the art life

It all seems to happen at once. The Frieze Art Fair in Regents Park London opened on Friday October 21 and closed on Monday October 24. There were 160 art galleries from all over the world with the work of more than 1,000 artists on display. There were talks, film screenings, conducted tours and a performance by Karlheinz Stockhausen. On the same weekend – and just across the park from the vast white architect designed tent – was the Zoo Art Fair, an art fair with 28 new galleries, artists’ collectives and spaces. In the St Martins Lane Hotel was another mini fair with 50 overseas galleries setting up shop for the weekend. The Pilot Art Fair was installed in a space in Clerkenwell to exhibit the work of new, unsigned artists selected by signed artists, dealers and collectors. Over in Battersea Park, London’s Affordable Art Fair was open for the weekend with 125 galleries that sold art works all under £3,000.

In the days leading up to that mad weekend of contemporary art, The Guardian put the UK art market into perspective. From a variety of credible sources, the paper estimated the global art market at $USD23.5 billion per annum with the UK’s art market at 25 per cent of that figure. That’s an incredible amount of money moving through London – and the art market is London – the paper also reported that 43 per cent of the country’s galleries are located in London and that 50 per cent of artists in the country live there. London also leads the world in numbers of visitors to its galleries:

How Popular Is Going To See Art? – Top Museums by Number of Visitors.

Tate Modern, London – 4,147,549
Centre Pompidou, Paris – 1, 275,029
MoMA New York – 1,000,000
Guggenheim, New York – 950,000
Guggenheim, Bilbao – 900,000
MoMA, San Francisco – 768,483

The leading art gallery is – perhaps unsurprisingly – the Tate Modern but the truly amazing part of these figures is that the second most popular gallery, the Pompidou in Paris, languishes at a head count of just over a quarter of the Tate’s. London has built an industry out of its contemporary art scene and the rewards for artists and galleries lucky enough to get to the top of the pile are equally handsome. The Guardian published figures compiled by the Arts Council of England that estimated the income for emerging artists, mid career artists and established artists [those with major prizes, commissions and pieces in national collections]. The top of the pile, the established artists, could expect an income of between £50,000 to £60,000 a year.

Translated into Australian, that’s about $150,000 to $175,000 a year, an amount that artists who exhibit with A–list galleries in Sydney and Melbourne could easily earn. The next rung down – the mid career artists who’ve been out of art school for ten years – can make between £12,000 and £32,000 in the UK. Again, pretty comparable with the Australian art world [albeit with more space on those career ladder rungs]. The real difference is at the bottom with the emerging artists. According to the ACE figures, emerging artists in the UK can earn between £500 and £20,000 a year. That’s almost enough to live on…




Autumn is a big time for art in the UK. New shows are opening in the major museums and public galleries and, aside from the art fairs, there’s the Turner Prize and the Degas Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec at Tate Britain, major shows and retrospectives by Jason Rhoades, Mark Dion, Edvard Munch, Nobuyoshi Araki, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov and Francis Alÿs. Then there are the tourist traps like the Saatchi Gallery’s self aggrandising Triumph of Painting Part 2 and the eyesore that is the endless Dali show. This is all before you begin to navigate the dozens of commercial galleries. It’s too much and a decision had to be made. We could feel a little twinge at the back of our minds that said “Go to the art fair with all the unsigned artists, you’ll be doing the right thing.” Or should we go to the art fair with the best contemporary art galleries in the world, to see all the artists’ work we keep seeing in magazines and have little or no chance of ever seeing in an exhibition in Australia? The debate took about .5 of a second. We jumped on a bus for Regents Park and the Frieze Art Fair.

The Frieze Art Fair is only three years old but it’s already the European art fair of choice for the world’s leading galleries. To get in, galleries are screened through an application process. Some obviously go straight through, like the galleries from London and New York who support the magazine from which this gargantuan four day event has grown, but there are also galleries from Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Berlin, Munich, Moscow, Tel Aviv and Melbourne. The work you see at Frieze fits easily into the spectrum of contemporary art, but what was surprising was the huge amount of painting. It was by far the dominant form, comprising what seemed to be about 50 per cent of all the works on show, easily outstripping the photo art and the measly showing of DVDs. If video art is big, it’s only big in places that haven’t cottoned on to the fact that painting is back big time in contemporary art.




A year ago The Esteemed Critic at the Sydney Morning Herald described what he called ‘fey painting’, the groovy lo–fi work that’s incredibly popular in artist run spaces in Sydney. We have bad news. It’s a world wide phenomenon. Artists from Japan to Norway are bashing out pathetically inept pictures of cute bears, little girls, space ships, guitars and cars. The good thing is that we love it and it’s everywhere. Probably one of the best known of these artists is David Shrigley, a Scottish artist with no fear of the ‘c word’. His drawings and paintings challenge the viewer to meet his hopeless aesthetic half way, and then fail. They are also immensely funny. We mentioned last week how we had tried to see the work of Manfredi Beninati in Rome but hadn’t been able to. We shouldn’t have worried because his work was on display at Frieze. We had described his work as a kind of figurative Maria Cruz, but that was way off, it’s like a figuartive Ricky Swallow, because his work was displayed right next to the Boy from Oz’s monkey man watercolours. It all makes sense now.

Another kind of painting that was big at Frieze was a super slick and amazingly executed hyper–pop. The work of Justin Faunce reminds us a little of Ben Frost’s, but where Frost seems to be searching for a solid conceptual foundation for his otherwise impressive pop collages, Faunce has it in spades. His work is both occular and cognitive and adds a mind bending mirroring to his compositions. Rachel Feinstein, is mining the same seam as Glenn Brown, that is, an immacuately executed oil on canvas rendering of faux and quasi historiucal art to create something akin to melting wax works.

To prove that we’re not just interested in fashionable painting styles, we should also mention that we were taken by two artists represented by the same gallery, but painted in utterly different styles. Jeremy Dickinson is a British artist who paints weird pictures of toy cars and buses next to playing cards and blank, monochromatic backgrounds. A little reminiscent of John Brack, the works have an intensley idiosynctratic feel that’s like playing with your toys in the late afternoon sunshine of your lonely bedroom. Perhaps that’s the link to Atsushi Fukui, who paints psychedelic paintings of nude Japanes girls with stars for bodies, surfer guys with guitars and other throwbacks to the 1970s. It’s closeted and airless, but fascinating nonetheless.




Surprisingly another hugely saleable area of contemporary art is text works. You could have knocked us down with the proverbial feather, but pictures by Art & Language were featured at three stands at the fair, including the classic piece by Ian Burn [pictured above]. More recent work ranged from loose flow charts and graffitti to gruff political sloganeering, pamphlets and newspapers. It’s fascinating that text is such a visible genre within art because, perhaps a little like decorative minimalism, it seems to exist on the periphery, but where this particular art fair is concerned, more is better. It also helps to be funny. Sean Landers work made it into the fair, courtesy of no less than eight galleries: “People think I’m a fucking comedian. Hey, I’m a serious artist for god’s sake, look at this painting […] OK, this painting isn’t a good example, but I’ve made lots of serious art before right???”





Photography is still huge being the second most popular form of art for collectors [according to The Guardian]. We can still be surprised by a good idea. Thomas Ruff, who did a series of works based on internet pornography, has branched out on a different tangent by using low resolution JPEGs taken from the web and blown them up to a massive scale. One work at Frieze, an immense shot of a mushroom cloud, was breathtaking. From the other side of the room, the image was perfect, but as you approached it, it began to break apart into pixels. There was also a mini theme of wildlife fauna that connected all the painting to the photography– we saw an inordinate number of works that featured rabbits. We realised we are starting to hallucinate and know that too much contemporary art is bad for you. With just a fraction of the thousands of works on display actually seen, we had to depart.




It would of course be absurd to draw too many conclusions about what's happening in international contemporary art from the work at Frieze. After all, painting is most popular type of art with collectors, and the exhibits at a commercial art fair are tailored to their tastes. The whole event was skewed by both commercial forces and personal taste. Yet at the same time, painting's preeminence was undeniable. The influences of Martin Kippenberger and Gerhard Richter are still widely felt, and a new genaretaion of artists are under their sway.




We are being drawn back. We thought that we had escaped, if only for a few weeks, but the super abundance of art at Frieze simply ended up underlining the paucity of the art life. When we arrived we discussed the illusion that we had more to choose from, that there was so much more. That is wrong, it's just more. Home is a dull magnet that draws us back into the narcotic stupefaction of encroaching summer. How ironic that the British sent their economic refugees and political prisoners to the worst place they could think of, yet it turned out to be more congenial to a nice sun tan that where they had come from.

The Roman summer was marked by burning cars. As the season became hotter and the skies cleared, a person or persons unknown randomly set parked cars ablaze across the city. The sound of fire engines racing through the capital’s congested streets quickly became unremarkable and as black smoked curled over the city’s rooftops and across the face of the rising moon, native Romans sat back at their café tables completely unconcerned. Some of Rome’s newspapers had suggested a political motive, others a rash of copycat anarchists who had aimed their ire at everything from battered Quintacentros to BMWs, while right wing op ed writers blamed the Italian youth for their well dressed but politically apathetic indolence.

We asked Marcello who he thought was responsible. He shrugged and said "boh" – the all purpose Italian expression that means both ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t care’. Marcello was our Art Life contact in Italy. A middle aged, married man with two children, he lived in an unremarkable part of town that’s typical of life outside the city walls. His neighbourhood was a cluster of high rise buildings - all more or less the same height - situated between playing fields and across from a small square. In late afternoon with golden hour light on the orange sides of the apartment buildings, the suburb looked just like a Jeffrey Smart painting, [but without the moody skies]. It was a sun blasted development with tree lined streets and cars jammed into every available parking space. Although the streets were apparently two way, the view from Marcello’s rooftop apartment was a ring side seat on stand offs between cars wanting to go in different directions.

Marcello is a member of The Art Life affiliated La Società per la Unificazione Delle Arti e Della Vita. Back in 68, during the Art & Life schism, the Italian branch maintained its Communist/Anarchist roots fighting on against The Spectacle. Some 37 years later, La Società maintains a relaxed and ironical distance to its Australian cousins. Marcello is a political street fighter, a diffident gourmand and a lover of post modernity and the utopian modernist ideals of the original Art & Life Manifesto. It’s a peculiar local mix and one that only Italians can understand. In his living room, crowded with ornate furniture, scattered kid’s toys, a map of the world on the living room wall and a mountain of international art magazines that spill from coffee tables to the floor, Marcello also proudly hangs a Men of The Vatican calendar, an official Vatican publication that reveals that although they’re priests, they’re also all-Italian boys.



Marcello organised a contemporary art tour of Rome for us, heading off in his beaten up car towards the old city. Rome’s city walls - which date from between 378BC to 271AD - are a demarcation point between the lived-in heritage park of the inner city and the wide open spaces of the outer city.

The outer city - which we travelled through at break neck speed - is a modern European metropolis which occasionally slips into an alternative universe as imagined by Benito Mussolini. The district known as EUR – the site of a proposed universal exposition for 1942 – is an amalgam of Fascist architecture, modernist office blocks, big parks and open spaces. In The Guardian, Matthew Kneale described the area:

“EUR, the new Rome that Mussolini began constructing south of the capital, is largely fascist. So are Rome University, Termini station, and the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation offices, which were originally intended for administrators of Italy's African empire. The huge Foro Italico sports complex, built to inspire lazy Romans from their lethargy, is covered with fascist heroic athletes. More surprisingly, Mussolini's propaganda has been preserved in stone. High on the façades of ministry buildings you can still read fascist catchphrases about glory and the Patria, and see statues of patriotic peasants, workers, and mothers of the warlike generation to come (as Mussolini hoped). There is even a large obelisk proclaiming "Mussolini Dux".

From this brightly lit nightmare, you travel through the city walls into the old districts. Inside it’s all narrow cobbled streets, absurd juxtapositions of Roman ruins, churches and government buildings, insanely crowded tourist districts of the Pantheon, the Forum and the precincts of the Vatican, and a city map so jumbled with streets and back alleys - and so out of scale - you need years of experience to navigate around it. Marcello, an old hand, parked in a zone clearly marked NO PARKING and pointing across the Tiber to the Galleria Lorcan O’Neill. We set off.

As we crossed the river - and saw cormorants drying their wings on the broken marble pillars of an ancient bridge - we asked Marcello if it wasOK to park in a no parking zone. He told us that Italy is the freest country in the world because it is the most heavily governed. There is a rule for everything, yet no one, not even the police or the carabinieri, enforce the rules because no one knows what they are. In practice, this means you can park wherever you like or ride on the bus without buying a ticket. It’s all good. We soon discovered that galleries – perhaps accepting this lackadaisical attitude – did not necessarily follow their own advertised exhibition dates and opening hours. Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, one of the city’s leading contemporary galleries, was only technically open.

Manfredi Beninati, work in progress.

We had come to see the work of Manfredi Beninati. Born in 1970, Beninati is part of the younger generation of Italian painters, and he makes pictures in a style that plugs right into the international contemporary aesthetic. Featured in this year’s Venice Biennale, Beninati is the kind of artist who a lot of younger Australian artists could identify with. His paintings are loose and washy figurative dreamscapes that make the viewer feel as if there’s a thick gauze on the surface of the painting and a story book world floating behind it. Imagine a figurative Maria Cruz painting with a good dose of Neo Rausch mixed into a Trans Avant-Garde soup. It’s crazy, but it works.

Inside the gallery, the art was leant up against walls, a few canvases hung and boxes stacked up with sculpture that looked like garden gnomes designed by Yoshitomo Nara. A tall man with a sweater and an immaculately manicured beard asked us what we wanted. To see the art. Yes, one moment he said, and got a gallery assistant. It became apparent that despite the clearly advertised dates on our official Art Guide, the exhibition was yet to open. The glimpse of the art was tantalising but also mildly infuriating. The gallery staff were helpful and Marcello left his postal address with an attractive female assistant asking to be notified of any forthcoming parties.

Having a coffee down the road at a local café, Marcello examined the art guide for new exhibitions. The Gagosian Gallery from New York had an address in Rome. Perhaps we should see it? Marcello’s hands were in constant motion, feeling inside pockets of his loose fitting suit, inside his jacket, in the shirt pocket of his 3€ shirts proudly bought from a local market. He is always searching for an elusive lighter to light his hand rolled cigarettes. Eventually he finds the lighter on the second time around his pockets – it was in his pant pocket all along. He drags on his cigarette, squints his eyes and says, finally, yes, the Gagosian.

There had been talk that Gagosian was building a new art gallery on the outer edge of Rome after making a big splash in Venice with a show by the official American artist Ed Ruscha. The talk went that more American galleries would set up shop in Rome and bring an already ‘vibrant’ scene to international prominence. There was yet more talk, perhaps inevitable, that it was just another case of American cultural indifference to the local scene, and it should be resisted at all costs. Whatever would happen, we were keen to see the gallery and what it had to offer.

With map in hand Marcello led us back across the Tiber and into the city centre. Passing Hadrian’s Column of Trajan and down some narrowing side streets it soon became obvious that we were lost. We emerged into a large square that was part parking lot, part open air market specialising in art prints of birds and fish. Parts of Rome seem to be over specialised, perhaps in keeping with the medieval ambience of the old city. At one point in our long walk around the side streets, Marcello pointed at a shop and said, “That store specialises in repairing briefcase lids.” Marcello checked the map and read the street sign ‘Via F. Borghese’. He shrugged. Asking a woman at the market, we were directed to a large building on the other side of the square. Police stood around cradling machine guns and chatting. Marcello led us straight past the police and to a door at the far corner of an indoor square. On a buzzer on a nondescript door was ‘Galleria Gagosian’. Marcello pressed the buzzer. A few second passed and a striking looking Asian woman opened the door, her eyebrows raised quizzically. “Galleria Gagosian?” asked Marcello. “Yes,” said the woman. “Exhibition? Here?” “No. This is just an office.” Marcello quizzed her. There was no gallery here. The woman was in Rome to put together a catalogue raissoné on the works of Cy Twombly. And what of the talk of opening a gallery. The woman denied everything but added cryptically “We have plans to do many things.”

We walked away, our guide grumbling into his hand. Marcello had an idea. “The Il Ponte Contemporanea is the best gallery in Rome, follow me.” And so we did, along cobbled streets, down steep alleys until we found ourselves on the chic and expensive Via di Monserrato. The gallery looked closed with a workman out the front and up a ladder attacking something with a screwdriver. We stood back but he waved us in when he saw us.

Gianni Piacentino’s show with Il Ponte Contemporanea is a retrospective of work from 1966 to 2005. Piacentino was one of the Arte Povera generation of the 1960s, but where many other leading lights of the movement stressed the formal poetry of found materials, Piacentino’s work was more in line with emergent styles in radical minimalism. This work, the stuff from the 1960s, is a shiny, sleek and internationalised version of minimalism. One piece from 1966 in the show was a U-shaped construction that hung on the wall like a door frame. It was painted in a ravishing blue and could have been made yesterday. Around 1970, Piacentino broke with Arte Povera and started getting interested in F1 racing cars, downhill skiers and aircraft emblems. He famously stated that his break with his former colleagues was based on his conviction that “art had to have something to do with beauty and decoration, even when taken to extremes.” Instead of a horse in an art gallery, Piacentino looked to the machine.

The shadow of the Futurists falls across Piacentino’s art. He loves the styling of the machine, the surfaces of the racing car, and his abstractions of the lines and forms suggests a fetishist’s love of detail. It was said of Piacentino’s early work that he conformed to the notion of radical minimalism as a parenthetical quotation of painting, but the work seemed to also suggest a love of decoration which his later defection from AP seemed to confirm. The recent work doesn’t need much justification beyond the fact that is beautifully made. In one work, a long blue steel car with wheels tucked out of sight as though it was about to make a land speed record attempt, sat next to a work that was a frame like a painting, but was made of metal and had large clasps on it like a ski boot. The whole series of works, stretching back to the 60s pieces, had some suggestion of art forms but also referred to things from the world. The work was remarkable in both its precise and unwavering consistency and its wilful eccentricity. It would perhaps be no surprise then that Il Ponte Contemporanea also represents Australian artists Paul Ferman, Selina Ou and Tracey Moffatt.

Heading back to the car, Marcello talked excitedly of his plans to open his own art gallery. It sounded like a pipe dream, but he was so enthusiastic it was hard not to get excited for him. As we walked, he explained that there were many opportunities in Rome for the adventurous contemporary artist. Sure, there was plenty of bad art, but there was a margin to be filled, a possibility of something new. As we walked, we seemed to have gone a long way further than we had gone in the morning. Marcello stood in the street and scratched his head. He shrugged and said “The car must have been towed”. We asked a group of parking police who were standing around smoking and chatting where the car would be and were directed to a car impound yard down near the old Olympic Village. We took a cab to the other side of town, past the obelisk commemorating El Duce and found a large yard full of cars and motorbikes behind a line of fir trees. Marcello had left the house without his ID and asked us to show our membership card for La Società per la Unificazione Delle Arti e Della Vita. The woman behind the glass smiled and pointed at the cash register: 190€.

We asked readers last week for nominations for their favourite film about or by an artist. The reward for effort [and don’t we all need a little rewarding now and again?] was a ticket to see a movie by an artist about an artist. The question was simple - complete the sentence 'The best film about an artist is [...] because..." The answers were interesting:

“Frida because it came along when Hollywood decided it was okay for attractive actresses to 'downplay' their beauty for a so called brilliant script. And we musn't forget the melodrama it oozes, the physical pain, anger, and disappointment... Hey what can I say, I'm a sucker for any movie where there is a remote inkling of bisexuality, torture and a fat man to complete the picture. That, and all I want is to do is paint, marry said fat man and have him build/buy me a house that has a connecting bridge and occasionally watch him fornicate with my sister.... only problem is, I'm an only child."

“ Legal Eagles, 1986, because Chelsea Deardon (Daryl Hannah) sets the benchmark for all performance artists aspiring to Hollywood budgets. I know, it's not strictly by or about an artist, but then again, maybe Chelsea really does or did exist.”

"Immortal Beloved. (Dir. Bernard Rose, Gary Oldman), because never before, nor since, as far as I am concerned, has there been a film about an artist that so thoroughly and enchantingly woos the audience into the life of an artist, including his loves and his pain. Oldman's portrayal of Ludwig Van Beethoven is stunning, subtle and complete, giving a real sense of the (almost shattering) tensions that ran through his life. Directed with precision and care, avoiding nostalgia for it's own sake, and using a textured and tightly woven narrative that wraps you up, then spins you outward, dizzyingly, into the madness behind the genius, and the agony and ecstasy behind the music. I dare any viewer to forget the emotionally taught storyline that ferments into his 9th Symphony (Ode to Joy) when next they hear it.

“Love Is The Devil because it never shows the works of the artist so you don’t have to get upset by seeing a filmaker trying to reproduce the creative experience. Oh Basquiat was really good as well ….”

“Derek Jarman's The Garden because being carried away by someone elses imagination has never been so all encompassing or rewarding.”

“The best movie by or about an artist is Happy Gilmore because the artistry of just tappin' it in may be the most underrated action ever. seriously, it's a happening. "

"The best movie by or about an artist is Drop Dead Gorgeous because they made a dancing Jesus out of stockings and he has wheels on the bottom of his cross and ... um ... I think I misunderstood the assignment."

"Bukowski: Born Into This because: It inspires honesty, dedication and faith to the artists' way of life and life of work. At times painfully absolute, the film technique is complimentary to Charles Bukowski's life and art, only leaving room for the viewer to taste the grittiness and feel the heartbeat of a man and his desire. A story that connects you with a complex cluster of emotions and almost lets you live through the eyes of the writer for a few hours. The documentary and it's subject matter, refreshingly awaken our senses from the glossy post-production driven aesthetic of today's popular culture in terms of the moving image. This, as well as, Bukowski's concentrated spirit and candid veracity which are ultimately humanizing and stimulating make Born Into This the best movie about an artist."

“The best movie about an artist (Woody Allen's Bullets over Broadway) is about a writer. The reason is for the catharsis at the end of the movie when the Allen stand-in David Shayne (John Cusack - I wish he always played Woody) goes to the woman he loves and says "I know two things for sure. I love you, and I'm not an artist". I melt every time ... I wish I could just admit it and give up. It's like a kind of artistic existentialism ... he finally understands his own mediocrity, and his acceptance of his failure to be a good
artist offers the opportunity for a new life, liberated from the burden of his creative practice ... it's the most optimistic vote for life over art. Of course it's a fantasy, for a risk-free, safe (if banal) existence. But it's a good
one. Oh its meant to be a sentence innit ... Oh well. There's a great writer/artist scene is Husbands and Wives as well, when Juliette Lewis' character is talking with Woody about his new manuscript that she's begged him to let her read ... there's a perfect depiction of that whole, how do you explain that you hate your friend's artwork without appearing to say anything negative about it ... "it's like Triumph of the Will; it's brilliant, but you despise the ideas behind it ... that's a bad example"

"...Empire Records because the artist says, "I don’t feel the need to explain my art to you..."

"dear artlife, I would like to win some movie tickets to rescue my relationship. My relationship has been damaged by my decision to nominate a Fassbinder film. the best movie by or about an artist is Martha by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, because he's such a <>, but has no humanity whatsoever.

"The best movie by or about an artist is CRUMB because it promotes piggyback love."

"The best movie by or about an artist is I Shot Andy Warhol because it's about Valerie Solanis; the plays she writes are funny; and the guy that plays Warhol is ok. [This is not a clever or witty entry I know, but I'm not too good with these types of things. I really did like the movie though.]"

"The best movie by or about an artist is Days of Thunder because Tom Cruise is awesome and it's about god damn time someone acknowledged his amazing talent."

"The best movie by or about an artist is 9 Songs because."

You are invited to the opening of
The Elastic: Archive Project
BY SUSAN CHARLTON
CREATIVE PRODUCER STATE RECORDS NSW (STATE GOVERNMENT ARCHIVES)
SATURDAY 15 OCTOBER 4-–6PM

Elastic archive... bring your reading glasses.

The Cross Art Projects: A space for independent art & curatorial studies. 33 Roslyn Street Kings Cross Sydney 2011.

ELASTIC is a group of nine artists who create projects that invite other artists to participate with a view to expanding the scope and interpretation of a project. This democratising curatorial model allows unexpected outcomes.

The Elastic: Archive Project displays, in various forms, the collecting and classifying activities that engage these artists’ practices as both research and raw material. Classifying systems are fundamental not only to public and private collection activities but relate, in a gallery context, to the manufacture of authenticity within the art-culture system. This exhibition explores this operation by placing private studio process in the lived context of the gallery space.

The resulting archival categories range from fantastic or absolutely bloody useless catalogues of vernacular objects or adornments, to straight-faced empirical research into, for example, the reasons given by an arts council for rejecting a grant application or under-representation of women artists in contemporary criticism. The archive even has its own exhibition reviews.

Draw your own conclusions with regard to the authenticity of the artists’ interpretations of material and museum culture!

From a historical perspective the Elastic Archive Project harnesses conceptual and process art’s critical forces as well more recent methodological innovations using analytical techniques appropriated from interdisciplinary and institutional critique. Out of these parameters a new direction in contemporary art has emerged. The emphasis is on the formal experiments of individual artists. In this way and by these means, contemporary life and issues of the marginal or unfashionable can be given prominence.

The Archive Project is the latest Elastic ‘edition’. Artwork editions are available exclusively for the exhibition. Artists: Lisa Andrew, Hany Armanious, Stuart Bailey, Jay Balbi, Joanna Callaghan, Liz Day, Deej Fabyc, Ian Geraghty, Sarah Goffman, Kathryn Gray & Holly Williams, Ross Harley, Mark Hislop, Emily Hunt, Andrew Hurle, Melanie Khava, Claire Lambe, Sally Mannall, Elvis Richardson, Tobias Richardson, Raquel Ormella, Luke Parker, Elizabeth Pulie, Mary Teague and Regina Walters.

Rockin!

Alex Lawler Psychedelic Warlords (disappear in smoke) MOP Projects. 27 October - 13 November 2005. Opening Thursday 27 October 6-8pm.

"This project builds on my involvement with the Psychedelic and aims to create a dialogue between the structures of canvas supports in painting, with the technical supports for the pop psychedelia of rock music. The work aims to re-orientate the imagery featured on LP covers as well as logistical equipment like speaker boxes, into the academic and aesthetic language of the gallery. The exercise is transgressive for both genres and alchemic in nature.

"This work also aims to question the parallels between the visual artist (art-star’) and the musician (rock-star’). Despite the differing natures of production, an examination of the outcomes of artistic production, records in all senses, over the span of an artists’ career is open to all.

"Also, the pacification and objectification of active subject inherent in exhibition or performance is inverted in this project. Those occupying space in front of the installation, are brought into the imaginary world of pop archetypes. The viewer placed in front of this work is faced with speakers oscillating with rhythm and a grounded fold-back speaker – objects always levelled at the performer themselves. Thus the roles of performer and spectator are inversed. "



Ben Frost, 'dorothy, these aren't yellow bricks - theyr'e incontinence pads!'
1.2m x 1.2m acrylic & enamel on board.

Rainbows End
A New Solo Exhibition by by Ben Frost
Opening November 10th 6- 8pm
Helen Gory Galerie - 25 St Edmonds Rd, Prahran, Melbourne
continues until December 3rd, 2005

11 new paintings from the end of the world

The results of our poll before last are in and we are... The Land of The Bears, a kingdom ruled with an iron paw. We're also a little bit like the Weimar Republic which we think of as being a lot of sexy women in fishnet stockings, dodgy cabaret and sexually ambiguous MCs. Yes, that's us to a tee. The similiarity to us and China during the Cultural Revolution is purely coincidental but a big shout out to our readers who nominated the general ambience around The Art Life to be a direct analog of Nazi Germany.

The Art Life Is...


Land Of The Bears 42% [31]

The Weimar Republic 18% [13]

Cultural Revolution China 14% [10]

Paris Commune 1871 8% [6]

Imperial Amerikkka 5% [4]

The Reformation 5% [4]

Soviet Russia 4% [3]

Fascist Germany 3% [2]

Total votes: 73

Anyone who reads The Art Life regularly knows that we have a keen interest in movies by and about artists. It’s perhaps for that reason we’ve been approached by Palace Cinemas with an offer of 50 double passes for Art Life readers to preview screenings of Me You And Everyone We Know, the debut feature by US video/performance artist Miranda July, on October 21, 22 and 23 at the Palace Academy Twin, Sydney.

Caution: artist at work! Miranda July as Christine
The film has really piqued our interest. July has her own website with downloadable videos of her work and links to a number of quirky web projects that read like classic 60s Fluxus art projects with a little bit of Ghost World mixed in. July is touring the world on a promo tour for her much lauded film [prizes at Cannes, Sundance, San Francisco Film Festival] and has her own beguiling gosh-darn-it-felt-ball-earrings-blog . The film itself looks good and has scored a 80 per cent approval rating across the board on Rotten Tomatoes where A.O. Scott, the hard to please film critic for The New York Times claimed cryptically, “while Miranda July's first feature film might be classified as romantic comedy, it introduces the playful qualities of installation art to the conventions of narrative cinema.” We have no idea what that means but it sounds amazing!

So what do you have to do to get a double pass? Send an email with your postal address to The Art Life [[email protected]] and complete this sentence:


“The best movie by or about an artist is____________ because….”

We'll publish the best entries next week. The film is being screened at the Palace Academy Twin, 3a Oxford Street, Paddington, 2021. The giveaway is only available to our Sydney readers and all emails with your name and postal address must be recieved by 9.pm Friday, October 15, 2005.

Thanks to Palace Cinemas.

The last time we were in England we arrived at Heathrow and took a train into London. Passengers could watch a video presentation about rail services in the UK and the soundtrack immediately caught our attention – Squarepusher’s My Red Hot Car was playing under shots of the very train we were riding in, speeding along in the outer industrial estates of Greater London, a hectic breakbeat mixed with mellow ‘the future is here’ vibes.

This time we arrived in Manchester at stand 239 [that’s 239 extra places for aircraft to dock aside from the 40 or so gates in the airport proper] and caught a bus that took us across the tarmac to the terminal buildings. As we rode along, the bus taking a circuitous route between ranks of charter planes emblazoned with logos and travel agency web addresses, the bus sound system played Oasis’s Standing On The Shoulder’s of Giants. We’re not sure if these soundtracks were meant to be an official welcome for the newly arrived but in their own way they perfect examples of the way culture is everywhere in the UK.

That sounds like an oxymoron, we know, but we’re talking about a consciousness about culture – music, art, books, theatre, movies, architecture, ballet, opera, modern dance and on and on – that is downright freakish. When you step off an airplane, you’re of course in the culture, but the ‘culture’ industry in the UK is a profound presence in the everyday that would seem completely bizarre in Australia. We’ll give you just a couple of examples…




George Stubbs

George Stubbs is one of our favourite artists. He was the great English equestrian and sporting artist who married scientific inquiry with 18th Century fantasy painting to create one of the most dazzlingly odd bodies of work ever produced. We love looking at his paintings because, aside from their formidable accuracy in anatomical detail and composition, they’re also like science fiction paintings in that they propose a utopian landscape of mathematical precision and Capability Brown-esque tranquillity. We’d only been here a few days when we turned on the TV to catch a documentary called The Secret of Drawing. The Radio Times write up described the show like this:

The Secret of Drawing is a four part series hosted by Andrew Graham-Dixon. By looking at drawing we can understand the history of art, science and technology. Episode One, The Line of Inquiry, is a look at the many ways in which drawing has connected us with the natural world and how it has advanced scientific inquiry from the Italian Renaissance to today.

It sounds dusty and boring but the host, a long haired bloke with a Northern accent who, despite his posh sounding double barrelled name, was a genial non-condescending guide through Stubbs’s work. He also looked at other artists including a contemporary of Stubbs named John Russell who became fascinated with drawing the moon after peering through a telescope. Russell worked only in graphite and gauche and produced reams of drawings and a massive five foot by five foot gauche on paper painting of the moon’s surface that’s virtually photographic in its detail and looks like one of the Apollo shots from Michael Light’s Full Moon series.

The program, although somewhat obscure in its appeal, had a lot of stylistic quirks not the least of which was using Pink Floyd’s Meddle as the soundtrack. The thing that blew us away was not so much that it was tailor made for our own obscure interests but that it was on at 8pm on a Saturday night on BBC2. This documentary may turn up on the ABC at some point locked away after 10.30pm on a Sunday night, perhaps given pride of place on Sunday Afternoon when any decent human being should be outside enjoying the sunshine, or maybe even on SBS where no one will watch it. In the UK, this kind of thing is prime time.

Contemporary artists from the Young British Artists period of the mid to late 90s have moved into being celebrities in mainstream English media. Some - like Rachel Whiteread who is unveiling an installation in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall this week - gets a lot of press. It’s all respectful and interested, flattering the reader’s knowledge and intelligence. Unlike Australia, mainstream media coverage of contemporary art in the UK doesn’t start from a position of suspicion. In Australia, articles in the newspapers either position themselves as completely gormless and accepting of any media bumpf they are given or are suspicious and distrustful, demanding that the artist and the art justify themselves on some nebulous grounds known only to the journalist and editors. The contrast in the English papers is actually confusing, as we keep expecting the articles to turn on the artists, but they never do. [This is in stark contrast to the English newspaper critics who are actually incredibly savage – but we’ll get to that…].

Perhaps the best known YBA artist is Tracey Emin and she seems to be everywhere. She copped a lot of flack from her appearance in an advertisement for gin, but it seemed like an incredibly apt endorsement to us, and she continues on making ill-advised appearances on TV and in the press. We discovered that Emin had written a column for The Independent called My Life In A Column and we thought it was probably a one off. But no, Emin is there week after week with a picture of her kissing her cat, lank hair over he eyes. Reading her column is like a parody of Emin, but it’s real:

Have you ever drunk three litres of water a day, every day for a week? I’m telling you, it’s like drowning from the inside out. And everyone tells you how well you look, amazing skin, bright sparkly eyes and a very bush tail.

But the reality is that I’m pissing every 25 seconds and feeling like a baby whale (there she blows!). Oh yeah, and tray alcohol, there’s juts no room for it. In fact it goes straight to your brain. You’d think all the water stuff would sober you up. One minute I was having a sensible conversation and three glasses of rosé later, I was square dancing on the black-and-whites in my friend’s kitchen…

She talks a lot about getting drunk and her bodily functions, which is all very entertaining, and does eventually have time to talk about her art:

Some days I wake up and I just can’t believe how lucky I am. Even today, when I woke up a bit tired, pissed off and miserable and, to make matters worse, really wanting a shag. I still have my brain, I still have my soul and my depths of loneliness are nothing compared to the super-strength gang.

Anyway I have got to stop writing this now, because I’m totally preoccupied with the work for my show in New York. I spent most of Friday, which meant that if it had been, I would have forgotten to write this column all together. Sometimes when I’m working, I’m alone and I feel really happy. I’m locked into myopia of my own world. Art is always there to hold me, I wouldn’t go as far as to say cuddle me, but it keeps me secure. Whether people like it or not, I enjoy my personal mission. If you stuck me on a desert island alone I would be still be making, I would still be creating.

To be an artist is to give and receive. The best thing I have done lately is to make a small animated film. It’s called Reincarnation and it stars a beautiful little dog. If I were reincarnated, I would like to come back as the sun.

These are just two examples out of dozens [possibly hundreds] of appearances of art – historical and contemporary – popping up in the English media every single day. Feature articles aren’t reserved for the weekends while newspapers - including the tabloids - have two or three art critics churning out commentary on a daily basis. Artists have a much larger hold on the public imagination that anywhere else, including art crazy places like New York or Paris. If an artist has been around awhile and embraces the media, their pronouncements on just about anything make the papers.

We arrived in the UK in middle of party conference season. In the last few days the Conservative Party had been meeting to elect their new leader after their last Prime Ministerial hopeful Michael Howard crashed and burned at the last election. The Conservatives are suffering the same kind of malaise as the Australian Labor party with confusion as to who they really are and what they stand for. On side argues that the Conservatives have lost their way and must get back to their core values while the other side contends that the party needs to get with the times, engage with the ‘youth’ and a lot of other very familiar sounding rhetoric. It’s a bizarre sight to see a leadership competition happening in plain sight instead of behind the closed doors of Party HQ. Doubly odd is that each candidate for the leadership – and there are four for the Conservatives – must get up and make a speech outlining their credentials and core beliefs before the party’s rank and file vote directly on their favoured candidate. If there are factions a la the Australian Liberals or Labor parties, there’s absolutely no talk of it in the media.

Because of the media scrutiny, the party conferences also attract of a lot other issues with people popping up to make outlandish statements such as demanding the UK withdraw its troops from Iraq. In the week before we arrived, the British Labour party held their annual conference. Since they were the winning side, all the talk is now about succession of the leadership; when will Gordon Brown take over from Tony Blair? It’s all eerily familiar, but back to front and upside down...

Hockney - having a fag.
What isn’t so familiar is an artist making an unscheduled appearance at a party political conference to promote smoking. Incredibly, David Hockney popped up in Brighton to fight the British Government’s proposed ban on smoking in pubs:

The internationally acclaimed artist, who spends most of his time in smoke-free Los Angeles, arrived at the Labour conference wearing a pink rose, rather than the usual red one, and declared “Death awaits you whether you smoke or not.

He started the day with an appearance on the Today programme on Radio 4, dismissing as ‘absolutely dreary’ Julie Morgan, the earnest Labour MP who argued smoking in pubs could damage the health of bar staff. He told her: “You’re too bossy, chum… People don’t want to live like you do.”

Over the course of the day Mr Hockney, came up with a palette of colourful abuse of Labour’s plan to ban smoking in pubs and clubs. The proposal to outlaw smoking in public places was “ridiculous” he said.

“You cannot have a smoke free bohemia. Without bohemia you pay a heavy price,” he said in an interview with The Independent. “Picasso smoked until he was about 98 and so did Matisse.”

We mentioned the English critics earlier, and they’re a mean bunch. We buy Modern Painters magazine pretty much just to read Matthew Collings Diary [styled, incidentally, on David Hockney’s fantastically readable dairies]. When he’s on form, he’s an insightful and entertaining art writer but lately his writing has turned into a non stop litany of complaints. Colling’s main beef seems to be that people don’t take art seriously enough and that it’s our fault the art world is rubbish. If we could just appreciate the rightness of formalism over ‘ideas’ then we’d be on the right track.

We had started to think that this creeping fogeyism had something to do with the fact that Collings’ own paintings – which he publishes with unapologetic regularity in his dairy – are being ignored. But we were wrong. Colling’s attitude seems typical of many of the UK newspaper and magazine critics. You read it all the time, a kind of startled reaction to the fact that in England art is more popular than anywhere else in the world. Not only are the English ready and willing to celebrate and promote contemporary art and artists, they’re also ready to embrace overseas artists as well - Andy Warhol’s Empire State is being projected on to the outside walls of the National Film Theatre for the next month; Fracis Alys recently released a fox into the National Portrait Gallery and made a video of it from CCTV camera footage and Marc Quinn’s marble sculpture of a pregnant, armless woman is on display on the fourth empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. You want public access? Channel Four, as part of its charter as a public broadcaster, has made band width available to anyone who wants to upload a documentary to their website – and hundreds have.

Art is too popular and has to be stopped, somehow. Art critics take pot shots at the usual targets – video art is boring? Blimey. Occasionally along comes an example of populism run amok the critics can sink their teeth into.

Jack Vetrriano, The Singing Butler.

Jack Vettriano is a self taught artist from Scotland whose work has proven to incredibly popular with the general public and cashed up celebrities who are willing to pay big money for the artists work. His painting is illustrative and not exactly horrible, but as public figure he’s a cross between Charles Billich and Ken Done, with his own website selling prints of his most popular paintings When some writers compared Vettriano to Dali, Bacon and Picasso, serious art critics were appalled. The problem was that Vettriano’s fame is critic-proof, raking in embarrassing amounts of money.

Last week the critic’s had their revenge finally when it was revealed that this former miner had lifted designs for his best loved paintings from a book called The Illustrator’s Figure Reference Manual from 1987. “Now out of print, the book, which contains photographs posed by models intended to be traced or copied, are almost identical to those in Vettriano paintings such as The Singing Butler (1992), Dance Me To The End of Love (1997) and Elegy for a Dead Admiral (1996)….” reported a clearly delighted Times.

Writing in The Guardian, critic Jonathon Jones railed against the populism of art in Britain.

Vettriano is not even an artist. He just happens to be popular with ‘ordinary people’ who buy reproductions of his pseudo-1930s scenes of high heeled women and monkey-suited men, and celebrities who for out for the originals of these toneless, textureless, brainless slick corpses of paintings. I urge you to visit the National Gallery. Look at great paintings for a few hours. Now take a look at Vettriano. I’m not arguing with you, I’m telling you. I look at art everyday and I know what I don’t like.

There I go – being elitist. Art critics in are, in the game that Vettriano plays, snobbish patsies. Critical disdain is part of his success making him ‘controversial’. By liking him you are siding with ordinary folk against the lofty hierarchs. So I should probably praise him and hope he’ll go away, but it’d be like some scientist saying, you’re right, evolution is just a theory. Some things in art are true, and some are false – all of which was easier to explain before we decided popularity was the litmus test of aesthetic achievement.

Contemporary art has never been as popular as it is in Britain now. There has never been a mass culture in which modern artists were household names in the way that Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin have become. Robert Hughes once pointed out that that however famous Andy Warhol might be, he would never be as famous as a certain sports illustrator. But Marc Quinn is that famous. People have come from all over to see the Fourth Plinth. The hierarchy of taste has truly vanished.

Emma White's Paper Trail at Phatspace

"Please come and see my show Paper Trail at Phatspace. The show runs until Oct 22 (the gallery is open Wed-Sat until 6pm). Everything will be correctly spelled. "


Brett Moffatt's A Charade at Brian Moore Gallery.

"In his first solo exhibition in three years, SILENT FICTIONS, Brett Moffatt examines the psychological and emotional charges created by figures within enclosed settings. Moffatt's work is both seductive and discomforting, exploring how a static painted image can evoke its own past and future through compositional and subject matter choices. This extraordinary exhibition of around 25 works will include a series of miniatures painted with the aid of a microscope. Exhibition continues until Saturday 5 November 2005. Brian moore gallery, 11 - 6 Tue Fri, 10 - 5 Sat."

Damiano Bertoli's Continuous Moment: Hot August Knife at MOP Projects

MOP 6 October - 23 October 2005

"THE FUTURE LASTS A LONG TIME; OR, DAMIANO BERTOLI’S Continuous Moment: Hot August Knife 1969 is undoubtedly a key year in the story of the Continuous Moment. In 1969, Rupert Murdoch buys the British tabloid News of the World. Yasser Arafat becomes head of the PLO, diverse terrorist organisations strike across the globe, and the Soviets and Americans escalate the space race. The Yanks land on the moon (allegedly "for all mankind"), and continue to bomb the crap out of Vietnam. The Soviets squabble with the Chinese. Chicago cops shoot two Black Panthers in their sleep. Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife, is slaughtered by the Manson Family. The world’s first ATM is installed in New York. There’s Woodstock. Altamont. Lennon and Ono have a Bed-In. Hippie communes breed like rabbits. The radical Florentine designers of SUPERSTUDIO launch their Continuous Monument. And 1969 is also the year in which DAMIANO BERTOLI is born… "

Anna Peters On A Roll at MOP Projects.
"In my paintings I use the cartoon format – a well known way of incorporating words with characters. The characters act out the worlds, which can vary from the serious to silly, the funny to the not so funny."