the art life

They do things differently in Norway. After two paintings by Edvard Munch were stolen by thieves in a ‘brazen’ walk in, walk out ‘raid’, it was revealed that neither The Scream nor Madonna was insured against theft. As Agence France Press explained:

“‘The pictures were insured in case of fire or water damage from water but not for theft or burglary,’ said John Oeyaas, of Oslo Forsikring. ‘They are irreplaceable… it makes no sense to insure them against theft.” Experts have said that The Scream is worth up to $100 million.”

The painting isn’t priceless, there’s another four versions of The Scream and they were only worried about flood and fire. The whole story was already odd, but became stranger still when it was revealed the extent of the ‘security’ at the Oslo museum, as reported by ABC America

“’What's strange is that in this museum, there weren't any means of protection for the paintings, no alarm bell,’ a French radio producer, Francois Castang, who saw the theft told France Inter radio. ‘The paintings were simply attached by wire to the walls,’ he said. ‘All you had to do is pull on the painting hard for the cord to break loose which is what I saw one of the thieves doing.’”

Although there was a photo taken of the two masked men carrying the paintings to a waiting car – and the vehicle was later found full of fire extinguisher foam to hide the evidence – Norwegian police have been caught flat footed.

Now, we don’t know much about police work, but we’ve seen a lot of movies, so we were thinking that detectives should be looking at someone with opportunity, motive and enough knowledge to pull off such a daring heist…Then we realised that someone already known to us has an unusual amount of knowledge about the whole affair. It turns out that Sebastian Smee knows details of the theft as he had been at the museum just a few weeks before. As Smee explained in his article from London’s The Telegraph:

“No museum can afford to turn itself into a fortified bunker, but the Munch Museum on the quiet outskirts of Oslo is an unusually open and informal home for one of the most valuable paintings in the world. Edvard Munch’s The Scream […] was hanging on a low, portable partition wall only two dozen paces from the museum entrance when I visited several weeks ago. It was surrounded by other masterpieces of the 1890s and 1900s. Even the most meticulously guarded museums are vulnerable to well-planned thefts… ”

Quiet part of town? Unusually open and informal? Only two dozen steps from the entrance? Sebastian Smee is currently assisting Interpol with their inquiries.

One of the perpetual stories of the Sydney media is the vexing question of why Ken Done doesn’t get respect. It’s a story that comes around every few years and it always posits the same argument – here’s a guy who has made millions of dollars from his designs, had his paintings hung in the Sulman and Wynne Prizes at the Art Gallery of NSW, has his own gallery and everybody knows who he is, yet he don’t get no respect.

This year the story is the handiwork of Richard Zachariah, a clotheshorse who has turned his journalistic talents to the art world, and his Done article Hue & Cry appeared in the August 28-29, Weekend Australian Magazine.

We have often felt that Done has been given too hard a time in the art world. We don’t care much for his paintings and his t-shirts and bedspreads and doona covers are a thing of the past, but compared to a lot of other bad artists with their own brand name galleries, he’s not that bad. He can at least put some colours together and his compositions are pleasing. We know that’s faint praise but compared to Charles Billich, Done is a freakin’ genius. But Done’s big problem is that he wants to be taken seriously by the mainstream art world, he wants to be included in proper art reference books and he wants to be recognised for his achievements.

You feel bad for Done because every time a newspaper or magazine runs a story on the guy, they have to drag out that quip by Brett Whiteley who said he’d rather “have methadone than Ken Done” and there it is again in the third paragraph of the Zachariah story. Done must spew every time he reads it – perhaps if Whiteley had opted for Ken Done over methadone he’d be alive today. The irony, however, is never remarked on and Done should feel rightly aggrieved.

Zachariah is someone with only a passing, social knowledge of the art world and doesn’t do himself or his subject many favours. When trying to calculate what Done’s work is ‘worth’ he turns to Denis Savill “an acknowledged super-dealer”:

“Ken is a marvelous marketer and most of his success has been overseas where 90 per cent of his output is sold. I know his Paris show two years ago was a sellout. However, because Dones rarely come up for auction here and Ken has his own private gallery, it’s hard to value them.”

Ouch.

Another of Done complaint is that he’s not in the Encylopaedia of Australian Art:

“And there's the question of Done's no-show in The Encyclopaedia of Australian Art. There are 3000 entries in this rather weighty tome, but you won't find Done. He's officially been left out because, he says, he hasn't won an art prize. Does any of this upset him? Damn right it does. "I was angry about not being included," admits Done, adding ruefully that "I thought I would have crept in at around number 2999. I am a f..king Australian artist, after all - probably the best known one around."

What Done doesn’t seem to understand, or cannot understand, is that the way to get into the big book of Australian art is to not care. Thirty years ago, Pro Hart was in exactly the same position as Done – his work was considered amateurish and embarrassing by the ‘trendies’ of the Australian art world. Did Hart care? Not a jot. He continued on with his work and a ‘fuck you’ attitude to the art world, set up his own gallery and sold a ton of work and his famous advert where he did a “painting” on carpet with tomato sauce and jelly helped along his popular image of an artist. Eventually, not even Hart’s far out, far right anti-world-Jewish-banking-conspiracy-theory politics could keep him from evetual recognition. Pro Hart is now respectable, his work is in all the collections and he's in the big book of art. Done just has to shut up and let the art world come around to the idea that being undemanding and decorative isn’t a bad thing per se, just stop bloody whinging about it.

Zacharia, meanwhile, tried to make the case that Ken Done is so well-known that his name has entered the vernacular:

“[…] notwithstanding the critics, Done has found a place in the nation's vernacular and psyche, if not its high culture. He is a recurring metaphor for the colour and movement of Australians at play. For example: "On a clear spring day the spectacle resembles a Ken Done painting" (Sarah Waters, The Sunday Telegraph); "Watching the sun strike Uluru ... and turn it into a Ken Done red" (Craig McGregor, The Sydney Morning Herald). The Age's Jonathon Green described the water off Cairns as "like swimming through Ken Done", while Susan Kurosawa, reviewing Doyle's Hotel at Sydney's Watsons Bay in The Australian, wrote: "It's as if I have drifted inside a Ken Done painting."

This is‘journalism by search engine’. Although Whiteley’s mean spirited remark has been the most retold Done quote, we have always preferred Anna Johnson’s quip “I can’t Ken Done it…” and hope that one day it’ll pass into wider usage.

Our very special report on the life and times of Peter Hill has only just been posted and already we’ve had complaints. It wasn’t so much what we had said, it was what we didn’t say (see Litmus Paper Glowing Red below). One of our most loyal readers JV Adams commented thus:

“How could a discussion of Peter's handiwork not include a high-five to the time he used an involved eggs-n'-bacon metaphor to explain the complexities of composition?”

Because there was so much we had to say but only so much space (and time) to dedicate to the talent of Mr. Hill we just left it out. But JV’s comments made us go back and have a look and, yes, we made an egregious error of omission and so we present for your reading pleasure the following excerpt from Better By Design, Spectrum, August 7:

“What is composition? If you are the sort of person who dishes out your bacon and eggs and fried bread with mushrooms every morning into a pleasing arrangement on the plate, you are probably a natural born designer; and the basis of all good design – whether in paintings, CD covers, repeat patterns in textiles or billboard advertising - is composition. The hand-maiden to composition is “framing” and just as your plate frames your breakfast every morning, so artists have used a variety of devices to separate their experiments in paint from the surrounding world…”

It’s so great to know that Peter Hill is Scottish – that whole fried bread thing would sound fabulous coming out of the mouth of someone who sounded like Begbie from Trainspotting:

“If ye ur tha sort ay bodie fa dishes it yer bacon an' eggs an' fried breed wi' mushrooms every morn intae a pleasin' arrangement oan tha plate, ye ur probably a natural born designer…”

Every time you walk into Art House Gallery, it’s hard not to wonder how young Joshua Yeldham feels about being represented by a gallery that’s run by his mum Di and his older sister Ali. Do you suppose they keep his fridge drawings in the stock room? ‘Look’, they might say holding up a drawing of a house with a big smiley sun in a bright blue sky, ‘He did this when he was 3 and we always knew he was an artist! Playing with his little paint set and smock in the backyard! He’s such a clever boy!”

Joshua Yeldham is Art House Gallery’s best artist and his slightly crazed version of Donald Friend meets Norman Lindsay via Brett Whiteley has been very popular with collectors who demand little from their art other than it looks nice and is big. Yeldham is fond of red, a popular colour for paintings, and also of brown, another colour that fits in nicely with interior design schemas.

Yeldham has branched out into new direction for his latest Art House show, Birds Nest Diaries, and there’s a story attached to it. About six years ago, Yeldham went for a drive in the country that took him right out to Cameron’s Crossing in north western NSW near the borders of NSW, Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory. His van broke down and he took refuge in an abandoned bus while he waited for his van to be fixed in town. The bus had a tin roof and, as the sun began to beat down and his brain began to boil, he was visited by the spirit of a local lady of the night. Somehow – and here the story gets a little vague as it was told to us by an eager gallery assistant – Yeldham got a hold of a photo of this lovely, curvaceous lady of the 1940s and a bunch of other pictures which he kept as souvenirs of his days trapped in the outback.

We’re not sure if Yeldham had a Wake In Fright style experience, but the results of his desert sojourn have created a body of work that isn’t half bad. In a series of works ranging from small to enormous, Yeldham took the photos, double exposed them with his own photos of Cameron’s Corner, blew them up, painted over them, and presented them for our consideration.

We were quite taken with the artist’s joie de vivre and his application of ink over the large photos of busty dames that added a weird element to the images that was quite unsettling. As to how or what these white markings and decorative flourishes are meant to add to the pictures, we don’t know, but we thought of them as being something like the a combination of the Norman Lindsay school of ‘derrrrty pictures’ crossed with doilies and cobwebs. When we were told that the naked lady photos had been distributed by the government in the 40s to soldiers on active service in WW2 we felt a little bit disturbed.

Saying something isn’t ‘half bad’ is just another way of saying something is 50% bad, 50% OK, but Yeldham’s work is starting from a place that is decorative with some embarrassingly bogus artist-in-the-desert-experience type expressionism laid over the top. Yeldham is also leading exponent of the school bad art known as “I thought it was art but I was wrong” where you look at something and think its alright, but after awhile your realise it isn’t. The big change in Birds Nest Diaries is that the badness takes awhile to wear off and even now, as we ponder the photos of these bashful ladies covered in white ink – and ignoring the possible Freudian implications – we think this isn’t half bad at all.

The first thing we saw when we walked into Brook Andrew’s show Photography and Neon at Stills Gallery was a work mounted at the top of the stairs. At the bottom was the White House and sailing way above it a satellite, both constructed with white neon tubing. In the middle of the gallery was another neon work called DNA, a large construction in multiple colours hanging in the middle of the space.

We were confused. The invitation to the show featured a photo of a kookaburra, possibly two kookaburras, mirror images, on a branch. The kookaburra is the largest and most wide spread of the kingfisher family of birds in Australia, and we were hoping – we don’t know why – for an exhibition that was an ornithological study of popular Australian wildlife. A Pied Currawong was featured in another mirror image work, where the bird was sitting on branch eyeing off a black snake. But there were also photographs of nude Aboriginal people against dark brewing skies and an emu puking up the letters USA. Upstairs was a series of photos taken in India of signs hanging in trees and by the side of the road that said things like SELECT YOUR INVADER and OPINION AS A CRIME. Obviously, this had nothing to do with wildlife, it was political.

The two bodies of work are quite separate, if not in intention, then definitely in effect. The upstairs work, collectively titled Indian Series, is openly and obviously ‘political’ in the broadest sense. They have the appearance of political art (text being a dead giveaway that there is a social engagement going on in an art work) and are visually unencumbered by a sense of an ‘artistic’ styling or framing. If these photographs were in black and white you would have a hard time placing them chronologically as they could have been made at any time since the 1950s. Because of these features, the works immediately negate themselves, becoming emblems of the artist’s good intentions rather than any specific or meaningful engagement with the text, their placement or the audience.

The works in the main gallery, called Kallar Midday, however, are far more effective. The combination of the neon works, the wildlife pictures and the images of naked men and women evoke a museum setting and the artful arrangement of the pieces creates a commentary between the apparently ambiguous images and the blatant, in-your-faceness of the neon works. A trio of photographs called Gary, Tina and Miriam edge close to kitsch, evoking sentimentalized versions of indigenous people equally reminiscent of black velvet paintings and the well-intentioned displays of museum culture. The two kookaburras – looking away from one another – and the pied currawongs – staring at the black snake – are heavy with alternate readings, suddenly symbolic of anentirely different order of classification and ‘scientific understanding’ than the ones for which they were created.

Andrew's show is strangely configured. The unsettling and ambiguous nature of many of the works are let down by the hectoring obviousness of the text pieces, yet, together, they form a persuasive and troubling voice.

James Angus’s installation at The Art Gallery of NSW is called Truck Corridor. The artist has taken a full sized 16 wheel Mack Truck and put it in the Contemporary Project Space on Level Two.

We liked the idea of it before we saw it but someone said, as we were on our way into town to the AGNSW, ‘so, you’re going to see a truck in an art gallery?’ and we said, yeah, sounds good, doesn’t it?’ Our friend looked a bit doubtful, as though just taking an object and putting it in a gallery was an easy option. It is an easy option, after all, and there is no doubting the power of the white space as framing device around any old thing you choose to chuck in there. As we traveled along George Street we began to think that maybe we were suckers for an artistic stunt, no matter how cunning. If someone said they had put up a diving pool in the middle of the AGNSW we would probably go and check it out – we just like that kind of stuff and we know we’re pretty uncritical about it. Still, it was a big truck and it was in a gallery and so we went.

And we are so glad we did. Angus was the artist who installed an upside down hot air balloon in the foyer of the Opera House for the 2002 Biennale of Sydney. In that work, called Shangri-la, Angus had chosen an object that seemed to fit the space perfectly, the balloon forming a kind of mirror image to the roof space, the lines on the balloon’s skin echoing the ribs of the ceiling construction and the volume of the balloon was almost equal to the space it occupied. If you had taken an object that was smaller or larger, or had a different colour, you would have had a very different kind of art work and one that wasn’t nearly as elegant and simple as the one Angus created.

Truck Corridor creates a similar kind of intervention into an existing space. The Project Space at the AGNSW is a rectangle with doors at two ends. As you step into the space, when other exhibitions are in there, you step into a corridor-like gallery from a bigger space. By some incredible, miraculous coincidence the distance between the two doorways on opposite sides is exactly the same length as a Mack Truck. So, when you go to see the Angus work, you can either look through one door at the front of the truck, or from the other door at the back of the truck, but you can’t get into the gallery because the truck is just that bit too wide and blocks your entry. By taking an pre-existing object, Angus has created a sculpture that deals with architectural space and the mass and weight of the truck.

Naturally you begin to wonder how the artist got the truck in there and how he (and the AGNSW) will get it out again. You also find yourself pressing against the truck to see into the Project Space but there is nothing in there, just an empty blank whiteness and you feel foolish for wanting to see nothing. But are you seeing nothing? Or are you seeing the enforced presence of the truck into this inexplicable collision between and existing object and conceptual space? This is a brilliant work, a sensational contemporary art object that seems so easy yet is so conceptually sophisticated. From what we can tell, this is only the artist’s second large scale installation work, but if he manages to keep up this level of brilliance, he’s destined for a glittering international art career.

Sadly, not everyone quite sees the work this way, zeroing on in the allegedly 'easy' aspects of the work. That paragon of bad writing Jack Marx, had a go in the pages of the Herald’s style guide Radar. We encourage our readers to do as we did, and let Jack know what you think of him

There’s not a lot to be gained on ganging up on the same person week after week. We swore off having a go at Peter Hill, the Sydney Morning Herald art ‘reviewer’, because we just kept repeating ourselves. Hill’s m.o. doesn’t change all that much from week to week and it’s probably unfair to be criticising him when we actually agree with much of what he says. True, we don’t like the way Hill says it, and we get put off by his petty moralizing, but when he’s on form – such as when he reviewed the Talking About Abstraction show at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery – he has something to say and he can say it well. But that just makes his usual slackness all the more difficult to fathom. Is it just laziness? Does he save up all his good writing for his own art projects? Is his brief to rewrite press releases?

Perhaps the best approach, we thought, was to take a longer view of Hill’s work and see if we could come up with some answers to these imponderables. We decided to keep a random selection of Hill’s reviews from the last six months and take them into the Art Life labs, dip them in a clear liquid and then, after exposing them to heat from a Bunsen burner, see what colour they turned (blue for good or red for bad). That was the idea. Then last week the SMH announced that Spectrum, the section that Hill’s columns appear in, was getting a major overhaul. There were ads in the paper about the design rejig, a new logo and the promise of exciting, fabulous, expanded arts coverage. We knew we had to act.

Then we heard, and we almost fell over en masse when we were told, that Peter Hill lives in Melbourne. He pops up to Sydney from time to time to see shows and then flies back home to write his copy. We had wondered how an art critic (sorry, ‘reviewer’) can manage to stay in touch with the art world of another city when he only comes for the occasional visit and how that same someone might develop an intimate and nuanced understanding of the art being made there? We don’t know. Some of Hill’s more perplexing habits - such as reviewing art works seen in magazines or referring readers to web sites or Scottish artists people have never heard or cutting and pasting chunks out of other people’s essays into his reviews in place of his own opinion – all would certainly be explained if he hadn’t actually been to a show and was cribbing from other sources.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s have a look at what we found:

In Peter Hill’s latest piece for Spectrum we have a review of the Zeitgeist show at the Australian Centre for Photography. As one of the curators for the show, Hill gives an account of how he came to select the artist David Thomas and a tedious re-telling of the catalogue notes and how each of the curators chose their artists as well. Hill uses a few of his standard techniques in the review, demonstrating the perils of the critic going over the fence into curating. Perhaps mindful of his word count, Hill likes to list all the names of all the artists in a show he reviews and the Zeitgeist review does just that, wasting column inches on information that is repeated elsewhere. He also lists all his favourite Australian photographers too

“The call came late one Thursday night. Would I like to be one of 10 people chosen to select one photographer each for the Australian Centre for Photography's 30th anniversary exhibition? Of course. But what a big ask. Photography is strong, diverse and experimental right across Australia and I have many favourite practitioners. Just for starters, into my head floated the names of Rosemary Laing, Pat Brassington’s, Sarah Ryan, Jacqueline Drinkall, J.J. Voss, Patricia Piccinini, Dan Smith, John Douglas and Patrick Pound. And that was even before I began to consider the other near neighbours to photography also permissible - video art, web design, photo installations, even sound art.”

Another of Hill’s favourite techniques is to make reference to international artists in connection to Australian artists. There’s nothing wrong with doing it, but perhaps Hill might try to make his comparisons a little more apt. In the Zeitgeist review he makes a couple of astounding comparisons:

“I've always been interested in artists who experiment with combining photography and painting - the Austrian surrealist Arnulf Rainer being one of the main exponents in a black-and-white expressionistic sort of way. Closer to home, Joshua Yeldham's new work at Art House Gallery is a similar hybrid of both mediums.”

Thomas paints on his photographs and so does Joshua Yeldham and so does Arnulf Rainer! It’s experimental photography! The comparison is incredibly wide and not very helpful to anyone who doesn’t know what Arnulf Rainer’s work looks like. Perhaps if they did they would be as agog as we were reading that sentence – when you really start to think about it, it’s absurd.

But wacky comparisons to international artists are one of Hill’s favourite pastimes. In his review of Patrick Pound’s show at GrantPirrie, Hill compared Pound to Donald Judd and Elsworth Kelly on the basis that Pound was an artist ‘before he was anything else’. In the same review, Hill compared Gina Tornatore’s video piece Catch (Struggle and Roll) at the ACP to Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho because both artists used slowed down footage.

Douglas Gordon was again invoked when Hill reviewed Dennis Del Favero’s video art exhibition and the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss were also mentioned for no very good reason at all, perhaps because they make videos and films of their installations. Fischli and Weiss were also mentioned by Hill in connection to sculptor Tim Silver’s show at GrantPirrie with similarly inexplicable reasoning. The work of conceptualists can be connected in no more a profound way than by comparing two separate painters by virtue of the fact they use paint on canvas.

Artists help reviewers by making their own references, and all the better if that reference happens to be to an artist the reviewer already likes. Silver had made reference to Martin Creed, creating a facsimile of Creed’s crumpled paper ball, and that suited Hill just fine. Creed is a favourite artist of Hill and also was mentioned in connection with the work of James Angus and Angus’s installation of a truck at the Art Gallery of NSW. It would appear that Hill has a select international artists that he uses again and again, irrespective of their direct relevance to an artist’s work.

Sometimes the references are more apt and not just a chance combination when Hill reaches for an example. In his review of Adam Cullen’s show at Yuill/Crowley in May, Hill mentioned the work of Gary Hume, a British painter, and the early 80s school of ‘bad painting’. Who is Gary Hume? Well, he does paintings that are kind of similar to Cullen, but not really. There is a superficial similarity, but that’s where it ends. While Hill liked Cullen’s show, we were left wondering what these kinds of comparisons are supposed to achieve. Hill provided an answer himself in his piece on Talking About Abstraction:

“We run into all sorts of problems when we attach ‘nationhood’ to art […]. Artists ‘of a type’ or period style have more in common with overseas artists of the same school than they do with their compatriots who are investigating other visual phenomena […] Thus Melinda Hraper and Emily Kame Kngwarreye […] have a closer kinship with, say, Canadian-born Agnes Martin […] or the Scottish artist Callum Innes, than any of them would in similar group of four figurative painters: Peter Booth and James Gleeson in Australia; the Canadian-born Eric Fischl or the Scottish painter Peter Howson.”

In his review, Hill was talking about the internationalism of abstract painting and how painters investigating certain visual effects have more in common with their international counterparts than with their fellow artists at home painting in a different style. It’s tempting, however, to see this reasoning as some sort of explanation for why Hill scatters names of artists from all over the world through his reviews like confetti. The idea is that artists are not constrained by nationality but connect to other artists by virtue of their concepts and formal approaches. This is a lovely, warm and fuzzy idea but it doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny.

In his Cullen piece, Hill talked about Gary Hume and ‘bad painting’ but made no reference to where Cullen’s work fits into Australian art – there is no mention of Grunge as a defining moment in the early 90s, the connections between Cullen’s work and painters like Mike Brown or Dick Watkins, or the particular and warped version of European conceptualism that took root in Australia over the last 15 years. Nor does Hill make allowances for the fact that Cullen may have never even heard of Hume, so whatever connections the reviewer finds are just superficial similarities. Similarly, in Hill’s review of Silver, Ricky Swallow is mentioned only in passing as a name on a long list of people who make work similar to Silver, but Hill makes no reference to the fact that Silver also tipped his hat to Swallow in the show. Ironically, the image of Silver’s work used to illustrate the review - a peeled orange showing “Apple” colours beneath – was an explicit reference to Swallow that Hill either ignored or missed completely.

After a while you begin to suspect that ex-pat British artist/reviewer Peter Hill is making these references because that’s what he knows – he just doesn’t know the details of artists and their work and probably couldn’t construct a history of recent contemporary Australia art because he just doesn’t know it. Hill sometimes makes gaffs that lift the veil on what he really knows. His piece on Dennis Del Favero of July 31 is already infamous among people who know something about video art because the introduction revealed an ignorance of the subject that was breathtaking:

“What is video art? And how does it differ from Television, art-house movies or rent-with-a-pizza videos? First, it is a new medium that has arrived in the past decade or so, like web art or hip-hop music. Second, its sense of possibility has attracted a range of artists who have been grazing across different media for some time and have, for a while, settled on this thing called video. Like birds alighting for a while on a newly seeded lawn, they will peck away at all the possibilities until they have exhausted this area and then move on to another form. Many of today's video artists trained as painters or sculptors and they have brought age-old traditions to the new medium.”

By “past decade or so” Hill obviously means the 39 year history of the medium since the mid-60s, or the 25 year history of hip hop since the late 70s, or perhaps that all the artists who “like birds” are making videos as an adjunct to their painting or photography practice, not all the hundreds of artists in Australia who make it as their prime means of expression.

Sometimes Hill’s writing is pure comedy with his usual habits running away with themselves to the point where you get a piece of writing that doesn't inform the reader, offers no real insight into the artist’s work and then jams so much into a couple of thousand words it reads like a demented ‘what’s on’ than some piece of criticism or a ‘review’. His July 17 piece is a great example of just this sort of thing happening. Hill has about 1500 words a week to fill and that week was a doozy. He managed to cram into his piece an introduction that discussed the home of Art Monthly magazine in Canberra, who’s up for the directorship of the NGA, a short history of sculpture that included two paragraphs on the rivalry between Cellini (1500-1571) and Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519), as well as name checking Brancusi, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin even before he even got to the exhibitions by Hany Armanious, Nell, Ken Unsworth, Bob & Lorraine Jenyns and the Biennale of Sydney.

We know that examining what is essentially Peter Hill’s diary serves to highlight inconsistencies and obsessions and may be unfair. We also know that an examination of The Art Life reveals our own shortcomings –we have, for example, a tendency to call out to the gods of art for ‘meaning’ in work when we know full well that the meaning is in the discourse not necessarily in the art object (blah blah blah). We also say we want to ‘get on with our lives’ when what we really mean is ‘we are sick of this bullshit’. Yes, we know we have our shortcomings and we are striving to make ourselves better.

The new Spectrum is really just the old Spectrum conjoined with 48 Hours with a slight design rejig. Failing to find enough advertising to justify Spectrum’s existence on its own, the shotgun marriage of the two sections makes sense – books and music and relaxation techniques and profiles of Paul McDermott’s hobbies meets up with Malcolm Knox and his literature mates and their reviews of new fiction and coffee table books. Even in this broad church, Peter Hill and his art ‘reviews’ stand out as an example of very slack, uninformed writing untroubled by editors who should demand a decent piece of writing by the Herald’s art critic. We know our usual sign off is that we'll now forget about Peter Hill and 'get on with our lives', but you know what we really mean...

Where were you? Brad Miller was there, Jan Batten was there, Dominique Angeloro was there, even Christoper Hanrahan and his mouthy mate were there with a bottle of wine and something to say! Yes, it was the first public "appearance" by The Art Life. We'd been invited to the NSW College of Fine Arts to talk about our 'thoughts' on art writing and the mass media... Well, if you couldn't make it because of the weather or because your hot water system blew up and flooded your house and the shop downstairs and now the landlord wants to sue you for damages, don't fret, because we present the text of our talk:

This is the voice of The Art Life. We’re going to talk about art writing and the mass media by starting with some descriptions of what we think different media offer. We’ll talk about magazines, newspapers, and books, and we’ll discuss the so-called ‘crisis’ in art writing and then we’ll talk about what the web can offer.

When we talk about the mass media and arts writing we’re naturally talking about print media. Texts in its various forms are the basis by which the information about visual art in Australia gets disseminated and the ways in which text reaches us are valued by readers in different ways.

Books are the preferred option for reading about art and they are the preferred context for artists who want to see words written about them and their art reproduced on nice quality paper. This is preference for books is based on two things; art books have a permanency and a formal beauty but they also have an ineffable weight to them, an authority about their subject that, despite the fact that they are just another mass market commodity, can carry the imprimatur of high culture. We think of books as being meant for considered, thoughtful writing and, although this is demonstrably not the case in many instances, the idea of books as being somehow special persists. A monograph written by a serious academic on an artist’s work is one of the symbols of serious artistic success and galleries and their artists are willing to pay to make these books happen. If you can’t afford a work by your favourite artist, the coffee table book is the next best thing. A Rosalie Gascoigne work may cost over $100,000 but a book on her work costs less than .1 of 1 percent of the real thing. And once you have a lot of art books, they look great all lined up on your bookshelf.

Most glossy art magazines in Australia are published quarterly. As a consequence, art magazines are thought of in a different way to books. With cover prices anywhere between $15 and $20 and with generally high production values for the colour glossies, people keep their magazines in the same way they shelve their books – the magazines become trophies of their interests. The content, the actual articles in the magazines, varies greatly depending on the target audience of the magazine, but people don’t buy art magazines for the writers, they buy them for the artists being covered and the pictures of the artist’s work – if the stories are well written and the artist is interesting, that’s just a bonus.

Newspapers are a different thing. In theory, the news media provides a running commentary on current events, cueing readers into the latest shows, performances and exhibitions in the “what’s on” sections, such as Lenny Ann Low and Dominque Angelero’s columns in the Sydney Morning Herald. This sort of commentary usually appears on a weekly basis. Meanwhile, the newspaper art critics chart the courses of artist’s careers, the changes in their work and reflect on where the art might fit into broader contexts like history, aesthetics and fashion. They can also add their own opinion into the mix and things can get very exciting as this day to day commentary unfolds because, when there’s a really good art critic, you start to feel as though you know what’s going on but there’s also something to barrack for or rail against. Unlike magazines and books, newspapers feel more ephemeral and throwaway, but they carry their own weight because of their reach. Everyone knows the thrill of seeing someone they know in the paper or even being mentioned yourself, and papers have a power to create audiences for galleries that is unrivalled.

As a print medium, the web has the biggest potential audience of them all. Unlike movies and TV, magazines and newspapers, the web is immediate, borderless and democratic and offers a soap box to anyone with something to say and an axe to grind. The web has no real weight and is more ephemeral than newspapers, it doesn’t have authority like a book, web sites don’t normally have the production values of magazines and once the plug is pulled, it ceases to exist. Although there are millions of pages of material on the web, it’s an uncharted frontier of rumour, speculation, wild theories and baseless postulation. As a research tool, it’s rated somewhere below bubble gum wrappers in terms of its credibility, nothing really solid or worthwhile exists on the web next to the gambling, pornography and blogs.

These are the ways we think of these mediums and the way they deliver writing about the visual arts. But our perceptions of what these mediums have to offer are not really backed up by an objective examination. Books have no more authority than comic strips in the hands of bad authors and magazines can be little more than a venue for advertising. The web, on the other hand, can be a place for enlightened comment and well researched information. For every corporate site or meandering blog, there’s the Internet Movie Data Base and Amazon.com, two utterly commercial entities that have unassailable authority when it comes to their writers, content and accessibility. For every ranting nut job blog like Queen Madonna.blogspot.com, or the endless “I have fixed my computer, promise to update soon” blogs, there’s also rarities like Where is Raed? the Salam Pax blog written in Iraq before, during and after the war.

Our perceptions of the mass media are based on an outmoded hierarchy of the printed word – books at the top, magazine and then newspapers, and the web somewhere else - and this hierarchy doesn’t have much to do with what these various media really offer.

Lately, we have been hearing a lot about a ‘crisis’ in art writing. Despite the proliferation of magazines and opportunities for artists work to be seen and for writers to write, there is a feeling in the visual art community that something is wrong and something needs to be done. Some have suggested that what is needed is another magazine. At a recent public forum at the MCA, it was pointed out that there are already more than 30 visual arts magazines in Australia and countless more catalogues and essays writing about artists and their work. So if there is already a lot of opportunity there, where does this sense of crisis come from?

We thought about that idea for quite awhile and the feeling we had was not that there weren’t enough magazines, but there wasn’t enough diversity in the writing. Launching another magazine would not solve the problem - diversity in publishing is a good thing if diversity of opinion is what is delivered, but art writing in Australia is not that diverse. As far as the quarterlies go, the magazines share many of the same writers and the monthly and irregular journals feature unknowns alongside guest appearances by well known writers.

To give you an example, in Melbourne recently a new journal called Un Magazine was launched that is both a magazine and a downloadable PDF. Featured in the magazine is a story on Melbourne artist Guy Benfield written by arts writer Ashley Crawford. Crawford has also written for Australian Art Collector, Art & Australia, Art & Text and he was the former editor of Tension, a visual culture magazine in the 90s, and he was the editor of its successor World Art and he is currently an editor with Thames and Hudson overseeing books being published on Ricky Swallow and Adam Cullen. In addition to that, he’s working on funding a relaunch of Tension. Crawford’s is a good example of the kind of career-arts writers who populate the magazines. You can pick up ten years worth of assorted glossy art magazines and find names that should be familiar to everyone who reads them now – Juliana Engberg, Felicity Fenner, Natalie King, Susan McCulloch, Christopher Chapman, Ted Colless, Rex Butler, Bridget Crone, Patricia McDonald, Carmel Dwyer and so on and so on. Aside from the glossies, in the slightly more vigorous small magazine world of Art Monthly, Real Time and Broadsheet, the names Blair French, Stuart Koop, David Bromfield, Peter Hill and Peter Timms should ring a few bells. There are scores more writers who come and go, and the writers for the quarterlies also write for the smaller magazines, topping up their meager earnings from Art Collector and Art & Australia with cigarette money from Metro Screen . The writers who write on Australian art tend to be the same names across nearly all the magazines.

Magazines articles are often essays written by curators, academics and researchers. These types of articles are a combination of biography and an interpretation of the artists work with reference to the writer’s area of speciality such as post modernism, religious studies, cultural studies or art history. The other dominant kind of magazine article is the life style article that skims over the more complex issues of artists work and concentrates on personalities, anecdotes and a little light interpretation. Because of the publishing schedules of art magazines, they aren’t the places where art world news will break first. Even the lower budget broadsheet publications like Metro Screen, Real Time and Broadsheet are much cheaper to produce, they are typically run along the lines of journals so even now, they are only just catching up to things that happened in June and mid July, such as the publication of Peter Timms book, the Biennale of Sydney and the Sydney Film Festival. While there is a value in retrospective reviews, after-the-fact art writing does not drive people to exhibitions to see the work first hand – it’s simply too late.

So if there’s a crisis in Australian art writing, its a lack of diversity - andlooking back over art publishing in Australia in the last 20 to 30 years, there has been an increase in the number of titles but few changes in the way magazines are produced, written and read.

We mentioned newspapers before and their ability to create a running commentary on exhibitions, artists and issues in the art world. We also mentioned that newspapers did these things in theory because although that was the case in the past, it is not the case now. We know that for newspapers generally, there is little money in art world advertising, and aside from the prestige attached to sponsoring art events like the Biennale or the Festival of Sydney, there seems to be little will to create a forum for accessible art criticism in the newspapers. If you compare the situation in Sydney at the moment to the way it was 10 or 15 years ago, you see that whereas the Sydney Morning Herald would once devote an entire broadsheet page of some 2,500+ words to its art critics like Bruce James or John McDonald, Peter Hill and Anne Loxley get barely a look in to say their piece today. We can agree that the real crisis is not in the magazines – they are what they have always been – but it is in the mainstream press. For artists to be able to engage with audiences, to get people along to shows and to create that much abused term ‘debate’ – there needs to be a lively commentary on events as they happen.

And that’s where The Art Life comes in.

We speak for all of us – the disenfranchised true believers, those of us who are also cynics and gossips, wracked with guilt and misgivings and prone to melancholy, but who are also driven by a belief in all the clichés of art, that it is transformative, important, dangerous and possibly beautiful. We are for, not against, we are pro, not anti, but we are also driven to tell the truth. We risk offending people but we approach everything in good faith – and that’s really all you can demand.

What we’d like to see in art writing in Australia is more diversity of opinion and more risks being taken. We like writing that is personal and has its own voice, one that is willing to be stupid, to get it wrong, to crack some jokes, but also to be serious when it needs to. We know that art publishing in Australia is a small world and the reliance on advertisers for survival means that you can’t say a lot of things about art and the artists because the advertisers, the galleries, would pull their ads. It’s the economic reality of the art world. But the web offers up an opportunity for everyone to get involved and have their say if they want to.

When we started The Art Life we assumed that the web would have plenty of sites like ours but, as far as we can tell, there is only one site similar to us that’s in the UK. There are two art blogs in Australia but both of those are quite different to us and are updated infrequently. Although the opportunity is there for arts writers and artists to use the web and blogs in the same way we do, hardly anyone has. Perhaps it’s a fear of being bad, but there is no lost honor in saying what you really think even if you can’t find the right words to say it – people tend to zero in on what your argument is, not how you say it.

Are artists really smart enough to take on the world? There’s something willfully self destructive about artist projects that are meant to be something more than just art – as though it wasn’t hard enough to make a regular, garden-variety work of art, there are people out there who want their work to be mistaken for advertising or Hollywood movies…

It’s a brave artist who wants to mix it up with the big boys of the real world of agencies and production houses with their multi million dollar budgets and ad spends across multiple platforms, their planners and buyers and market researchers. As much as we admire the sheer gumption of artists trying it on, they can end up looking very sad indeed.

There was the case of Stefan Smith, a Sydney artist who got mixed up with the makers of SMINT and, believing he was the new Warhol, became the momentary poster boy for the triangular mints in an agreement that allowed the artist to promote the product in a gallery exhibition and be featured on street posters put out by the company. With plans to take on the world, Smith was going to claim actual products as his art works, endorsing each as a kind of roving good-will ambassador for capitalism. After the SMINT experience, Smith couldn’t get a gig with another product because he was associated with SMINT and the reality of being some poor sod who’d been taken advantage of by unscrupulous ad men hit home.

We also keenly recall the pain we felt seeing Maria Kozic’s posters up at Martin Place Station advertising… well, herself. Dressed in a skimpy tights, Kozic was lying down, her breasts pushing provactively against her bra, in one hand an action figure, in the other a power drill, above which were the words MARIA KOZIC IS BITCH. When we saw the poster for the first time we felt as though we were seeing a member of the family doing something stupid, like she was our auntie from Melbourne who had finally gone too far and was stripping off in public. No, we thought, we don’t know anything about art or artists and we have no idea who she is! Honestly! People next to us at the station were overheard saying “who is that?” to which a bloke in a suit said “no idea… so how was you weekend?” The really sad bit came a week later when the billboard had been defaced to read MARIA KOZIC IS a f***ing BITCH! (except without the stars)… Oh dear. It may be a good idea but it doesn’t last long in the harsh light of day.

Which bring us to Shelly Innocence :

“We deal in Human Possibility™ and we are the only company in the world marketing Happiness™”

So far, happiness comes in the form of a series of billboards, t-shirts and a web site and is backed up with research into the happiness level of Melbourne residents (an installation at Flinders Street Station Plaza in June). As a personality, Shelly appears to have done it all and knows a lot of important people. As her official bio explains:

“Shelly Innocence™ is a supermodel, an international athlete and a retail in-store demonstrator. She operates on the border between art and advertising. If consumerism is the religion of our culture then Shelly Innocence™ is the embodiment of Faith™. Shelly offers a seductive range of marketable concepts, traversing all labels including gender. Her brand loyalty is 100%. Shelly lives for the camera and never goes anywhere without her personal photographer. Shelly never looks a day over 29.”

Ah yes, the bogus trade mark symbol – the very definition of irony™!

We don’t know where Shelly is going next but what we can tell you is that she is a he and is the brainchild of Melbourne artist Peter Burke. The artist shaved his legs and now he is a she™! We also thought that Burke should have shaved his chops before the photo shoot, but we always forget that there aren’t any gay men in Melbourne to give out that sort of advice and, because of the shortage of gayness in general, Melbourne skipped campness and irony and went straight into metrosexuality. Orange and blue, blokes in dresses, media manipulation™? It’s all so 90s!

Do people still ‘vogue’ now? We haven’t seen anyone doing the Madonna hand dance lately, but doing a version of something else is still big. Shelly Innocence in its heavy-handed parody of branding pales in comparison to the idea of a bunch of people hosting a fake arms fair on board a ferry in the middle of the Baltic Sea.

But yes, it is true. The International Corporation of Lost Structures a.k.a. ICOLS has just presented the Strategy Defense And Arms Fair featuring the work of a lot of artists, a bar, some conference type activities and a life jacket stowed under your seat. Featured artists from Australia included Alan Cholodenko, Nigel Helyer, Suzanne Treister, Bronia Iwanczak plus assorted Finns, Poles, Americans and Germans. We should have known that Richard Greyson had something to do with it, as we discovered he had written the events ‘rationale’:

“Technology based art uses technologies largely developed by the Military, which are dispersed into the social sphere and then subsumed back into the Industrial Military complex - the use of video games to train pilots, or the design of complex interactive shooter games to attract young men to the idea of enlisting in the armed forces. The existence of the military-industrial complex and the mechanisms of state control inevitably inflect all activities in the arena. This is amplified by a certain gender loading to the techno-fetishistic urge.

“Young children - boys in particular - like making detailed drawings of guns/swords and castles and so forth. They then go on to computers

“We have just been involved in a war based on the existence of imaginary weapons and linguistic constructs; where Weapons of Mass Destruction as a phrase and concept is transmogrified from the Atomic bomb deployed only by the USA, to mustard and nerve gasses, the deployment of which, although deadly, fits neither previous understandings of Mass nor Destruction. It transpires that they may not exist as physical entities at all no matter how they are defined, but their existence has been generated through the validations of hi-tech Intelligence.”

According to the art world the Melbourne Art Fair is a good thing, a festive gathering of gallery people from around the country, who put up their best stuff and have fun at cocktail parties attended by international art celebrities. But the art world also says that the Melbourne Art Fair is a bad thing, a pointless gab fest and opportunity to pose in front of art, piss on and it’s an event that has all the artistic credibility of a boat show. And then there are the art world people who don’t really have an opinion about The Melbourne Art Fair, they’re just kind of, ‘hey, we’re heading down to Melbourne this year to see how it goes and if it’s fun, maybe we’ll go back…’

Then we hear that painting is either ‘dead’ or ‘overlooked’ but every show we go to in commercial gallery is painting, and not just abstract paintings either, but landscapes and horses and portraits and figurative paintings, some out of focus, others in focus, some very colourful and others a bit drab, but it’s painting, people, painting, painting, painting! And guess what? Joe Furlonger does better “surfaces” than Dale Frank. We don’t know what that means either but before we have time to figure it out, we hear that Tracey Moffatt sold USD$500,000 of work from her Oxley show and, if she sells out the rest of the edition of 25 of her Adventure Series through her international dealers, she stands to make, before commissions and deductions, USD$2.5 million or about AUD $4.8 million. Does Moffatt give a toss what people think of her? Pffft.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. The sun is shining and the sky is blue and the late afternoon sunlight makes Sydney sandstone glow a beautiful orange. We may be embittered cynics without a penny between us, but we’re living the art life, and that’s just another way of saying the good life…

The Kudos Gallery is the College of Fine Arts student gallery and features a lot of group shows and exhibitions that students put on as part of their degrees. We stumbled into Ben Ponté’s show Coastlines and Landscapes: And the whole between and thought we were in a group show. Ponté has a unifying aesthetic which may be seen by some as making a big mess, but it is remarkable how consistent that mess is.

Living in Maroubra, Ponté created a series of rude collages, rough paintings and found objects all overlaid with smears of paint that were either inspired by Frank Auerbachor Mr. Whippy, and responded to the whole overexposed life of the beach side brilliantly.

Using crappy 1-hour photo lab developed snaps of the artist in the water, by the water, or playing with water, the whole show came across as a kind of degraded time lapse of the Australian seaside, that narcotic state of forgetfulness that descends in late November and then doesn’t lift until May. Living in Sydney’s eastern suburbs with its big skies, concrete roads and endless roofs, the effect is intensified to the point of madness. In the erratic nature of the show and the subject of the pictures, Ponté got the whole effect down in mixed meida. We particularly liked an installation of a couple of dozen found pictures of Maroubra mayors from over the decades, each brusquely overlaid with pencil scrapings, paint and assorted crap.

Not a unqualified great show by any stretch of the imagination, but we liked Ponté’s chutzpah – the titles Photocopy Guru, Crankin Bombora and Dead Bird for Soutine were great - and his determination to make something idiosyncratically his own out of the detritus of the Maroubra storm water channels was persuasive. A glorious mess.

At King Street Gallery on Burton you have to always remind yourself that you are not on King Street, Newtown, but you are on Burton Street, Darlinghurst. Although the gallery started in Newtown on King Street, then opened up a second space on Burton Street, then closed the King Street gallery, they kept the name going. It’s a slight discombobulation that creates an odd feeling that can become extremely profound if you’re looking at the wrong art. It’s a bit like standing on a slope, with one foot a bit lower than the other. In the case of the gallery’s latest show, an exhibition descriptively called New Paintings by Alexander McKenzie, the feeling is so crazy you feel like you’re falling off a cliff.

McKenzie paints landscapes that are part reality, part fantasy, amalgams of Australian and European places that get squeezed together in the artist’s imagination. As a graduate of Julian Ashton’s charm school, McKenzie has bucket loads of technique and pushes the oil around the canvas like a champ. With startling effects of light and shade, water surfaces and mist, the cumulative effect is a combination Claude Lorrain and those piss-taking canvases that Matthys Gerber did of bad department store art (snowy landscapes with cabins and deer). McKenzie is a classicist with little time for nature’s imperfections – he imposes classical compositional methods into his landscapes, creating repetitive frames, enriching drab Aussie bush with the footprints of long lost buildings, temples perhaps, in the shape of a few well chosen ruins.

This is of course insane. Going so comprehensively against the grain of what’s happening in painting, McKenzie’s paintings could be taken for kitsch – some of the works suggest that the monarch of the glen is just around the corner of the frame – and is so anti-fashion to be the work of either someone who just doesn’t care or is simply mad.

King Street Gallery on Burton is a gallery that is known for its abstract painters and chooses the odd figurative painter for contrast. In artists like Wendy Sharpe and John Edwards – both figurative - you have a nice contrast to people like Elisabeth Cummings and Robert Hirschmann – both abstract painters. Then there is McKenzie, all on his own, on another planet, painting the Australian landscape into a facsimile of Capability Brown. He stands in contrast to no one in the gallery, and very probably to anyone who doesn’t sell their pictures in a gilt frame.

There are many uses for honey – you can put it your tea, eat on toast, use it to dress wounds, pour it on a friend, or perhaps take the beeswax and mix it in with your oil paint. And why not? Philip Wolfhagen has a new show of his honey on toast paintings at Sherman Galleries called The Inner Edge. We have always liked ‘Flip’ Wolfhagen’s paintings, right back to his show at Syme-Dodson Gallery in 89, and he’s been plowing the same field ever since. Perhaps it’s some sort of marketing agreement with Tasmanian honey manufacturers, or bee keepers, but whatever he’s done, they look beautiful.

There are two series of works. The first is his Landscape Semaphore series of oil and beeswax on linen panels – striped paintings that suggest landscapes without actually defining them. As far as we can tell, this is the first time Wolfhagen has strayed into a semi-conceptual realm by naming his pictures in a way that indicates that the stripes of pigment (a la Sean Scully) are merely notional landscapes in the viewer’s mind and not illusionistic paintings. Like the system of signals that the pictures are named for, the Landscape Semaphores are acute indication of the awareness of the artist that his paintings are both images and signs. Blimey!

His other series, three large canvases that seem more traditional than the semaphores, are also similarly on the edge of an abstract/illusionistic expressionism. They could be pictures made of painterly gestures, but they are also just a bunch of beeswax hanging on canvas. Painted dark grey, blue and black, these images of tree lines receding into darkness are enlivened by splashes of red and yellow, which cannot but help to invoke the trailing of car tail lights. Kind of like a Tim Storrier painting, only better, Wolfhagen puts his big pictures into a slightly uncomfortable relationship with photography – the tail light smears are really only something we experience on film and the little outlines of red he adds elsewhere are not ‘natural’ either. But then again, these are just paintings, not frames around a window. Despite the falsity of the medium, we still seem to expect a form of realism from landscape painting and Wolfhagen’s breathtakingly subtle show puts all of that up for grabs.

Peter Powditch's exhition closes today (Wednesday, August 11) at Ray Hughes Gallery, and that's probably a good thing. We went along to Ray Hughes Gallery with an open mind and a desire to be seen to be fair, but we were having trouble almost from the start.

We doubt that Ray Hughes has done anything to his gallery since it opened and, you know, why should he? Perhaps there are artists who like seeing their work illuminated by fluro lights or stuck in a corner or hung either side of what is essentially a thoroughfare, but we know we're applying a weak-kneed, contemporary art sensibility to a gallery that has been cruising along for years without a worry in the world. The one thing that you consistently hear about the Ray Hughes Gallery is that Ray himself treats his artists very well and we respect him for that. But we know we are afraid in a way that we rarely are when we speak ill of Hughes's artists...

So anyway,Peter Powditch's show; thirty five works spread around the gallery, each looking grey and flat under the house lights, scored with a palette knife and bubbling away with little nodules of paint, figures fading into the white, looking a little like trees or perhaps some form of Cubism hitherto unknown. The works are, to be blunt, awful, perhaps demonstrated by the fact that not one seemed to be sold. That isn't the measure of success, of course, but Powditch makes such a long series of deliberate anti-aesthetic choices that you sense he's a guy in a studio and to hell with the world.

This is what happens to many older Australian artists - they stick to styles of art that were marginal to begin with and, as time goes on, become less and less relevant. It isn't necessarily the job of the artist to stay in step with the rest of the art world and there's a certain heroism to soldier on, painting in a way that is less and less appreciated. There are perhaps a handful of older artists whose work speaks across the generations, are still vital and happening. But the majority are like Powditch, bit part players in the big picture of Australian art. No one doubts Powditch's dedication - this show, if nothing else, is a demonstration of dogged determination - and perhaps in 50 or 100 years time the work will be reassessed and celebrated as a brave voice in the wilderness. But we seriously doubt it.

We congratulate Hughes on standing by his artist but this is a show so bad we wonder why on earth he decided to show it. We hope it was loyalty.

Joe Furlonger's show out the back, Improvisations , is like being knocked over by a truck. Hung salon style in row after row of framed woodblock prints, the works are variations on the same South East Queensland generic landscapes, done in different colours and looking like a cross between hippy batik and bark collages.

Like Powditch's show, the Furlonger prints seem completely out of time, adrift to fashion, but unlike his unfortunate stable mate, Furlonger still has plenty of gumption and a great eye for colour. The browns are so intense you can smell the fondue.

Arriving mysteriously in our snail mail box was a flyer for the semi-mythical unMagazine. Available in both print and PDF formats, unMagazine is a new publication that may just keep Mathieu Gallois quiet for awhile – an art magazine with a super clean layout, diverse content and articles on a list of up and comers to kill for: Cate Consadine, Guy Benfield, David Noonan, Lane Cormick, Cassandra Tytler and oldesters John Gillies and even Vito Acconci.

The cover has a great shot of Danius Kesminas and The Histrionics performing ART IS EASY & all music is the same. In terms of style alone, we’ve always liked artists doing joke covers - we have fond memories of Nice Style and Dan Graham’s bands from the 70s - and it’s great to see Darren Knight’s favourites doing so well, as they are about embark on a tour of Europe starting at Vilnius, Lithuania and all points East. Yo, wassup Stuttgart!

Using the web to distribute a magazine is a great idea - no printing or paper costs, no distribution worries - all you have to do is attach it to a web site and off you go. It's a mystery why the publishers have even bothered with a print version - even if it is short run- but we all know something only really exists if you can hold it in your hand.

The writers for the first issue includes Ruark Lewis from Sydney, Sally Brand, Andrew Gaynor, Jeff “Wrath of…” Khan and Ashley Crawford in Melbourne. The only drawback as far as we can see is the entirely superfluous inclusion of a piece by the most boring man in Australian art, Philip Brophy, and his article Picture Perfect Political Art:

“See that woman near the left in the picture? The one with the Malvern bob hair-do? She’s using henna, but you can’t see the colour in this picture. See how she’s pinching my right nipple? That’s to make me political.”

If anyone else had written that, we probably would have found that funny, but we just don’t like Brophy – we didn’t care much for his band, we thought his magazines were try-hard, we had no time for his dead-in-the-water film career, his audio art articles for The Wire were aimed at Year 9 students and we think his art video pieces suck the big one. Bu that’s just us – we know a lot of people like him and that’s great.

Speaking of Ashley Crawford, he dropped by The Art Life to clear up a few misunderstandings and confirm a few rumours:

“Just saw your comment about my "ill chosen" words re; VCA Painting Nazis. [Robert] Nelson mis-quoted me; they were Guy Benfield's words. Also, re poss collaboration with Morry Schwartz and Tension - looks like it's on. But we'll probably have Peter Craven as a contributor to prove a point. Enjoy your tirades.”

We stand corrected, although wouldn’t it have been great if Mr. Crawford had called the painting department at VCA a bunch of Nazis. It would have rather been like that episode of The Mighty Boosh where a turtle was a Nazi, swastika on its back, and it was called a “fresh water fascist”. After all, if the shell fits… We’re also super excited to see Tension being revived even if we were a bit sarcastic about it last time, after all, it might see Ken Wark come back from New York and delightus with more articles on “vectors”. We are somewhat mystified by what Mr. Crawford means when he says Peter Craven gets a job to ‘prove a point’ – must be a Melbourne thing. Finally, we don’t write tirades, we produce tightly reasoned arguments and reviews of artists shows that could be used in CVs and other official documentation. But we’re glad people enjoy them.

Someone with the mono-moniker James left a comment asking very sensible, constructive questions regarding our “tirade” regarding the “state of art criticism” :

“Perhaps a list of things to improve the state of writing could be listed here? E.g. various ways of reading works etc? I've read reviews that have clearly come from people who do not really have a firm grasp of what they are writing about (medium, subject matter) or even the purpose of the show. Sometimes these are artists themselves writing these misdirected pieces. Should artists write reviews? Stones & glass houses? Attention seeking?”

We are currently formulating our response to this proposal and yes, we know we said that we’d review the rest of The Biennale of Sydney and we never got around to it. But this time, honestly, we will start being constructive instead of just cynically tearing down other people’s efforts.

In our email inbox we found another email from Tara D’Cruz Noble at the UTS Gallery promoting the gallery’s latest show New Urbanism: Emerging Artists From China, curated by Zhang Zhaobui. It doesn’t open until August 31 but it looks like a good one. We had started to believe that D’Cruz Noble was a real person until we saw a photo of her in the Sun Herald, or rather, a photo of what purports to be her hand holding a pink bag shaped like a telephone designed by “Tatty Devine from London”. Could someone please explain why on Fernando Frisoni’s Diary page in S, every other photo features someone with a face? Hmmm.

Finally, Dan Obido from Sierra Leone has written to us offering us a cut of USD$7.3 million:

“
Dear Sir,

It is my warmest pleasure soliciting your confidence in this transaction, which I propose to you as a person of transparency and caliber. This by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and top secret. A foreigner Late Engineer Michael Creek, an oil merchant/contractor with the federal government of Nigeria, until his death a year ago in a ghastly air crash, banked with us here at hallmark bank plc Lagos. And had a closing balance of account as at the end December, 2000 worth {US$7.3M} the bank now expect the next of kin to claim the money as the beneficiary. However, effort being made by the bank to get in touch with any of Creek’s relative or family proved abortive […] I and my colleagues now seek your permission to have you stand as a next of kin to late engr micheal creek, so that the fund [US$7.3 M] will be released and paid into your account as the beneficiary….”

As Martin Kippenberger might have said, there is no problem with art on Australian TV, we just buy their paint brushes. We have come to accept that the only things worth watching about art on the ABC are the odd documentary from the UK or perhaps a rerun of This Is Modern Art.

Over on SBS (the lowest rating TV station in the country and still falling!), their screening of Art:21 featured Steve Martin, William Wegman's dog and Heather Locklear (among others). SBS's own arts programming has attempted to become more "hip" and "relevant" to younger audiences so, in place of The Movie Show after its departure to the ABC, we now have a bizarre sideshow hosted by a psychiatric nurse and two women who look like Alternative Barbie (square glasses, rectangular hairdos) and who read their pretentious scripts from autocues with grim determination.

The ABC's panel discussion show Critical Mass, hosted by Jonathan Biggins (comedian, actor, author, TV personality), features an ever-changing line up of guests who argue with one another. Each week they talk about a movie, a book and an exhibition and then show us how erudite a man who wrote a book about Carravagio can be when it comes to reviewing a teen comedy (which is to say not at all) or how out of their depth a tedious newspaper movie reviewer can seem when discussing visual art (which is to say very out of their depth).

The ABC bears the biggest burden of responsibility when it comes to art TV - it is the national brodacster and creating art programming part of its charter. Since the 1980s the ABC repeatedly used the magazine show formula to varying degrees of success but when each show was inevitably axed, management resurrected the format in a new timeslot. State of The Arts and The Arts Show and then that Sunday morning version with that cattle dog with a neckerchief as a co-host to Robyn whatsherface and the long running rerun show called Sunday Afternoon with Peter Ross or Andrea Stretton. Whatever.

As members an audience who would like to see some good coverage of the visual arts on the ABC, we have slowly had adjust our expectations downward and now just thank our lucky stars that Friday night is given over completely to crime shows with crusty English thespians pretending to be Belgian.

Back in April, University of Technology Professor Liz Jacka released a report on the state of arts programming on the ABC and found it wanting. As was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald reported at the time:

"The ABC is failing its charter to give Australians their promised cultural content by opting for populist programming over more specialised arts content, a report by a Sydney academic says.

"A desire to attract new audiences has given birth to shows such as Mondo Thingo and New Inventors, while more in-depth arts programming has been axed, says the report by Liz Jacka, professor of communications studies at the University of Technology, Sydney.

"Shows to be axed include Classic FM's The Listening Room, Triple J's Artery and Andrea Stretton's TV program The Arts Show".

And the shows were indeed axed with no replacements and no across-the-board arts policy to create a game plan for the future. Jacka's report went further, pointing out systemic failure of the ABC:

"Commissioned by the Community and Public Sector Union, the report […] found that taxpayers were getting less arts content since 1992 on TV, radio and online. It also noted a decline in Australian performances and discussion of cultural issues."

"In the last five years ABC TV has undergone a definite change of direction in relation to arts programming. The explicit strategy espoused by the director of television, Sandra Levy, is 'arts by stealth', seemingly sharing the view of ABC radio that the word arts scares people, although the words science, law, media, religion and health do not. So arts will be smuggled in via other timeslots," Professor Jacka said.

As a result, the ABC was failing to live up to its charter obligations and editorial policies, she said. It needed to develop a mix of populist and in-depth programming and an ABC-wide arts policy."

The ABC management were having none of it:

"The ABC's managing director, Russell Balding, said it was "a palpable nonsense for the CPSU to assert that the 'ABC is failing in its role as Australia's premier producer of cultural programming. The ABC has a comprehensive range of arts and cultural programming across radio, television and online. In this regard, it is without peer in Australia."

Four months later and nothing much has changed. Interestingly, the problem has turned out not to be with the ABC, but with the arts community itself. In an interview for the SMH supplement The Guide, Jacqui Taffel interviewed Sandra Levy on the eve of a conference in Melbourne designed to bring together members of the art community and the ABC to see what could be done to create exciting, vibrant and relevant arts programming. Surprisingly, Levy put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the viewers.

"Levy […] defends the organisation's arts record."What I resent is the assumption that we're not interested in it," she says, then points the finger in a surprising direction. Levy claims the ABC has tried to pursue many exciting arts projects that have fallen through because "the arts community are not that interested in television".

Really? "They might be interested in getting publicity for their own art form but that not the same. We're not here as their publicists," she says. "We wouldn't be having a conference to stimulate some real development if we were awash with exciting projects from the arts community."

The invitation list for the conference was kept secret and the agenda for discussion also kept under wraps. Jacka was also not welcome:

"Among the recommendations in Jacka's report were that ABC TV develop a prime-time arts program, continue to diversify strategies for developing new arts audiences and develop creative works designed specifically for TV […] but Levy dismisses Jacka's report. "I haven't read it and it's not part of our brief," she says. "Anything she says has got no relevance to what we're doing."

We shouldn't be too harsh in our pre-judgment of what came out of the conference. After all, there are some very exciting new art shows coming up as Larissa Dubecki's article in the SMH explained under the title Aunty's Going Monobrow:

"If you thought arts coverage on the ABC was all tweed suits, cravats and earnest panel discussions of Chaucer, think again. The popular preconception of ABC arts programming is about to receive a shake-up, with the announcement that new programs will be open to the concepts of reality television and popular culture. Future fare will include programs such as Operatunity, a British production to be aired early next year. It has been described as Pop Idol meets opera."

Huzzah! We have been looking forward to a reality style opera show for ages!

"Ms Levy, who wants to expand arts programming and give it a prime-time slot, said the conference was driven by an awareness that the ABC could be doing better in the arts. "We need dynamic, inventive arts programming . . . The worst thing we can do is bore people away from our channel."

Fenton Bailey, executive producer of the World of Wonder production company, told the conference that arts programming needed to make a cultural adjustment "not up, but sideways". Programmers needed to abandon "their highbrow haunts and engage with all aspects of the world around them if they are to become relevant, engaging and revitalised".

What the hell is Fenton Bailey talking about? As far as we can see there isn't any programming, high brow or otherwise to react to. In truth, the whole attempt to portray art coverage as tweedy and high falutin' is a smoke screen to cover the fact that the new programs will be short, commerical and have little time for difficult or demanding content. We are also predicting that, as far as visual arts are concerned, there will be sod all, and we may yet be right, what with the ABC's attempt to shoe-horn this content into the left over 15 minute slots between the end of one show and the beginning of the next. With the difficutties inherent in transferring art into a different format, it would take a genius to translate difficult contemporary art into a digestible chunk of programming.

Perhaps not all is lost - Tuesday night sees the premiere episode at 8.30pm of a four part TV series called Art House: Playing The Game, which follows Christie's head of painting David Cook and Damien Hackett from Deutscher-Menzies as they try to scare up some decent lots for their Australian painting sales. Although some Art Life readers have already seen the show and told us the show is dull and rather boring, we hold out hope that finally something good will be on the tele. Otherwise it's back to cable and Naked News.

Getting out of The Art Life bus Soudan Lane in Paddington was like stepping back in time. Does anyone remember when galleries all had their openings on one night, usually a Tuesday, and people made their way from one gallery to the next looking for the ‘best’ opening? Cars would jam streets, people would be spilling out of taxis and when you got to the door of the gallery, people would be on the street, smoking, drinking and gossiping. As we walked down the street to Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery to attend the opening of Tracey Moffatt’s Adventure Series, we were having serious flashbacks, the place was jumping, the balcony was packed and as we walked in the front door, two people went out, one saying to the other, “she just lacks any sort of edge…” We had that exciting churn in the stomach… this is the art life!

It’s difficult to talk about Tracey Moffatt in an objective way. It seems that you’re either for her or against her, and by ‘her’ we mean the artist herself, not just the work. Perhaps unlike any artist before her, Moffatt is as much a PR figure for contemporary Australian art as she is a practicing artist. Brett Whiteley and his psychedelic caravan came close, but Moffatt’s status is of a completely different order. With dozens of solo shows, hundreds of group shows, international representation, thousands of articles and news items, Moffatt's international profile is unmatched. Patricia Piccinini and Ricky Swallow are often touted as being on track to achieve a similar recognition level, but since Moffatt is an Aboriginal woman making photographs and videos and her work dovetails nicely into themes that curators think are important, it seems unlikely that any Australian artist could come close to Moffatt. In essence, her work and her personality (or the public perception of both) is indivisible; Tracey Moffatt is her art.

When Moffatt was the subject of a career retrospective at the MCA last year, the artist’s self portrait was used to promote the show. Plastered all over Sydney on bus shelters, the photo, as an act of branding, was the distillation of everything the artist has become known for: an aboriginal woman, standing windswept in the landscape, head scarf on, sunglasses reflecting the sunset, her camera at the ready in her pensive grasp. It’s as a romantic self image of the artist figure as anyone is ever likely to find. That the picture was also hand-tinted only added to its aura of artistic endeavor and that, perhaps, the reflection of the sunset in Moffatt’s sunglasses was also sly reference to the Aboriginal Land Rights flag (a claim the artist refuted), added a neat political frisson. The faux-irony of the image - and the attempt to pass it off as being a Cindy Sherman-esque gesture of self invention - was lame in the extreme. The image had the power of a advert and it stuck in the mind as the image that the artist herself had endorsed as the promo image for the show - under the no-nonsene title Tracey Moffatt.

We did not think we were alone when we wondered how on earth we had arrived at a moment when such a banal image could be taken as the height of artistic integrity. The media, unsurprisingly, gave the whole show a free ride and the arts community fell into line. Peter Hill took time off from his hectic schedule of art criticism to ‘interview’ the artist in place of his normal column in Spectrum and was completely accepting of the artist and her position. We know of two stories that were run by magazines in Sydney where the artist insisted upon (and received) approval of the contents before she would allow them the use of her images. It's hard to think of any other public figure - not even a politcian - who has that kind of control of the media or their image.

At the same time, commerce and art came perilously close to collusion. Moffatt was repeatedly referred to as “one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists” and the MCA, unwisely in our view, promoted the fact that Moffatt’s work is highly sought after in the auction market, referring in press releases to that the fact that her Something More pictures currently hold the record for the highest price paid for a series of photographs at auction for the princessly sum of AUD$226,575. That the person who had paid that record amount was Reg Richardson, a collector and non executive director of the MCA, was not mentioned, we were perhaps naïve in thinking that something was seriously amiss. Nothing was amiss, of course, this is just how artists get promoted these days and the MCA continues its close relationship with Moffatt.

Another troubling aspect of the Moffatt phenomenon is the glaring disingenuousness surrounding the perception of her ethnicity. Moffatt has attempted to steer her work away from being read simply as an extension of the debates on aboriginality in Australia. As much as we appreciate the fact that an artist may want have their work seen in the context of broader international debates such as post colonialism, post feminism and gender politics - and indeed, it can be read that way - it seems inescapable that Moffatt’s work is seen, at least by her white audience, as some sort of validation of equal opportunity politics in the art world. To deny on the one hand that the work is not something but, on the other hand, to encourage a bland acceptance of the work on those very terms is, in our opinion, a double standard of the like few artist's work ever experience.

You can’t really blame Moffatt for the perception people have of her work. After all, her earlier photograph of David Gulpilil at Bondi Beach, is being used in high school art texts as a discussion starter on debates on the nature of aboriginality and national identity in Australia. Her work has been included in high school art texts since at least 1994, so there is a whole generation of people out there who see a Moffatt work and think, “hmmm, aboriginal artist, uses photography, about aboriginal identity”. The Something More series, the Up In The Sky photos and the Laudanum pictures all add to that view. The fact that Moffatt is also the creator of videos and work demonstrably not engaged with those debates (and when we say ‘debate’ we simply mean a lot of talk), it is deeply troubling.

Despite her incredible success and her international success, Moffatt has a PR problem. All the works in all editions of Adventure Series sold out before the opening at Oxley and it would be a very mean person who would begrudge anyone that level of reward. However, that level of success does not in itself prove anything - Tom Clancy is popular, so is Stephen King, Anne Geddes is hugely popular... and so is John Howard. Being popular and commercially successful doesn't prove anything about the worth of a cultural object. All it means is that, for whatever reason, people like it. We feel chills when we look at the accepting and largely uncritical way Moffatt's work has recieved support from cultural institutions, newspaper, magazines and the general population...

The work and the way it is understood are at odds and the fact the artist has left the writing about her work to others has only made it all the more confusing. With a CV that lists hundreds upon hundreds of articles it comes as something a shock to discover that the artist does not list a single piece written by herself. Perhaps the fact that the press release for Adventure Series is written by Moffatt is a warning that an artist should be seen and not read. It is hard to imagine anything more archly camp and silly:

“In July and August of 2003 I returned from New York to my hometown of Brisbane in Australia’s subtropical north to be artist-in-residence at the Institute of Modern Art. Here I was to produce a new body of work called 'Adventure Series', inspired by The Flying Doctor series, an adventure comic strip I read as a kid in the Brisbane newspapers as well as the 1970s Australian television seafaring show, The Rovers. Although in the previous months I had made sketches of the backdrops I eventually commissioned a young Brisbane woman graphic artist to paint the backdrops as she could paint them better than I could.”

Moffatt goes on to describe the trouble she had in finding talent in Brisbane and how terribly difficult it was to find everything else too: animals, scuba gear, fake rocks and hair and make up people. Luckily, it all came together in the end but not before some worrying developments on the waistline:

“I found myself eating a lot from nervous tension. At teashops that made Devonshire tea I would have scones piled with cream. I would tell myself that this was my unique Australian treat because I would never get fluffy scones in New York. I would go down to the new trendy James Street markets in the mornings and have eggs benedict. Then on the weekends to the farmers markets down at the Powerhouse Museum and eat lots of homemade German wurst. Then down to Chinatown to the Singapore La restaurant always ordering the same dish over and over again – Hai Nan Chicken. It's a lot of steamed chicken with plain rice and greens with ginger on the side. I kept convincing myself that this dish wasn't fattening because everything in it was 'steamed'.

“Then of course I started to pack on the pounds and my face grew very round. This made me panic because I had now decided that I was going to star in my own photo series. I couldn't find a dark witchy mature looking woman model anywhere so I was to be her.”

And so on. Moffatt concludes her catalogue essay by thanking all the people who helped her put together the new works, but sadly not to name them.

“I went back to New York and couldn't wait to work with photo shop artists who helped to put the images together. I am very grateful for everyone in dearest Brisbane, Australia who worked on my 'Adventure Series'. I haven't named names because there are just too many to list. But it would include family and friends as well as all the staff at the Institute of Modern Art for being supportive. The moral of this story is never think that everything will be easy, and that you have to make mistakes and work for every crumb that comes your way. I still haven't lost all the weight I gained from doing the Brisbane ‘Adventure Series’ shoot. Give me time, as anything is possible.”

OK, so this essay is written for Americans, and perhaps it is wrong of us to look to the artist for an explanation, but a 44 year old woman writing in the style of Dolly magazine is just creepy. Let’s just forget about the whole Tracey Moffatt "phenomenon" thing and just look at the work.

So what did those people mean when they said “[the work] just lacks any kind of edge”? It would be a mistake to think that Moffatt’s photography was edgy, and disappointing to go to her shows expecting some sort of aesthetic challenge. Moffatt’s work has always been self consciously ‘artistic’ – the framing, the use of colour, the treatment of the medium and the subjects - have always been resolutely middle-of-the-road and the work of someone with an average imagination. The works are also undemanding, opting instead for a beguiling use of humour that tends to defuse any feelings of resentment one might feel for being compelled to view such relentlessly mediocre work. And so it is with Moffatt’s latest Adventure Series. Although they are lacking many things, the photos are funny. The goofy looks on the model’s faces, the angles of the shots, the toy town placement of aircraft and other hardware, the faux-porn styling, are all genuinely amusing.

Harking back to her staged photographs from Something More, Moffatt uses fake environments to create a heightened sense of unreality and her people and locations are glossy and superficial. And that is where the pictures start to fall apart. One of the problems we have had with Moffatt’s work over the last 15 years is that her grasp of montage and narrative is so vague. Perhaps this is intentional, but these works don’t really add up to a coherent story, alluding instead to something beyond the frame of the picture. Montage theory proposes that the meeting of two images creates a third meaning, but in Moffatt's work the arrangement of images - usually four in the frame - are simply decorative. We can’t for the life of us figure out what, if anything, the pictures in Adventure Series are meant to mean beyond a camp celebration of their fakeness and, perhaps, it’s just the look of narrative that Moffatt is celebrating, but that would mean the works are just a collection of images, colours and poses without reference to anything very substantial… That can’t be right, can it?

It’s interesting to compare Moffatt to other artists using photography in a similar way. Moffatt is certainly not unique in her use of photography as a form of narrative, or narrative quotation, but the most disturbing aspect is how ordinary her work looks in comparison to people like Jeff Wall,Geoffrey Crewdson or Sam Taylor-Wood. Not only does Moffatt’s work look unrealised and amateurish in comparison, technically Moffatt’s work is found wanting as well. The Adventure Series images are flat, harshly lit and, in some instances, the deep etching around models is dodgy. Moffatt’s work may be many things, but technically accomplished it is not. One need only look at works like Invocations and Laudanum to find poorly executed works that balance precariously on the edge of the seriously bad.

Also on exhibition with Adventure Series is a video piece called Love. Since Moffatt has only come up with the idea and the editing is left to an accomplice, the work is credited as a collaboration with Gary Hillberg. It’s a pity the backdrop painter who creates so much of Adventure Series’ zest languishes in obscurity. Like Moffatt’s recent video pieces Artist and Lip, Love is a compilation of moments from preexisting Hollywood films. Featuring shots of women being beaten down, up and sideways by a variety of men, the video is a 21 minute excursion through sheer obviousness, a defiant statement that cares little for subtlety.

Moffatt has wisely stayed away from cinema since the disastrous misadventure that was her feature film Bedevil in 1995 and her excruciatingly awful short films. Video, that handmaiden to mediocre photography careers, assists Moffatt in creating work that neither delivers a coherent statement nor an adequate narrative. Her video montages are rather like cut ups from the 1980s or cable TV now, where rapid-fire montage irony is a transport mechanism for promos and ad breaks. The cable station TV1 has taken exactly the same sort of approach as Moffatt to promoting everything from I Dream of Jeanie and The Brady Bunch to The Six Million Dollar Man and Star Trek, complete with sound bites that create a kind of staggered monologue. If contemporary art does nothing else, it at least creates a sense of difference from the mundane reality of day-to-day media. Andreas Gursky's work may well have the look of advertising but there is no mistaking his work as anything but art. Moffatt, instead, inverts the process and makes art look like a commercial.

There are five stages to coping with tragedy: denial, anger, bargaining, resignation, and then, finally, acceptance. Looking at our own reactions to Moffatt as an art star and as an artist we think we are finally beginning to accept that our view is the minority opinion, that the vast numbers of people who like and love her work are the majority, and that we should quit our moaning and get on with our lives. We understand now that, like governments, we get the artists we deserve.

There’s nothing quite as pleasurable as walking into a show of painting that is exceptionally good. It feels like a horrible pressure has been lifted and we can see clearly, like the rain has gone… Such was the feeling when we went to see Maria Cruz and Sally Ross’s shows at Kaliman Gallery.

In the front room is Ross who has managed to squeeze in 15 paintings and probably as many drawings. Executed with ballpoint pen, painted with obsessive dots and lines, the images are a crazy concoction of still lives, alpine views, portraits, insects, plants and Viking boats. It’s a fine collection of work that has a refreshingly ambiguous aesthetic bent – one portrait reminded us of either Florien or Rolf from Kraftwerk, another was reminiscent of European landscapes in Hungarian cartoons, one could be the cover of a Stereolab album, yet another of a church steeple in a village made us wonder if the painting’s weren’t the work of an ‘outsider’ artist.

We love it when a painter drops you into uncertain territory, where all reference points are speculative and you’re left to your own associative devices. Just as the world is being over taken by photography, something as beguilingly simple as Ross’s work comes along and reminds you of the power of painting. It also reminds us, that like punk, there is something possible in the simplest of combinations. We cannot recommend this show highly enough.

In the big room is the work of Maria Cruz, who has managed to find a life raft after the sinking of Sarah Cottier Gallery and join up with Kaliman. We are also immensely relieved to report that Cruz has given up on her Yoko Ono obsession of a few years ago and appears to be doing something that is all her own work. Called Nothing In This World, the paintings are semi-abstract landscapes that have forsaken text for soothing pastoral views, forests and green swathes of colour that could equally be oceans or trees. There’s a self portrait and another work with text that says NO SMOKING in gothic copperplate that reminds you that the classical landscapes of Casper David Friedrich can be despoiled by thoughtless butt throwers, or perhaps that nature is a conceptual figment. Cruz is one of those artists whose work makes you just not quite sure what the devil is going on, but is so persuasive you don’t really care.

So the Australian Centre for Photography has been around for 30 years? Wow, we actually remembering it opening! Send flowers, send cakes, send presents... To celebrate they are having an exhibition called Zeitgeist that showcases a bunch of artist/photographers chosen by a bunch of curators, collectors and others, and the results are on show until September 5.

The artists are up-and-comers and players in the Sydney art scene and the curators are museum big wigs and people in the know. The result is a dog’s breakfast of a show in a gallery space that has been painted dark grey, divided up with walls at odd angles, has the names of the artists emblazoned on the walls in white and spot lights picking out the unframed works. It is a brutally unsympathetic environment, part HSC art show, part Showbag Pavilion at the old Royal Easter Show. We’re not sure what the ACP thought they would be getting into with 14 curators (Virginia Baxter & Keith Gallasch, Rex Butler, Robert Cook, Patrick Corrigan, Max Doyle & Malcolm Watt, Juliana Engberg, Caroline Farmer, Peter Hill, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Daniel Palmer and Steve Vizard) but it's a stinkin’ mess.

The works of these apparent superstars of tomorrow is pretty darn average. The video installations probably come off best since watching a TV in any space is usually OK. The King Pins Dark Side of The Mall is amusing enough and the half-mad security officer patrolling a shopping centre who wears a T-shirt that reads “I survived the Cremaster series and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” is value enough. But we're starting to wonder if the King Pins have got something else up their gender-confsuing sleeves? IT's a great act for now but they're also in serious danger of being over exposed. We think of The King Pins as being like a promising new band with a few good singles out but soon they’ll have to make an album and stop stuffing around on these club dates. Similarly, Grant Steven’s video installation of words flashing on a screen (BROKEN HOMES WITH HOT SHOWERS) accompanied by Hendrix, Zep and other Westie favourites, is blank but interesting and beckons us back for another look.

Elsewhere, however, the jumble of images and crappy hanging make otherwise good works look rather lame. Rachel Ann Hobbs’s series called Couple Physics is witty but hung in what seems like random order and the presentation, stuck to the walls without frames, makes them seem like the work of someone who needs a bit of cash to realise their concepts. David Thomas’s painted photos are great, reversing the viewer’s perceptual relationship to the picture surface, but why are they hung at such a low height and in semi-darkness?

Silvia Velez has one of those breathtaking works called Post Its, which, from a distance, makes you go “Ooh wow! Somebody drew hundreds of overlapping post it notes!” but when you get up close you realise that they are all print outs from a computer. What a disappointment. Speaking of let downs, Shaun Gladwell is in Zeitgeist too and we would have thought that someone represented by Sherman Galleries was already here, not up and coming, and surely Gladwell has been in rather too many shows in the last year? Perhaps he is the zeitgeist? But never mind. He’s represented by three photographs, two the same and one not the same. We’ll leave it to you to discover what exciting images Gladwell chose for the show because there is little else to be excited about.

We like what the ACP does but for a 30th anniversary show celebration they could have come up with something better than this poorly staged exhibition - and is it too much to ask that when such a major event is staged the room notes are actually available at the gallery or online?

We have been looking for signs of intelligent life in the world of blogs ever since launched The Art Life itself into the virtual world. We’ve scanned links and sent out probes and although we’ve found a few interesting specimens (listed on the right of this page) we hadn’t found any artblogs worth a mention. That was until last week and the discovery of Bilateral. But, as Dr. McCoy used to say, it’s life Jim, but not as we know it.

Bilateral is the work of Lucas Ihlein and is unapologetically eclectic, chronicling his 'thoughts in process', posting press releases from the Sydney Art Seen Society and providing links to a swag of web sites. We were so excited that there was another art blog out there that we linked to it last week before we had a chance to send in an expedition. We have had a look and now we can reveal to you that Ihlein has a bee in his bonnet and that sucker is buzzing. Posted in June, 2003, he had a big idea:

“People might wish to get involved with a fictional project I have thrown out into the ether. its a response to that ghastly magazine called the "australian art collector" and their "50 most collectable artists"...

“A dynamic network of artists from around the country will soon be launching their new DIY magazine The Australian Art Eclector. Each issue of The Eclector will incorporate an exciting feature on "Australia's 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists".

“Phil T. Luca, magazine editor and spokesperson for the Network of Un-Collectable Artists (or N.U.C.A.) explains: "The compendium of "Australia's 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists" will be an important resource, especially for those wishing to look beyond the pseudo-official canon of Australian artists who have been vetted and rubberstamped by our short-sighted and commodity-oriented art institutions."

Ilhein’s idea was to get together all the artists who defy the economic forces of the art world and make art that cannot be sold or collected by avaricious capitalists who want to decorate their office foyers with trophy art works.

“The group obsessively documents the occurrence of ephemeral artworks, such as Weed-Killer/Pest Controller by Diego Bonetto and Emma Jay, where the artists created an informative audio tour of the various weeds on a run-down Drive-In Theatre site in western Sydney. Another project to make it into the top 50 was SquatSpace's SquatFest, an anti-TropFest screening of film and video by independent artists and activists. The screenings were held in an abandoned brickworks in inner Sydney.”

And so on. Building on his idea, Ilhein ruminated on the fact that artist run initiatives like the NUCA tend to replicate the very organisations that they seek to replace, what with all the networking, press release writing and web site building you have to do to get the thing started. But eventually, he admitted in May this year, these kinds of things take on a life of their own:

“NUCA’s first big, silly idea was to publish a magazine featuring Australia’s 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists. As a concept it was immediately oppositional – we wanted to lampoon the Australian Art Collector magazine, which publishes annual lists of artists to “look out for” on the market. This kind of art market “speculation” has always been a complete anathema to our desire for a do-it-yourself utopia. We envisioned a roughly photocopied zine secretly inserted into each copy of the Australian Art Collector in every magazine shop around the country.”

What a brilliant idea! If the NUCA put a copy of their ‘roughly photocopied zine’ into every other copy of Australian Art Collector Magazine it would make 50% of the issue’s print run instantly collectable. Unfortunately, printing that many zines would have meant a hell of a lot of money at Kinko’s so the NUCA moved on to an even more devious proposition:

“[…] as NUCA’s growing core began to think more about the idea, and began to email it around, and as the enthusiasm poured in, we realised that there was a wealth of artists who identified with the term “uncollectable” for all sorts of different reasons – and that our publication could serve a purpose beyond satire – it could become a kind of document of their activities. Six months later, the Network of UnCollectable Artists hardly even remembers its oppositional roots. NUCA has become a self-legitimised network in its own right. The magazine idea has evolved into a set of (un)collectable bubblegum cards (it will be nigh-on-impossible to collect a full set). These cards were first sold by our itinerant vendors in Melbourne during the 2004 Next Wave Festival.”

Ah, the irony… We really want to get our hands on a set of those cards! The NUCA web site is now up but sadly, except for a recent event documented through a poem, major NUCA events sees to have stalled. We’re assuming that, on the verge of success, the organisation have done the only sensible thing and disbanded. If not, they’re in danger of getting on Australian Art Collector’s list of 50 Most Collectable artists next year.

Speaking of the Sydney Art Seen Society, they too have a web site and it chronicles their efforts in demanding (in a polite way) set fees for artists included in every public gallery exhibition in the country, $500 for an artist in a group show and $2000 in a solo gig. We don’t really understand how SASS came up with those figures, but we are definitely of the opinion that to receive, one must ask.

SASS has been pretty successful getting press coverage for their activities and their site posts stories from The Australian on their meetings and events. Kate Lundy, the shadow minister for the arts, helped the SASS cause by attending their meeting at the Australia Council and by provided a sound bite to ABC radio who attended the meeting. As The Australian reported:

“Lundy said the FTA represents ‘one of the greatest threats to Australia's cultural capacity’, a position held by many local artists, who object to culture being included in the agreement. Repeated in a radio interview on Tuesday morning, her comments were seen by some as fracturing the ALP's position on the agreement, although Labor leader Mark Latham insisted that Lundy was raising "items of public concern" rather than breaking ranks. He said Labor would decide its position once it had all the facts.”

John Howard and Alexander Downer seized on Lundy’s statement as evidence that the Labor Party was “splitting down the middle” diverting the story away from the SASS event and its petition. Still, The Australian must be congratulated for widening the debate away from a simple demand into the complexities of what such a set fee would mean:

“Payment of set artist fees used to be a prerequisite of funding through the Australia Council, but the scheme was scrapped in 1997 because it was seen as inflexible. Galleries now decide what fees are appropriate, with the result that some pay good fees and others little or nothing at all. […]

“The National Association for the Visual Arts - whose voluntary code of practice contains a schedule of recommended artist fees - supports the petition. Gallery directors contacted by The Australian support the concept of artist fees.

But the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art's director Sarah Miller warns that standardising fees nationally could put undue pressure on galleries outside Sydney.

She also wonders why the petition is limited to galleries that are federally funded, ignoring the galleries most likely to be in a position to pay: the big state-funded capital-city galleries, artist-run spaces, universities and festivals.

‘There is absolutely the will to [pay a substantial fee], but the capacity is another matter,’ she says.”

As much as we agree with the sentiment that artists should be paid for their efforts, we also can’t escape the thought that the whole exercise is somewhat futile. Attaching a set figure to an artist’s participation is tokenistic, no matter how appealing certain sums appear. More problematic is changing the way an artist is paid for their work. Being selected for a solo or group show and attracting a set fee for that participation is akin to a service fee where a participant is rewarded for their efforts by an industry-wide agreement on the value for that service.

Artists and their work, by the very nature of the activity, usually operate outside the payment-for-service arrangement you would have for say, trades people like plumbers and electricians. After all, they are providing their skills for a fee in much the same way artists would under SASS's proposal. The difference is that in a competitive market place, plumbers and electricians can attempt to undercut their competitors by offering a cheaper service and thus attract more work. If public galleries started paying artist for their participation, why wouldn’t an artist be able to offer their services for a cheaper rate to get into a group show? As a government mandated payment, there would be a good argument that such a payment would be anti-competitive.

Perhaps a more suitable analogy to what the artists are asking for is the music industry – after all, individual musicians are rewarded for the popularity of their work and are supported by advance payments on the potential of their salability before they even get to the market place. Organisations like VisCopy who collect royalties for the reproduction of artists work in magazines have a direct equivalent in music industry organisations like AMCOS (mechanical rights) and APRA (performance royalties) who police the reproduction of musicians work. Musicians also have the advantage of massive multinational entertainment corporations looking out for their interests from distribution right down to busting copyright infringers. Naturally, visual artists wouldn’t want those kinds of organisations to run the art world, preferring instead a more low key approach that would ensure artists rewards for their efforts. Or would they?

At the first SASS meeting the even more vexatious question of a living wage for artists was brought up. For those among us old enough, it is surely a case of “here we go again” with flash backs to the Artworkers Union. Placing a value on artist’s worth, despite the fact that so many artists live close to the official poverty line, goes against the whole ethos of what art is, a commodity that is valued by its scarcity and not on its material value. Artists are by their very nature capitalists, offering their work to a market place that decides which of the art works are the most valuable and then, if enough people agree, the value of those objects increases. The artists can benefit directly and (albeit with a few intermediary steps) reap the market’s rewards.

But to value an artist’s activity by a government mandated payment derails the whole ethos of the art market and, if values are set in advance of the artist’s work ever reaching the market place, then how would artists hope to benefit in the future if their work proves to be popular? We can well imagine that once an artist’s wage is set, a pension plan can’t be too far behind.