the art life

What a big week it is. Tracey Moffatt is opening an exciting new show at Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery, Shaun Gladwell is in another big exciting show at The Australian Centre for Photography celebrating 20 years of art at the gallery and there’s just a few shopping days left before another Biennale of Sydney fades into memory… But what are we worrying about? Brett Whiteley. We know it’s hopeless but we’re finding this late winter melancholy hard to shake, and we think it has something to do with the visit we paid to the Brett Whiteley Studio on the weekend.

We had vowed we would never go back to the BWS, but the trustees have just fixed the roof and they decided to celebrate the fact by opening the doors to all comers. We had been to the BWS once before, late last year, and it had been a sobering experience. We went to have a look at the Brett Whiteley Traveling Art Scholarship show after we had seen a jolly little piece on the exhibition of finalists on Ovation. We thought, hey, Brett Whiteley, paintings, let’s get down there! But what a disappointment. If you’ve ever wondered where all those people who graduated from Julian Ashton Art School go to, this is the answer; they’re all entering their chocolate box paintings into the BWTAS and hoping to be sent away overseas where they may sketch the streets of Paris, just like Brett did.

The BWTAS exhibition was really crummy but that wasn’t the reason we had made our vow. What had troubled us was the deep and inescapable sense of sadness you feel inside the studio. Perhaps it was the ignominious junkie’s death, maybe it was the work that was in a serious state of decline in the last decade of his life, we’re not sure, but there is something unsettling in the way the BWS is part gallery and part shrine to the memory of man who was once vital, and then faded away.

A few weeks ago at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, in a show called Conversations put together from the gallery’s permanent collection, we saw a Whiteley painting called The American Dream painted between 1968 and 1969 in New York, New York, USA. On the AGWA’s web site the painting is described this way:

“The imagery of the painting moves from a calm landscape on the left-hand side, reminiscent of the Australian interior, through an extraordinary range of images of terror and decadence, frightening electrical storms and vivid mushroom clouds, until it returns to a tranquil, Eden-like landscape again in the right-hand panels. Of the painting Whiteley himself said: ‘This painting is a record of a struggle and my resolve; it is an admission of failure.’”

If Whiteley could have stuck a kitchen sink to the painting – and it felt right – he would have done it. Looking at the massive red painting with its mushroom cloud, stuck on pictures of Bob Dylan, shark’s jaw, old vacuum tubes and a bird and bird’s nest at one end, we began to feel freaked out, the way people in the 1960s used to get “freaked out”. It was a bad trip, man. We had this thought years ago that Whiteley was way better at drawing than he ever was at painting, and looking at the vast dead areas of The American Dream, it’s horrible worked up surfaces and the artist’s love of wishy-washy colours (pale blue, insipid yellows, fading whites), this thought came back to us stronger than ever.

Which, in a circuitous route, brought us back to the BWS to see if we could find something to change that view. So many people have so much invested in Whiteley that we just kept thinking that there must be more to his work than that.

Alchemy (1972-73) is a companion piece to The American Dream and is a much more successful picture. It too is a sprawling psychic self portrait over 18 panels and has numerous massive details (big arse, the word IT, gold leaf, exclamation points) and tiny details (words, photos, drawings) mixed together. It seems to flow a lot better than The American Dream too, but we cannot, however, escape the thought that the work is also horribly dated. Anyone who is sentimental for the mythic past of the 1960s should take a look at this picture to be reminded of the reality – although it was painted in the early 1970s, its hippy concepts are so overwhelming it’s hard to take it seriously.

Even in smaller paintings at the BWS, like the fun pictures Willy Wag Tail from 1988 and Willy wag tail and passion fruit from 1987, there’s a serious sense in the pictures of unbalance. The works are as bold but there’s an uncertainty about them that is worrying. The works that he did in tribute to Van Gogh, ranging from the painting Night Cafe to the ill-advised early 80s series of works with match sticks and sculptures were a terrible misjudgment.

Searching for drawings we found a work from 1965 called Swinging Mickey that is a pretty simple but effective work and an indication that with a pen – even when his references were pretty naff and when he was just getting started – he knew what he was doing. Nuclear Vision of Plain de la Crau (Provence landscape) from 1982, a mixed media work from the 1982 period, and Starry Night, ink on plywood from 1982-83, are exceptions to the general awfulness of the Van Gogh pictures with their startling black and white and precise lines and gestural control.

Contemplating the Self Portrait in the Studio,we felt very uncertain. This is meant to be among the best Whiteley canvases, but the use of the blue, the dodgy references to Van Gogh and Picasso and the nasty ass self portrait – we just kept thinking, this isn’t right. And what can you possibly say about Art, Life and The Other Thing from 1978? Screaming baboon (Frances Bacon reference), syringe stuck on, and that “naughty little boy” look on Whiteley’s face… Ugh.

Upstairs we looked through the Whiteley detritus – his hat collection, his sunglasses lined up next to the CD player, his collection of post cards and clippings stuck to the doors – Bacon in his studio, Bob Dylan about five times, Whiteley with Malcom McLaren – the Heroin Clock sculpture and a telephone on which one can hear two dead men talking, Andrew Olley interviewing Whiteley. Unfortunately the conversation is one way only, so you can’t ask them how the weather is on the other side. Flipping through the photocopied note books on the coffee table we found:

“Absolutely not easier after 10 years of drawing and painting every day, the commencement of another piece or another try at an existing piece is the same unknown blank struggle.”

Eventually the sadness was too much to take and we vowed we would never again visit the Brett Whiteley Studio.

About six months ago, perhaps longer, we were forwarded an email that had been written by the artist Mathieu Gallois and which had been cc’d to perhaps 30 or 40 people in the Sydney art scene. The gist of the mail was that there wasn’t enough ‘good criticism’ in the Australian art world and someone should do something about it. Gallois talked of Art & Text and celebrated the fact that it was once contentious, opinionated and trend setting. Art & Text had a good ten years at the top of its game but the magazine didn’t last long after it left Australia for the West Coast of the USA, where it went on to become over designed and irrelevant to Australian art. It eventually went out of business. Gallois wanted someone to buy the Art & Text masthead, relaunch it and everything would be wonderful. He’d been in ‘talks’ with ‘people’ at the Australia Council and apparently their response had been ‘supportive’.

The purpose of Gallois’s email was unclear. What did he want the recipients of the email to do? Put up the money for an already-failed business venture? Lobby the Visual Arts and Crafts Board to support yet another magazine? We didn’t keep the email and we’ve regretted it ever since; it was as pure an act of art world whinging as you are ever likely to find – please, someone must do something! PLEASE!

We were intrigued when we heard that there was going to be a talk convened by Gallois at the Museum of Contemporary Arts’ Discussion Island nights where notables in the world of visual arts publishing would get together and discuss just what is wrong with art criticism. The guests were advertised as Robyn McKenzie, former editor of Like, Art Magazine, Alan Cruikshank, editor of Broadsheet in Adelaide, Lisa Kelly, artist, and Anna Waldman from the VACB. The chair of the event would be Blair French, associate director of the Performance Space.

The first shock discovery we made at Discussion Island at the MCA was that Blair French is a man. Perhaps we had him confused with Linda Blair (and the way her head could turn a full 360 degrees) but we had always thought that he was a she. Silly us. (Also, in the audience, were Julie Brown-Rrap (that’s Mike Parr’s sister) looking like a finely weathered tree, Russell Storer fit and well after his holiday and we saw a person who had an actual smiley-face for a face.)

The feeling in the art world in general is that ‘something’ is ‘wrong’ with art criticism, that there aren’t enough good magazines, that there isn’t enough ‘diversity’ in opinions, that artists work is being lost to the ages without proper documentation, that the glossy art magazines are too superficial and that criticism is either too flippant and aimed at lifestyle readers or too hagiographic and advertorial. Oh, and writers aren’t paid enough and young graduates aren’t given a chance to show what they can do. Despite the plethora of funded and independent magazines ranging from Eyeline, Art Monthly, Object, Photophile, State of The Arts, Art Monthly, Broadsheet, Real Time, Metro Screen to glossies such as Australian Art Collector, Art & Australia, Monument and Oxygen, it’ still not enough. This is the general view and we have to admit we often feel that way ourselves. But the question is, why do we feel that way?

The topic for the MCA’s panel was about this “state of art criticism” - a somewhat vague proposition - that French narrowed down to: how do you characterize the state of critical writing on visual arts in Australia?

Robyn McKenzie spoke about her experiences with Like, Art Magazine and its by-accident birth and ultimate demise at the hands of the RMIT. When the architecture faculty asked themselves why they were funding an art magazine they couldn’t think of an answer. The funding was pulled just at the moment the magazine was attempting to reinvent itself as a more populist magazine covering different areas of art practice while dipping its collective toes into pop cultural material like movies, music and tongue-in-cheek top tens. McKenzie is a low key but opinionated speaker and her dry-as-dust delivery belied the fact that she was about the only person on Discussion Island who could talk about the market, the arts sector and the perils of publishing from a tertiary institution with any authority.

While discussing art writing from the position of both an artist, occasional writer and a self-described ‘avid reader’, Lisa Kelly talked about the general consensus that there is a lack of generous, thoughtful and intelligent criticism. Referring to James Elkins book Whatever happened to art criticism? Kelly claimed that she recognised his description of the problem with art writing internationally applying to Australia as well. Unlike her fellow panelists, Kelly, as a reader, had no vested interest in big upping her own career or publications – although she very modestly acknowledging her own efforts – and spoke of the emergence of semi-anonymous publications, both in print and on the web:

“I suppose the most the most obvious example of this is The Art Life, which is quite thrilling in it’s freedom of voice, a total breath of fresh air in its informality and intelligence of local art. Judging by the comments The Art Life receives there’s a real hunger for this kind of fearless criticism. [The blog] uses humour very heavily and effectively. But that this kind of writing is contingent on an anonymous position which is, I think, of some concern. They do joke about committing semi-anonymous career suicide to take this position. It comes back to that sense of creative freedom coming at professional expense. Still, as a reader I’m really excited at the emergence of these kinds of voices as a much needed compliment to more formal publications. Especially, the active role they are playing in criticising criticism itself. The Art Life is especially strident in that respect.”

The editor of Broadsheet, Alan Cruikshank started his allotment of time by declaring that he had little to say and that he warned Blair French in advance of thatfact. Then, on the plane from Adelaide to Sydney, he decided to put something down on paper. Perhaps if he’d just written “BOB” on a sick bag and left it in the toilets there might have been a bit of excitement, but instead Cruikshank was unprepared, had no special insights to offer, was dull and went on interminably. French, as the chair of the event, should have stepped in and stopped him but instead flattered and complimented Cruikshank and discussed how Broadsheet had allowed him [French] to be “cranky” in print! Well, whoopy-do!

The VACBs Anna Waldman was at the event as an official representative of the funding body and thus had very little to say except that, as far as she was concerned, the VACB was hitting all the performance measures it had set down for itself and she dutifully recited them. Waldman’s has a voice like a Viennese psychoanalyst and although she was... measured, her voice was hypnotic and soon we found ourselves drifting into a deep, deep sleep and thinking about how our fathers wouldn’t take us to the zoo when we were children…

One aspect of this 'issue' that was never seriously discussed in the entire 2 hours of Discussion Island was the fact that part of the ‘problem’ with art criticism in Australia is that it is generally very dull. Much of it is well meaning and displays a high level of education and knowledge, but very little of it is well written. As much as we dislike the opinions of John McDonald, we agree with the assertion that he can write. The same goes for Peter Timms (who was mocked by Cruikshank but also who admitted he hadn’t actually read Timms book but he had a “sense” of it), Benjamin Gennochio, Sebastian Smee, Peter Hill and even that poor old duffer Giles Auty. There aren’t many names you can put up from the non-conservative side of art writing – we think of Ted Colless and Rex Butler, Daniel Palmer can write, so can that nice young fellow from ACCA, Stuart Koop.

People who write for the art magazines are in large part made up of academics and curators who write about artists because they have a professional interest in them. Although they are paid small amounts compared to their day jobs, it’s a nice little value add to their careers and CVs. The other dominant strain of arts writing is a mixture of pseudo-academic and lifestyle journalism written by people who, like their counterparts in museums and universities, don’t need the money. Only about one quarter of all art writing is actually written by people who actually need to make a living from their journalism. As Cruikshank admitted, his magazine is paying 1993 Australia Council rates of about $300 a feature. For that kind of money, no wonder the pros stick to just a few magazines, leaving the rest to over-eager uni grads and academics.

Another major factor in this idea that there is something “wrong” with art criticism is that, despite the more than 30 magazines, countless catalogue essays and web sites, artists are still not happy. Gallois, sitting at the front of the audience, was asked by Blair French how he felt after everyone had spoken and he said two things: writers should be paid more and that there is a feeling that there is something wrong with art criticism in this country. We’re not sure if Gallois had been listening, but there are hundreds of opportunities for writers to write, and for readers to read. With no one actually reading all the magazines and literature on offer, the realisation begins to dawn that it's the art world that's the problem. On any objective level, the diversity and opportunity is there, but no matter what, people aren't happy.

We wonder if Gallois went home happy or sad? As a pitch for funding, perhaps to show Waldman how much interest there is in doing something about this terrible problem, Discussion Island was a damp squib. One question from the floor rambled on about how there needs to be some sort of central repository for all knowledge about art writing, you know, a place where people can go and find out everything that’s going on. Anna Waldman commented, yes, I feel that way every day and so do we. We want more of everything and we want it now, but unlike the Uni student who asked the question and then happily admitted she didn’t know anything, we know you just have to go out and create it. As Christopher Hanrahan said from the floor, if you don’t agree with something, pick up a pen. And there's always the web, anonymous or not.

Jane writes in with a request:

"I am a mature age fem Uni student[MLitt]/Writer/Poet seeking person/s to share rural acreage in central Queensland. Ph Jane 0749569141"

Then Heidi has a thought:

"Hi, I am a self taught oil artist and wanted to know if anyone knows how to go about having an at home exhibition. thanks Heidi"

Yes folks, these posts are from the National Association of the Visual Arts web site and it’s the place to go to meet like-minded practitioners, art workers and artists who want to know how to “go about” getting an exhibition at a commercial gallery. It’s a helpful community noticeboard for the arts so, instead of ads for lost dogs and lawn mowers for sale, people post requests, announcements and slices of their own home baked theoretical discourse. To wit, this extract from the mind of Jay Wissing:

21.5.04
"As pidgeons be to sculpture, critics, so be it to ARTISTS! Whatever the review? No-matter by who, tell them you're just getting started! If their reasoning, it seems, be wilder than all your dreams? Bare your arse! State your case!! Ask if they have a freeform handshake? Be political TO the cause, be polite & respect the laws. ART has a language, often HARd TO SPEAK. Not unlike a stutterer, finding his words to place, him, right beside the normal without serving his disgrace! So, to all you ART CRITICS, know words have I, to place you all, before your standing. (FReeForM on your face.) So, if you're arsked by any of your peers tell them straight, to alleviate their fears - THAT, they have no reason..."

That’s just a small slice of Jay’s thoughts and we urge all readers of The Art Life to take his words to heart.

In a similar vein of “freeform for your face”, we delve into The Art Life mail bag and find that Jacques Delaruelle has advised us (in a friendly spirit of give and take) that we should consider using a hammer when it comes to writing criticism:

“Nietzsche describes philosophy as the art of making nuances, yet he nevertheless recommends the use of the hammer to destroy consensual false evidences. I agree with your nuanced essayistic approach to contemporary art, but please do not give up the hammer! To write something of any worth about ‘art’, whatever the word still may mean, you need a sense of the enemy.”

Never fear Jacques, we live by the sword.

Some weeks ago we noted the amazing fact that Tara D’cruz Noble was a real person and not a fake, made-up name used by unscrupulous internet pirates to sell us cheap Rx and land in Florida. Not long after, Ms D’cruz Noble wrote to us:

"Just had a read of your Not Fake, Actually Real piece and ohhh did it make me giggle! In fact i'm finding it hard to write now. Ok, just wanted to say thanks for the write up and wondered who in fact did the writing? And did you really think my name is fake? Maybe lots of people think that when I email them... oo-er."

We do the writing and let’s not forget that!

Finally, Silas Hassan of Nigeria writes to us with urgent news of a money making offer too good to be true:

"I am sorry for using this means to contact you but my fax machine has broken down. First I must solicit strictness in this project and your confidentiality. I am Silas Hassan, Vice president of Vaswani Group which include (Honda place, Hyundai Nigeria, Skoda World, Stallion Group and the Volkswagen Centere.t.c. which are all worth $2billion. By now I confirm you would have read about the deportation of the vaswani brothers out of Nigeria on a trumped up allegation of sharp practices. On their behalf, I deny all allegations brought forward…"

Every time we think about going to Danks Street, we imagine, “What a good idea, we can check out a whole lot of galleries at once, see everything that’s going on. It’s like the Supacenta of art!”

The reality of Danks Street, however, is a bit too much like the Supacenta after all –once you’ve been to Freedom and Ikea and looked in Harvey Norman, there’s very little to do except eat a $1.50 Wendy’s hotdog (with mustard) while riding the escalators and listening to the Muzak.

Danks Street has its coffee shop and its long hallway with doors to galleries to either side, and the depression sets in quickly once you realise that there are only a couple of galleries worth looking at. Doors are locked and galleries are closed even if the sign on the door says they should be open. We’re always too guilty to go into Utopia Gallery and the hire space that interstate commercial galleries use to have shows feels wrong – we don’t know why – it’s just an emotional thing we can’t explain. It’s a shame that Danks Street isn’t bigger – perhaps another storey with more commercial galleries, artist run spaces, a few restaurants, a bookshop, perhaps some discount DVDs and rugs, a room where children can play among multicoloured balls… That would make us happy, we just know it.

The good thing about the Danks Street complex, as some call it, is that for a reviewer you can build up an entire week’s material in one hit and still be home in time for brunch. It’s a soft option, we know, but we’re soft and uncritical when it comes to passive spoon feeding type experiences and besides, it’s a whole lot of art in one place.

One of the galleries we look at through the window but don’t often go into is Conny Dietzschold Gallery and its next door space, Multiple Box. We don’t know how they do it in Germany, but all we can say is that it must be a hell of a place to dust.

The main gallery, the Conny Dietzschold bit, is like half a gallery in the front, with the second part at the back divided by a wall and featuring some other artists work. There’s a doorway in the middle of the room and when you go right, you’re in Multiple Box, which is bursting with trestle tables loaded up with books and objects d’ art, every bit of wall space covered with framed art, plinths here and there with video monitors playing weird Euro performance art, more chairs and tables groaning under the weight of various sculptures, books, magazines, artists records, CDs and more, all arranged just so. It makes for great browsing, a bit reminiscent of the bookshop at the Pompidou, and you could spend hours in there looking at things.

The problem with the gallery, as a gallery, is that it’s very hard to see the art – it’s a visual jumble of things all piled up on top of one another and if you’re trying to concentrate on something, it’s bloody hard. Sure, there is a framed print of Peter Davies’ The Fun One Hundred for $4,000, but we came here to look at Lisa Jones’ Memories of Sculpture, (until August 18).

Putting aside our reservations about any show or work of art that uses “memory” in its title, and putting aside the terrible difficulty of looking at the work in the crammed space, this is an excellent show. The works are in two series – rubber and felt objects on the wall and felt objects on the floor and facing wall. Jones’s memory seems to be of objects that look a lot like lungs, or bunches of grapes – weird, febrile things that hang from a rusted pipe on the wall. You can imagine someone on the other side of the wall breathing through the pipe, or of scrofulous air sacks straining with the effort of a terrible cough. There’s a strong surrealist quality to the works, summoning up the ghost of Man Ray on a bender. Our eyes watered as we looked and found ourselves were simultaneously repulsed and attracted. The felt objects, two pieces on the floor and the facing wall, were more soothing and fun – you just wanted to run your fingers across the surface and admire their tactile qualities.

The door to Multiple Box swings both ways and we found ourselves inside Gallery Barry Keldoulis with Barry Keldoulis right there, walking around, smiling, tidying up glasses from the night before, saying brightly “Hi, I’m right here – if you need me!”

Yes, we said, thank you, and continued to admire the handsome works of Sarah Smuts-Kennedy who wins the award for the best artist’s name we’ve heard in ages. It rolls around on the tongue and is just begging o be used as in conversation, as in, ‘that couch has been Smuts-Kennedy'd!’ or, ‘Hi, I’m just going to Smuts-Kennedy these glasses and I’ll be right with you!’

Smuts-Kennedy has made some rather beautiful photographic works in her show called Ascension. A collection of C-type prints on metallic paper, mounted behind glistening sheets of acrylic, you’d be hard pressed to find works with as much elusive appeal anywhere right now. The works are abstract lines of colour on inky blue and black backdrops, vague and indistinct perspectives that may or may not be clouds, rolling surf or wave lines digitally composited together on large sheets of paper. The works are blank enough to pass for fashionable minimalism but have enough to keep your eye going for some time as you try to decipher what you are looking at.

The Gallery Barry Keldoulis is set out like a maze for this show, and like the little mice we are, we scurried around looking at the works, happy that we had found our conceptual cheese.

Going into the Brenda May Gallery nearly always feels like an obligation. Until a few years ago, Brenda May Gallery (formerly known as Access Contemporary Art Gallery) was housed in an architect-designed concrete battleship in Surry Hills. It was a serious place for serious artists and you felt special when you went in there. The next thing we knew, May had shut up shop and considered her options for awhile before reopening in Dank Street as BMG. Now, when we go to the gallery, it’s a lot like going to visit friends who were once rich but are now living in much reduced circumstances.

But given enough time, Brenda May Gallery may expand back to its original size and take over all of Danks Street as we discovered, since our last visit, that the gallery has expanded into a new space and can host two shows at the same time. The show that caught our eyes was Shadows Under The Stairs by Sybil Curtis and is remarkable for two reasons – one reason is that it’s a show of oil paintings on canvas and that’s pretty rare these days, and the other reason is that Curtis’s paintings remind us a lot of Jeffrey Smart – another astoundingly unique factor.

The pictures are mostly industrial landscapes like gas works or junk yards and rubbish tips. Despite the incredible demands on technique by choosing such minutely detailed landscapes, we couldn’t fault the execution of Curtis’s paintings. Giles Auty once remarked that Jeffery Smart wasn’t all that great a painter because his skies looked like flat areas of paint, an anti-illusionistic faux pas that worked against the De Chirico-inspired landscapes. As much as we hated to admit it, Auty was right. Curtis has avoided this, although the colours seem to go a bit flat as well at times – with an odd suggestion of John Brack in the choice of colours – but that’s hardly the point. The surprise in these works is the choice of image, angle and juxtaposition. We acknowledge that that is what painting is supposed to do, but you hardly ever see it these days.

Speaking of not seeing things, we missed James Guppy’s last show at Brenda May but happily a selection of works were hanging on the sliding wire frame in the gallery that doubles as moving stock room. How wonderful it was to see Guppy’s pornographic image boxes, wooden constructions with beveled mirrors on the fronts and side so you really have to make the effort to see what is going on inside. Guppy is one of the country’s only decent Surrealist-inspired artists working and what a joy it was to see a selection of images from a truly warped mind. We imagine you could make a truly amazing show out of works by Guppy, McLean Edwards, Ashley Hempsall and Lucinda Chambers. But you’d have to serve devils on horseback and a really heavy cabernet sauvignon, of course. But that’s just an idea.

On the way out of Danks Street and really needing a coffee, we stopped in at Stills South to check out their show. Featuring some older works by Trent Park and Narelle Autio and a piece by Anna Noble, the gallery is basically a stock room where Stills gets out some great stuff for the curious to check out. Luckily, this is worth looking at.

Across the hall is Gow Langsford Gallery, the Kiwi gallery originally from Auckland and who have staked a claim in the good soil of Redfern. Featuring a series of works by Xin Dangwen - who is featured in the Sydney Biennale with works from the same series – they are showing the entire dis + dup photographic series. The works are large scale photographs of compressed plastics, bits of computers and wires, dolls heads, dolls dressed as bears and toy guns from two series of works called disCONNEXION and Duplication.

Although we are starting to feel a little worn out by large scale photography – a sort of phonotony (photo monotony) is setting in. Everywhere artists are making lovely pictures with cameras and when they sit alongside other lovely images made from cameras (ads, movies, etc) we can feel our brains starting to go fzzzzzzzz. But there is more than enough in Xin Dangwen’s work to keep you going, pretty colours, interesting context:

“The disCONNEXION series was taken during Xing’s frequent travels to China’s Guangdong Province. Along the coast, more than 100,000 people and migrant workers make their living by recycling piles of computer and electronic trash, operating in rough environments and social conditions. This huge amount of e-trash is shipped from industrialised countries - Japan, South Korea and mostly from the United States, and dumped here. This trade is an economic boom to the province, but because of mercury in the machinery there are major ecological and biological side affects. The artist has written – ‘These machines (computers) become deeply rooted in our daily activities, replacing the old ways of doing things. Being confronted with vast piles of dead and deconstructed machines, the overwhelming number of cords, wires, chips and parts, with the clear indication of American company names, mode numbers and even individual employees, I felt shocked.’”

One of the problems with art works like these is that although they have a social purpose, they are also immensely attractive. The qualities of colour and composition – not to mention the way in which the works are presented in the pristine gallery space – seems to say, ‘you can have a social conscience if you buy this work, but it isn’t ugly’. Thinking back to our indoctrination into Marxist art theory in high school by being made to watch John Berger’s Ways Of Seeing, this feels somehow wrong. Things that are bad shouldn’t look nice, should they? OK, that’s the way the world is, so we can feel a lot better about desiring the art object. Interestingly, the Duplication series were shot in toy factories and Xing said of the production:

“…during the shooting [of the series], I observed the entire production process and was amazed at how the designs made for the market, match desires of people in every corner of the world. The toys are assembled with each part representing a ‘universal’ beauty that parallels the ways in which we strive for beauty in our own lives…”

Speaking of high school, as we were above, one of the threats the teachers used to use against us was that we’d be sent to Clown School if we misbehaved. But we wanted to go to Clown School – it was where all the kids had fun, dressing up in floppy shoes with makeup and all that, mucking about with rubber chickens and bad drama “trust” exercises where you’d fall over and hope the other kids would catch you.

That was before we got to know about things like (cue ominous music) “the other” and “abjection”. Suddenly funny clowns were creepy symbols of degraded humanity that are OK to laugh at, and the more we think of clowns, the more creeped out we get. It’s easy to forget that some people have good memories of clowns and circuses because it seems so foreign to us. A grown man driving a little car? Shudder.

Your reaction to Sophie Coombs’ show at Yuill/Crowley until August 7 will be entirely based on your feelings about clowns, pro or con. Called Clowns, it features clowns, real and imaginary, metaphorical clowns and general clown symbology, an examination of clowning, red noses, floppy shoes and seltzer sprays. In short, Coombs has been to Clown University where she majored in Clown Studies.

We were told that Coombs has fond memories of clowns, although the show is decidedly neutral. A work like Gold Bohemia – a collection of beer, wine and whisky bottles of various sizes crowded into a corner of the gallery - works on multiple levels. There’s the pun of the title (a brand of beer) referring to the home of beer (the Czech Republic) which is also home to famous circus troupes. We have known a few Czech people over the years and it’s fair to say they were piss heads. Is this work talking about the famous image of the clown as alcoholic (see the great work on this theme, Shakes The Clown ‘the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies!’) or is it reference to the origin of absurdist theatre?

Then there are works which expand the clown theme into other realms. There is a Homer Simpson doll that has been chewed by a dog and buried, then exhumed by the artist and put in a box and called Dog’s Breakfast. A photograph of a bloke next to a barbeque is called Bangers & Hash and he's wearing a goofy apron that’s casual looking but also washed out, the barbeque apparently located somewhere on waste ground. Then there are pictures of European clowns crudely photomontaged over a shot of Australian bush land and in the middle of the gallery is an ornate swing with a mask one might see worn to a masque ball or perhaps on an extra in Eyes Wide Shut.

Coombs has also constructed an array of collages, pictures torn from magazines ranging from acrobats and jugglers, rope acts to circuses and the Pink Panther stuck to bits of plywood and timber. Oh, and there’s a photo of a zebra painted on a wall.

The unaccountable thing about this varied collection of objects – beer bottles to photographs – is that it all adds up to a narrative about how far these images go through western society. As much as we hate to think about clowns, as soon as someone points them out to you they are absolutely everywhere – on greeting cards, on posters, bad paintings, t-shirts, in movies – they are the marginalised under class that haunt us. Perhaps Coombs thinks this is a good thing to point this out, we’re not sure, and the aesthetic of the works is rough and ready, fine edges are eschewed in favour of a frayed crumple, so you think maybe she’s saying it isn’t a good thing. We had to fight back a real sense of unease in Clowns and even if we’re not one hundred percent sure what the hell the show is all about, we like it.

You remember a few weeks ago we mentioned the group of artists who were getting together to demand a standard rate of pay for artists work exhibited in publicly funded galleries? Well, they have a name now and they’re called the Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group and they’re taking this fight all the way to the top.

Under the pithy slogan SAY NO TO NOTHING(a negation of negation that leads to the brave acceptance of nothingness) the group have invited the newly appointed Minster for Communications, Information and Technology and the Arts Helen Coonan along with Kate Lundy,the Shadow Minister for The Arts and representatives from the Australian Democrats and The Greens to speak at a special gathering at the Australia Council foyer meeting room next Monday, July 26 at 5.00pm. Hear what they have to say, demand money and perhaps ask Helen Coonan if you can have some Arts Ministry letterhead to get some discount art supplies…

There was a time when The Good Weekend was the epitome of everything that is wrong with Fairfax – elitist, facile and shallow – but along came The Sydney Magazine and changed all that: just when you thought the bar couldn’t go any lower,jobbing journalists are lining up like drunken limbo dancers to get their by-lines into a publication that one reader described to us as “utter brain poison”. The Sydney Magazine makes the Good Weekend look like respectable, old school, quality journalism - even if we still can’t quite get our heads around the cognitive disjunction of having photos of dead people in Iraq (for instance) in a magazine called The Good Weekend…

Speaking of which, you may have caught the Two of Us recently that featured Melbourne gallerist Anna Schwartz and her daughter Zahava Elenberg talking about their relationship. Schwartz is well known in art circles as the proprietor of a gallery that has a lot of high profile Australian artists that she shares with Roslyn Oxley.

Anyway, there are two extracts from the GW piece you should have caught. The first was the intro to Elenberg’s ramble about her mother:

“[Schwartz’s] daughter Zahava Elenberg, 31, heads an architectural firm with her husband, Callum Fraser, plus a furnishing business and a property development company. She is expecting her second child and is Australia’s Young Business Woman of the Year...

Zahava: I’m an only child, so a lot has been invested in me. I grew up in a very creative household, and I’m not talking about your average wooly jumper, arts-and-crafts, touchy-feely kind of creativity. Dad [sculptor Jules Elenberg] was an artist and best friends with Brett Whiteley, so we always had interesting people around us. I was incorporated into their life, this big world, and not into the realm of children.”

It’s good to see that the investment in Zahava is paying off so nicely, what with all her accomplishments and her disdain for run-of-the-mill suburban creativity:

“Schwartz: The day [Zahava] moved out of home, when she was 21, I cried. I kept saying through my tears, ‘You’re not doing anything wrong, darling. It’s fine’, but I was totally bereft. She told me it would be better for us and she was right. When Lilith was born, she came back and lived with us, and now that she’s having another child we’ll be living together again, in adjacent penthouse apartments in a 28-storey building that Zahava and Callum designed, and that my husband [Morry Schwartz] built. It’s a wonderful arrangement, this penthouse village where we can have an extended family but also total privacy if that’s what we want.”

We read that and thought, how lovely, a family that builds together, stays together! Speaking of Morry, is there any truth to the persistent rumour that he’s bankrolling Ashley Crawford’s revival of Tension magazine? We count ourselves among those who want to see more art magazines on the newsstands and more pictures of Tim Storrier in a nice suit. Ah, memories.

We had never intended on buying or reading Peter Timm’s book What’s Wrong With Modern Art? We’d seen it in book shops, flicked through a few pages, had a laugh, then got on with our lives. A former art critic for The Age, former editor of Art Monthly Australia, former curator and former adviser to various marginal galleries and the author of books on gardening and ceramics, Timms is the Melbourne answer to Giles Auty – a paid up member of the Old Fogeys club. Timms believes in beauty and simplicity and classicism and why aren’t the kids reading Plato and Ruskin in art schools anymore?!! Standards are falling!! You know the drill – whatever is new and post modern he has to be against it. Who needs it?

Then we got a phone call at 8 am from an Art Life reader who had been up all night reading Timm’s book over and over and he was in a terrible state. His girlfriend had advised him to get on the phone to The Art Life Crisis Hotline where one of our operators was standing by to take his call. Calm down, we said, and yes we’ll read the book and get back to you. That was somewhat foolish as we had been on holidays and were heading back to Sydney when we saw the book at the airport bookshop and thought, we’ve got a few hours to kill, we’ll knock this sucker off over a few beers.

We started off by reading the book and turning down the corner of a page when we thought there was something we either disagreed with or had something to say about it. After about 30 minutes the first 50 pages were all turned down, we were on our sixth beer and the emergency handle on the door next to the seat was looking mighty tempting. We could just blow the hatch and take our chances...

As a book it is a mess – What Is Wrong With Contemporary Art? has no overall narrative shape, its arguments are vigorous but contradictory and the chapters follow a muddle-headed formula that starts with a statement then drifts off into increasingly irrelevant examples before fading away without a conclusion. There are factual errors all the way through,foot notes go AWOL for the first chapter and the book’s production is cheap and nasty as well. There are reproductions of artists work including pieces by Callum Morton and Patricia Piccinini that are grey and washed out and in the case of the Piccinini, badly pixilated as well.

Timm’s book sets up a series of arguments spread across its 184 pages complimented by studies of artists the author thinks are either good or bad. The arguments roughly go as follows:

Why New Media Rule is where Timms explains that new media forms like photography, installation, video art and the web rule the art world, having staged a palace coup against painting, drawing and sculpture. The reasons are many: there is an academy at work that is teaching this rubbish to our children who neither know nor understand classical aesthetics and are betraying the future of art by adhering to cultural studies (read post modernism) rather than to art historical texts by Plato, Ruskin and the rest. He also argues that new media is inherently bad because it is allegorical rather than metaphorical and therefore cannot exist without a framing text to explain what its all about.

The Wheels of Commerce argues next that the art market is conservative (demanding paintings and plenty of them) and therefore has a pernicious effect on true art that is naturally resistant to such pressures. Timms cites examples of where artists have resisted but notes cynically that it is a no-win situation and even if artists attempt to control their own work in a gallery or in the market, this is doomed and counterproductive.

Building A Notion, the third chapter, is a description of how art writing, the market, TV shows and magazines are the ones responsible for creating the framing justification for allegorical art that could not otherwise stand on its own. Funding bodies and universities also come in for a serve because one funds work that doesn’t deserve to exist while universities are just diploma factories where the unworthy teach the untalented and where neither students nor faculty know their own history.

Cultural traditions and personal desires is something about ceramics and we were struggling to keep our eyes open as we read on to…

What Can Art Do? is the final chapter where Timms compares a work by Patricia Piccinini to George Stubbs’s Horse Attacked By a Lion and brings the full weight of his art historical knowledge and critical talents to bear on an unlikely juxtaposition.

So there you have What Is Wrong With Contemporary Art? The unnerving thing about reading it is that in some respects we agreed with Timms. His description of the way Indigenous Art is held to a different measure of criticism than non-Indigenous art was pretty much spot on, and, in broader terms, his arguments about academic orthodoxies existing in universities and art schools were also right. But the odd thing is that he doesn’t successfully explain why anything is necessarily bad. As the back cover says “in this provocative book Peter Timms asks confronting questions” – but he satisfactorily answers none of them.

In Why New Media Rule Timms cannot bring himself to explain why a framing text for what he terms ‘allegorical art’ is a bad thing. Picking on some fairly silly new media art texts, Timms shows that new media writers like Adam Geczy don’t know anything much about painting but conversely fails to justify how or why a text is 'wrong' or how indeed the historical context of painting is any different to that of pop culture in general or new media in particular. Context is everything, Timms says, but apprently not when it comes to something you plug into a wall.

In The Wheels of Commerce, Timms wants to say that the market is bad and evil and is stopping artists from being truly creative. We agree with Timms that the market is conservative, but again why is that a bad thing? For an Old Fogey like Timms we would have thought the secondary market’s adherence to painting (and mostly figurative painting at that) would be the prefect refuge for the last of the real artists. Timms takes aim at the complicity of magazines and their advertisers but doesn’t satisfactorily explain how it could be any other way. Bizarrely, Timms cites some very odd examples of how commerce affects art – the closure of the Andreas Serrano show at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997 and a protest by artists over the (partial) sponsorship of an arts festival in Hobart by Forestry Tasmania in 2003. Although both events were victims of inappropriate advertising, were public relations disasters and travesties in their own right, they are hardly good examples of the way money distorts artistic integrity.

Timms’ book is full of contradictions – he repeatedly cites artists from the US and the UK as his examples while bashing local funding bodies for ill advised press releases and reports, as though, somehow, it all just goes together in the end - Damien Hirst and The Australia Council exist in the same universe.

Timms'critique of Callum Morton completely misses the point of the artist’s work - Timms wanders off on an analysis of Modernism and architecture after Robert Venturi but ignores narrative in Morton's work - and then gets all hung up on what Juliana Engberg wrote in an essay somewhere. For heaven’s sakes Pete, if you don’t agree, give us your interpretation instead. Actually, when he does offer an interpretation, likewhen he discusses the work of Gwyn Hanssen Piggot, the results are not much better than the writing he lambastes elsewhere.

In his comparison between Piccinini and Stubbs, he goes on for pages discussing art and nature, but ignores the simple theme of hubris as the constant between these historically removed art works. There are no mentions, interestingly, of Tracey Moffatt in the sections that deal with new media or Indigenous art, no mention of Ricky Swallow ehen it comes to discussions of artistic 'skill', there is no analysis of market forces in any detail and the specific magazines that deal with the market (Australian Art Collector and Australian Art Market Report) are not mentioned at all.

To make his toughest judgments, Timms follows a simple maxim: never let facts get in the way of a good argument. He wanders off the subject on tangents that seem only vaguely related to the topic and along the way makes some horrendous blunders. In his chapter on creating an aura of specialness around contemporary art (an aura that Timms naturally abhors) he has this to say about Adam Cullen’s art:

“One reason is that art - even, or especially, art that pretends not to be art - still holds out the promise of financial and career opportunities. It's all about status.

“The kid who spray paints graffiti onto railway viaducts can expect no recognition or financial reward, just a fine if he's caught. But when an artist such as Adam Cullen copies those designs onto canvas and hangs them - dripping with irony -on a gallery wall, they add another notch to his meticulously detailed CV as well as bringing in the cheques. Then, when one of Cullen's paintings pops up in an ABC television advertisement without his permission, Cullen rushes to the arts copyright agency, complaining that his work 'is art ... not a random image ... it's been cretinised into something that has nothing to do with the art's original conception, production and eventual context'.”

Timms is completely and utterly wrong when he says that Cullen copies his works from the imagery of unknown and uncredited graffiti artists. To our knowledge, Cullen has never used text from anywhere else but from inside his own fetid imagination. Timms might be excused for imagining that the text that Cullen had used his paintings of seven or eight years ago came from some unattributed source but the art work in question was Cullen’s portrait of David Wenham that won the Archibald Prize in 2000 – and there was no text in the work at all. The ABC had used an image of the painting in a promo for the station and Cullen rightly objected to his work appearing in another context without his permission. Even if the work had been an appropriated text or image, the artist could still claim that their own copyright had been violated and not a court in the land would deny them.

“There are endless other examples of artists who, while freely appropriating pop-culture imagery on the basis that art and mass marketing are all just part of the same game, retreat very quickly into the old fine-art rhetoric when they, in turn, are appropriated.”

That may be Peter, but you’d better find another example to back up this contentious claim.

Timms takes aim at the pitiful state of art criticism in the newspapers and on TV and we at The Art Life applaud his generally perceptive comments. Unfortunately, the author’s Old Fogeyisms get in the way when he reaches for examples. His condemnation of Matthew Collings is typical of Old Fogeys – but again Timms gets the basic facts wrong, and ladles on his own expectations above what is actually offered:

“These days, even the BBC opts for the fatuousness of Matthew Collings, whose series, This is Modern Art, shown here on the ABC a few years back, managed to fill six hours without ever delving much below the surface. In the hour-long program devoted to Beauty, for example, Collings gave no indication that he was aware of the vast literature that exists on this subject, from Plato to Wendy Steiner, making no attempt even to consider what beauty might be.”

The episode that Timms is referring to was called Lovely, Lovely where Collings compared the philosophy of Matisse to artists working today. Although we doubt Timms taped the show when it was screened or during its recent repeat, we suggest he goes to the library and checks out page 104 of the book version of This Is Modern Art and reads under the subtitle What Is It? where Collings attempts an admittedly light but nonetheless to-the-point definition of what the concept of ‘beauty’ means to us today. Although he does not mention Plato or Wendy Steiner – Timms preferred references – Collings does show his audience examples of work by Matisse, Picasso, Morris Lewis, Jules Olitski, Alex Katz, Elizabeth Payton, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns, Chris Ofili and Patrick Heron and although he doesn’t mention Plato, you get the general idea. While we mostly agree that art on TV in Australia is pretty shit, again Timm’s example is way off the mark in both substance and detail. And by the way, This Is Modern Art was on Channel 4, not the BBC.

One last example. Timms chapter on the warping of art culture by dreaded commerce is illustrated by some odd examples as we have mentioned – but none are odder than this example where he discusses the fact that artists and galleries promote their work in ads in magazines:

“The cover of the Autumn 2003 issue of Art and Australia […] featured a striking close-up of one of Dani Marti's woven constructions. His densely textured strands of clashing orange, pink and white synthetic fabrics certainly made the magazine stand out on the newsagent's shelves and induced me to purchase a copy. Inside, Victoria Hynes had contributed an eight-page feature on Marti which was an unashamedly puff-piece. 'Until recently unrepresented by a commercial gallery and still largely undiscovered by the wider public,' she wrote, 'the artist has nevertheless built up a strong following among architects, designers, institutional bodies and critics.' […] Prominently situated at the front of the magazine was a full-page advertisement for a Dani Marti exhibition at Gitte Weisse Gallery's Room 35, and another full-page advertisement reminding us that Dani Marti is represented by ARC-one at Span Galleries in Melbourne.”

“Now this confluence of cover, feature article and paid advertisements might, of course, be just a happy coincidence, but it's the sort of coincidence that occurs with alarming frequency in art journals, where editorial content often reads like extended promotion and serves to complement the advertising pages only too well.”

The interesting thing about this passage is that Timms does not appear to know much about the detail behind the example he cites. Room 35 is a hire space gallery which would have been rented out by the artist and the advert would have been paid for by Marti as well. The gallery that Marti subsequently joined was Sherman Galleries who, as we all know, has no connection to Gitte Weise Gallery whatseover. That Arc-One Gallery chose to advertise the fact that they represent Mart when the magazine was running a feature on him is so unremarkable one wonders why Timms chose to mention it. He also overlooks the fact that the article by Hynes was not in fact a critical essay or evaluation but more a lifestyle/art news article which simply stated the facts about Marti’s career. These are almost random facts that don't add up to a conspiracy...

“I don’t mean to suggest any conspiracy. The editors of Art & Australia […] and so on no doubt see it as their job to be supportive of artists and the commercial apparatus that sustains them. It’s just that their conception of what constitutes support is limited very narrowly to career advancement. To be fair, they are caught in a bind. Since their advertising revenue comes from almost exclusively from commercial galleries and art dealers, they cannot afford to bite the hand that feeds them.”

That sentiment in general would seem to be true but it is not the case in the example cited. Since Art & Australia regularly features critical articles, reviews and news items along with softer lifestyle articles as well as art market reports, it’s unfair to generalize that the magazine is beholden to its advertisers without giving a reasonable example. If the fact that the magazine is supported by advertising is some sort of indictment, then every single magazine in Australia and (very possibly the entire world) is guilty.

After reading What Is Wrong With Contemporary Art? we felt as though we had been beaten around the head or forced to listen to a tedious lecture for hours. As we arrived back in Sydney we decided we would never discuss Peter Timms again and drank to it - we needed something to forget and help us get on with our lives. Here's cheers.

Tomorrow night, Wednesday 14th of July, sees the launch of art consultant Michael Reid’s book How to Buy and Sell Art at the Queensland University of Technology Art Gallery.

Reid is a former Christie’s staffer who set up shop and hung out a shingle for passing trade in the secondary market. It’s a busy old life for Reid, making appearances on Radio National, writing books and magazine articles, running a boutique gallery in Darlinghurst, giving lectures and advising people on what to purchase while generally demystifying the whole secondary market voodoo that puts people off buying something nice for the lounge room.

Reid also writes a column for The Australian’s Wealth section where he dispenses invaluable advice for free. Any captains of industry paying attention will get some good tips, such as this from Reid’s Art Investor column from Wednesday July 7 under the title Master a good first impression:

French Impressionism makes a great investment.

“Internationally, European Impressionism is the most significant category for artworks sold at auction – a market worth at least $800 million in sales a year.

“It is a broad, well-established market, and strong prices indicate astute collectors are seeing real returns – both aesthetically and financially – on purchased artworks.”

You can tell Reid is a market professional – he has the language to prove it – astute buying prices market significant strong collectors financially – and we’re only two pars into the story. We were hoping we’d see the word ‘robust’ before too long but our concentration as diverted by the promise of a work of art that had an ‘aesthetic’ return. We think we know what he means – not only does it cost a lot, it looks nice too.

Further down the article, after Reid gives us a round up of sales figures gleaned from auction house web sites and clearance lists, we get to the nub of the column…

“Australian collectors are still somewhat of a rarity in [collecting European Impressionism], even though European Impressionist pictures are without doubt a good complement to any Australian art collection. They link so directly to works by our own artists — one only has to look to the Heidelberg school to see the French influence.

“Artworks by famous names can and should be collected, if only for the reason that the better-known artists hold their value easily.”

We did a double-take when we read that – we just assumed that since prices for works by big name impressionists like Pablo Picasso and Vincent Van Gogh were well over $100,000USD each we’d be looking at selling off the beach house to even get in to the bottom end of the market. Blue chip investments hold their value says Reid, and that may be true, but how many people have the ability to buy into a blue chip market, especially one with such high class cache as Impressionism? You’d be hard pressed to buy any decent Heidelberg school paintings in Australia let alone getting into the serious, cravat wearing Impressionist buyer’s scene. But maybe we don’t have to buy oil paintings - maybe works on paper are the way to go –it’s always the default recommendation by art consultants when people want in but can’t afford the best stuff:

“Works on paper are a great place to begin collecting, with pieces by famous names such as Edgar Degas and Paul Signac appearing regularly for $20,000.”

Reid also does his readers a service by providing handy links to Sotheby’s and Christie’s web sites and that’s another column for another week... Thank you and good night!

After following a link provided by Hot Buttered Death we found ourselves at one of the best web sites we’ve ever visited The 365 Day Project was a year-long musical adventure that ran during 2003. Each day the site owners would add a new MP3 to their collection of what they call “outsider music”. Part thrift store archaeologists, part musicologists, the 365 Day Project brought together the most incredible collection of weird music ever found on the web. Although the project is now over, the entire site, complete with downloadable MP3s, is now archived. Want to hear Frank Sinatra and Mohammed Ali join forces to fight tooth decay? Like to learn how to teach Bible lessons to the “retarded”? Want to hear the classic Orson Welles pea commercial outtakes? How about some high school band music, cartoon tributes or hear a love song written for a park ranger by Howard Hughes illegitimate daughter (who also happens to own the ring of Jesus Christ)? It’s all available here.


The MCA have just re-launched their web site after months of out of date pages and annoying pop up windows we couldn’t link to. With the work of creative design agency Deepend, the new pages are clean, easy to read and feature a crazy, crazy feature - along the top of each page is a row of little people in black sitting or standing. Behind them are people walking back and forth just like you were inside the MCA. Even more life-like is when, if you point at one of the little black figures, they raise a hand and tell you useful information. Pity they don’t come forward suddenly if you try to touch an art work or attempt to go out on the grass with a bottle of beer – then things turn ugly. And could someone please tell curator Vivienne Webb about The Art Lifefor her links box? The Bureau of Metrology? Conversion tables? Maybe it’s some sort of conceptual art thing? Still, a very nice job.


On a completely unrelated angle, there is Melange Magazine, an online journal of thoughts and feelings and diaries of Emily Ding and Krystin Low, two young women whose first issue is themed around Adolescence and Adulthood. At first we thought it was some sort of Malaysian or Singaporean government sponsored guide for responsible young adults, but it turns out to be the work of a couple of women both under 20 who are doing it all off their own bat. You can read articles of what it is like to be young, Asian and girlish and you might even contribute an article for issue 2, theme Of Memories and Men… Our favourite article is The Lamentations of A Teenage Homeowner by 17 year old Melissa Yow, who complains that now she owns her own apartment in Melbourne, she has to clean it as well. Life is just so unfair.