the art life

Last week, while discussing Artspace in the Comments pop up, a reader who signed their name Bored Now had a go at us for not doing our homework:

“Perhaps the Art Life should visit Artspace, have a look at the exhibition/s, speak to Nick Tsoutas... how long has Edmund Capon been at the AGNSW? How long has Sarah Miller been at PICA? Why don't you actually do some research, instead of simply contributing to the already ridiculous amount of Sydney art gossip. It does nothing for the promotion or critique of Australian art.”

We always find it amusing when someone says we should do something, but we were troubled by the fact maybe we’d let the whole debate run on for too long without going back to the source. We’ve been to Artspace quite a few times this year and reviewed shows, but we hadn’t gone back to Nick since the first email and again asked him directly what was happening. So we sat down and wrote a friendly email:

“Hi Nick,

“There have been recent rumours and speculation on our blog and in our reader comments that you are leaving your post as director of Artspace in 2005. In the interests of accuracy and fairness, we were wondering if you'd like to respond to those rumours. Are you leaving and, if not, for how long is your current appointment? What does Artspace have planned for 2005 and do these plans signal a change in direction for Artspace?

“We would like to point out that we are not in any way hostile to you or the gallery, we simply have reported what we have heard. If you read back through the blog you will see that we are regular visitors to the space and have been supporters of the organisation since its days in Randall Street Surry Hills and the directorships of Judy Annear and Gary Sangster. Some readers have recently started signing their name "Nick Tsoutas" so we'd thought it was high time we sent you another email and went straight to the source.

Looking forward to your response,

The Art Life.”

The very next day we received a response from the general manager of Artspace, Helen Hyatt-Johnston:

"Thank you for your enquiry. The Executive Director Nicholas Tsoutas is currently on leave."

We emailed right back and asked when we might expect a response but we haven’t as yet received a reply. We will keep you posted. Meanwhile, Ruark Lewis posted a response to the Artspace discussion which we thought was definitely worth being reposted here:

“It's a damn pity the NSW Ministry of Art hasn't forced Artspace to employ new curatorial/directorial staff. This could be done in say a 5 year management rollover program. Westspace Director Brett Jones would make a great CEO at Artspace. Someone like Jonathan Jones is another excellent and most competent management prospective - currently doing Public Programs at AGNSW. Very few of the younger director/curatorial people are getting the mid-level experience they desperately need.

“I very rarely go down to Woolloomooloo. I thought that the restrictions placed on the local community using the Artspace facility, and there being no educational program developed with the local schools, wasn't really very fair. But I guess Australian contemporary Australian art isn't really very fair.

“Whoever pointed out Sarah at PICA and Michael at Institute of Modern Art for that matter, ought to ask the question - why we owe these guys the best jobs forever? These small museums have become over formalised art management solutions. They are now mid-sized corporate style government funded institutions. For the last 2 years I have been finding more exhibition and performance possibilities and audiences outside the 'big' mid-spaces. Although I have shown in Artspace, IMA and PICA in various capacities over the years, I do not find any follow through - no email notices of forthcoming exhibitions or events. So I have to assume I am not relevant to them and they are not relevant except in the most minor bibliographic kind of way.

“Often, these sorts of brick walls force artists to find more interesting opportunities elsewhere. Then I have also thought that [there is a reason] to close these mid-size institutions down altogether. Take their funding allocations and provide funding for 6 Artist Run Initiatives (ARI) full programs in each of these cities. A central ARI management structure could introduced to over see each 6 ARIs - coordinating printing, mail out, databases, documentation, audience development and public programs and the all important funding application process with government. That's where Nick and Sarah and Michael can go to - leaving the individual programming and selection to young directors/committees.

“Each individual ARI then could better focus on getting their programs fully produced, their artist-director role better sorted out, and their artists fully paid for participation. With the Artspace model being 20 years old it is a generation out of date. I think if a serious shake-up could occur then the contemporary arts in Australia could again become vital.”

Last Thursday after putting The Art Life to bed for another week, we belatedly received an email from artist Zanny Begg who was taking part in the Out of Gallery project in and around the Blacktown area. Begg was planning to install her work on walls and in car parks in Blacktown which would have fit in nicely with the stated aims of the project. According to the web site of the University of Western Sydney the Out Of Gallery project is:

“A series of guerrilla exhibitions in Western Sydney [that] brings together the works of over forty artists with the public of Western Sydney in the form of artist happenings, short-term exhibitions, public interventions, performances and other forms of contemporary art. The project encases five distinct yet compatible art ventures: Urban Architecture: Site Specific Interventions, Art Park: People, Ecology and Environment in Art, Art Trafficking, Other Places: New Media and Local Identities and Digital Landscapes. Each project aims to present confrontational and unexpected dialogues and interactions with Western Sydney society through contemporary art. These five components within [OUT OF GALLERY] provide both artists and audiences with the stimuli to react to issues in our everyday contemporary culture.”

But it seemed that Begg’s work was too confrontational and too unexpected as her email explained:

“Today (Tuesday 23/11) I was stopped by police when installing a work - Checkpoint - for the Blacktown Art Gallery [Out of Gallery] project. For this work I was creating 10 "checkpoints" for "weapons of mass distraction" in various locales throughout Blacktown. These "checkpoints" were marked by a life-sized stencil of a soldier and were placed on hoardings, fences, walls and car parks.

I was contacted by a police officer outside Blacktown Gallery and told to take down all the artworks as, in a "climate of terrorism," it was inappropriate to "show such political messages". I was told that if I did not take the works down I would be taken to the station and fined. I rang the curator of the show and he explained to me that the council had asked that my work be pulled from the show and that all the works must be taken down.

”I am disappointed that this work was censored by the council and will no longer be able to be part of the [Out of Gallery] project. I feel this work would have made an important contribution to the exhibition and had conceptual and artistic merit - in addition to its political anti-war message. I had hoped that these artworks would surprise people, in back streets, car parks and other parts of the suburb and remind them of the conflict which is going on in the backyards for people in Iraq.”

Update: Bilateral has the whole sorry story.

Altruism is alive and well according to the latest Art Life poll. Starting your own damn museum is the option of choice (29 per cent) for those entrusted with $4.6 million. The second parochial option of buying only Australian art (13 per cent) just pipped buying endless rounds of drinks for all your friends (9 per cent)… We know which option we'd prefer.

I Have $4.6 million I will…

Start my own damn museum 29% 17

Buy a lot of Australian art 22% 13

Drinks for all my friends! 15% 9

Just one more heist and then I’m out… 10% 6

Buy three Cy Twombly paintings 8% 5

Invest the money wisely 8% 5

Bet it all on black 7% 4

Total votes: 58

We will be making a public appearance (on radio) this coming Sunday morning at 9.30am as the guests of Vicki and Melody Wren. Tune your wireless sets to FBi Radio 94.5FM.

With a whiff of Christmas pudding in the air, the end of November is an incredibly busy time in the Sydney art world - so many things are going on it’s impossible to keep up. We missed the new show by Paul Donald and Sarah Newell at the revamped Gallery Wren even though people kept saying it was a great exhibition and we should get along, we’ve just about missed the Robert Owen exposition at the Art Gallery of NSW (closes Sunday) and it looks like we’ll miss the Margarita Georgiadis show at Maree Mizon Gallery that opens on December 1.

We woke up in a sweat the other day and decided we had to do something about it. To celebrate the end of our first year, The Art Life is proud to announce The Art Life Guarantee of Quality!™ You’re asking yourself, what is this so-called “guarantee”? We vow that we will see every single exhibition advertised in Art Almanac in the first two weeks of December. We guarantee our readers that we will review every single show we see.

You’re no doubt saying, but that’s insane – you can’t see everything! Ah yes, but we can! Here’s how it’ll work: the list of galleries to be visited are those included in the listings of Art Almanac, excluding the North Shore, the Inner and Outer Sydney. Galleries that have exhibitions that run over into that period from November will be noted but not reviewed again. If we visit a gallery during advertised opening hours but find that the gallery is closed, they’ll be eliminated from the list. We’ll visit everything from the Wedding Circle to JL Etching, Gallery Wren to Galleries Primitif, Flying Lobster to MOP Projects, from Marlene Antico to The Dentist. This is The Art Life Guarantee of Quality!™

It was something of a relief to discover that Gow Langsford Gallery has remained open long enough for Matthys Gerber to have his show there. We felt bad for him and the rest of the former Sarah Cottier Gallery stable after that gallery closed a year ago but many of the artists have found new galleries while some have not – it’s a cruel art world out there – and it was good to know that Gerber had a new home. Then Gow Langsford announced they were closing and Art Life readers began to speculate whether it was Gerber who was the Jonah, but it’s hard to imagine that Gerber will have trouble because his art is so effortlessly cool.

The new show of Gerber’s is called Elasticum and it’s on until December 9. Perhaps one of the most ironic aspects of this artist’s work is how good it looks in reproduction. His mad use of geometric abstraction, crazed depth perceptions and layers of patterning seem tailor made for magazines and CD covers and some of the work in this show verges on Euro-Moderne design, a sort of post war European abstraction that meets Miffy in Ikea’s lighting section for a fight (and Miffy wins).

The epitome of this approach is Animal Magnet, a large painting of globular colours, reds and yellows and four speakers emitting music by Rik Rue, that stalwart of Sydney’s underground avant garde music scene, and it’s all burps and pops in a crazy musique concrete stylee. Measuring 1700 x 1700 x 110 mm. the work commands the room. Green Light features receding lines that are like a hypnotist’s wheel and Men’s Wing does a similar trick with layers and depths and monstrous black and white tentacles that reach out of the work. In an altered state of mind this kind of work could be damaging, so we advise to take only in the company of friends.

Gerber’s work is pretty entertaining and we like the fact that it could only have been achieved through a very deliberate series of choices. You can see that Gerber is an intelligent artist – there’s nothing hit or miss here - but the problem we have, however, is that Gerber’s painting skills have always appeared to us be rather rudimentary. He has a classy eye for composition and colour and makes all the wrong choices beautifully, it’s just a pity that the works never looks as good in real life as they do in reproduction. The lines seem too hesitant and the application of the paint is far too drab for our taste – if he got some art students in or employ some sign writers to get those surfaces glossy and hard edged, Gerber would probably rule the world. There is one work in this show that seems to say that Gerber can make that kind of art if he wanted to and it’s called Tight and Shiny. We think there might be a message there.

At Martin Bowne Fine Art they have a very hands-off approach to visitors. When we went to see the Chris Langlois show Vanishing Point , there was no one there. The door was open, the lights were on, but all we saw, or rather heard of the staff, was distant laughter and the faint splashing of the gold fish in the gallery’s indoor pond. It was like someone had come in and spirited the staff away leaving us to ponder Langois elegant seascapes alone and in silence.

The last lot of works by Langois that we had seen was some skyscapes of indistinct cloud and haze over graduated blue squares, as though the artist had simply recorded a section of the sky in oil paint for our consideration. We were captivated. This new selection of works finds the ocean added into the frame and in two instances bits of coast line, and breaking waves in others. Verging on the photoreal, Langois technique rewards the viewer who takes a few steps back to let the brush strokes coalesce into a seamless whole. There is something ineffably contemplative in the works, and the edge of the ocean and the sky at the vanishing point of the pictures is a place where the viewer’s mind rests. That the artist also conjours up something about the very nature of seeing in his titles Ocean (Violet Green) or Ocean (Green Blue) only adds to that sense of infinitude.

Gazing on these paintings also inevitably suggests artists who have been this way recently as well. Gerhard Richter of course added ‘focus’ to the equation of his images, making the seascapes mediate between a photographic record of the ocean and the pictorial representation of the image (he’s German you understand) and Hiroshi Sugimoto invested a Zen like weightlessness to his images of oceans and seas (he’s Japanese you understand). With the ghost of JMW Turner floating over your shoulder too, it’s a brave artist who takes on the seascape, perhaps even one who’s a little foolhardy. Luckily for Langlois he succeeds.

Jessie Cacchillo wrote to us an invited us to the opening of her show Quiet They Might See You at Mori Gallery. “I know the gallery is a pain in the ass to get to, but there will be a drink waiting!” she said and we thought we’d probably like a drink, so we went. It’s been ages since we went to an actual opening and we were so glad we did. If we were Jessie Cacchillo, we’d be very happy with our opening – it was everything you’d want it to be - there were loads of people there – good looking people – it wasn’t too hot or too cold or too crowded and the booze was good. A nice looking fellow came up to us and flattered us by asking if we were painters or sculptors. But no, we were just there to see the art.

Cacchillo had two sets of works. On one wall are a series of mixed media works on paper and on the facing wall another series of small acrylic (13x18cm) on canvas paintings.

It was this second series that had all the trills. Using images (we’re guessing) from personal family photographs and other sources, Cacchillo has a pretty good eye for the macabre. Aunty Fran is a lady in a party frock, her head cropped at the top and her shoes just getting into the picture, Betty and Cat is a little girl with a pet and demonic look on her face while Hot Dog Man is a surprised looking fellow putting a red sausage in his gob.

The problem with painting from photographs is that the images always have a slightly squashed feel as depth becomes flattened in the process of painting. Like her stable mate Michael Zavros, the real art is in the choice of images and Cacchillo has a pretty steady sense of what will make a good picture. It would be nice to see the works on a larger scale, but then again the intimacy of the works really adds to their allure. Unfortunately, the Mori web site doesn’t have images from this new show yet but the image archive has some similar works.

Cacchillo’s second set of works on the opposite wall are a bit of a let down – the mixed media pieces have a definite joi d’vivre, but they are much lesser works than her paintings. We couldn’t help but feel that the artist should have taken a real leap of faith and just shown the paintings alone in a gallery with a single wall of small paintings. It would have certainly given us somewhere to slump with a studied air of insouciance.

In the smaller gallery, Sarah Parker was having her first show in Sydney in four years. Having escaped the horrors of Marlene Antico, she now finds herself in a proper gallery with a proper opening and an exhibitions space you can actually move around in.

We discovered that Parker is having a “let’s see how it goes” exhibition with Mori before they officially tie the knot. Having seen the show we have to ask - how much better does an artist have to be to get a permanent gig? This is without a doubt one of the finest and strongest shows by any artist we have seen all year.

Parker is an artist with years of experience painting and it shows in her beautifully understated works. Her images might not be to everyone’s taste and we have to admit that we have acquired a taste for them over the years – we usually prefer space ships and robots and monsters and that kind of stuff – but we are now totally seduced by her pictures. Some might call her work ‘soft’ or ‘girly’, but there is an incredible authority in the way Parker paints with minimal and graceful lines, using exquisite colours and an application of paint that makes you incredulous that she is using acrylic on canvas.

We especially like the way Parker has achieved a style that’s a combination of narrative symbolism and faux-naïve image making. Seeing the works in isolation is a lovely experience, but seeing them together in an exhibition suggests some sort of alternative New Testament Bible story where no one has to get killed, goodness is rewarded and people live happily ever after with birds. It’s an eccentric, original and beautiful show.

On November 1 we were discussing some recent articles and news items about art. Among the usual stuff, we noted Steve Meacham's interview with the indefatigable Edmund Capon in The Sydney Magazine and noted that aside from the fact the article had very little to say about Capon, the director of the Art Gallery of NSW mentioned a wish list of five artworks he would like to buy regardless of the cost. Being the trendy, shallow and fashionable types that we are, we zeroed in on Capon’s mention of a video work by Bill Viola and didn’t even bother to note the name of the triptych by Cy Twombly he mentioned. We just thought, "yeah, that'll be the day."

Two weeks later on the 13th of November, we were perusing the letters page of the Sydney Morning Herald. It was a slow post-election Saturday and when things get dull, the newspaper’s thoughts turn to art. Under the heading For Art’s Sake, finding the funds to buy pieces by internationally renowned artists.

”As if to drive home the point, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art announced its most expensive purchase -paying an estimated $US45 million ($59 million) for Duccio di Buoninsegna's Madonna and Child - on the same day this week that the next director of the National Gallery of Australia lamented that prices were pushing masterpieces beyond the reach of public galleries here. The Met price, of course, is untouchable for any Australian gallery but it illustrates the difficulty of public institutions here competing for art treasures”

The main thrust of the piece was that Ron Radford, the newly appointed head of the National Gallery of Australia, was arguing that Australian museum galleries should club together to buy art treasures for Australian galleries. The SMH pointed out a few problems:

”Trouble is, the strategy has flopped before. Galleries are notoriously individualistic, reflecting the influences of their directors. And how would artworks bought collectively be equitably shared, particularly given their fragility and the costs of transport and insurance?

A few case studies are instructive. The National Gallery and the Art Gallery of South Australia teamed up to buy an Australian painting a few years ago but were still outbid by a private investor. Twenty years ago, the Art Gallery of NSW failed to persuade me National Gallery of Victoria to jointly buy Tintoretto's Christ Washing the Disciples' Feet. When the Victorian gallery subsequently suggested joint purchase of a pair of Canalettos, it was snubbed by Sydney. Australia's only apparent joint acquisition - a John Glover in 2001 -prompted a price-fixing investigation, although the probe was inconclusive.”

Imagine if the AGNSW and the National Gallery of Victoria did jointly buy a work of art. How would they share it? The AGNSW could have the piece on Monday, Tuesday and Friday, the NGV, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, swapping every second week…

It all seemed rather strange that when the AGNSW last week triumphantly announced the purchase of Twombly’s Three studies from the Temeraire for a rumoured $4.6 million, all of this was forgotten. A suspicious person might wonder if by just happening to mention Twombly in the Meacham interview, Capon wasn’t cannily setting up the next news story for the gallery?

Announcing the news via a press release, the AGNSW would be forgiven for wondering (and not for the first time) just who they were dealing with at the Sydney Morning Herald. First out of the gate was Lauren Martin on November 16:

A Modern Gem or A Load of Pollocks.

Nobody say Blue Poles. Sure, Three studies from the Temeraire (1998-99) is probably the most expensive picture the Art Gallery of NSW has ever bought. And without doubt one of the most significant. But the gallery's director, Edmund Capon, conceded that the painting's artist, Cy Twombly, is "perhaps more than any other living artist, [one] about whom people will say, 'My six-year-old could have done that' ".

To which he sniffed: "Try it."

Mr. Capon flew to Italy to negotiate directly with the artist for the picture, and while he's keeping the price secret, sources say he pruned it down from $6 million to $4.5 million, well below its market value.

The gallery's publicist, Jan Batten, suggested that the triptych was the most notable cultural acquisition since the National Gallery in Canberra controversially bought Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles in 1973.

Mr. Capon demurred from such comparisons. "All I do know is that in 50 years' time people will be coming in here and looking at this in wonderment," he said.”

Although Capon had secured the painting at a knockdown bargain price after negotiating with the artist directly for $4.6 million (or $6 million or $4.5 million depending on who you believed), the gallery had to tiresomely justify the works' credentials to a disbelieving public.

"Twombly has built a career on what Mr Capon describes as "scribbles, doodles and moments of existence on a profound and richly emanating light", and Three studies from the Temeraire 1998-99 is his first to enter an Australian collection.

"Buying a picture like this, that doesn't so clearly and so obviously fit into a specific collecting pattern, absolutely needs to have that quality of conviction," Mr. Capon said.

As to the public's reaction, Mr. Capon said: "I'm sure it will have its critics ... and its fervent admirers. But every now and then, what we need to do is to get a great, empowered, individual work of art that owes nothing to anybody - which this doesn't."

The next day, the SMH had changed its tune slightly with another story by Martin called Twombly Earns High Praise.

"The Art Gallery of NSW's purchase of Cy Twombly's Three studies from the Temeraire (1998-99) was praised yesterday by the rival gallery in Melbourne, which revealed it is aiming for similar works after an internal review into its collection strategy.

"Well done Sydney, from Melbourne," the director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Gerard Vaughan, said of the acquisition, reported in yesterday's Herald. In a deal with the AGNSW director, Edmund Capon, who negotiated at the artist's Italian studio, the expatriate American Twombly is believed to have sold the triptych for just under $4.5 million.

"It's great for Australia to have a work of such significance," Vaughan said, calling the purchase "very ambitious".

"The state galleries, unlike the National Gallery of Australia, do not receive money from their state governments for acquisitions. So to take on a multimillion-dollar purchase ... using the resources of the Art Gallery of NSW and with special gifts made by people in Sydney - I think it says a lot about Sydney in particular, but Australia's commitment to contemporary art."

The purchase must have really stuck in the collective craw of the NGV, as the money for the Twombly came from private donations by the AGNSW cashed up benefactors. Well done indeed.

Meanwhile, the peanut gallery protested. Over at ABC 702, which is sort of like the SMH's radio arm, the station’s day time DJs got stuck in. Sally Loane, that doyen of Volvo driving soccer mums, interviewed Capon about the purchase beginning her interview with “anyone could do it, couldn’t they… not really, but you know what I mean." The air down the telephone line from Capon’s office was freezing. James Valentine, 702’s resident cynic and former saxophone player with Oz rock band The Models (how’s that for a CV!), used his entire afternoon shift to mock the “avant garde” playing music that was little more than static, sound poetry. You see, it's all the same. Ha ha ha.

Our favourite dunderhead reaction to the works was from Greg Graham, an outraged letter writer to the SMH, which we reprint here in its entirety:

Money spent on artwork an elephant could draw

Edmund Capon and his ilk, our so-called art elite, should not be allowed to purchase laughable rubbish such as Cy Twombly's Three Studies from the Temeraire regardless of who pays for it.

The NSW Art Gallery is a taxpayer-funded amenity and as such taxpayers are entitled to have art purchased on their behalf that they actually like.

The fact that a demand exists among a small clique of individuals and corporations, thus making it a potentially good financial investment, is irrelevant. What matters is what normal people think, and I suspect they'd think their six-year-old or a gifted elephant could produce a better work of art than Twombly, and they'd be right.

It's high time the likes of Capon were compelled through legislation to do away with this nonsensical and cynical view that one must appreciate a pile of potatoes dumped in the centre of a gallery as art, and demand instead that art must impress on a purely visual level before it is considered worthy. Greg Graham, Artarmon, November 16"”

We think that Mr. Graham might have a point - when we see a bunch of potatoes in a gallery we immediately think 'chips!'- but hey buster, leave the elephants alone!

Speaking of elephants, The Australian wasn’t to be left out of the fun and excitement and called in Sebastian Smee, a man who knows quality when he sees it. Under the scintillating title $4.5m fair price for elegiac work, Smee got straight down to work:

"Cy Twombly is one of the world's great living artists, and it is terrific news that one of his works has finally entered a public collection in Australia. But of the new paintings by Twombly I have seen over the past few years, it is not the one I would have bought.

These things are intensely subjective. My view is that any of the paintings in the recent Gagosian Gallery show in London - vertical works in pale blue and brown that derive from Japanese calligraphy - might have been more exciting, and better complemented the Art Gallery of NSW's superb new Asian galleries. Nonetheless, it is a beautiful, elegiac work of art, at once powerfully iconic and subdued."

We’ve missed Sebastian Smee and its so good to have him back. Giving a little background to the painting, he explained:

"The title of the new acquisition refers to a painting by JMW Turner in the collection of London's National Gallery. The Temeraire was a 98-gun warship that played a distinguished part in Nelson's victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. However, Turner chose to paint the ship three decades later, being tugged out to its last berth, about to be broken up. The painting symbolised the winding down of Britain's naval supremacy, the end of an era.

Twombly will have been attracted to these connotations, but just as stirred by Turner's paintwork, his evocation of sweeping vastness set in tension with intimate observation."

Ninety eight guns, Battle of Trafalgar, 1805. Gotcha. The English satirical magazine Private Eye has a writer who does stuff like this and his byline is Phil Space. But is the painting any good? Smee turned to Roland Barthes:

”Barthes, who wrote at length about Twombly, likened his work to a pair of trousers -not the ideal pair hanging neatly on a rack, but a pair that has been discarded and left on the floor after wearing.

"The essence of an object," he wrote, "has something to do with the way it turns into trash."

How good is the Twombly purchased by the Art Gallery of NSW?"

We have a suspicion that Smee just called Twombly’s work a pair of pants. Pants!

Sorry to be rude, but last week we really fucked up. There’s no way around it. Every time we think about how Guan Wei was transformed into Guam Wee (and other screamers) we shudder with embarrassment and groan, 'how could we have been so stoopid?'

Last week also boasted a brand new feature at The Art Life , our first honest-to-god flame war. The Comments attached to the story on the SH Ervin Year in Art show glowed red as posters slagged each other off, rude invective was slung and baseless claims were made. It was a rather unedifying experience but at least we can now claim to be a proper web site, what with readers viciously attacking one another.

Another claim for full blown web pest status was the unfortunate double mailing of our update email on Wednesday. We then discovered that a select group of readers who signed up for the Bloglet update – and which we thought we had canned about three months ago – were still receiving updates every time we made a correction, changed a comma to a full stop or republished the blog. One reader returned an email to us with ENOUGH ALREADY in the subject field claiming to have received six emails in a row. We then looked into it and discovered a technical glitch, fixed it and now hopefully, there will be no more emails. That at least was a plus.

Another upside to last week’s week of hell was the continuing receipt of emails from people asking us random questions or making suggestion for updates to our links. Christian Capurro wrote to us from Melbourne asking if we could include his Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette site to our Sorted list. This we have done.

Then someone with the name of ArtLifer666 sent us an email headed oh adam! and then this in the email itself:

“i like adam geczy. most of the time he has good insight. and definitely a better writer and a broader knowledge base than our old friend peter. recently though the guy is seriously becoming sentimental. either that or he has fallen in love with the sound of his own voice.

for example at grantpirrie he writes - "Kershaw exhorts us to remember well. For there is no use in communicating with ‘absent others’ unless it is for the betterment of those who are with us, just as it is the function of a memorial to ensure that the dead remembered thus will not die in the same way again. Today, with the recrudescence of political lies, (unapologetic) racial intolerance, torture and war, work such as this could not be more apposite. "

its so hyperbolic it turns into pure bathos. having bumped into kershaw around the traps - i cant find an artist more apolitical and more a moral neutral. my bet is he is probably just really missing his old friends.... oh adam! you who can write so well - why have you not practiced more restraint? just because something rhymes and flows and sounds poetic does not mean you have to publish it. It might sound great - but that maybe all it is. pretending otherwise is deceitful. “

We certainly know what you mean when it comes to tenuous essays in exhibition catalogues and rash and bold claims they make on the behalf of modest art works. On the other hand, we’re starting to think that catalogue essay writers should be free to talk about whatever they want to talk about and in fact, if they didn’t mention the art work at all we’d be happy. Catalogue essays seem obliged to discuss the art work in reference to something that is not readily apparent – say, the history of the artist’s work, their influences or interests.

Critics and essayists are tempted to take an oblique angle to the work and talk about some tangentially related topic that does not seem to be relevant at all and then, in a dashing moment of authorial brilliance, bring it all back to the art works at hand. That this second tangential subject be thematically or conceptually related only in the mind of the writer is all part of the approach. Unfortunately, it rarely works. For example, we’re thinking of an incredibly dodgy review of the 2004 Sydney Biennale that’s in issue 72 of Photophile by a bloke named Robert Cook. He draws nonexistent parallels between the art in the Biennale and “indie music” and name checks, along with the artists, the band My Bloody Valentine. Please!

As far as we’re concerned, the writing of reviews and essays for catalogues should be free to discuss the history of boxing, flower arranging, the philatelic arts, ocean currents, ornithology, jazz or whatever the hell the writer wants to talk about and sod the art work. If you’re at the exhibition, you can look at the work yourself and no amount of brilliant and cogent writing will make you believe if the art work is a load of old toss. So Adam Geczy, shine on you crazy diamond!

Heidi Boudet wrote in with a simple enough request:

“I was wondering if you could possibly explain the problems with the current Artspace show. At the opening there were apparently some technical glitches but now there is a notice up saying that it is a work in progress that wasn't there on the opening night. I am just a bit curious given that these are all reasonably established artists - is it true that it was not a clash of civilisations but a clash of egos? Don't worry if it's too much bother. I was just wondering if you had some insights.”

No bother at all, Heidi - the artists in question are George Alexander, Maria Cruz, Zina Kaye, Jacky Redgate, Julie Rrap and Cathy Vogan, so we can’t see any continental sized egos there - and Artspace is such an efficiently run organization we can’t believe that it all fell apart on opening night. But this is just mere speculation on our part and anything could have happened.

Unfortunately, Artspace is rather like North Korea to us these days, inscrutable and silent, and even if we asked them straight out, they wouldn’t tell us. You may recall some months ago we emailed them and asked if it were true that Nick Tsoutas was leaving his tenured position as Dear Leader of the gallery. We’ve had no reply. We did receive an email from Dr. Brad Buckley, a board member of Artspace and man about town, asking us where we had got the information that Tsoutas had been initially appointed for two years. We emailed the venerable Doctor and said, hey, it was just something we were told, was that not correct? And is Tsoutas really leaving? Of course, acting as an official spokesperson for the gallery, Buckley did not reply to our questions. So our advice to you Heidi is to make something up and go around and tell as many people as you can because no one from the gallery will contradict you.

Of course, we can’t expect Artspace to talk to The Art Life. Why should they? The Art Gallery of NSW will reply to polite emails asking for factual verification of things we have heard, but Artspace does not dignify gossip with a response because, after all, the AGNSW is a publicly funded gallery with public servants as staff whereas Artspace is not. Right?

Art Life readers are suspicious people, shifting blame for art on to the middle class, are strangely aroused by art and have a keen interest in aesthetics... Our shock poll proves it:

When I Hear the Word “Culture” I

Blame the middle class 25% (14)

Feel strangely aroused 21% (12)

Think it should be ‘kultur’ 20% (11)

Fall into a fitful sleep 11% (6)

Seek the support of others 11% (6)

Reach for my cheque book 7% (4)

Look the other way 5% (3)

Total Votes 56

Due to some horrendous spell-check gremlins, some artist's names in the story below were rendered not as they were intended, but as spell check imagined them. While we don't necessarily like certain artist's work, we're not out to ridicule anyone. Our sincere apologies.

Why is the National Trust SH Ervin Gallery at the top of a very big hill? If it was at the bottom of a hill, perhaps in a dingly dell surrounded by flannel flowers and babbling brooks, we might be in a better frame of mind when we get there. But it is at the top of Observatory Hill and we are invariably in a bad mood when we arrive. Another thing that sticks in our collective craw is that you must pay $6 for the privilege of going inside. We know, it's the velvet rope syndrome - you want to get in to see what's on offer and the $6 makes you think that there's a value-for-money equation going on - but like the velvet rope, once you're inside it's nothing special, just people standing a round looking depressed.

The SH Ervin Gallery is named after the man who, in 1754, created the concept of the 'group show' (which in those days was called a 'salon') and the National Trust uses the place for worthy competitions, overflow shows and carefully curated exhibitions that go on to become "important". That's all good and we have no problem with that aspect of the gallery, but we do have a problem with the excessively crappy way the gallery exhibits art. The cheap and tacky hanging, the placement of paintings on curved walls next to windows, the discovery of blind alley ways where you find a lonely painting hung on what looks like an office divider, cluttered sight lines, indistinct lighting, the chatter of idiotic gallery guides - the SH Ervin is like an artist's run space for grown ups. However, instead of the sheer chutzpah of real artist run stuff, the Ervin is all Devonshire teas, ABC Classic FM and people talking about their recent operations. Artists should think long and hard before they agree to show their work in a gallery as badly compromised but as heavily promoted as this.

We went to the Ervin for the third annual The Year in Art exhibition and discovered that the show is the result of a concept:

"The concept for this exhibition is to present a selection of works from exhibitions that have been held in art galleries throughout 2004. The [gallery] invited arts writers and curators, to view exhibitions throughout the year and nominate works that they believed represented the scope of contemporary practice. The artists that have been selected for this exhibition demonstrate the dynamic contemporary arts scene and include both emerging artists and established practitioners. The exhibition aims to promote living Australian artists working in any discipline and bring their work to the attention of a wider audience."

Perhaps we were foolish for thinking that a statement of intent should actually reflect what is in the show, but if you can't trust the National Trust, who can you trust? No one, that's who! If the arts scene in Sydney is evenly divided between painting and drawing with a bit of sculpture and photography on the side, then this show is indeed representative of the "scope of contemporary practice". But where is a representative sampling of all the video work that's going on? Where is the installation work and the conceptual stuff you see in artist run galleries? The sexiest this show gets is with a few photographs and an inflatable sculpture. Wooh! But as far as a true sampling, this show falls at the first hurdle. The key word in that statement is "believe" which is a good get out clause - they believe and thus it is so.

This show is a trawl through exhibitions at commercial galleries around town and as such is not representative of the 'scope' of anything, but more a demonstration of how the art world is divided between old school modernists and the slightly frayed generation of avant gardists. And forget the business about a "wider audience" - the only people who are seeing this show like scones, Richard Clayderman and are in bed by 9pm.

Perhaps the most apposite example of the show is the inclusion of a work by William Kentridge called Office Love, a mohair tapestry measuring an impressive 350x460cms. It looks a lot like the work of Sally Smart, cut out shapes against a background map of Johannesburg and is so deadly dull and worthy it sends you into paroxysms of admiration - Oh William Kentridge! You are a master of your craft! We admire your Phaidon volume and your dogged devotion to heavy charcoal lines! You are indeed the modernist father figure we have been hungering for! Actually, to be perfectly blunt, piss off - we cannot tell you how sick we are of this kind of tedious display of artistic merit. It's art for the leather-lounge-and-whisky-after-dinner set.

On a similarly duff note is an example of John Beard's Headland show from Liverpool Street Gallery which, to be fair, looks quite good on its own. Rick Amor's work Path to The Sea is quite similar to Beard's art its blatant foregrounding of its attempts at being artistic, but unlike Beard and Kentridge, Amor manages to pull it off, partly due to the eccentricity of his vision and partly the deftness of his technique. It's still a bit of a yawn, but it's a quality yawn.

There is a lot of that kind of art in this show - high quality, high concept, unreconstructed modernism, technique-will-save-the-day stuff that's pretty much bereft of anything but the artist's own blind belief in their talent and importance. The shock is that there is so much of it. (We don't know who the arts writers and critics were who nominated these shows but we have our suspicions...)

In this kind of tepid environment, Wendy Sharpe can't help but stand out - she's not here to save the world from heathen post modernity, just to record it. Her six panel A Night In The City is a wondrous thing, even if it's hung so badly. Actually the prize for the worst hung painting in the show goes to the person who decided to hang Jon Plapp's black and white geometric abstraction next to a gallery air conditioning vent, which looks rather like Plapp's painting. You're fired!

A lot of works look exceptionally ordinary in this exhibition - works by artists Anne Wallace, Peter Atkins and Susan Andrews do not benefit at all from being hung in the Ervin, while the pieces by severely over-rated artists like Guan Wei, Polixeni Papapetrou and Cherine Fahd are like the HSC works of mildly talented students. What a great leveller it is to have all this work hung on shit brown walls. It makes everything look equally bad.

That anything looks good at all in this show is a minor miracle. Brook Andrew's Ignoratia (kookaburra) photographic work looks at home here - perhaps because of its faux-museum stylings. Philip George's The Affliction of The Protestant, a photograph of a ghostly green building floating in a desert calls to everyone who sees it. Anne Nobel's Ruby's Room #23 is a large photograph of a strand of hair on a girl's face and we kept going back to it.

We know, it seems like we just liked the photographic works, and looking over the catalogue, perhaps that's true. Certain paintings did look good, but they were always let down by the hang. At first glance, two large drawings looked great and we resisted going up and have a gander until the end - sort of like saving the dessert 'til last so you walk away with a sweet taste. eX de Medici had two drawings, Skull (Willow) and Skull (Camo). They are big, clean and are meticulously done. Then we discovered something kind of crap - there was a written explanation of the works hanging next to the two pieces. What a package - pretentious name and an explanation that makes sure that you walk away with what the artist thinks you should know. To paraphrase Tony Montana, we don't need that shit in our lives.

Just because you can do a thing, is it necessarily a good idea to go ahead and do it? This is the conundrum of art that is a conceptualised practice rather than an impressionistic impulse - should the artist go to the very end of the idea when she and her audience can see that end, rushing up with the inevitability of an egg heading for the floor? This is the problem for Jude Rae and her show at Gitte Weise Galleries (Sydney & Berlin) .

Rae has been doing paintings of objects set up in a product shot-like setting where the objects are pictured against a background with red flock wallpaper and a neutral ground on the bottom. You can't really fault Rae's highly aestheticised choices - everything is balanced just so and even if you're not wild about her technique, it's there for all to see. The more problematic part of her work is her choice of subject. Recently, Rae painted cups, saucers and vases and the works had a classic feel. For this show, Rae has done a couple of plastic chairs, two portraits of people and a group of still lives. Of what? you ask, of fruit? flowers? Actually her paintings are of fire extinguishers and gas cylinders.

At this point, we must admit we were struggling. Gas cylinders contain flammable material - the fire extinguishers put out fires. Is this something we should be thinking about? No clues in the titles, unfortunately: Still Life #146, Still Life #161. Hmmm. Do we really need to think about this? Is this as far as the concept goes? Is this how the egg feels?

Then we realised there was another way to look at this show and we immediately felt a whole lot better.

Rae is clearly a fan of gas cylinders and so are we. We looked a bit closer and found that the artist had pictured a range of LPG cylinders in various sizes with a selection of classic Primus-style gas cylinders ranging from the 1.25kg to 3.3kg capacity range up to the longer lasting 4.5kg and 9kg models which, as you know, are ideal for bbqs, leisure and other domestic uses. The artist has gone to great lengths to depict the three most popular types of valves from the right-hand thread internal valve and the left hand thread of the 3/8ths of an inch leisure and industrial models to the more durable and fool-proof POL connectors.

The artist is no trudge with the fire extinguishers either. At first we thought we were looking at some of the rightly famous Automatic Fire Services (pre Wormald take over) models designed for electrical fires, (using foam as the main retardant) but we noticed by the shape of the safety notice that these are EAC 5 Type E extinguishers used for electrical fires utilising carbon dioxide gas as it does not conduct electricity, but are of some assistance for other types fires as well.

Perhaps the key to understanding the import of Rae's show is that these are gas extinguishers. As the highly respected journal Fire Safety News and Review put it:

"...as a gas, it will not leave a messy residue over your equipment, which can be helpful for salvage if the fire has not totally destroyed your electrical/electronic equipment. Remember, as a gas, it will dissipate into the atmosphere, so direct the stream to the base of the fire from as close as you can get."

Indeed.

It must be awful to be a gallery artist and have some upstart having a show in the Gitte Weise Gallery downstairs hire space Room 35 that's a better show than yours. Paul Donald has a show on called Flatware and it's a beauty.

The pieces are simple - abstract shapes cut in acrylic and resin on MDF with a glossy check pattern. The artist has then added a cartoon eye to the work, a black dot on a white circle cut into the MDF. By adding the eye (which can be rotated in any direction), the works take on bizarre allusions to animals. The shapes aren't really suggestive of real animals, but hybrid reatures, and the titles of the works say it all - Untitled (yawnpuppy), Untitled (tanglebunny). Truly and exceptionally weird.

Art Write is a publication put out by students of the University of NSW College of Fine Arts. It has been running in various guises since 1992, first appearing as a Word 5 doc and, after a few intermediary steps, evolving into the Art Write web site. Although a vigorous publication with a ton of enthusiasm, COFA management decided (in its cod like wisdom) not to support it with a budget for technical back up. Ever resourceful we have just been notified that the online publication is now a blog. Bookmark it!

Anyway, there’s this TV series that’s has its last episode tonight and frankly, we were over it about a year and a half ago. We have our TV allegiances and we have residual loyalty to SiTC but things have been dragging for quite a while. The only spark in these last weeks has been the sudden and inexplicable appearance of the character of Aleksandr Petrovksy, played by Mikhail Baryshnikov. Petrovksy is an artist and not just any old Hollywood cliché painter either, but a Russian “light installation artist” (that is, he makes installations of some kind with video and lights).

The character first appeared in the series when the scriptwriters had concocted a wholly implausible episode where the main characters ended up in a Chelsea art gallery witnessing an endurance performance piece. We won’t bore you with the details, but it was a total fantasy with a sliver of reality that we really enjoyed. Over the next few weeks we wondered if we were ever going to see Petrovsky’s work but were only given tantalising glimpses inside his studio. The artist was seen welding bits of metal together – which made no sense at all – or he sat glumly at a table in his studio with a video loop playing on a lap top as he gazed off into the distance – which we thought quite realistic.

We also really liked the depiction of his life style, which is all international jet setting type escapades to Paris and Venice, meetings with dour art world figures, three personal assistants and a studio/home loft conversion that would be worth tens of millions. Our favourite moment was a scene where Petrovsky and whatsherface were having lunch when they were pushily “joined” by a famous New York painter, another famous artist and a woman who was the editor of a high brow art magazine called The Art Life. We also thought this was all quite realistic, if bizarrely mannered, and related to the real art world in the way that Dallas was related to the real world of the international petroleum industry.

We’re hoping that tonight we will finally get a chance to see Petrovksy’s art and predict that this will be the final straw in the character’s already tenuous romance. Perhaps if Carrie finally wakes up to the fact that any artist who is invited to ‘show’ in Paris aint all that – and anyone ‘working’ has to be welding bits of metal together - she’s not as big an idiot as we have come to believe. But she is and it won’t. But we can dream.

By a strange quirk of fate, artists are becoming a big element of Six Feet Under through the character of Claire Fisher. From a budding photographer with an interest in the arts, the character discovered she had all sorts of bohemian relatives and eventually got into art school with a portfolio of shots of dead people.

There is something eerily right in the way the show has depicted art school – from the eager first year students and their horrendous end of year art show (bad painting, “political” photography, a pyramid sculpture) to the sex, drugs and more sex and lolling about in second year. We’re only half way through their course (which seems to be unfloding in real time) and already Claire has gone from nervous, non-orgasmic, try-hard bohemian, to a bisexual, multi-orgasmic artist taking photos that veer from Nan Goldin to Wolfgang Tilmans to tiny weeny models inside a dolls house. Meanhwile, the art school characters have stopped making art seriously and are now just getting high, lying about in their apartments, taking photos of each other stoned and then showing up for desultory crit sessions with their out lesbian college lecturer. Maybe we went to the wrong art school but all that we can remember about it is was that it was really drab and straight and we got "high" by smoking weaving cane and drinking 4 litre bottles of moselle (before falling into a potted palm).

Perhaps it's time we started to put togther our own TV series on the art world - something along the lines of a soap with a veneer of lo-fi, downbeat realism like all the other HBO series that get the plaudits and the awards. It'd be called The Gallery, and follow the ups and downs of a psychotically paranoid art dealer, his stable of artists, their exhibitions and his love life. The series would practically write itself.

Our latest poll proves decisively that Art Life readers have little time for red and blue paintings done in acrylics. Perhaps even more surprising is that if it’s not a painting, all the better.

I Like A Painting that is

Two hours long with Johnny Depp in it 35% 18
Abstract 15% 8
Other 12% 6
Mostly red 10% 5
Done in oils 10% 5
Mostly blue 8% 4
Figurative 6% 3
A written description of a painting 6% 3
Red and blue 0% 0Done in acrylics 0% 0

Total votes: 52

The Tall Show - A new mixed media show for artists over 181cms tall, the art varies from painting and photography to video installation, but does not necessarily conform to the bean pole theme. The Tall Gallery, Until Nov 30.

Nearly There – Curated by Tom Hewson at Mary Pax Gallery, this exhibition gathers together artists on the cusp of making it and who are desperately looking for proper representation. The work is kind of ok, kind of not. Until Dec 12.

Commercial Gallery Xmas Show – Stuff from the stock rooms, leftovers from exhibitions and works on paper they hope you might buy. Work includes pastels by a mad woman from Taree, photographs by someone who really shouldn’t be seen in the nude, and a guy who is so past his prime it’s just embarrassing. Merry Xmas! Commercial Gallery, Queen Street, Woollhara.

Sculpture In The Sea – Taking the annual sculpture extravaganza to its logical conclusion, this breakaway exhibition features exquisitely crafted sculptures, mixed media installations and other unsightly crap hurled into the ocean from Bondi’s South Head. Until November 14.

Skittles – All new Australian video art, featuring work by up and comers Todd Flanders, Barrington Levy , I.Q. Lowly and Why. The show takes its name from Levy’s magnificent Skittles video work that is collated from hours of RTA footage showing unwary pedestrians being knocked over by cars on badly lit intersections. Take a packed lunch, the work runs for 8 hours. First Performance Gallery . Until Nov. 30.

Short Person Fight Back Show – Fund raiser for the Short Person Fight Back Fund, a group of artists under 181cms fighting against heightest discrimination. Events include a sit in, a petition and a deputation to a bored government minister. The Good Cause Exhibition Space, Potts Point. See web site for details.

1 Hour – A group show with 30 artists participating on the theme of duration, 1 Hour is a worthy show in a worthy gallery, but only opens for one hour on a Thursday between 3pm and 4pm. Be quick. The 1 Hour Gallery , Thursdays.

Cute Puppies! – Collaborative show between local Australian artists and South Korean exhibitors from Seoul, Cute Puppies! is a follow up to last year’s sensational Kittens In a Basket exhibition that featured the loveliest little kittens ever seen with their big wet eyes and soft little paws! South Korean-Australian Friendship Society Gallery, North Sydney.

Never Ending “Exhibition” – The latest work from the never-tiring Charles Done, endless repeats of the same flaccid crap sold at astronomical prices. You gotta admire him for sheer chutzpah! His latest “exhibition” runs 7 days a week, every day of the year, even on Christmas Day. Charles Done Gallery, The Rocks.

The season we love the most here at The Art Life is nearly upon us. Yes, it’s that’s difficult ten week period from mid-November until the end of January when commercial galleries go on holiday, the public galleries let their hair down with works from the permanent collection and artist runs spaces struggle through the fallow period with fund raisers. It’s a very special time of year.

At the Art Gallery of NSW, they are trying to get everyone involved in the festive spirit with promos for their Art After Hours program that’s been running on Wednesday nights from 5pm to 9pm. Presumably they’ve added a bit of tinsel to make their weekly art get together (i.e. pick up joint) more Christmassy. There is a special Silly Season program which apparently means more “jazz”. We don’t know what they mean by that.

Meanwhile, the AGNSW shop is also getting in on the act by claiming to be the best art book shop in town and a one stop shop for your Xmas items:

“The Gallery Shop has a fantastic selection of children's books, craft ideas and clothing… For people who like to write, the moleskine diaries include a removable 2005 address book and are priced from $27. Margaret Preston print scarves, Brett Whiteley porcelain mugs, Eric Thake's popular Sydney Opera House drawing on the gallery tea towels, exquisite Japanese paper designed photo albums and origami earrings the list is endless…”

We were going to ask for the new Saddle Club book but since we like to write, you know what to get us!

Over in artists run space land, Phatspace are having a come-one, come-all fundraiser show. They're calling for artists to donate A3, A4, or A5 sized works to sell in their annual fundraiser. The works will sell for $20 and can be in any medium. Works need to be delivered to Phatspace before December 4 2004. Go to the gallery’s lovely new web site to check out the details.

The most perplexing annual event is Sherman Galleries Festivus exhibition. The show is a get together for the gallery artists plus special invitees who get to hobnob with Sherman’s more ‘senior’ artists. You can see work by the usual suspects such as Mike Parr, John Young, Tim Storrier and Marion Borgelt but also by up and comers like Chris Hanrahan, Vanila Netto, Jasper Knight and Jane Burton.

The odd thing about the show is the choice of name which, to the unsuspecting, has a holiday feel. “Festivus? Hmmm, just like Christmas.”

We are wondering if the more extreme moments of the Festivus celebration will be held at Sherman Galleries, such as the grueling father-son wrestling match known as “The Feats of Strength”? Will Gene Sherman sit down with Bill Wright and tell him just what a shit job he’s been doing during the annual “Airing of The Grievances”? Indeed, will the gallery artists be forced to dance around an eight foot aluminum poll covered in tinsel on December 23rd before sitting down to a meal of spaghetti and meatloaf covered in ketchup? What the hell are we talking about?

In Episode 158 of Seinfeld called The Strike, the true meaning of this annual holiday is revealed as George’s father Frank Costanza explains his hatred for Christmas and the festival that he invented to replace it – yes – Festivus!. Now, who was it that said Gene and Brian Sherman didn’t have a sense of humour?

Voting has now closed on our Who Is The Most Influential Art Person In Melbourne? Poll and the shock results are that Anna Schwartz and Other tied for first place.

Anna Schwartz 20% 18
Other 20% 18
Un Magazine 12% 11
Howard Arkley 10% 9
Guy Benfield 9% 8
Marcus Westbury 6% 5
Ted Colless 6% 5
Andrew Bolt3% 3
Westspace 3% 3
Angry Penguins 3% 3
Bill Nutall 3% 3
Charles Nodrum 2% 2
Arthur & Corrine Cantrill 1% 1

Total Votes 89

The question that remains is who is Other? Although we declared that a vote for Other was a vote for Juliana Engberg, it has been pointed out to us that we don’t have the power to make that declaration and nominees for an equally powerful Other list include: Alexie Glass, Uplands Gallery, Debra Halpern, Jane Scott, Tony Elwood, Max Delany, Jason Smith, Charlotte Day, Samantha Compte, Naomi Cass, Daniel Palmer, Stuart Koop, Penelope Aitken, Suzanne Davies, Ruth Bain, Maudie Palmer, Helen Gory, James Mollison, Robert Nelson, Robyn McKenzie, Francis Lindsay, Charles Green, Bala Starr, Clare Stewart, Sue Cramer, Lesley Always, Patricia Piccinini, Ricky Swallow, John Nixon, Guy Abrahams and on and on and on… While we decide, please enjoy our new poll.

Clearly, we know nothing about the Melbourne art scene. Aren’t those Angry Penguins still angry? We would have thought so, what with all the melting ice and poetry floating around? Clearly Ted Colless is important, as are Artie and Corrine Cantrill - with or without their blessed magazine - and goddang it if Howard Arkley can’t get more votes dead than Westspace can (collectively) alive… The best way to prove us completely wrong is to vote OTHER into first place and demonstrate what a vital democracy we are.

Meanwhile, we find a minor victory for a special alliance between ignoramuses and the aesthetically outraged as the Sydney Morning Herald’s Spike column reports that Ken Unsworth’s much hated sculpture Stones Against The Sky is going to be “axed”. Standing outside the Elan apartment building at the top of William Street in Kings Cross since 1998, the sculpture has been the subject of long running protests by the local community including orthodox responses such as petitions and vandalism. They know good sculpture when they see it and, according to them, it aint good:

“A committee member […] said he knew no one who liked it. "The residents think it's bloody awful. We are very open to suggestions what to put down there. Maybe a water feature to complement the El Alamein Fountain at the other end of the Cross. Maybe even a garden or trees. I reckon we can do this in around six months," he said.”

The sad part of this story are the largely unreported facts that the sculpture was never finished and wasn’t made from materials specified by the artist. Looking rather like papier mache balls hoisted up some flag poles, the sculpture was meant to have the appearance of gravity defying rocks hanging on metal poles with each pole flanked by a fir tree. If you know the artist’s work, you’d know how good this could have looked but the builders of the Elan did it all on the cheap. Unsworth told Spike he wasn’t upset if it were removed and frankly, considering how bad it ended up, who can blame him?

Public sculpture in Sydney has often faced the same ignominious end, as anyone who remembers the debacle over Bert Flugelman’s Martin Place sculpture will attest. There was also the unedifying sight of a statue in Darlinghurst commemorating the area’s prostitutes being smashed to bits by outraged “art lovers”. Perhaps the sensible thing would have been to spend the money to finish the work properly, but you can also see the attraction of building another place where junkies can do business. Everyone will be happy about that.

When we jokingly said that Tim Olsen Gallery should be in the Rocks two weeks ago we were wrong. After spending half a day walking around Woollahra we realise that it’s in exactly the right place. There are so many crummy, overrated galleries tucked away in side streets, the kind of places where artist’s shows are promoted with red banners that say things like PAINTING SHOW NOW ON, Olsen’s gallery can only look good, even with faux-tasteful branding of its own. The only upside of the Woollhara art belt is the proliferation of patisseries where one might sample top quality brioche and good coffee. The rest of the suburb is full of people that Tom Wolfe dubbed “social x-rays” back in the 1960s and aggressive motorists in high class European motor vehicles.

We started out on Queen Street because that’s the only street we knew and passing the patrician portal of Rex Irwin Gallery we decided to pop in and see what was on offer. The answer was bull’s balls. And feathers. It’s an exhibition by Jonathan Delafield Cook that features two stupendous charcoal on gessoed canvas works, one of a life sized Black Angus Bull and another of a life sized Angus Calf. The rest of the show is made up of some exquisitely executed larger than life bird feathers each 82cm by 62cm. Drawn in portrait format, the feathers are incredible, their execution masterful, the distorted large than life scale a testament to Delafield Cook’s ability with his medium. For us, the real attraction of the works is the absence around the images, the white grounds that give the works a sense of detached scientific observation that’s also evocative of a cool modernist conceptualism. Yep, they sure look like art.

As we stood admiring the size of the Bull’s testicles, we ripped open the Velcro flap on our special Art Life back packs to get a pen when a startled man jumped out at us from behind a vase of flowers.
“It’s ok,” we said. “We’re just reaching for a pen.”
“Oh,” the man said, “I thought maybe you were going to slash a painting.”
We assured the man that we liked the works as he sat down behind his desk.
“We don’t know who you all are,” he said. “You might attack the work, like a Michelangelo.”

Next stop on our mini tour was at the Maunsell Wicks Gallery on the corner of Holdsworth Street and Jersey Road. We’d never heard of the gallery were surprised to discover that it’s rather like the old Sherman Galleries Hargrave, a concrete wedge stuck up high from the street with large glass windows and hardly any wall space. We were invited to see Craig Waddell’s show Abstractor, and as with any invitation to do anything, we said yes. Now we’re warning you straight away that there’s a pun in the title as Waddell seems very fond of tractors and the works are abstract, so put ‘em together and what you get is abs-tractor.

Unlike the cramped and poorly lit Mori Gallery show we reviewed a couple of weeks ago, Waddell had the whole top floor of the gallery for his work and despite the fact that the air conditioning was melting the paintings, it was a major step up with brilliant lighting and works all over the place. (Mind you, the gallery also chose to exhibit two works in the upstairs window which you couldn’t see properly from inside the room or out on the street where they were lost to sight behind trees…). The mass impasto technique that Waddell’s using is eye watering - like being poked in the eye by wet hair- and you can see that technique is everything for him. His portraits are deft and concise but it’s the tractors and trucks and other earth moving equipment where the technique is slightly out of control.

If you can imagine a work that is made up of big brush strokes, there’s little room for mistakes or loss of nerve. Although we really liked the tractors and the dumpsters, we couldn’t quite get with some of the hesitations in the execution – either they should be bigger works to contain all the energy that’s undoubtedly there, or Waddell is going to have to spend a lot more time refining the technique – or perhaps use smaller brushes. The real saving grace of this show is Waddell’s use of colour, the whites and yellows and the sparing use of blacks really make this artist someone to watch.

It’s the last days of Richard Grayson’s show at Yuill/Crowley on until November 6. The hubbub in the press has been about the 2 channel video piece called Messiah which is a Country and Western reworking of Handel’s Messiah and it’s funny enough. Using his artist/musician mates to rework and rewrite the lyrics, Grayson has taken a musical readymade and inserted his own sense of humour into the piece as a good natured act of artistic vandalism.

But for us the real the real treat was the work Intelligence which again, like most of the artist’s work we’ve seen, is about using a preexisting text, or a system for generating text, as a way to create a commentary on that process and that creation. Grayson makes maps, recites facts, and creates bogus diagrams. It’s an approach that is old school conceptualism at its best. Completely unadorned, his work reminds us of the aesthetically stringent but playful works of the 1970s and we half expect to walk into a Grayson show and find a filing cabinet full of documents with the words “Here, you do the work” plastered on a wall. Grayson is a bit more accommodating but anyone not prepared to do some reading at his show will be disappointed.

Intelligence is a series of astrological star charts for well known politicians generated using various horoscope websites . The extraordinary aspect of this work is how close the star charts are to the public personas of the people Grayson chose to profile. For example, Dick Cheney’s chart declares “You may have trouble with any ideas that are new and different”; Osama Bin Laden, “You may find yourself involved in causes that go against tradition, revolutions of one kind or another.”; Saddam Hussein, “”You are unconventional, independent and drawn to whatever is different and original in life.” The only confusing star chart was Condoleeza Rice – “You have a love of physical pleasure. You are passionate and have an aura of secrecy.”

Readers of The Art Life demanded it! So here is our very special Melbourne influential arts person poll. Vote early, vote often! ==>

Never drive a metaphor while drunk, tipsy analogies will get you into strife and a few loose similes will get you into a lot of trouble as well. In fact, if you’ve just come off a two week detox diet and there’s a bottle of red wine in the cupboard don’t think you can drink and write with impunity. Just look at us and see what happens. We compared a recent show at Mori to a sampler, then to a Chinese meal (because of the way Chinese food can get all mashed together) and again to a Chinese meal because the whole group show experience fades after 20 minutes – and all in the one sentence. It was a hideously mixed metaphor, a mish-mash analogy horror and a simile graveyard. Thankfully, Art Life readers were on hand to point out or egregious errors. Phil T Luca left a comment:

“that's such a hackneyed cliché about chinese food. It’s based on the old fried rice with the little prawns and sweet and sour pork aussie chinese food. if yer eating that in sydney yer going to the wrong chinatown. over and out.”

In our short bit on Tony Dupé show at Disc Gallery we made an even bigger blunder where we used a full stop instead of a comma.

“Going for small and intimate rather than large pics – and a larger scale might have really brought some of the works spectacularly to life - you can see that Dupe is a lot more than just a dilettante musician. Dupe has a real feel for the broken ready made and the possibilities of domestic scales.”

What we should have done is put a comma after “dilettante musician” so the next sentence was the last clause of the sentence rather than a separate statement. Read literally, you might think we meant that because Dupé works well with scale, he’s a lot more than just a dilettante musician. And that was exactly what the reader Anonymous objected to:

“On what basis is it not just the work of a dilettante musician? Because it's small? I mean really, some analysis of IDEAS please! Oh, sorry, there aren't any...”

As Bosco pointed out to Anonymous, it’s good to see a generosity of spirit among Art Life readers and we should have realised that a work of art has to be demonstrably about an “idea” (as opposed to the notion that making something beautiful is an “idea” in itself), but truly, it was our mistake and the person responsible for this horrific error (under the influence of alcohol) has been fired.

We’ve had to let a lot of people go from The Art Life - spelling mistakes, errors of fact, misplaced emphasis, absurd polls – and now the office is starting to look very sparse. We are looking forward to taking on a new batch of interns. If you’d like to work for us in the New Year making toasties, answering long and complicated email interview questions and spreading disinformation in the SMH’s Spike column, send your application to the usual address.

As Steve Martin so eloquently put it, some people have a way with words while other people… not have way. Artists, however, can do anything they set their minds to – paint pictures, make movies, start a band, write a novel, put out a magazine – and the great thing is that it’s all art.

We discovered that Un Magazine has a second issue out and it’s available on the web in a colour PDF version and there’s a supplement section that’s exclusive to the Projekt site. As we’ve mentioned previously, we support initiatives like Un Magazine and can say without hesitation that the editor Lily Hibberd and designer Brendan Lee are doing a hell of a good job. Unfortunately the writing dips from the merely adequate to the preposterously bad, as this lead paragraph by Billy Gruner on the opening of Peloton Gallery shows. Under the title Peloton: an art critical space appears in the material city he began:

“It seems an understatement to claim there is a crisis concerning the lack of credible exhibition spaces in Sydney. In post 20th century terms, this is an issue that local and visiting artists alike must attend. There are two fundamentally important aspects of the ‘artist run space.’ The first concerns accessibility, the second is what they provide virtually gratis to culture. In short, these are significant places for the establishment of new ideas, yet despite Sydney’s profile as a contemporary centre of art it is clear that the needs of a generally impoverished local milieu and the mounting requests of as many artists from other places, outweigh the capacity of the few existing venues who struggle to maintain. And if the ‘artist run space’ in Sydney is now more important than ever, it is reasonable to claim that this lack has as much to do with rising real estate values and with how their social significance remains underrated by critics, collectors and those who administer the institutionalisation of art.”

Can you imagine the freak-out Microsoft Word must have been doing when he typed that up? LONG SENTENCE, GRAMMAR, CONSIDER REVISING! DANGER, DANGER! etc. This is a piece of writing so badly in need of an edit that including it, even if only in the web supplement, brings down the tone of the whole publication. A piece of writing like Gruner's may well raise a few "issues" but it does so in prose so convoluted and difficult to read that anyone not directly involved with the issues could hardly care less. If Un Magazine is going to survive, then the editors need to take an axe to articles like this.

Runway magazine, now on its fourth issue, is a publication put out by First Draft Gallery and it’s a much more traditional artist’s magazine. Edited by David Lawrey, Emma White, Rachel Scott and Jaki Middleton, Runway uses the printed form for artist’s projects instead of trying to replicate a mainstream publication. The latest issue is about work and the contributors responded in different ways. Our favourite stories are the personal responses to the theme, such as Gerry Bibby’s photocopies of documentation from his run in with Centrelink over his (non) enrolment at VCA and Paul Donald’s conflation of work and love and black coffee. Emma White has included a diary of her anxiety dreams over her art career:

“14/8/03
I dreamt about the Helen Lemp - that they split the prize between four joint winners, ten grand each, including me. I was very upset until I realised this was still enough to spend six months in Prague and then I was happy as it was a pretty good result. Then somehow I realised that it was a dream because it hadn't been judged yet, and it changed to my sister explaining to me that this other artist whose work was hung next to mine had won; her work was all black like Sarah Smuts-Kennedy's Photo Technica work. The artist had been dead for two years (she had died aged seventeen) and was Aboriginal, and everyone thought it was a beautiful thing to do in her memory. I was angry - "what's the bloody use of it to her?" Then I realised that Helen from Artspace (who was called Rebecca) had re-hung my work. The lists were all missing and all this other crap was sitting on the shelf, and the photos had been re-pinned so that they overlapped and were pinned in the wrong places. I was just kicking up a big stink and ranting and screaming when I woke up.”

We can totally relate to dreams like this: every time we entered the HQ Short Story Competition we kept having dreams that our fantastically original short story had come second to a Year 10 History essay on the First Fleet that some kid had written and illustrated with traced drawings from an encyclopedia. The unconscious is such a cruel place.

We should also mention that Jaki Middleton has included an article called All-time Top 5: Recipes with some amazing recipes that includes a dessert called Angela’s Chocolate-Orange Mousse. We made it on Saturday night and we have to tell you, it’s sensational!

The people who are supposed to “have way” with art writing – the professionals – sometimes get a bit confused too, and perhaps none more confused than Peter Hill. Oh no, you’re saying, not the beleaguered SMH art critic again, leave him alone! But just take a look at this excerpt from two weekends ago when Hill was discussing the legacy of Situationism in his better-late-than-never “review’ of Primavera:

“The Situationist International was a powerful influence on the striking students in Paris 1968; their use of café tables as barricades was classic detournement. Nine years later. The Situationists formed the black-clad honour guard at the birth of the punk rock movement. The all round nihilism of both groups was underscored by the suicides of first, Sid Vicious and later Guy Debord.”

Would someone please explain to Hill that the connection between Punk and Situationism is tenuous at best, and really nothing more than self-aggrandisement on the part of Malcom McLaren? There’s probably little we can do about that, but Sid Vicious had nothing to do with it and died of an accidental overdose in February 1979 while Debord killed himself in November 1994. A wave of suicides separated by 15 years? How nihilistic. Let’s not get too het up about that, it’s probably just Hill filling up word count – who cares if it’s right or wrong.

The indefatigable Edmund Capon was the subject of cover story at the SMH’s The Sydney Magazine last week. Being more famous for refusing interviews than giving them, we made extra sure that we bought the newspaper to read the super glossy supplement. It turned out however, to be a bit of a damp squib when Steve Meacham got very little out of Capon and had to rely on quotes from people who seemed more interested in backhanded compliments than real tributes to their so-called “friend”. Here’s an excerpt where art dealer Giuseppi Eskenazi and old Victoria and Albert museum colleague Somers Cox discuss Capon’s tenure as director of the Art Gallery of NSW:

“Eskenazi was astounded his friend had been offered the job, and advised him against accepting. "Quite frankly, I didn't think it was a job he could do, or one he was suited for," he says. "He could have made his name as an international scholar. Some of his books are quite brilliant. As it has turned out, he's been an excellent director. He turned from a scholar to a fundraiser. I don't know how he did that.' Somers Cox, however, felt Capon realised he would end up a frustrated man if he stayed at the V & A. "Australia suits him. He enjoys being a big fish, playing with the politicians who make a difference. He has more direct power in Sydney than he would ever have had in London."

He could never have made it in London!

The most interesting thing to come out of the profile was a list of four art works Capon would buy for the AGNSW with unlimited funds, a list that was topped by a Cy Twombly triptych, a painting by Paul Cezanne and any drawing or study by Raphael. His number two choice was Bill Viola’s Five Angels for The Millennium, a video installation work that Capon described as “by far the most powerful, convincing and brilliant of this (newish) genre.” That’s why Capon has been in charge for so long – on the one hand he’s a classicist, while on the other has impeccable taste for the new.

While on the subject of the AGNSW, did you know that the gallery’s Art After Hours is “pick up central”? Apparently it is so, according to gossip columnist Holly Byrnes, whose piece The New Art of Romance in The Sun Herald’s S blew the lid on the hot, steamy and salacious world of contemporary art:

"The next time someone offers to show you their etchings, count yourself in the Carrie Bradshaw class of dating: all very new school, in an old fashioned way. Just as the Sex And The City singleton found her latest love, Aleksandr Petrovsky, by hanging around an art gallery, Sydney's solo warriors have recently found exhibitions and art auctions a happy hunting ground.

"At first glance the Art Gallery of NSW may not appear a hotbed for your next hot date, but by all accounts the Art After Hours program runs every Wednesday night is pick-up Central. The AGNSWs young members society, Contempo, also boasts some of the best opportunities to socialise in a sophisticated setting, but with the kind of reckless abandon that comes from all that artistic fervour."

Yeah, we knew the young members at Contempo were everything we were looking for, but what about the Museum of Contemporary Art? As readers of The Art Life pointed out, the conservators there are “dreamy”…

“Across town at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I'm told you need to know what you're looking for. Not the artwork, mind, but the types of blokes you want to meet, which can range from the serious artiste (easily identified by his paint-flecked Blundstone boots) to a few banker boys, who are keeping up appearances as corporate sponsors of various exhibitions, but happy to be typecast as shrewd intellectuals. And just as niche galleries proffer the talents of the obscure, there are also niche social types to appraise as well.”

The magic of the internet! State of The Arts editor Caroline Meagher emailed this response from Matthew Collings to our recent comments that he was turning into an old fogery. Imagine our surprise when Collings responded to our article...

Although we hadn't intended to impune Collings's taste by claiming he was a fan of Lucien Freud, he gets stuck in straight anyway...

"I think Lucien Freud is a terrible artist. The paint's really horrible, the nudity is stupid, the whole vibe is a repulsive mixture of snob/sensationalism/twee whimsy. I think I might have mentioned this in Blimey.I t's not old master reverence that is important, but old master seriousness.

I never thought anything else. It's not a change of mind that has come with middle-age.In the 70s when I went to art school and first came across the art world as a professional and social system, I more or less only knew people who were exactly like people in the art world now -- that is, I couldn'tunderstand how they got away with their ridiculous fatuous idiotic unpleasant insulting posing. I think this may have started in the Picasso era.

So it's not that I remember a time when everything was more authentic, and I'm now forever whining on about it. I don't have any interest inthe remote past on those terms either. I am very interested in why things are good and bad. I think the reasons are often rather underwhelming. Louise Bourgeois isn't good because of the "uncanny" but because of her talent at putting a bit of second hand texture next to another bit of second hand texture. This is a genuine talent but no one wants to hear about it because it sounds boring. So we have to hear all that governess seductiondrone instead, from people who don't know what anything is and aren't interestedin the difference between one thing and another.

The sarcasm etc you mention in my writing and films comes from this sense of the narrowness of art -- seeing that art is narrow and letting allother perceptions flow from that. I know I'm always performing in a context where the fantasies of what art is, and expectations of it, are out of controland absurd. Regarding videos as a genre, I do actually find them/it quite boring. Except when they're (etc) good -- which is usually because a kind of 'abject' button is hit just right. The artist concedes, 'Yes I am a fuckup -- however I have accrued a certain amount of useless knowledge about art...' -- and somehow some magic happens.

I think Dan Graham for example is a top artist of course. But I don't agree that his mirror performance film is the same as Velazquez's Las Meninas>. In fact its strength is in its complete willingness to give up. The fact that DG talks a lot of incoherent self-important burbling drivel between sometimes being quite funny about the professional aspirations and posturing of his rivals, doesn't make him a great thinker or this work a great milestone of thought. He is part of the first wave of video-conceptual art but also the second -- present -- wave.

The present wave has become in my view pretty ghastly, really pompous. I think it's important for the sake of good values in general (communitarianism, friendliness, ecology, good design, good colour) to resist that unpleasant hustling sanctimonious bullshit, although naturally several videos from the lastfew years are not bad. Video is better when it's cut-back. It was just luck as far as goodness is concerned that minimalism was the issue in the late 60s instead of the identity (etc) issues of now, which for some reason naturally lead in a pomp direction.

Thank you for all your -- I hope -- genuine enthusiasm for my earlier stuff. Best wishes - Matt"

If Robert MacPherson is Exile on Main Street then...

Brett Whiteley is Pub With No Beer 30%
Tim Maguire is Tie A Yellow Ribbon 15%
Ricky Swallow is Pablo Picasso 10%
Ann Wallace is In Dreams 10%
TV Moore is Radios Appear 10%
Richard Larter is Blonde on Blonde 8%
Susan Norrie is Live and Let Die 5%
Rodney Glick is …art* 5%
Deborah Paauwe is Girl 5%
Todd Hunter is Hey Mr. Pharmacist 3%

(Total Votes 43)

Our poll analysts explain the result thus: “There seemed to have been a massive donkey vote with Brett Whiteley streaking ahead from the start, but perhaps he truly is a pub with no beer. The most interesting aspect of the voting was Ricky Swallow’s drop from second to third place as Tim Maguire’s vote stacked up late in the week to put him in the second spot. No one ever called Picasso an asshole, but tie a yellow ribbon around that old oak tree is still a perennial favourite. There has also been some unsubstantiated speculation that Swallow, Moore, Paauwe & Larter may form some sort of coalition to take the top spot, but this seems unlikely.”