at Super-Cannes!’ and here’s one she made earlier… For us, the paradigm of modernist architecture is the supreme uselessness of Brasilia, Brazil’s decaying showcase capital. It’s the dark shadow of the fascism of modernist brutalism, the truth incarnate that every utopia is unachievable. With a few bits of cardboard, a light and a bit of plastic, Pratt’s little model echoes both the reality and the dream.

Fellow Canadian Renee Van Halm’s work is much more orthodox, very reasonable and bland museum objects not without charm. Pauline (2004) is a pink room concocted out of two adjoining walls, scaled down to about 1/12th actual size. Apparently, the work is somehow concerned with the ways people modify their houses, but we were having a problem to see how that worked.

The second Japanese artist in the show was Yuichi Higashionna and it was also a stretch to see how his work fitted into the curatorial dictate. The rest of the show was much more concerned with the architectonic nature of models – how the systemized description of a building could be contained in a model, cross section or drawing. Higashionna’s two works are interior features, a curtain and a chandelier. The curtain was made of strips of rubber and was called Untitled (Elastic) and the chandelier was made of circular fluoros lashed together and was called Untitled (Chandelier). Perhaps it was because they were so different that we liked them so much, but they really didn’t seem part of the same show. Higashionna’s use of materials was assured and the accretion of humming fluorescent lights, their wires and transformer boxes looked like something out of Ghost In The Shell. The curatorial echoes of Morton and Pratt were obvious, but their non-schematic nature was puzzling – they may be isolated architectural features, but they were what they said they were, not a representation of the thing.

The status of true rank outsider in Architypes, however, belongs to Australian artist Sally Smart. When we were looking at her wall work – a huge collection of felt shapes pasted one on top of the other, a seemingly haphazard sequence of images that includes pianos, spiral staircases, heads and other figurative elements – we just couldn’t figure out what the hell it was doing in the show. The work, unhelpfully titled Parameters Head: Architect (2000-4) was described in the catalogue as drawing “on historical models, investigating the resonances and mnemonic impact of domestic architecture then and now.” Please sir, what does that mean?

The thing that has struck us again and again about Smart’s work is how badly it's put together. It may have a lot of associative meaning, but the shapes in the works are poorly cut, placed seemingly at random with little regard for traditional composition and in general betray the artist’s complete lack of regard for the tactile qualities of the material she uses. You could well argue that Smart does in fact do these things but chooses not to do them in obvious ways – after all, it took her four years to make the work - but you would be wrong. Sometimes art is just bad and there’s no getting around it.

A couple of weeks back we gave Dominique Angeloro a hard time for rewriting press releases in the guise of journalism in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Metro lift out. Sure, people like Victoria Hynes and Bruce James had taken that thankless gig and turned it into a bona fide alternative to the rest of the paper’s art coverage, but maybe we were too harsh on her, after all, we could easily imagine ourselves doing the same thing, running out the end of the week with a few press releases chucked in and who would care?

Then we read her piece of the Sam Smith show at Gitte Weise Gallery and she made some perceptive comments. We really began to think we had been too hard and when we read her write up on artist Joseph Marr’s show, we were intrigued:

“It’s possible to imagine that Joseph Marr’s painted galaxies might be motivated by serious astrological study, or the kitsch co-opting of outer space by pre-teen doona covers. Either way, the paintings are impressive.”

Oooh! Outer space! We had all sorts of images going through our heads and we discussed the possibilities – Hubble style images? Malin Space pictures? The surface of Mars? Consider us hooked. According to Angeloro:

“Marr duplicates the visual distortion produced by looking through a telescopic lens, his paintings morphing into different focuses as you alter your proximity to the work.”

We got our walking shoes on and headed off to Glenmore Road and to the hitherto unvisited Harris Courtin Gallery. As soon as we walked through the door we knew two things: one was that Dominique Angeloro was off her head and two, we were in deep, deep trouble.

Space may be the place, but it’s got nothing to do with Marr’s work, except in the most generalised sense. With Angeloro’s description we thought we were in for some art that was a combination of space imagery, perhaps with some element of perceptual, perspective playfulness – but what we got were big canvases, thickly applied paint, and horrible semi illustrative pictures of plants. In fact, it’s all there in the handout where the artist discusses the fact that “nature is sculpted by its existence, the passing of life, the coming into being and everything in between.”

What was Angeloro thinking? When she says that the paintings are “impressive” was she being sarcastic or ironic? There are plenty of arts writers out there who have concocted an entire vocabulary of non-descriptive adjectives that, in one context, can be quite flattering. So in that style, we can only say that Marr’s work is unique, extraordinary, outstanding, different, special, exceptional, unprecedented and unparalleled.

By the time we got out of the gallery and down to Five Ways and a cup of coffee, we had calmed down enough to think that Marr was on to something. Knowingly or not, his work is reminiscent of an entire body of abstraction from the 60s and 70s, and his thick, eye watering surfaces conjour up a lost world of suburban civic centres with their chunky wall sculptures, mosaic murals, indoor fountains and plush carpet. There’s also an uncanny resemblance in some of the pieces to Czech science fiction art found in films like Fantastic Planet and the Soviet era comic strips of Pravda that showed the future of proletarian communism on other planets. Although art is sometimes just bad and there’s no getting around it, you can still see how the artist has stumbled on to something special.

Speaking of Sam Smith, as we were, we have to say that we admire his gumption. He wrote to us an invited us down to Room 35, the hire space gallery at Gitte Weise Gallery, to see his show Set Piece. He told us we could make of it what we wanted and so we did.

But first, a confession – we had never ever been to Gitte Weise Gallery in our lives. Not when it was on Oxford Street, nor when it had moved to Paddington and occupied the old Coventry Gallery space. One time we rang them to ask what their address was and when we said, “so you moved to Paddington?” the incredulous voice on the other end of the phone said “we’ve been here for over a year!”. Our bad.

We don’t know why it was there, but Gitte Weise Gallery was a black hole in our minds – it has a perfectly presentable line up of artists, has nice catalogues, gets written up, has a very polite director who is happy to field all questions (no matter how ridiculous) – but for some reason it represented one too many art galleries. When your life is full of Sherman, Oxley, Crowley, Kaliman, Browne, Knight and Cottier, one more gallery at that level is starting to look dangerously like the straw that’s going to break the camel’s back. Since Cottier is no more, perhaps now we can add Weise to its rightful place in the pantheon? Who knows?

Sam Smith’s show features a set, a DVD, some wall photos taken from the shoot, two other installations of recent DVD works and a pair of headphones presenting 10 hours of piano telescoped down to a listenable length. The show is called Set Piece after the major DVD piece and the set is right there – albeit in pieces. We weren’t sure if this was a pun – and if so, was it necessary? – and we could see that the looped nature of the narrative in the DVD connected to the bits and pieces (another pun?) arranged around the room.

So what’s in Set Piece? There are these people who are seen dancing in a room. Apparently the people are Dr. Who style time travelers who come from inside the Blue Screen, the void in digital transmission, and when they exit their alternative dimension into ours, they meet up with some guy in a nice looking house and have a fight over squatter’s rights. They have a dance/fight until the dero guy clocks one of them over the head with a pot plant. There’s also some stuff going on back at mission control where a guy in a hooded jacket is punching holes in a piece of plywood with a special tool. What does it mean? We don’t know.

The curious thing about Smith’s work was how much it reminded us of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle we saw at the AGNSW some weeks back. Smith’s narratives are pretty hermetic – they have an internal logic that makes a consistent kind of sense, but are difficult to translate into an actual description of what they are about. Like Barney’s works, they seem to be operating on another level perhaps known only to the artist. But what’s great about Smith – and something quite extraordinary for an artist who is 22 – is that his work is so assured. We don’t make the comparison with Barney lightly – it’s easy to lose your critical head and start making all sorts of wild claims (just look what happened to Ricky Swallow) when you’re confronted with work this good. But it’s tempting to say that Smith has the makings of a brilliant artist. There are a lot of echoes of other artists work in here too; the music (also by Smith ), the costumes, the dance/fight sections of the piece, the construction of the set, the carefully arranged installation. We thought of everyone from Prefuse 73 to Paul McCarthy. Luckily for Smith, he makes this work his own.

We were saddened to hear that Australian film director Tim Burstall had suffered a stroke while watching a retrospective of his films in Melbourne. He died the next morning after being rushed to hospital, age 76. A significant figure in the emerging Australian cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s, he directed Alvin Purple (a sex comedy starring Graeme Blundell, and the first Aussie film to get distribution in the US) and Petersen, a Jack Thompson ‘vehicle’.

Burstall also had a few relationships with the non-cinematic visual arts – he was famously the subject of a portrait by artist John Bloomfield, who won the Archibald Prize for Portraiture and then had it taken away again when it was discovered he’d painted it from a photo in a magazine and Burstall didn’t know anything about it. To the director’s credit, he supported Bloomfield, but rules are rules and aren’t meant to be broken, are they?

Burstall’s other interesting association with Australian art was that he sold two of his Arthur Boyd paintings to help finance his second feature, Stork (1971) starring Bruce Spence, based on a play by David Williamson (back in the days when people gave a shit about Williamson). As David Stratton described the film in his book The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival;

“For most of its length, Stork is an enjoyably ribald comedy carried along by the smart dialogue and the splendid performances. Williamson and Burstall have captured perfectly Carlton in the early seventies, the days of Sir Henry Bolte and anti-Vietnam, anti-apartheid demonstrations. Bruce Spence's Stork is a magnificent creation, showing his contempt for the system […] ruining his chances with a prospective employer as, over a smart lunch, he confides that "I couldn't manage me bowel movements till I was five ", or disrupting a snooty art gallery opening by a revolting trick with an oyster stuffed up his nostril.”

There’s quite a bit of broad satire in Stork, especially as much of the film is concerned with the Australian art scene. Our favourite memory of the movie was Stork’s fleeting career as a painter and his invention of “chunder art” where, after a few long necks of beer and some ripe cheese, he bellows the contents of his stomach on to a canvas, to the great appreciation of the foolish art world people who'd accept anything as “art”. It's also worth noting that Stork was also a huge financial and critical success. Adios Tim Burstall.

One of our friends, a reader, left a comment suggesting that we should include a list of links to Australian art web sites. As Selma Bouvier put it, a good idea is a good idea and so we have scoured the web for signs of intelligent life... Believe us when we say we have looked and the only sites that we could find are pretty poor; it’s all bodgy CVs and crummy organisations with an axe to grind.

But thanks to another friendly reader of The Art Life, one Christopher Hanrahan, co-director of Francis Baker-Smith (formerly Gallery Wren) who says, not only are we funny, (as in “funny ha ha”) we’re like another web site from the UK called Art Rumour. We had a good look at the site and although there is a passing family resemblance, we think it might be something to do with that first six month period where the baby looks like the father, but after that takes on its own physiognomy.

The problem for The Art Life is that, by definition, the Australian art world just isn’t as interesting as the UK’s. For instance, they’ve got Grayson Perry, winner of this year’s Turner Prize for – get this – erotic pots! If we had some cross dressing artists who made crafty art we’d have something to talk about. And in England they’ve got Damien Hirst who, according to Art Rumour, uses assistants to come up with his ideas and has recently turned his (or their) hands to bad poetry.

In this country, artists just make art and don’t go making foolish forays into other mediums they neither know nor understand, now do they?

It’s a minor milestone but one worth mentioning: The Art Life is celebrating its 1000th visitor this week and we thank all our readers for making the art life worth living!

There’s plenty to complain about in the Australian art world but people are asking, hey, smart arse, what do you like? You may not have noticed that we say positive things about artists and their work, or may have just thought we were being sarcastic. That’s understandable. But what do we like?

We like The Australian’s Review section that comes out on Saturdays. Unlike the Sydney Morning Herald’s approach to sectioning everything off from the main paper into crap like Radar and Spectrum (in a desperate attempt to generate separate advertising), The Australian is actually going the other way, subsuming back into broad sheet format well established sections such as their weekly Media roundup. But Review remains a separate section and it’s all the better for it.

Their art coverage attempts a national flavour, for all the readers in Adelaide and Brisbane and wherever, but the focus is pretty much always Melbourne/Sydney with the occasional side trip to Canberra when something big is on. (Just as an aside, why is Canberra always the place to go when you want to appear inclusive?). They tend to cover big museum shows and retrospectives and when there’s a lull Review will run a well-chosen piece from an overseas newspaper in the News Corp empire, a recent review by Waldemar Januszczak arguing that Brancusi is overrated was a good example of how art criticism can be universally interesting even if you can’t get to see the show…

It’s strange to have warm and fuzzy feelings about a News Corp publication, especially with the residual annoyance at the Australia Council’s funding of the Australian Review of Books still coursing through our veins, but with the quality of the art writing, book reviews, the music writing and the generally perceptive TV pieces, Review is pretty much what you want out of a Saturday supplement. It’s true, Review used to be the home of the dreaded Giles Auty and Young-Fogey-in-waiting Benjamin Gennochio, but they still have Susan McCulloch. Review has been so roundly kicking the arse of the SMH’s Spectrum, you wonder why the Fairfax hacks keep toiling away, what with the ever-changing line up of section editors, biased in favour of ‘literature’ fiction reviewers and the anodyne rubbish of Peter Hill, it just couldn’t get any worse, could it?

On April 3, the difference between the two papers couldn’t have been more profound. Nicolas Rothwell wrote Crossing The Divide for Review, an extended piece on the dearth of critical reaction to recent developments in Aboriginal art and the paucity of critical art writing in general. Over at Spectrum, Peter Hill “reviewed” the Rover Thomas exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW in a story called Desert Dreaming. Rothwell wrote:

“The problems confronting the would-be critic of indigenous art are multiple. How to explore the visual creations of a totally different culture – or, rather, several distinct cultures, whose traditions and belief systems are not merely foreign to mainstream Australians but also veiled in secrecy? How to assess the art from such a world, and present its stylistic and its variations? Who first decides what counts as successful, resolved piece? And who then makes the case for its power and appeal across the cultural divide?”

Rothwell’s assertions were simple – that there was little understanding of Aboriginal art in the mainstream art world except for a misty eyed acceptance of the “dreaming” as a catchall explanation for all Indigenous culture; that there is a vested interest in keeping things that way by Aboriginal art collectors and secondary market profits; and, with three apposite examples, how recent significant developments have been ignored by critics.

“Critics who consider themselves to be friends, part of the enlightened crowd, will tend to view paintings as though from the artist’s point of view; they will be prompted to explicate the coded meanings, to read the canvas, in almost anthropological fashion, rather than judge its effect. Spiritual profundity will be assumed as a given and diligently blurted out. And what could count as a bad painting if the Dreaming is deep? This stance, though, is a species of cultural relativism taken to its logical conclusion. The true task of the critic, faced with the exalted material of traditional Aboriginal art, is to explore the margin between the two worlds; to investigate, to explain how, and how well, the painter succeeds in transmitting the shimmer of beauty and sacred power across the cultural divide. But this is the fence Australian art criticism hasn’t climbed over – for intriguing reasons…”

Rothwell ison the money here. The only disagreement we have is with his argument of what a critic is “supposed” to do. We think all a critic has to do is account for what they see, what they experience. It’s all very well to try to acknowledge the fact that you are a culturally determined construct whose views and opinions are predetermined by your cultural lineage, it’s another to incorporate that understanding into an assessment of visual experience – all you end up getting is a second-guessing criticism, the “we’re not worthy” approach that leads to the very bland acceptance of things like the “Dreaming” as catch-all explanations in the first place.

Rothwell has a job description for the would-be transcultural critic:

“And what might such a dialogue sound like? It’s authors would be familiar with the history, the symbolic and narrative components of the main indigenous schools of art. Perhaps they would know some traditional language as well. They would be steeped in Western cultures, past and contemporary. They would be conscious of the art market’s distorting pressure and immune to it. Above all, they would treat traditional artists not just as figures frozen in the Dreamtime but as individuals, as creative figures susceptible to understanding.”

So who is up to the job? We were thinking that given this description, what is needed in the art world are Indigenous art critics, individuals with Koori backgrounds who would write across these very areas and describe, as Rothwell insists, the divisions and similarities of the shared experience of Aboriginal art. Actually, no. Rothwell thinks that John McDonald is the man for the job. Call us Flabber and Gasted, Solicitors for the Incredulous! If it has to be a white critic, how about The Australian’s own Susan McCulloch, a writer who has taken on the Aboriginal art industry, written with passion and compassion and intelligence on Indigenous art and paid the price for rocking the boat? How about Rex Butler, the critic and essayist who has consistently insisted on dealing with Indigenous art in almost exactly the way Rothwell suggests? Rothwell says that “few other media practitioners come to mind”.

Whatever the shortcomings of Rothwell’s argument, it was at least there: it was in the newspaper and as tiresome as it sounds, it promotes some sort of meaningful debate if you want to engage with it. At Spectrum, Hill was performing exactly the sins that Rothwell described; patronising, paternalistic, simplistic and pedantic. Hill was doing his usual thing, quoting others in place of an argument (extensively from catalogues and other material) and offering only the slimmest appraisal of what he was seeing. The word “dreamtime” crops up in relation to both Rover Thomas and Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

“I wanted to spend time with the paintings. And they are very different from the all-over dotting of some indigenous work, and from the bark scratchings of others, and from the loose and luscious sweeps of colour that Emily Kngwarreye dreamed into existence. Aboriginal art is far more varied and multilingual than is often credited. Thomas's work is sparse in mark and intense in content and emotional pull. It is like the dry husks of seeds or the even drier riverbed. It is not just of the land, it is the land.”

There we go – Thomas was not an artist who interpreted the landscape through his cultural beliefs and customs, he was the landscape, he was the Dreaming…

“But is his work "a form of sophisticated, modernist abstraction of universal appeal" that the gallery press release proclaims? Yes, but it's more than that. Much more. In the catalogue, Mary Macha, […], says of Thomas that when he was at the National Gallery in Canberra he saw a Rothko and commented, 'that fella paints like me'.

"I was with him there once and there was a large whitefella painting hanging on the wall. Down in the corner there were some leaves and rushes, and he looked at them and studied them quite seriously: 'Why do you reckon that fella did that down there?' So he had a deep interest in other paintings.

"We went to the conservation section: there was a damaged Chagall - I think someone had put her heel through it! - it was small and so beautiful. Rover studied it for a long, long, time. He was captivated by it. He did make one comment about the damaged work: 'Ahh, poor bugger!'

But what makes Rover Thomas entirely different from Rothko and Chagall? The paintings he produced, in addition to being aesthetic objects, were maps to the physical world and to the inner Dreaming. They were also archives that held information about past road crashes, massacres, and meteorological events.”

Barf bags available on request.

Since we’re not a far right web log, we encourage our readers to leave their thoughts on the comments pages by clicking on the COMMENT button at the end of each item; we encourage dissension and diversity of views and all that blah, but for the sake of legality, if not just simple politeness, we’re going to remove or edit comments that are straight out insults and anything we deem potentially defamatory. Say what we will about an artist’s work, an exhibition, an institution or a gallery, we won’t countenance abuse for no good reason! We’ll refer to this as The Rules and woe unto anyone who breaks them!

A few weeks back we ran a story about the complaints of conservative Federal MP’s who think that the Parliament House art collection is a disgrace. The ABC’s 7.30 Report ran a report on it on Thursday the 8th of April and featured some of the prominent players in the saga, notably Liberal MP, Parliamentary Secretary and lover of pastoral landscapes Ross Cameron, NSW backbencher Alby Schultz and Australian Democrat Senator Aden Ridgeway.

The 7.30 Report story was an absolute hoot, and you can read the transcript at the official 7.30 Report web page. Sadly, what the transcript doesn’t show are the suspect art works nor the faces of the politicians. (If a picture paints a thousand words, etc).

For example, when reporter Jeremy Thompson explained who the hell Ross Cameron is, there were two quick visual grabs from the archives…

JEREMY THOMPSON: “Ross Cameron, Liberal member for Parramatta, stands out from the grey-suited crowd in Parliament.”

“For a start, he's a singer.” [Shot of Cameron walking into Parliament singing “they said you’d never make it” with a photographer snorting in disbelief as he passes…]

“And unlike George W Bush, he knows where the leader of Al Qaeda is hiding out…”

ROSS CAMERON: “Today, in the mountains of West Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is stroking his beard and celebrating the advent of Mark Latham.”[Shot of Cameron wearing a bicycle helmet, bike pants and polo shirt enunciating his words very carefully - (rehearsed, moi?)]

So far, so far right.

No wonder the Liberals hate the ABC – although there was an attempt at balance with quotes from opposing point of view, the tone of the story was most definitely biased against Cameron. He came across looking like an idiot, especially when bagging Latham as pro-Al Qaeda while wearing a polo shirt and eye wateringly tight cycle shorts.

There was also a sneaky shot in the story that began with the ceiling of a hallway in Parliament House and then a tilt down to reveal a hard line abstract painting that was a grey stripe between two white stripes. The roof looked like the art work and although it was almost subliminal, the message was clear – at least the camera operator, the editor and the reporter thought the work was rubbish too.

JEREMY THOMPSON:“Mr. Cameron doesn't like most modern art.
He's led an eight year crusade against Parliament's collection, not only those in the offices, but those on the walls and in the courtyards.”

CAMERON: “This is one of the two works that every member of the Government sees before they walk into the joint party room to consider the aspirations of the Australian people - a grey stripe between two white stripes. I'm not saying, ‘I hate it’. I'm just saying it's a wasted opportunity”

.

So what does Cameron like? He favours landscapes and historical pictures that portray the heritage of Australia and provide inspiration to politicians as they go about the difficult job of shaping this nation’s destiny. He likes a lovely gold gilt framed picture by Penleigh Boyd and a nice etching of Captain Cook draping a limp wrist over a map of Terra Australis.

The suspect art works illustrated in the story included pieces by John Coburn, Fred Williams, Sydney Nolan, Michael Johnson, Arthur Boyd, younger artists including Annette Bezor (whose painting was emblazoned with the word RUBBISH in post production), Gordon Bennett and Janet Burchill and a host of non-descript sculptures and garden installations that, to be perfectly frank, looked rather drab. The most contentious was the hard line abstract painting.

While standing and looking aghast at the painting, back bencher Alby Schultz comes wandering up. He’s a portly gent with an eye patch and black hair forced across his head in an unforgiving comb-over:

ALBY SCHULTZ, LIBERAL BACKBENCHER: “What are you up to, Roscoe?”

CAMERON: “Well, what do you think of this, Alby?

SCHULTZ: “That is appalling… And as an old meatworker, I think I could do a better job than that, with a bit of masking paint and a spray gun.”

JEREMY THOMPSON: “Not everyone shares the views of Ross Cameron and fellow Liberal Alby Schultz. In fact, judging by a recent survey, MPs opinions are evenly split between those who want change and those who don't. The Democrats' Aden Ridgeway is in the latter camp…”

RIDGEWAY: “I doubt whether Alby Schultz or Ross Cameron or anyone else could produce the same sort of artwork and certainly fetch the prices that some of these recognised artists are getting.They might not like it, you know, but if they want to be spectators on the sidelines throwing criticism, that's fine, but recognise that we need to have a varied and vibrant collection.”

Thank god for Aden Ridgeway. Unlike Cameron, he seems to have some understanding of art and culture and is very well informed about what the art is worth.

The interesting thing about Cameron’s view is that it doesn’t seem that far out. He admits he’s a philistine and he likes what he likes, the default position of people who don’t know much about art. His plea for something heritage-like and historical isn’t all that outrageous and the bottom line of his proposal is that if conservative art lovers don’t like modern rubbish, why should they have to put up with it? Can’t they have a choice what they hang in their office? To Cameron’s credit, he went out and took a photo of the Tasmanian wilderness and had it framed and, judging by the image in the report, it could be happily sold at any one of a dozen tourist art shops.

When Cameron singles out a Ron Robertson-Swann sculpture of and called The Quick Brown Fox (a perfectly average bit of 70s style metal sculpture that sits on the ground like a busted carburetor) you almost agree, this is just crap!

ROBERTSON-SWANN: “I wanted the sculpture to have the possibility of starting there and running across the ground like a rabbit rather than a traditional piece of sculpture. And it's like a sentence.”

JEREMY THOMPSON: “Hence, The Quick Brown Fox with its allusion to words and to movement. But Mr. Cameron is unmoved.”

CAMERON: “No title will change the fact that it is, you know, a few bits of steel welded together and painted brown.”

Complacency is easy with this kind of reasoning. Do we really have to put up with cultural diversity? Must art always be difficult and modern and inaccessible? There was another school of thought, perhaps not that far from Cameron, who proposed just such a philosophy towards art – and the artists who followed it produced works that valorized history, promoted the nation and its citizenry and created a sense of belonging and togetherness rarely matched in the history of the world. It might be a far fetched comparison but then again…

PavModern – Mary Lou Pavlovic’s world straddling art gallery-come-museum-without-walls - has an Educational Unit. According to the PM web site, the Unit looks “at things we think are overlooked in the broader art world, and make them prominent.” As part of the exciting build up for the Jake Chapman lecture tour, an interview by Jennifer McCamley on the artist’s collaborative process was posted on the web site complete with this scintillating intro:

“ I was asked to undertake an e-mail interview with Jake Chapman for two reasons: firstly, because I was an artist who has worked collaboratively with another artist (Janet Burchill) for many years and secondly, because I have frequently expressed to Mary-Lou Pavlovic a host of dissatisfactions in relation to the art world in general, and especially the Australian art world. […] The ‘finished’ interview is more fragmentary in style than I had initially intended or ever desired. The e-mail exchange between Jake Chapman and myself extended over a number of weeks- there were often days between his answer and my next question, and occasionally vice versa. I would also ask a question relating to one area and then loop back to an earlier area. There were some areas which I touched on to which I intended to return and didn’t, and other areas which I wanted to ask about and never got around to (due to time management deficit disorder on my part).

It’s getting to be that time again in Sydney when summer fades into autumn and the shadows are darker, the sun light in the afternoon more yellow and, no matter how much coffee and cake we consume, we can’t shake the poet’s disease. Melancholy can’t be far away and art is supposed to help, so we started out on a big art tour and went to see what we could see.

Call us superficial but any show called TOO MUCH SUGAR is enticing and expecting a quick pick-me-up we wandered into the Saint Sophia Hall. The Kudos Gallery is the exhibition space of the Student’s Association of the UNSW’s College of Fine Arts and they’ve been renting the Greek Orthodox Church Hall at the back of South Dowling Street for years now. The shows are a real pot luck option, oscillating between greatest hits group shows and ill-advised solo outings. TOO MUCH SUGAR is an example of the former and the quality was surprisingly low, hovering somewhere between Art Express and promising new comers who had a neat idea but were let down by slightly crappy execution.

Robyn Buchanan has a problem (apparently). Exhibiting realistic looking psychiatric assessments and letters from her solicitors, she is attempting to Sue the 1980s for emotional damage, breach of promise, pain and suffering, etc, etc. The idea is that the decade owes the artist some sort of recompense and to prove her claims, Buchanan also exhibits a cassette tape of dodgy 80s hits (Billy Ocean et al), leg warmers, shoulder pads and photos of herself with enormous hair, Wayfarer sunglasses and big, loose-fit cardigans. Buchanan puts forth a pretty convincing case.

It’s completely circumstantial of course, and the artist would probably be old enough now to put the whole sorry decade of CHOOSE LIFE, Live Aid and “sexy” Olivia Newton John videos into some sort of sensible, mature perspective. The other problem with the art work, aside from the fairly funny and flip idea, is that the way it has been put together is all too neat and tidy. Wouldn’t a mind that distressed be closer to disorder? Or is that the essence of the 80s?

We never finished that thought as we became distracted by a cow in a video called Surreel #1 Treading Water In The Bar(re)n by Felix Suttler. Give anything a title with a pun on ‘surreal’ in it and we’re totally mesmerized and if it has a cow, all the better. If you start using pointless parentheses we're hooked. In Suttler's video installation (which is just a TV on a stage) there’s a cow (looking a bit confused) digitally placed into a landscape (mountains, plains). And that’s it. Pretty surreal, huh?

Next to the stage area where Suttler’s video sits is a giant castle made out of cardboard. It’s called Castle and it costs $10. The artist, Phoebe Torzillo, knows no one is going to buy it so she’s taken the logical step of offering it at a price no one could refuse if you were in the market for a giant, cardboard castle. Sculpturally, it’s very nice too, glued together into a huge mass that looks like you could lift it with the tip of your finger, edges frayed and rough. Walking around the work we noticed that an electric cord ran from inside the castle but wasn’t plugged in. While we considered asking the gallery assistant if anything cool happened if it was turned on, we saw that the top of he castle looked like a head, perhaps even with a crown on. Was this some kind of statement? Some sort of comment on something? Was the artist just making a great big pile of cardboard with a hidden message? We became frightened and decided to leave and walked right into the middle of a protest.

The Black Fellas Dreaming Gallery on Oxford Street is terrible. The paintings in the window that we see as we walk past on our way to Taylor Square or the bottle shop are uniformly awful and we have never ever set foot inside, assuming it was another faux Aboriginal art gallery run by an excitable white guy with big mouth and no taste.

How wrong can you be? As we walked down Oxford Street one sunny Wednesday midday we stumbled into a press conference. There was a crew from the local Koori TV station, some sweaty photographers from the Wentworth Courier and various curious bystanders. After being welcomed by the reporter from the Koori TV crew – who acknowledged the indigenous land owners of Oxford Street – Gordon Syron the owner of Black Fellas Dreaming, was introduced to the gathering and he had something to say…

Syron had done a portrait of David Gulpilil and it hadn’t made the cut at the Archibald Prize. It had also been rejected from the Salon Des Refuses too. Syron, an Aboriginal artist with family connections to Gulpilil, had done his portrait and he was ‘questioning’ the selection process.

We had noticed his painting of Gulpilil in the shop window before and it was a useful reminder of the fact that no matter how average we thought Craig Ruddy’s prize winning picture was, it was actually rather good in comparison to most other things. That’s a rather piss weak assessment, we know, but in world of equivalence where everything is more or less the same, some slight difference is a good thing – even if it’s to be marked out as slightly crap, or slightly good – it’s better than nothing.

So what did Syron think of the Ruddy picture? “I commend the winner,” he said magnanimously. So what was his beef? “I question the selection process,” he repeated. “I don’t really know what the process is… but I am questioning it.”

As do we all. And that was pretty much the whole event. We went inside the gallery and had a look at the rest of the art. It was divided between quite good stuff by Syron that looked like a not so good version of H.J. Wedge and touristy stuff by a bloke named Walangari Karntawarra who is unafraid of bright colours.

It’d be a mad contest. We reckon Elizabeth Ann Macgregor (the boss lady at the MCA) would fight dirty. That’s not to say Edmund Capon (AGNSW bloke) couldn’t take a punch, he’d just hire someone to do it for him. If it was a head-to-head, Wrestle Mania type fight, the MCA Shop would kick the AGNSW art shop’s arse, but the restaurant café at Agnes is showing those snooty creeps at the MCA café a thing or two about customer satisfaction… If only we could really get them to fight one another! “Hey, Agnes, the MCA said you were a pussy.” “Hey, MCA, Agnes reckons getting Telstra to sponsor everything is for losers! You suck!”

We traveled down to Circular Quay to see two shows, the Ed Ruscha retrospective show and the Rodney Glick retrospective Ambitious? Who Me?

The quick answer to the question in Glick’s title is ‘no, not you’. We were only vaguely aware of Glick in the same way we are only vaguely aware of anything that goes on in Perth and were mixing him up with another, funnier Glick.

If this is what constitutes a retrospective or even a survey show this is about as thin a show as it’s possible to get. Glick is an orthodox conceptualist, an itinerant craftsman without allegiance to any form. There’s some sculpture, some video, a few fans and lights, a slide projector and a big photo and a wall. In all, there are just 10 works in the show spread out across the top of the MCA’s level 4. Glick is obviously far from ambitious, even if he is trying to create a gigantic snow dome with a picture of himself in the middle, an activity we would normally applaud, but it looks for all the world that Glick is just slack.

The big difference between the MCA and the Art Gallery of NSW is that the MCA seems hyper aware of the fact that they are at Circular Quay, not marooned in the middle of the Domain. Now that people don’t have to pay to get in to the MCA, anyone can wander in and they do, in their droves. As a result, the wall texts at the MCA seem very eager to explain that what looks like easy-peasy art works made from a bunch of stuff you could buy at Mitre 10 are in fact full of meaning and philosophical import.

One Glick sculpture was called Ocean, a blue tarpaulin draped over a table tennis table with a “domestic light” underneath. Another is called Mountain and it’s a cardboard mountain painted white. Another piece, Office, was a series of canvases with ‘amusing’ legends on them lifted from joke shop signs designed for the office smart arse (e.g. As an Outsider, What Do You Think of the Human Race?), arrayed along one wall with a giant rectangular frame joining them all together.

According to the wall texts, Mountain was about scale, Ocean was about material and the framing of the Office work was about questioning the value of the museum object. Of course, there were lots of similes, everything was like something else. Forget Heidegger, forget the phenomenology of the object, forget the fact that the titles told you exactly what you were supposed to be looking at, let’s have some “it’s like the ocean because it’s blue” explanations. It comes as no surprise to people who go to galleries that some artist would try this kind of material slackness, maybe even liked the distressed aesthetics at work, but perhaps if the MCA tried a little less hard to please know nothing tourists and more to convince the very people who would make the effort to get to Level 4 that Glick is actually worth the effort, then a show like this might succeed on it's own terms.

We like context for an artist’s work, their dates of birth, perhaps even the title of the piece and some background information. We realised when we went to see the Callum Morton show at the MCA some months back that if we hadn’t had the wall texts we wouldn’t have known what the hell the work was about – who knew that some famous architect had murdered his wife and put her heart in a box? It all became obvious that there should be a sci fi light show inside Captain Cook’s cottage or there should be screams coming from the UN Building. We are pro-wall text, but tell us something we don’t know would you?

Glick isn’t so much an artist as a chilled out entertainer. He has some good ideas and if you have a look at his web site you can see that, installed properly in a room with enough space and proper lighting, the works have a certain charm. In the MCA, the work Lap Poolwas stuck on wall, and the explanation was that, in that arrangement, the work was like a hard edged painting. Wouldn’t it just have been better to have shown it was it was in
Perth rather than straining to make some far fetched point?

Glick’s work is bloodless and smart arsed and far from ambitious, but we like some of it nonetheless. His video installations Earth Quake and LIFE Plus TV were screened together on a curved wall and have considerable visual appeal. Their complicated structure – a DVD of 12, one hour shots spliced together to create a panorama of a city during an entire day - adds to that appeal and, alone in the entire exhibition, are the most successful works because they marry a sophisticated approach to making the art, the subject and its presentation. This is in marked contrast to the rest of the show– the sculpture Marble Bun for example was conceptually vapid, suggesting not a sophisticated play on title, scale, material and form, but a more waste of everybody’s time.

We couldn’t think of a way in our coverage of the Sulman Prize last week to discuss the inclusion of a work by Virginia Coventry called Hover, a geometric abstract painting.

It was interesting to see the painting because we had lost track of Coventry over a decade ago when we were in her post grad class (where she said “I don’t think I can teach you anything” and which we naturally chose to take as a compliment). Coventry was a painter of abstract expressionist works 30 years ago before becoming well known for her writing and photography before giving up the conceptual school for a return to canvas. The last thing we saw of hers was a drawing with text called This Shift of Desire where the word ‘shift’ was scribbled over with the word ‘drift’ in heavy pencil work. Got it?

There’s nothing much to say about Hover except it’s a lovely painting, beautifully finished and knowing a little bit about Coventry, most likely underscored by some heavy theoretical discourse.

We are always impressed with artists who persist in making abstract work. It’s heroic in the best way, since so very few people buy it and it strikes us as amazing that artists are still even doing it, let alone taking it up. Sure, there are plenty of painters doing ‘conceptual’ pictures but they are hard to recognise lined up next to the stuff you can buy in homeware store and the decorative end of town is just… decorative.

Thus we were surprised to find that Anna Lisa Buckland had invited us to see a show of her abstract canvases on show at Francis Baker-Smith. Where? That’s Gallery Wren to you and me (or Rubyare if you’re nostalgic). The duo behind Wren joined forces with a new crew and decided that a name change was in order. Don’t these people know anything about branding for God's sake? Here’s a gallery that’s still open after all these years (it must be going on for four years now) and they decide to change the name – it confuses the punters and erases the good will the gallery built up. And to make matters worse, they’ve decided to cut the front gallery into two, making three tiny rooms with low ceilings and fluro lights, just like our father’s garage except without the antique TVs and bottles of red wine.

Paul McNeil was in the front room at the back and had stuck up a whole lot of drawings he had done on a cartridge pad. They looked nice, in red and black, layered and cartoonish, but we’ve seen this type of thing done a million times before and this was nothing special.

Meaghan Bennett and Kate Mulheron, meanwhile, had the other front room and they had done a floor to ceiling wallpaper style installation of some abstract colour photocopies. As we stood there looking at the work, two women were sitting and laughing, eating chips and gossiping. One said “This book goes with the show!” as she gestured to a spiral bound book on a bench. We checked out the book called Imitated and saw that Bennett and Mulheron had a complicated project going on.

Basically, they take digital photos of graffiti strewn walls and doors, door knobs, park benches, road signs etc, then make colour prints of the graffiti at a slightly less-than-life-size scale and then take photos of the prints in situ, which were then printed again and put in the book. Along with these images were shots of the artists wearing t-shirts with iron on transfers of the graffiti standing in front of the graffiti, like a slightly down rent Target catalogue.

It was while looking at the photos that we realised that the women in the gallery were in fact Bennett and Mulheron and they were discussing the trouble with men they’d been having. “I told him,” said the dark haired one to the blonde haired one, “that he was arrogant, obnoxious and distant!” Yeah!

We walked into the tiny back room to see Buckland’s paintings, not knowing what to expect. Apparently Buckland is related to the late Paul Partos so we weren’t sure what we were going to see. In the gallery were 11 canvases, in two groups of four and three separately hung and we were immediately struck by how finished they were. It’s true, one had slightly bodgy stretching and you couldn’t get back far enough to look at them properly, but their colours – predominantly shades of green – looked like a camouflage pattern and were very evenly painted with subtle underpainting. We were also intrigued by the way the paintings were hung in groups that could easily have been taken for one single work, implying in turn an interconnection between them, cells of a potentially infinitely expanding pattern without limit or edge.

We were on the verge of some massive conceptual breakthrough about abstract painting when the spell was broken by the sounds of vintage REM wafting through the gallery and the laughter of Bennett and Mulheron.

After saying farewell, we walked down the street and could smell the air getting colder, the light getting dimmer and we knew we were heading for magic hour. We passed a block where a beautiful girl once lived - and who we kissed and then never saw again - but now it’s just a massive building site.

“What can [the work of Rover Thomas] be compared to? A list of my favourite painters would include Terry Winter, Brice Marden, John Olsen, Mark Rothko, Susan Rothenberg, Sean Scully, Therese Oulton, and Ian Fairweather. I list those artists (out of many possible hundreds) because I see unconscious resonances of their work in the canvases of Rover Thomas…”

Peter Hill getting confused – does he mean the unconscious influences in the way he sees the work of Rover Thomas or influences on the work of Rover Thomas? Spectrum, Saturday, April 3-4

“Gallery crawls have always attracted Victoria Hynes more than pub crawls. Not surprising then that she worked as a gallery curator and manager before becoming an arts journalist. Hynes, who recommends the best exhibitions in Box Office, has been a contributor to The Sydney Morning Herald since 1999 and is deputy editor of Australian Art Reviewmagazine. She has deep respect for raw artistic talent and admits there is probably a frustrated artist in her trying to get out. "Unfortunately, though, without the skills to back it up you usually end up teaching or writing about art instead."

Good to see her career as an art writer has been a success then… The (Sydney) Magazine, page 14, Issue 12, 2004.

“A large number of people would rather eat their left arm than set foot in an art gallery, simply because they expect to be treated – and occasionally they are – with withering disdain by some clad in black, face furniture wearing assistant. I entirely sympathise. I have the same dread of entering a betting shop.”

The one armed art consultant Michael Reid quoted in Judgment Daze, Australian Art Collector, April-June 2004 issue.

“Another friend was [Betty] Churcher, whom [Ray] Hughes met while attending drawing and painting classes held by her husband Roy. ‘I was mediocre,’ says Hughes, ‘and I didn't want to bring any more bad art into the world. I only wish some of the people coming in here showing me their mediocre work felt the same way as I did.’"

A policy of complete and total honesty from Ray Hughes in Wheeler Dealer, The (Sydney) Magazine, page 40, Issue 12, 2004.

Art magazine faces nudity ban in US

An Adelaide-based art magazine, Artlink is facing a ban in the United States over its cover.

The publishers have been told by the American distributors that their March issue, Adelaide And Beyond, will not be sold in Barnes and Noble stores unless it is in opaque bags because the cover depicts a "completely nude male". Artlink manager Tory Shepherd says she is disappointed because it is actually a sculpture by Adelaide artist Christian Burford (sic).

"It's a fibreglass sculpture of a young man. It's completely not sexual in any way," she said. "It's not salacious or pornographic, it's art. It's actually got the same marble sheen on it as the statue of David, so we're considering on our next issue of putting a photo of Michaelangelo's David on the front."

Yes, but he does have an enormous cock… ABC News Online