the art life: May 2006

100 Promises for The Art World

Monday, May 29, 2006

Artists agreeing to Art Life terms.

I _____________________ undertake the following:

1. I will never exhibit my art in a homewares store.

2. I will never agree to do a painting in the street just for money.

3. I promise I will never dress up in drag and think I’m changing the world.

4. I will never charge more than pub prices for beer or wine at an opening.

5. When writing a catalogue essay, I’ll try to stick to just talking about the art.

6. I will accept that some artists deserve to be a success.

7. I recognise that a review that does not coincide with my personal prejudices is not therefore bad.

8. Just because I go around to all the openings I will accept that it doesn’t therefore mean I know shit about anything.

9. I will buy Australian art magazines and I will read them.

10. I will stop saying artists of negligible talent are “hot”.

11. I understand that my partner has as much right to an opinion about my work as I do [no matter how ridiculous].

12. At the first sign of trouble I will blame the News South Wales College of Fine Art for anything even if I live in Perth, Darwin or Hobart.

13. I have come to accept that drawing a picture of a tree is not necessarily the same thing as saving one.

14. I will accept that an artist’s vanity book is not a “learned discourse”.

15. I will stop using the word “discourse”.

16. I accept that a familiarity with Bunnings doesn’t therefore mean that I am a sculptor.

17. I will agree that when an artist uses ready made materials they have appropriated from a found object shop, they could have done so as a conscious choice rather than just as an easy option…

18. I promise to stop denigrating video art.

19. I will accept that video art is dead already.

20. I will accept that since video art is dead already I will not get hysterically overenthusiastic about a “return to painting”.

21. I will eventually come around to the idea that video art is alive and well.

22. I will never ever call my show of drawings “Recent Works on Paper”.

23. I promise to actually visit an artist-run gallery.

24. I will no longer take catalogue essays seriously.

25. I vow I will not automatically always buy the blue painting in an artist’s show.

26. I will acknowledge that just because an artist is famous their work isn’t therefore good.

27. I will acknowledge that just because an artist is unknown their work isn’t therefore “cutting edge”.

28. I will no longer take articles in art magazines 100% seriously.

29. I will acknowledge the genius of art writers.

30. I will see a show before slagging it off.

31. I will admit publicly that just because I feel I have seen it all, it doesn’t mean I have.

32. I promise not to go “hmmm” when looking at a work of art.

33. When I say “I will come back later and look at the show properly” I really will come back and look at it properly.

34. When making up an excuse as to why I didn’t come to your opening, I promise to make it a good one.

35. I will accept that I am not a haunted soul who has seen too much at 22 years of age.

36. I will enter public art competitions in the full knowledge that I may not win it, and even if I do, you know, big deal…

37. When I am leaving a gallery I will no longer say a cheery “thanks!” as I go out the door but scream “fuck off” instead.

38. I promise that I will not write outraged letters to art magazine writers just because that person didn’t accept that I am influenced by a prescribed list of artists that I can supply on request.

39. I promise not to threaten to kill someone in writing with my signature attached at the bottom of the email.

40. I promise that I will never again do a performance that includes me making horrible retching sounds with my throat.

41. If I am going to do a performance in a dress, I will make sure that either a] I am a girl or b] I look good in said dress.

42. I will accept that John Ruskin has been dead for over 100 years.

43. I will generously say that young artists are capable of maturing.

44. I will say that old artists are capable of change.

45. I will stop using the phrase “blue chip” as an insult.

46. I will finally realise that getting paid to write art reviews for a major city newspaper isn’t the “top job”.

47. I will say that [person’s name] truly deserved to made director of that [gallery/museum/magazine].

48. I will understand that children and dogs are essential components of any exhibition opening.

49. I will accept that if I see children or dogs at an exhibition opening, I am in the wrong place.

50. At the obligatory after-show dinner in a cheap restaurant I will pay my share of the booze bill.
51. I will accept that I cannot be an enfant terrible much past 33 years of age.

52. When someone asks me if I’d like some free publicity for my efforts, I will take the offer seriously and not say “sorry, but I’m really busy this week.”

53. I confess that I am no longer an “emerging artist” if I am represented by a major gallery.

54. I promise I will remain an "emerging artist" so long as it qualifies me for funding.

55. I will finally admit that buying works on paper is a waste of time.

56. I confess that owning Aboriginal art does not make me spiritually “in tune”.

57. I will stop stealing mailing lists.

58. I will accept that everyone steals mailing lists.

59. I understand that at 40 years of age, I have emerged as an artist as far as I ever will.

60. I promise to stop resorting to paraphrasing music/movie quotes when in a tight spot…

61. But “what are they going to say when I’m gone? Are they going to say that I was a kind man, that I was a good man, that I had plans, that I had wisdom??? Bullshit man…” etc, etc, etc.

62. I will thank whatever corporate sponsor the gallery director wants me to thank and I will be happy about it.

63. I will accept that plastering the entire city with posters featuring my own face is not a wise career move.

64. When Gallery Director A gets a job at Gallery B when Gallery Director C moves on to direct the public collection of Museum X, I will accept that that’s just the way things go around here…

65. I will come to accept that Gallery Board Member Z was there because they truly believed in the overall good cause of said gallery and now that they have retired I will cease my endless campaign of disinformation…

66. I understand that when I am travelling on a grant that my funding does not cover in-room porn movies.

67. When I am given the plumb job of curating an annual exhibition featuring exciting young artists, I will actually leave the office and see art for real.

68. When arranging someone to launch an artist’s exhibition I promise to choose someone who actually knows something about the artist and/or art.

69. I will find the person who thought up the idea of getting that celebrity to launch that show and pat them on the back with the words “good idea!”

70. I will no longer invoke the name of a French philosopher to justify my boring art.

71. I will accept that all art is the emperor’s new clothes and so what anyway.

72. I will cease to claim that a boring landscape/portrait/still life is “classic”.

73. If I start putting my art on t-shirts, I will accept that I have stopped being an artist.

74. I will stop ingratiating myself with the directors of galleries I have no chance of ever exhibiting at.

75. I will admit that I am underwhelmed by art from China.

76. I will find out why the performance artist crossed the road.

77. I will try not to bring every conversation back to my art career.

78. I will send out invitations to my show exactly two weeks in advance of the opening, no more, no less…

79. I will accept that it is not acceptable to pretend that my art career is as good as my partner’s.

80. I promise to never refer to a gallery owner as a ‘gallerist’.

81. I will remember that artists show in galleries, horses live in stables.

82. I accept that there is nothing wrong with making a living from art.

83. I also accept that not making a living from my art is not the same thing as being a failure.

84. When involved in a group show I will turn up at the end of the exhibition to take down my own work.

85. I vow that my artist run gallery will open on the hours stated clearly on the invitation.

86. I promise never to let the concept of opening hours for my ARI distract me from my social commitments.

87. I accept that a gallery that has exhibitions that are on for one night only [i.e. just the opening party] is really nothing more than an excuse for a party.

88. And when I am minding an exhibition in an artist run gallery, I will not try to turn the gallery into an extension of my bedroom/lounge room/shooting gallery.

89. I accept that artist run galleries make a profit from alcohol sales, so when I ask if I can provide my own booze at opening I will understand that it’s just the same as asking if it’s ok to steal.

90. I accept that the last time anyone put punch in a garbage bin and expected people to drink from it was at a place called Jonestown.

91. I accept that I cannot expect to hang my work on the best wall in a group show just because I turned up the earliest to the hang.

92. Now that I have been included in a group show at the [major art gallery]I promise that I will just relax and enjoy it.

93. When asked for the details of my work for an exhibition catalogue I will provide those details in a timely manner.

94. When asked for a JPEG, 35mm transparency or other reproduction of my work for inclusion in a catalogue/magazine I promise to not just stare blankly into space.

95. I will not pack my CV with made up exhibitions, publications or distort the truth of those crappy student shows I was in just to make it all seem a bit better than it really is/was.

96. I will accept that being a curator is a tough job that no one appreciates.

97. If an exhibition of art from overseas is shown in an Australian gallery I will not blame the local curator for the shoddy late career of Pablo Picasso.

98. I will accept that the reason my career is in the toilet isn’t because of Federal Government arts policy [or lack thereof].

99. I will realise that my early work was crap, but there’s still hope for me yet.

100. I promise that I will never stop complaining.

Labels: article, faqs

You Read It Here Last!

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

The word is out and the fix is in! The Australian artists being sent away to the Venice Biennale in 2007 is a Sydney-Melbourne love-in: Callum Morton, Daniel “Danny” Von Sturmer and Susan Norrie. Speaking to Virginia Trioli on ABC 702 this morning, curator lady Juliana Engberg revealed the super exciting plans for our country’s much maligned pavilion, to wit, although the exhibition space built at great expense and at the last moment will be used, Von Sturmer’s work will be seen in a “different context” that will apparently engage audiences in an unexpected way while Norrie’s work will be shown in a dilapidated Venetian building [exact location yet to be decided] which will suit her art. Engberg also explained that über art guy John Kaldor had been in Italy tirelessly working behind the scenes to secure the artists and their chosen [but yet to be announced] locales.

Trioli claimed in the middle of the interview that while holidaying in Venice in 2003 she and her husband stopped by the Biennale and – in the words of the art savvy radio host – “it was proof that contemporary art had lost its way.” Faced with such first hand knowledge and a good degree of cynicism, Engberg countered with the admission that 2003 and 2005 had both been “flat” but 2007 was going to be a hum dinger. Engberg did a great job talking up the excitement level, describing Von Sturmer’s work as an “exciting” investigation into abstraction. Norrie’s work was “well known to Sydney audiences” but did not specify if the work going to Venice will be her celebrated video work [and by ‘work’ we mean, as in that one video that’s been shown everywhere] or her rather fantastic recent white on black paintings of Godzilla. No mention was made of what Morton would be doing in Venice, but we can imagine that since he has the actual pavilion to play with, it’ll be an investigation of the history of Modernist architecture and it’s translation into a populist vernacular – you know, Burger King meets Archizoom.

Meanwhile, and on a much less grand a scale, local Sydney/Petersham artist Lucas Ihlein is having dinner on Friday night. It’s somewhat unusual to be sending out press releases for what you’re doing on the weekend, but Ihlein rises to the challenge. Actually, what’s happening is that Ihlein has a power point presentation that he’d like to show attendees to a scrumptious dinner cooked by Fiona. It all makes sense when you read it in context:

DINNER, FRIDAY 26 May, 6pm. Petersham Bowling Club, cnr The Avenue and Brighton Street with delicious dinner cooked by Fiona, bowling shenanigans, and a slide show by some amazing visiting Filipino artists who are here for the Biennale, Alfredo Juan Aquilizan & Maria Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan. There’ll also be a power point presentation by yours truly, which hopefully will satisfy the likes of Tully and his household. Dinner available at the cheap Big Bowl prices. RSVP to Fiona on 0434813926. EXHIBITION SATURDAY 27 May, from 2.30pm to 6pm Chrissie Cotter Gallery, Pidcock Street Camperdown (off Mallett Street, and not far from Parramatta Road) with afternoon tea, a little excursion to Johnston’s Creek, and, if we’re lucky, a ribbon-cutting by the Mayor Himself, Sam Byrne. It’ll be your chance to get a hard copy printout of the blog to put next to your toilet…

Call us crazy, but we’re putting our money down now for Ihlein be our country’s representative to the Venice Biennale in the very near future, possibly the 2009 exhibition but certainly no later than 2013.

Labels: announcements, international exhibitions

Just Beautiful

Nothing beats quality. You can feel it when you walk into a shop that sells expensive items, arranged just so, under special lights, perhaps with music playing somewhere in the background and [this being the future] the rich scent of just-made coffee in the air. It’s no use resisting the allure of the majestic shopping experience because the entire environment has been designed to capture your senses and lure you into an extended, sleepy reverie, a narcosis akin to lying under a warm blanket as you wait to be wheeled into surgery. Thoughts like these entered our heads as we encountered the beauty of the new Kaliman Gallery.

Kaliman Gallery as seen from space...
Our knowledge of the new Kaliman premises stretches back the final few years of Coventry Gallery when the entire place was as still and as quiet as the grave, an eerie isolation perfectly captured in Nigel Thompson’s portrait of the late Chandler Coventry. In the picture, the wheelchair bound gallery owner is marooned in vast polished wooden floor, the dull light of the outside world beckoning like a portal to the next life. Downstairs, the old second smaller gallery was a completely different experience as the entire room seemed to be carpeted with sea grass matting. For those of you who have never experienced sea grass matting, you are very lucky, as the smell is what you’d call ‘funky’ – bong water mixed with sweat and joss sticks. Fast forward into the 1980s and the highly polished sheen of Coventry gave way to the dull grey era of Gitte Weise Gallery. Nothing kills a work of art like florescent tube lighting, rendering everything pallid and spectral. Shoving a bunch of really unremarkable art into the gallery does nothing for the experience either.

Tim Mcmonagle, When good times turn sour #2, 2006.
Oil on linen, 77x77cms.
Courtesy of Kaliman Gallery.
[click on image to enlarge]

Now, some millions of dollars later, Kaliman Gallery emerges. The outside is painted black with the words “Kaliman Gallery” rendered 3D with the same font as the one on the home page of the gallery’s web site, making it feel like the Gem Saloon of the Paddington art belt. But instead of whores, drunks and a proprietor who could swear the hind leg off Jesus H Christ himself, the interior is a designer drug for the senses – naked wood, freshly painted walls, museum grade lighting, a low ceiling and a gleaming chromium coffee machine.

Tim Mcmonagle, Yuho, 2006.
Oil on linen, 122x122cms.
Courtesy of Kaliman Gallery.
[click on image to enlarge]

The challenge for any artist in this new space is to look good, and the paintings by Tim Mcmonagle certainly look good. Big, sketchy pictures done over creamy backgrounds, the paintings are narratives of sublimated sex. With rather odd echoes of the 1980s work of American figurative painters like Eric Fischl and Alex Katz or perhaps a more sober Stewart McFarlane, Mcmonagle’s pictures attempt to present one story while really being about another. It’s a world of bourgeois luxury, decadence, grey hounds and back yard bbqs. As The Esteemed Critic noted in his grudging review in the Sydney Morning Herald, the artist’s double play is most evident in a pair of paintings called When Good Times Turn Sour #1 and #2 in which a tomato sauce splattered sausage lays bereft next to a man’s bethonged feet. Ok, yeah, castration – but a sausage on the ground is just as tragic and so long as you declare the 5 second rule, you’d could probably stick it back on and no worries. Elsewhere there are a couple of paintings of people reclining in hammocks covered in goo [maybe spaghetti, but maybe something else] but the pick of the bunch, and by far the most obviously perverse picture, is the mammoth Yuho [122x122cms] a painting of a naked Japanese woman in a bath wearing rubber gloves. Do we have to draw you a picture? Actually we do…

Syd Ball, Saxon Conquest, 1974.
Acrylic and enamel on cotton duck, 181x241cms.
Courtesy Sullivan & Strumpf Fine Art.
[click on image to enlarge]

Another gallery with sumptuous spaces – albeit on a smaller scale to Kaliman – is Sullivan & Strumpf. Their big draw card at the moment is a series of paintings by Syd Ball from the 1970s. Just as to why they should be so popular now is not that hard to guess – it’s kind of like when Apocalypse Now Redux got a run in the cinemas when it was re-released – it was kind of barmy, big, magnificent and probably a little flawed, but it was so far ahead [and out] of anything else going on you just had to go and have a look. And so it is with Ball’s Stain paintings, seven large scale pictures beginning in 1973 and going through to 1979. Our attention was really taken by the earlier works in the series which were far denser and layered. The latter works became a lot looser with the artist happier to let the canvas show through. Ball obviously wasn’t taught by our Year 6 art teacher who insisted that every bit of the white paper was covered – didn’t she realise that the white bit is just as important as the paint?!! Ball has obviously taken that lesson and applied it across the whole series, playing the sort of canny perceptual games of spatial relations he investigated in his much more strictured Canto series from the 1960s, which was all tense circles and complimentary colours. These works from the 1970s is a cross section of a decade when the artist let loose, got free and you can feel the joyous experimentation leaping off the canvas.

Peter Atkins, Brunswick Journal, 2005.
Mixed media suite of 20 works, 43 x 43 cm each. Private Collection.
Courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney.
[click on image to enlarge]

Nobody does quality quite like Sherman Galleries. If Kaliman Gallery is the Gem Saloon, then Sherman’s vast space is the top floor of David Jones. It’s just so perfect in a casual way, from the polished cement floor to the invisible roof – it’s Zen baby. Back once again for his bi-yearly outing is Peter Atkins. We reviewed his show last time in 2004 and remarked that while we enjoyed his paintings it was his smaller Journal pieces that took our attention. It’s good to see that he agrees with that assessment because while Atkin’s paintings are beautifully judged, immaculately executed and things of great desirability, they lack the same kind of personal urgency that his Journal works possess. The Journal is an ongoing series in which the artist collects detritus found on the streets during his travels around his local suburb, on his overseas trips and through the darkest recesses of eBay. He puts everything he finds into plastic bags and then mounts them on boards, mounted one after the other on the gallery wall. They are fascinating, ranging from found notes [a list of things in a house that have never been fixed] to photographs, handkerchiefs and just abut everything else you can fit in a plastic. In a first, Atkins has included actual drugs found in a baggy outside his house. We were trying to work out what the white powder in the bag might be and how much you’d have to pay to find out, but at $22,000 for the whole series, you’d be paying over the odds no matter what it was. Still, it’s a pleasant mystery to ponder.

Sigalit Landau, Barbed Hula, 2001.
DVD, 1:53 mins.
Courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney.
[click on image to enlarge]
In the back gallery at Sherman Israeli artist Sigalit Landau has an installation of video and photographic works. In the past, Sigalit’s work tended towards some rather unlovely installation pieces that, while conceptually rigorous and as tight as a Matron’s bun, were neither as sumptuous nor as provocative as the new work. The suite of plasma screens arranged around the walls of the gallery space offer visually startling and provocative images that cycle around and around. One video reveals the artist in the Dead Sea trying to walk sideways on a spiral of watermelons floating in the water, perhaps in playful echo of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, maybe suggesting the ephemeral nature of the endangered sea. The toughest work in the show is Barbed Hula, in which a naked female torso suffers through the pain of keeping the self inflicted pain going. One cannot help but be swayed by work like this, boiled down as it is to the essence of an idea, presented so gorgeously on state of the art TV sets. Now that’s quality.

Labels: commercial galleries, painting, video art

From The Sublime…

Monday, May 22, 2006

The art world is swirling miasma of disinformation. There are always wild rumours circulating through its flyways and byways. For example – is it really true that Shaun Gladwell is about to be announced as Australia’s artist for the 2007 Venice Biennale? [And, if true, how do we really feel about that?] Or is it true that Artspace, the gallery in Woolloomooloo sitting on potentially the second most expensive piece of real estate in Sydney [after those lovely sandstone precincts around Taylor Square], is to be moved lock stock and two smoking barrels over to Redfern to join the Performance Space, the Sydney Dance Company and Mr. Gaspo Balloon Co. in a new precinct du art? [And, if true, how do we really feel about that?] Yes, these are the two big rumours of the week, but neither are wilder, more surprising or shocking than the final revelation of who it is who writes The Art Life. Yes, it can now finally be revealed that this blog is written by The Esteemed Critic, John McDonald. That’s at least according to the publications CV of one Clinton Nain, the article Surface Tension was written by Macca. [Thanks to Sublime-ation for the tip].

Transformative, a Peloton Project at Blindside, Melbourne:
Eleanor Avery > James Avery > Matthys Gerber>
Lisa Jones > Giles Ryder > Koji Ryui
Curated by Giles Ryder. Opening Thursday 25 May 2006 25 May - 10 June. Nicholas Building Level 7 Room 14, 37 Swanston St. Melbourne 3000Opening Hours: 12-6pm Thurs-Sat Ph. +613 9650 0093

One of the artist blogs we link to is the ongoing project 1001 Nights Cast in which artist Barbara Campbell is attempting to stage a different performance piece every day of the year streamed live from wherever she is in the world. The performances are based on stories submitted by writers to the web site and from which Campbell then draws her inspiration. We thought that trying to do 1001 performances back to back was one of those ‘crazy’ ideas that’d fall over in the first couple of months but knowing that Campbell had once spent an entire Los Angeles studio residency typing out Josef Conrad’s Heart of Darkness several times over [in tribute to the efforts of Eleanor Coppolla’s work on Apocalypse Now], we knew that if there was a performance artist who could pull of such a feat, it would be Campbell. She is now a third of the way through with 333rd performance based on a story by Victoria Spence last netcast week. Campbell is calling for writers who’d like to contribute to visit her site. She writes:

Thank you everyone - writers, audiences and technical support team - for helping me to this point. My special thanks to Mr. Snow and Zina Kaye of the House of Laudanum and Russell Emerson and Matthew Geier at the University of Sydney for keeping me on air. And my humble gratitude to the more than 100 writers who have contributed to date. 1001 nights cast travels back to the northern hemisphere on June 11. I'll be based in Madrid, Granada and London for three months, making a special effort to coax both old and new European writers into the pool. Be aware that writing deadlines and performance times will therefore change in relation to wherever you are and my new, later, sunset times. I will miss my Australian audiences who probably won't feel like getting out of their winter beds at 4am to tune in, but I fully expect them all to keep writing. We might have to say farewell to the west coast of north and South America for that period. Don't worry, they'll be back…

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Reconfigured: Fixations of the Body. In this exhibition, six emerging artists respond to the figurative. The contemporaniety of their interpretations are rooted in the extension of traditional approaches to representation of the human body through media and formal qualities, making them often confronting and humorous in nature. The diversity of the work addresses a number of concepts and issues including sexuality, social conformity, notions of beauty, gender & conflict, pathology, growth and death. The underlying focus is this fascination of our 'flawed being' with strong allusions to social constructs and psychological responses to stimuli. Exhibitors include: Keith Chidzey, Stuart Currie, Erin Muir, Tom Polo, Michael Thornell & Grace Tsai. Opens: 6-8pm Tuesday, May 23, 2006 Dates: May 24 – June 3, 2006.

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Terminus Projects, under the directorship of Clare Lewis and Sarah Rawlings, are getting ready to launch their next series of site specific art events for 2006. Curated by Lewis, the new works are by David Haines, James Lynch, Michelle Outram, Caroline Rothwell and Jay Ryves. According to the organisations spanking new web site [designed by Emoh], “Terminus Projects is an independent organisation that initiates site-specific projects of artistic and cultural relevance. We provide a platform that encourages dialogue with diverse audiences through projects that are critically engaged, innovative and stimulating.” These new culturally relevant sites will include the new Coles supermarket complex under World Square on George Street. Yeah!

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For your reading pleasure we maintain a list of international art blogs, some good, some not so good, but all worthy of your attention. One of the best international blogs is Simpleposie which is, to our own dyslexic minds, ‘angelpoise’ and that’s a design classic. The Canadian blog is a little bit like the Art Life, but more concerned with the big issues of the universe. Each day Simpleposie author Jennifer McMackon asks readers to respond to a question, to wit:

Simpleposie question for the day #989: Simpleposie wants to know:

What would you say is the most egregious artworld sin?

So in a spirit of give and take, we ask Art Life readers to engage in a exchange with Simpleposie and provide an answer in the comments below.

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: SafARI

What the Fringe Festival is to Edinburgh, and Liste is to Basel, SafARI will be to Sydney during the first few weeks of the 2006 Biennale of Sydney. SafARI will exhibit works by emerging and unrepresented Australian artists across six ARIs (artist-run initiatives), five in Sydney and one in ‘the gong’, from 3 – 25 June 2006. SafARI will include works in diverse media including sound, photography, jewellery, ceramics and painting.

The timing of SafARI capitalises on the national and international focus on the visual arts in Sydney during the BoS in order to provide opportunities to the artists, arts-workers and arts-spaces involved. While SafARI unabashedly seeks to ride the Biennale slipstream, there is no official or authorised linkage. SafARI brings focus to Sydney’s ARIs and the vital, formative and experimental role they play in Sydney’s visual arts scene.

In an inversion of the usual dynamic between capital and regional cities, the Wollongong ARI Project Contemporary Art Space will present work by all SafARI artists at a single venue. The five Sydney ARIs involved - China Heights, Gallery fourtyfour, ‘medium, rare’, MOP Projects and Pelt - will each showcase work by 3 to 6 of the artists. The Sydney ARIs are all within walking distance of each other, and the curators will lead a tour of these galleries on Sunday 18 June, from 12-4pm.

Other events associated with SafARI include a talk by Mike Parr, co-founder of ARI’s Inhibodress and Yellow House in 1970, artists’ talks, and opening and closing parties...

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International artists are heading your way, very soon...

THREE WEEKS TO GO UNTIL SYDNEY COMES ALIVE WITH AUSTRALIA’S FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART!

What would an 8 metre long 3-D map of the world look like?

How many generators are needed to power a 5 metre high chandelier?

How much space is required to house 180,000 terracotta figures from China?

If you could control the outcome of a war, what choices would you make?

Have you ever had the feeling that you are being followed?

Find out answers to these questions and a thousand others when you experience Zones of Contact, the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, 8 June – 27 August.

85 artists from 44 countries will present the most innovative and bold art being made in the world today. Some of the world’s most exciting artists have arrived in Sydney to put the finishing touches to their work. Over half the works have never been seen before and will premiere at the 2006 Biennale of Sydney. Australians and visitors will be the first to see fresh and ground-breaking new art when the exhibition opens at 16 venues across Sydney, from Campbelltown to Circular Quay.

Geography homework? Come and marvel at World Map an 8 metre long 3-D map of the world at the Art Gallery of New South Wales created by eminent Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, one of the architects of the Beijing Olympic Stadium and one of the most talked about artists working in China today.

Albanian-born Adrian Paci has begun constructing a stunning 5 metre tall chandelier that will light up Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay, a principal Biennale venue. Powered by 10 petrol generators, the huge luminous chandelier, Noise of Light, comments on the high cost of the luxurious and energy-hungry lifestyles of western societies.

Renowned British artist, Antony Gormley, exhibits 180,000 terracotta figures on the top floor of the 140 metre long Pier 2/3. Made by the people of Xiangshan village in south China, the figures form a sea of tiny faces that gaze up at the viewer - a spectacular, silent crowd that’s both ghostly and magical.

If you could control the outcome of a war through an interactive video, could you live with the decisions you made? In Shilpa Gupta’s Untitled at Performance Space, you must decide what to do as you navigate the battle that is taking place around you at Dal Lake, Srinagar, the capital city of Kashmir.

Feel like you are being followed? You are. Look above as you walk through the entrance court of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive installation uses a surveillance tracking system to detect the movement of people below. 72 fluorescent tubes positioned on the ceiling rotate as they follow people walking through the space.

Dr Charles Merewether, the Artistic Director & Curator of the 2006 Biennale of Sydney says that he is delighted to see the finished works as the show comes together. “Since 2004 I have researched Australia and the world to select artists whose work I could bring to Sydney and show to the people of Australia. Many of these works were created in response to this year’s exhibition concept Zones of Contact. It is great to see the works being realised and to see all the artists’ hard work pay off.”

Paula Latos-Valier, Managing Director of the Biennale of Sydney, says “The 15th Biennale of Sydney is going to reach more people than ever before. Expanded programs all across Sydney mean people will be able to enjoy a wide range of free events including artist talks, performances and tours. Thanks to the generous support of our government and private sector partners, the Biennale of Sydney is again presented free to the public and online programs and information will make the Biennale of Sydney more accessible than ever before.”

About Zones of Contact – 2006 Biennale of Sydney: The upcoming 15th Biennale of Sydney, directed and curated by Dr Charles Merewether, runs from Thursday 8 June to Sunday 27 August. Zones of Contact features the work of 85 artists and collaborations from 44 countries in 16 venues. Exhibition and events are suitable for all ages. The diversity of art forms, cultures and ideas that are represented in the exhibition and public programs will ensure that there is something that appeals to everyone.

Since 1973, the Biennale of Sydney has engaged Australian and international audiences with bold and innovative contemporary art from Australia and around the world. Visitors to this year’s Biennale can expect to see a wide range of work including painting, photography, fabric, sound and voice, light and projected works, drawing, video, film, performance, sculpture and installation. Site-specific works will be exhibited in various locations in and around Sydney, including the spectacular heritage-listed Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay.

Zones of Contact deals with events, ideas and concerns that shape our lives today, as well as our sense of both past and future. It is about the zones people live in and move between, and the merging and separation of public areas and private territories, places where people make contact with one another. Many works in this exhibition explore the influence and impact of different cultures upon each other, as well as upon the land we share. Other works presented by artists in Zones of Contact explore the experience of living in an increasingly cosmopolitan and globalised world, or alternatively, of existing within societies where impoverishment and survival shape everyday life.

The artists exhibiting in Zones of Contact present a powerful reflection upon the experiences of today’s world, the memories that haunt us, and the societies in which we live. The works reveal anxieties and aspirations, losses and hopes, as well as the imprint and trace of history, along with the possibilities of imagined other lives and dreams. To experience a work of art is to pause in time. In so doing, art offers a different way of seeing who we are and a new zone of contact.

*

Zai Jian!

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Thirty minutes drive from the Forbidden Palace and its monolithic nemesis The Great Hall of The People, sprawls an altogether different marking point of Chinese cultural change – 798 Factory in the Beijing district of Dashanzi. A vast, almost-former, manufacturing complex, it has seen a steady influx of artist studios and galleries over the last decade. 798 is this month hosting the third Dashanzi International Art Festival with over 150 participating galleries, studios and organizations and, unwittingly, a score of commercial units from which the sounds of wood-sawing, metal-cutting and bang-banging catch your ear unexpectedly.

798 Space, big paintings, bigger galleries...

The fact that the DIAF is taking place at all is impressive. This is all happening in the seat of power of a country in which permits for ‘cultural activity’ are still required and mysterious confiscations of work and catalogues occur the night before openings. (This article won’t be read in China as The Art Life is a blocked site.) So, one can understand why the official program is quite compact and spontaneous events flourish. The festival’s co-founders, Berenice Angremy and Huang Rui, wanted to “create a platform for bringing Chinese art out from underground, claiming its legitimate place above ground.” And they appear to have succeeded in that aim reaching a compromise with authorities who are gradually coming to see art and its freedoms of expression as ‘industry without pollution’. Faint praise yes, but praise nonetheless.

Beijing-Tokyo Art Projects

Attendance figures at DIAF are expected to be around 150,000 making it China’s largest arts festival and the festival is rapidly becoming a magnet for not only Chinese art activity, but international cultural investment with many local galleries establishing partnerships with European and Asian galleries. The festival is themed Beijing/Background in a witty nod to China’s growing influence on the world stage.

G'day Ray...

Welders on a break stand next to five-star fresh, German kollectors in front of a huge painting of a po-faced Mao. Assorted curatorial types hug each other in industrial chic café-bars, visibly emotional at their own ability to bump into each other on the global festival circuit. Ruddy-faced, immaculately uniformed, teenage soldiers observe expressionlessly as Japanimationists from the near future monitor activity with their tricorders. Nearly everybody smokes absolutely everywhere. So what exactly is on show here? We’ve whittled it down to a few galleries and events that are broadly representative, starting at Chinese gallery Long March Space.

Zhou Xiao Hu's Crowd of Bystanders installation view.

Long March is both a gallery and a project. As the latter and since 2002, it has been replicating the historical, 6000 mile Long March by taking its projects and art cultural discussions to those same rural and urban communities. The gallery is typically cavernous; about two thirds the size of downstairs at the MCA. Stand-out is Zhou Xiaohu’s Crowd Of Bystanders, a circle of ten ceramic dioramas each topped with a monitor showing a black-and-white claymation video of the scene below. For example, a woman gives repeated caesarian birth, endlessly being cut open and sewn up. Saddam Hussein is sentenced in a courtroom and has all his teeth pulled out by way of punishment. A truck full of army medics runs over two children skipping across a street, then reverses over them. It feels like CCTV from ‘toonland and there’s a troubled unity in the disparate images. In this minituarised world, each event draws a crowd of twitchy but passive onlookers.

Zhou Xiao Hu's Crowd of Bystanders video extract.

Of course, around this circle of tragicomedy is another circle - all of us watching, many of us taking photographs. Zhou is one of the artists Long March is taking to the new Queensland Gallery of Modern Art as part of this November’s Asia-Pacific Triennial with his gargantuan new work, Utopia.

Zhan Wang, Urban Landscape, London [detail].

We also liked Zhan Wang’s aerial-view photograph of a central London constructed entirely of gleaming aluminium kitchenware. There’s a pots and pans St. Paul’s, a colander and cheese grater Parliament, a catering tray Embankment and, no doubt, a good-enough-to-eat-off Saatchi gallery tucked in there somewhere. It’s a polished and presented London, stripped of all history and replicated for our amusement.

Herman Nitsch, Orgy Mystery Theatre, detail.

Over at White Space (a Sino-German enterprise), it’s a veritable abattoir. They’ve paired veteran visceralist, Hermann Nitsch, with painter Yang Shaobin both of whom share a taste for blood, bacon and Bacon. Nitsch is a founder (dis)member of Viennese Actionismus of the early Sixties – the central tenet of which is that rituals and ceremonies must be real, direct events, and not pretence as in conventional drama; the objective being to regain natural human instincts repressed by our conventional lives. And so it is that we’re shown, through video and photography, scenes of Dionysian frenzy involving a large slaughtered pig, lots of blood drinking and crucifixions. The overheard reaction from one visiting local family was not of disgust or shock but that it seemed a terrible waste of good food.

Yang Shaobin, Scandal Killing Rope.

Yang’s paintings owe a considerable debt to Bacon which is, at least, openly acknowledged. The iconography of screaming mouths, flattened spatial context and flailed figures is all there. Yet they’re beautifully painted and add a certain Asian sense of cruelty. But as an exhibition it felt like an obvious pairing of big names buoying each other up.

Ye Fu, performance at the top of the chimney [top right], Nest In The Metropolis 2: Chimney Plan.

Meanwhile, 100m above it all, Ye Fu is perched on top of a towering industrial chimney stack where he is performing Nest In The Metropolis 2: Chimney Plan. He’ll be there for ten days eschewing all modern comforts and meditating on the essence of life itself. He wants the performance to speak for itself and that’s what we’ll let it do. Elsewhere, in a castle-top room, the Viennese Interventionists on a grant at Head Room plot their interventions; desperate to engage with “…the real China. Rural China, you know, where the 900 million peasants live…” What they’re doing in Beijing then is anybody’s guess. We’ll also let that speak for itself - and the less said the better.

Loris Cecchino, Cloudless, installation view.

On to Sino-Italian Gallery Continua who have chosen DIAF as the first leg of a travelling show of two projects by Loris Cecchini. The first, Cloudless, is a big cloud made up of 50,000 ‘modular elements’ (plastic balls to you and us) within which are embedded ‘connective structures’ (step ladders), suspended in a cathedral space. One can’t help but be seduced. The physical oddness of a cloud indoors and the contradiction of weights between the cloud and the ladders all make for a beautifully balanced work and we had to sit down and think about our earthbound existence for quite some time.

Loris Cecchino, Empty Walls, Just Doors, installation view.

The second project is titled Empty Walls- Just Doors. In a small but labyrinthine compound of white rooms, we find that the interconnecting doors are all made of grey rubber. They droop rather forlornly from their hinges and in the absence of any Do Not Touch signs felt compelled to open and close a couple to see if we could experience the ”frustrated existential condition in which reality fades and the present seems eternally suspended between the real and the virtual.” They didn’t really work as doors but felt nice, so we guess, yes. Oh and we thought of Tim Silver.

Three paintings by Chiezo Taro at BTAP.

Over at Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, they’re showing Japanese paintings from the 90’s including favourites in Yoshitimo Nara, Takeshi Murakami and Chiezo Taro. The Japanese influence is borne out in the work of the Chinese artists represented here. We liked Gao XiaoWu’s Standard Times – a series of sculptures of bowing figures with simperingly benign smiles, full of false modesty and acquiescence. If they were to stand up straight, they’d tower over you.

Gao Xiao Wu, Standard Times.

Finally, at Red T Space, sole Australian representative Ana Wojak has a tri-screen video of her and Fiona McGregor’s performance Arterial. Sadly, we missed Wojak’s live performance in which she danced, back-lit and in silhouette, behind paper screens before smearing her bleeding wrists onto the paper. Brian Wallace, director of exquisite RedGate Gallery, tells us that eventually the paper tore under the weight of the red stuff. Nurse!

Talking of the red stuff, it’s high time we headed to Café Pause to take in a few drinks and some Chinese drag queens singing chansons. The Festival runs until May 21st. Zai Jian!

Bad Can Be Good Good Also Or Bad

The reader known as Undiscovered got us a good one, to wit:

The real register of the Art Life reviews is in the quality of the writing. If the writing is really good, then the show is suitably good/bad. You can apply this to most things; microwave cookery etc […] The trick to assessing your Art Life review, that is, if you've tempted them with the good stuff, is to note the literary worth of the review and to mark yourself accordingly. Bad can be good - good also, or bad. If you can make other people be more poetic, you may have something. Do you have private health insurance?

Like most people we have been driven out of public health insurance into uncaring private enterprise. Although we yearn for the days of free health insurance, free education, half price drinks between 5 and 7pm and all the other things that made life great, we have come to the conclusion that you have to pay to get what you want. Or at the very least, a nominal charge. We’d like to thank then the very special readers who have donated money to the Art Life. Recently a reader in Melbourne who we don’t even know made a donation. Just like that. Incredible. We’d also like to acknowledge another reader in Perth who, despite now being unemployed, also gave us a very generous donation [before going on to appear on Radio National to sing our praises!]. Our promise to these readers – and to you too – is as Dirk Diggler put it in Boogie Nights - "we’ll keep trying if you guys keep trying – we’re gonna keep rockin’ and rollin’ yeah!" For those of you rightly appalled at this shocking attempt to extort money from readers, you can support the Art Life by purchasing your copies of Making Planets, DVDs from the ultra expensive Criterion Collection or whatever else takes your fancy by clicking through to Amazon from our links and making your purchase. We earn a whopping [undisclosed amount] ‘store credit’ for your patronage and thank readers for purchasing their artist monographs through what must be the only US company not indirectly involved with the Iraq War. Yay capitalism.

Labels: site news

Jazz Is Cool You Crazy Fool

Friday, May 12, 2006

Last year we expressed the sincere wish that The Art Life could have it's own band in the grand tradition of bona fide art movements aligning themselves with cool groups. We were thinking perhaps of the Prague Spring and the greatest band no one has ever heard of, the Plastic People of The Universe, but we'd be just as happy to settle for Downtown NYC circa 81 and No Wave hipsters DNA. But like many of our Christmas wishes we found ouselves bereft, awaking on December 25 without so much as a CD under the tree. Imagine our immense pleasure to receive an email from Adelaide-based group Kubrick. The band are spruiking their new album soon to be available on iTunes. Of course, long time readers would know that our page design is in fact called Kubrick For Blogger but of more relevance, the band's self titled release features the rather splendid art work of long-time linkee Deidre But-Husaim. The band's bassist CJ Rhodes sent us a couple of MP3s to sample the band's style and we give 'em two unqualified thumbs up. The band is kind of jazz, man, kind of free, but right in the pocket. How did they know that we keep a copy of Beneath The Underdog as our bedside reading? Jazz is cool, you crazy fool.

Poll Shock: Emerging To Mean Whatever

An emerging artist is somone who...

Is represented by a commercial gallery 16% (24)

Has won major art prizes 1% (1)

Exhibits extensively in artist run galleries 5% (8)

Has been included in major museum shows 1% (1)

Has a monograph on their work 1% (1)

Is just starting out in their careers 23% (35)

Is never going to make it 15% (22)

All of the above 38% (57)

Total number of votes is 149.

Making Money in the Art Market: 10 Easy Steps

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

If you’ve been thinking of getting into the auction market but didn’t know where to start, The Art Life’s fool-proof ten point plan can double your money in 12 months or your money back – and that’s a guarantee!* Check your sense of propriety at the door. There’s no need to feel embarrassed about trading in the art market and you can forget all about the “intrinsic worth of the art object” – those are old world ideas that went out with the 1980s. We’re here to make some money.

1. Scout Out The Market – Have a look at some auction catalogues and see what’s popular. The Australian art market is very slow moving, so chances are figurative painting from any period (contemporary, modern, old) will be fashionable. Ask an auction house to send you a list of sale results and see which paintings are selling for the highest price. Now move to step 2.

2. Find an Artist– Choose an artist everyone has forgotten about, preferably someone who was on the periphery of a previously well known art movement or social circle of more famous artists. This chosen artist’s work should be readily available in the auction market for next to nothing because it isn’t very good. The artist does not need to be alive (but this will help later on) and if the artist is living in a decrepit flat or has a half-mad wife still living, all the better.

Catalogues available on request.

3. Buy Tactically – Now comes the buying part. Using your available cash, hire some front people to go to auctions and buy paintings by your chosen artist. Ask your front people to bid ostentatiously while pretending as though they don’t want anyone to notice they are bidding. You should buy as many paintings by your chosen artist as quickly as possible from as many different auctions as you can. This will raise a “buzz” that “something is happening” in the art market.

4. Raise Interest In the Artist – Getting a journalist or arts writer to publish a story “reassessing” your chosen artist is the easiest step. There are multiple angles they can take with their story – “overlooked genius finally making good”, “something is happening in the art market”, “a stash of unknown paintings found in cupboard”. There are plenty to choose from. The enticement for the journalist/arts writer is to promise to let them write the book you say you’ll be publishing on your chosen artist, which will be “in all good bookshops”. This is not a promise you will have to keep.

5. Publish A Catalogue – Dig up an academic who has written a hitherto unpublished book on your artist, excerpt a chapter from their book and publish a 12 page glossy brochure illustrated with reproductions of the paintings you now own. The purpose of this catalogue is to promote an exhibition you will have. Send out invitations to the “opening” along with copies of the brochure to arts writers, journalists, corporate art advisers and collectors. Make certain people notice the high falutin’ language in the text and the academic credibility of the author. You can also invite the author to launch the exhibition or save that pleasure for yourself.

6. Stage An Exhibition by The Artist - Lease a gallery space and arrange your paintings in an attractive display while hiring some attractive wait-people to dispense drinks and canapés. Working the crowd or standing back while wearing a cravat and drinking red wine is entirely up to you.

7. Have the Artist Appear At The Opening – If alive, have the artist come to the show to add extra credibility. Although they will not be receiving a penny from the sale of the works, the artist will appreciate all the belated attention to their twilight careers. If dead, have the artist’s wife or adult children attend and say something at the opening or, if incapable of speech, have them wave from their wheelchair.

8. Sell Works At Handsomely Inflated Prices – This is the most crucial step in the whole process and the point of the exercise. With enough attention to detail and effort on your part during the previous seven steps, the works should sell themselves. Your only task here is to set a price. Rule of thumb indicates 150 to 300 per cent over the original price you paid, depending on the amount of interest you’ve managed to create. If you only want to go through this process once, now is the time to cash out, so set the prices as high as you want.

9. Resell Works Back Into The Secondary Market – Anything unsold or kept back as being too good for your exhibition should now be offered back into the secondary market. If you’ve done it all right, you can be looking at anything up to five to ten times the original price. Just doubling your money shouldn’t be considered a failure. It’s all good.

10. Find a New Artist –Repeat the process.

*Guarantee will not be honoured.

Free T-Shirt!

Monday, May 08, 2006

Apparently photography is passé. That’s according to Sebastian Smee anyway, and his Image Fatigue article two weeks ago in The Australian – see Critics At A Glance III – has generated quite a few bemused reactions. According to Smee, photography is no longer special, or even art, because of its proliferation. Stephen Feneley, ex-ABC arts guy and now Crikey.com’s “arts correspondent” - was moved to write last week lamenting the great man’s gaff. Before kicking heads however, Feneley felt obliged to set up the riposte with an apology:

Before I give him a big slap, I should put on record that I think The Oz's visual arts writer, Sebastian Smee, is one of the most engaging critics working in Australia today. He knows how to string an elegant sentence together – a depressingly rare talent in Australian art criticism – and he has a healthy disdain for artistic cant. It pains me, therefore, to see that Smee has dug himself into a hole by declaring the terminal decline of an entire area of the visual arts. In art world terms, Smee could be seen as a tad conservative, but that's largely because he's a ruthlessly rigorous detector of bullshit. What a pity Smee didn't apply his usual rigour to his own bold pronouncement that “photography as an art form is on the wane” and that it's “losing its grip on the public imagination…

The reason Smee is considered a tad conservative ‘in the art world’ is because he is a tad conservative, at least. As for rigour? Smee’s critique in Saturday’s Australian was of exhibitions of figurative painting being shown in Melbourne galleries. Smee’s gambit was to wonder, as only he can do, why no one is painting abstract paintings in the style of Mondrian and Malevich anymore. Instead of asking where this new school of figurative painting is coming from, he opts instead for the reductive historical missionary position. As our good friend Billy Bloggs remarked regarding both Smee and Feneley, they both have good points that are wrong.

But back to photography. We were forwarded the exciting news last week that AMP Capital Investors and the City of Sydney were co-sponsoring the $10,000 Sydney Life Photography Prize:

The Sydney Life Prize will be awarded for the most outstanding work in the exhibition, as determined by a distinguished panel of judges: Sandy Edwards (Curator, Sydney Life and Curator, Stills Gallery), Alan Davies (Curator of Photographs, State Library of New South Wales) and Bec Dean (Curator, Australian Centre for Photography). The Sydney Life Prize is comprised of $5,000 cash, plus a $5,000 investment in the AMP Capital Investors Sustainable Future Australian Share Fund. The total prize value is $10,000.

Not only do you win a handy $5,000, you get a further $5,000 investment which, should you invest it wisely, could end up providing for you in your old age. The reader who sent us the news wondered who the winners of such a prestigious prize might be and we too wondered on just such a possibility, but at least in Sydney you can expect to get paid for your efforts. Not so in Melbourne where the Centre for Contemporary Photography is advertising for an “experienced photographer” to work for nothing:

CCP announces an exclusive invitation for a CCP member. We are currently seeking an experienced photographer to undertake the documentation of our exhibitions. In exchange for your time and dedication, CCP will provide an annual CCP membership, a copy of the CCP publication Photogenic: Essays/Photography/CCP 2000–2004, edited by Dr Daniel Palmer, and a limited edition CCP/Paul Knight M One11 tee-shirt. CCP will credit the photographer for use of all documentation images in CCP publications and on the CCP website. The documentation will take place 7 times a year within our four gallery spaces and projection window. CCP currently owns a very ordinary digital camera to document the CCP program, which is readily available (we give all our wonderful cameras away as prizes in the Leica/CCP Documentary Photography Award and the Kodak Salon). However if you are able to bring along your equipment we would be more than grateful. This is an excellent opportunity for a CCP Member to expand their photographic portfolio and to be involved with the preeminent Centre for Contemporary Photography.

"A 9x5" Show debuts on 13th May outside International Noise's favourite Sydney art gallery. Following the precedent set by the First Impressionist exhibition in Australia, which challenged established perceptions of art and its presentation, we will be paying homage to the nine by five inch format. This time, International Noise is bringing art to the doorstep of the community in a white-walled, moving, high-torque, eight wheelin', free dealin' gallery: a truck. Details: May 13th, 20th & 27th - In the back of a truck parked out front: 10am AGNSW; 12 noon Australian Centre for Photography 257 Oxford St Paddington 2pm Dank St Waterloo.

Last week’s meeting of staff at the National Art School voted unanimously against merging with the University of NSW’s College of Fine Arts. The vote followed the news that the NAS’s preferred merger partner – Macquarie University – had but the kibosh on a multi-campus love in. Clare Morgan, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald on May 1, explained that “a spokesman for Macquarie University said it had pulled out because "the [NAS] does not sit within Macquarie's focus on developing its research capacity". Now, with NAS staff voting against a merger, there are very few options left to the supporters of Sydney’s “only atelier style art school”.

NAS’s problems are many. Over the years the school’s staff and management have comprehensively pissed off just about everyone who might come to their rescue. Reading Patricia Anderson’s book Art + Australia recently, we were bemused to be reminded of some of NAS’s past fights. In 1995 when the school was still part of the Technical and Further Education system, TAFE had attempted to apply a set of criteria for marking NAS students just as they might assess an apprentice mechanic. Could the students clean their brushes? Did they know how to paint a vase of flowers? Appalled, NAS management protested by saying that art was far more than just a technical skill that could be judged by luddite “standards”.

To further this case, NAS staff attacked COFA, saying that here was an example of an art school with no standards at all and if they took away NAS’s ability to mark their own students in their own special way, then the atelier model would be lost forever. The underlying contradiction of this argument is still a bit of mind bender – a fight against standardised testing to ensure technical skills was fought by claiming that without technical skills there would be no school. The upshot was that eventually, after a campaign waged with support from old warhorses John Olsen and Robert Hughes, NAS scored its own special status courtesy of funding arranged by then Premier Bob Carr. Fast forward ten years and Bob Carr leaves office and NAS without any visible means of support…

The National Art School’s current position has not changed on iota in a decade. If the chips are down, attack COFA, call on celebrity mates to help out. Unfortunately under Premier Morris Iemma and his “lover of footy and no poofter arts” policy NAS is going to have to go somewhere. NAS has its bargaining positions[s] worked out:

“These included preserving the National Art School's identity; maintaining the school's artistic and educational philosophy, including the Atelier model based on one-to-one instruction and mentoring; retaining existing staff; and retaining the school on its Darlinghurst site.”

Reading this we were reminded of the film Downfall and the final scenes in which General Krebbs goes to the Russians after Hitler has topped himself and offers to begin ‘negotiations’. Maybe NAS is going to try to tough it out until the last – if they’re going to go down, they may as well go down fighting. The big problem for NAS is that they do not represent the sort of investment in time, money and resources that could make it worthwhile for a University to take over the NAS in its current form. Over the last decade universities have had their funding cut to the bone and have been expected to generate their own income form various other means. In many cases this has meant a skyrocketing number of full fee paying overseas students to fill the funding gap. Another avenue has been the additional funding that universities can get from bodies such as The Australian Research Council and, in the case of the College of Fine Arts, funding from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. Providing you can demonstrate that your work is new and original research into a valid area of study then you can get research grants. Unfortunately, the much vaunted atelier model does not offer this kind of opportunity and if NAS is going to merge with anyone, they can say goodbye to their list of demands.

There is one unexplored avenue left open to the NAS that we’d humbly like to suggest. What they need to find is a University without an already existing art school or visual arts component with whom they could merge. Ideally, this University should also be fiercely independent and respectful of the NAS’s unique character and traditions. It would also be handy if the University had a slightly conservative political base allowing for NAS’s own conservative, late-1960s ethos to thrive. We think we have found just such a institution.

What New?

Thursday, May 04, 2006

What exactly is an “emerging artist”? Most people would think that the term relates to artists who are just starting out – emerging from obscurity into the light of recognition – perhaps people who’ve just graduated from art school and are embarking on their careers. There are levels of visibility in the art world, so one could conceivably emerge from one level to the next – say from doing solo exhibitions in artist run galleries into group shows in commercial galleries and then perhaps to commercial representation. But could someone still be said to be still “emerging” when they’re in high profile group shows in museums? Or let’s say they had a commercial gallery representing them for a while and then lost that representation and are now trawling around the ARIs while they wait to get back into the state of ‘emergence’? As to what actually constitutes a state of being an ‘established artist’ is hard to define, but you would think having a commercial gallery dealer spruiking your work to collectors and curators, being in group shows in public museums, having articles about your work in glossy art magazines and participating in every other group show in ARIs around town and maybe even running an ARI as well would mean that you were no longer ‘emerging’. You’re there, if ‘there’ is actually a place.

Emerging artists, recently.

Well you’d be wrong. Being an “emerging artist” is a state of mind just as surely as it’s a marketing concept. The ½ Doz organisation stages shows of the work of “emerging artists”. According to the room sheet available at their latest project – Ghosts of The Coast at Gallery 4A – they are “a non-profit, artist-run initiative dedicated to commissioning, promoting and exhibiting the work of emerging visual artists”. In the past - with exhibitions such as The Late Show video program, the Half Doz Summer Festival and the recent Space Invaders also at 4a - the definition of “emerging” was pretty easy to understand, but in Ghosts of The Coast the mix of artists is utter madness. Now, before we go any further, we should say that we have no problem with established artists exhibiting alongside genuinely new artists. It’s good for everyone – you get to see an artist’s work in context with their peers, it can bring in a new audience to an ARI, it can bring curators to shows and it helps younger, less established artists get a foot in the door with commercial dealers. But when we see a show that is held in a gallery such as 4A with a line up of people who could not be included in a realistic definition of “emerging” you quickly realise that being “emerging” is a philosophical, political and economic declaration of outsider status when nothing could be further from the truth. For example…

In Ghosts of The Coast, curated by Dougal Phillips, we have artists representing a gamut of art career positions. Evan Salmon is represented by Legge Gallery in Redfern and has been there since 1993. His recent painting Salamander is currently hanging in the Sulman Prize exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. His work has been acquired by the collections of Colin & Liz Laverty, the University of Technology, the National Art School, Liverpool TAFE and the International Management Group. His work Dazzle Ship in GOTC was exhibited at the Wollongong City Gallery and the 4A installation is accompanied by its own handsome 4 page, full-colour catalogue. Lionel Bawden is represented by GrantPirrie in Redfern, as is fellow GOTC artist Alex Kershaw. Bawden’s work is owned by Artbank, the Newcastle Regional Gallery, Queensland Art Gallery, National Gallery of Australia and the Macquarie Bank Collection. Back in 2004, Bawden won the Emerging Artist Award funded by ABN AMRO beating other unknowns such as Patricia Piccinini and Shaun Gladwell for the prize. Meanwhile, Kershaw is all over town – he’s been in numerous exhibitions including works shown at Artspace, Tin Sheds, The Centre for Contemporary Photography and the Performance Space, he was in the 2004 Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship finalists exhibition and his work was included in Festivus 2004 at Sherman Galleries.

Mel O’Callaghan is represented by Sherman Galleries. She doesn’t actually live in Sydney, dividing her time between Berlin and Paris, but exhibits in Paddington with Sherman as well as in Paris with Schleicher + Lange. Aside from an array of impressive group and solo shows curated by some familiar names – Laura Murray Cree for example – O’Callaghan was artist in residence at the Foundation and Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague in 200, and had the Art Gallery of New South Wales studio and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2004. Joining O’Callaghan in international representation is Cherine Fahd who is theoretically still being represented by Gitte Weise. Although the gallerist may have shut up shop in Sydney, according to her line ad in Art Almanac she’s still open for business in Berlin. Fahd, meanwhile, is exhibiting some photos in GOTC she took as part of her $30,000 NSW Women’s and Arts Fellowship she won last year. The other three artists in GOTC are perhap a little closer to the more popular concept of ‘emerging’. Pat Sae-Loy is a recent graduate of COFA and we saw the artist’s work in Perth at Hatched 05. We don’t know anything about an artist named Prateep Suthathongthai but Todd Robinson is an artist whose shown work in the Sherman Galleries Art Box, recived funding from the Australia Council Visual Arts and Crafts Board and his portrait of Fahd called Cherine, Morning in the 2004 Citibank Photographic Portrait Prize.

If Salmon, Kershaw, O’Callaghan and Bawden are emerging artists then we’ll eat our collective hats. They are established artists by any reasonable definition of the word. What is going on here is a question of alignment. The notion of emerging is one of perpetual newness, of continual emergence into something more than you already are. No one really wants to be seen as established until they’re into their 60s because by then, if you’re seen exhibiting in ARIs, brother, there’s something wrong! Perhaps the curator decided for GOTC to throw away the definition of ‘emerging’ and just chose whatever works he thought were best for the show, and that’s fine, but it points to a more troubling lack of definition with the contemporary art world.

Hail Atlantis!

At 4A mid week and the gallery is deserted. [We notice that next door is a shop called, incredibly, Gizz Spot.] There is a palpable gloom about the place and as we wander around it feels like a rainy day when outside the sun beats down in glorious autumnal gold. Ghosts of The Coast at Gallery 4A arrives at a time when the gallery is trying to find its feet again. In February, Binghui Huangfu, Rod Murray and Brianna Munting all left the gallery leaving the Asian Australian Art Centre to find a way to keep the doors open. Under Huangfu’s stewardship, 4A had an ambitious program of exchange exhibitions that stretched its funding beyond breaking point. Art Life sources informed us that the gallery had been seeking $300,000 annually from the Australia Council but the Feds were only prepared to trump up $40,000. It looked quite dark there for a moment but 4A reopened a month ago as a hire space. With another show put on by external curators ½ Doz have - for the moment at least - saved 4A’s bacon.

The first and most amazing thing you see in Ghosts of The Coast is Evan Salmon’s work Dazzle Ship[“Oh God, if we didn’t have enough trouble! They send us artists!”] taking up the entire downstairs gallery. It is a massive scale model of a First World War battle ship, the ‘dazzle’ being the black, grey and white camouflage pattern. Salmon has been investigating through his painting camouflage patterns of various periods and he has previously concentrated on aircraft. The reference to art history in Dazzle Ship is the connection between Cubism and the development of patterns in camouflage during World War One. There is the probably apocryphal story of Picasso and Braque witnessing camouflaged tanks rolling through the streets of Paris and Picasso remarking “we created that.” but apocryphal or not, there is intimate connection between art and warfare. There is the question of how far does it go and what is its relevance now? Art as craft experiment hasn’t recently thrown up too many useable ideas for the military to exploit and Salmon’s investigation of the patterns seems boyish and obsessive. Sure, it’s a great big ship, but where is the art? Salmon’s early work was abstract, deriving pattern and shape from military equipment, but over the last few years his work has become increasingly literal despite gestural embellishments. Now his airplanes look like illustrations for war novels or maybe in a museum for old airframes. His step into three dimensions with his massive Dazzle Ship doesn’t really add anything new to the original idea but suggests intriguingly that his next logical step is to just skip the model making and paint some real ships or better yet, make a 1:1 model!

Alex Kershaw, Construction for Watching Waterloo, 2006.
Lambda-print, 118 x100cm, 2006. Courtesy 1/2 Doz.

Cherine Fahd’s grant money to document homeless people in Kings Cross has been well spent. He work in GOTC is a series of images, all quite small, pinned end to end along the wall. At this point we were wondering what the idea was behind the exhibition; were the work’s creating some sort of commentary? As a unifying theme, the coast, and ghosts thereof, is a bit ambiguous but thank god Fahd is there to make it all so simple and easy to understand. Mors, Mortis features a series of black and white images of people lying on the ground, presumably unconscious or drunk or stoned, like dead bodies. Juxtaposed with these images is a series of shots of the skeleton of a seagull washed up in the sand of a beach. The last sequence of images is of the sun in the sky behind clouds, and like the unconscious bodies, printed in crappy, low contrast black and white. Do you suppose Fahd is drawing some sort of connection between homeless people and washed up carcasses? And maybe the clouds are heaven or something? Answers on a postcard.

Todd Robinson gives his work from his recent Artspace show another outing with five prints of close-ups of hands on red velvet, like sections of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Called Sightlessness, we discovered from reading about his work with the Royal Blind Society that these are images of the hands of blind people. As to what they have to do with the coast - or ghosts - we have no idea. No further explanation is offered with the inclusion of another work called Untitled, which is a bucket on a plinth with a pig mask in it. Prateep Suthathongthai’s DVD installation Tidal Wave has some water but it is a fleeting pleasure. Running for just one minute, the video starts on a shot of a boat moving right to left, and the rectangular frame is cut up into several slightly discontinuous sections. Chug chug goes the boat. Fade out and repeat. Huh?

Next door Mel O’Callaghan has a video installation with production values to burn. A projected image of a under water frogman drifts dreamily along the wall. Called The Detection of Movement the work demonstrates the undeniable power of slowing an image right down, and with the underwater location, it’s Jah Cousteau meets Voyage To The Bottom of The Sea. Perhaps the accompany work by O’Callaghan is meant to be on the bottom of the sea - it’s a model of what looks like a oil platform, but it’s painted black and the towers have fallen over. Pat Sae-Loy’s work looked awfully familiar to us and then we discovered we’d seen it – or something very like it – at PICA last year as part of Hatched 05. In Perth, the work involved balanced cushions with piles of ash and glasses of water. For GOTC, the work is called Predicting The Fortune of Buddhism and we think that perhaps it is the first work we have ever seen that includes “Fish maw” as one of its constituent parts. Maw is like the long tails part of a prawn and Sae-Loy has stitched a whole lot together and pinned then to the wall above a row of cushions with little piles of ash in glasses of water. The fish maw looks like words spelled out and we couldn’t recognise any words, assuming the letters might be Thai script, but then thought of the Yum Cha scene in eXistenz and moved right along.

Lionel Bawden’s The Monsters [Like Some Colossal Python Which After Swallowing A Mountain Is Sluggishly Digesting the Meal] sits alone at the end of the gallery space on its specially built table. As a notional proposition for an ocean it seems to have more to do with science fiction and Solaris in particular than it does to a real ocean, or indeed, to ghosts. Whatever its tangential relationship to the curatorial gambit is, it seems explicit compared to Alex Kershaw’s Construction for Watching Waterloo. A photograph of a sail shaped climbing frame covered with people looking away from the camera – and looking at Waterloo tower – the work made us want to break down and cry with frustration. We’re always going on about letting artworks speak for themselves without the tyranny of the lecturing wall text or the overly prescribed catalogue essay, and then when we get it, we’re all at sea. This may point to the terrible possibility that without the contextualising information much contemporary art makes no sense. Without wanting to get too Greenburgian on your ass, we want our forms to be free, we want them to be sufficiently robust to stand alone and we want them to mean something too. That’s asking too much.

Space Odyssey

In Paul Knight’s show Don’t be Something Strong at the Australian Centre for Photography the thrill is that there is in fact less than what you see, the images working a kind of sepulchural magic on the viewer, then slowly fading away as you leave the gallery. It took us quite some time to realise that the strength of this show is in the sequencing. Knight is a very talented young photographer who has produced several series of discreet works – cinema curtains, interiors, naked people, head shots, enclosed spaces and landscapes. They have the same, very pleasurable sense of ennui one gets from wandering through a deserted car park at night or listening to the sound of a flickering fluro tube in a concrete staircase.

Paul Knight, Cinema Curtain # 6, 2004.
Courtesy of Neon Parc Gallery, Melbourne. Image © Paul Knight.

In her catalogue essay ACP curator Bec Dean discusses Knight’s work in relationship to the cinematic spaces of Stanley Kubrick’s latter films, notably The Shining. The absent spaces of Knight’s work do have the same kind of frisson of the vast, empty halls of the Overlook Hotel but what fascinated us in this show was how the arrangement of Knight’s images seemed to imply a narrative between all the works, rather than being isolated frames of disconnected instances and moments. The images of naked people, men and women of various ages and body types, as well as in the slightly histrionic close ups of heads, there is a very conscious sense of performance in the works. Arranged with faux casualness, it didn’t surprise us to discover reading the catalogue that the composition of the images is based on anonymous pornography shots found on the web. Although only one of the works shows an actual sex act, the rest have the same allusive moment of “before” or “after” the action” that set up porn shots carry with them. It’s in that moment of narrative promise that one can sense that a narrative is about to unfold.

Paul Knight, Untitled, 2006.
Courtesy Neon Parc Gallery, Melbourne. Image © Paul Knight
By juxtaposing these shots with cinema curtains, the idea of the narrative is made explicit, expect with the cinema screen closed, it’s the idea, or the promise, that is being held back, just like the sexless porn shots. So too with the landscapes of Hong Kong, images taken from far away, revealing little about the subject except for the generalised feeling of a “place”. The opening image of the show is called Path 2004, a shot of a cave path complete with handrail, cements pathways and uplights hidden behind rocks. The idea again is very explicit – here is nature as an artificial theatrical experience. Throughout Knight’s photographs this sense of performative space recurs repeatedly, suggesting layers behind layers, repetition and revelations of space.

Paul Knight, For Ann, 2003.
Courtesy of Neon Parc Gallery,Melbourne. Image © Paul Knight

The highlight of the show is For Ann 2003, in which a sweeping spiral staircase winds down into a darkened space, perhaps in an underground hotel lobby, with a table and three chairs and a weak lamp illuminating the gloom. This image is spectacular in its unassuming theatricality. It’s all there and it’s nothing much, the kind of negative yet oddly baroque space that seems so ideally suited to cinema or the stage. In this case, For Ann suggests the empty spaces of Kubrick’s Hilton Space Station in 2001: A Space Odyssey which was of course was based on an extrapolation of just such spaces in real Hilton Hotels of the late 1960s. Knight’s image is intensely nostalgic with its cast of orange and browns, looking more authentic yet less real than what you would possibly experience yourself. Together, Knight’s images conjour so much, and yet when you walk away, they seem fade leaving you face to face with the world.

New York London Paris Munich

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

ian milliss the invisible artist

You are invited to the opening on Wednesday, 10 May 6-8 pm at
Macquarie University Gallery

Ian Milliss is often categorised as an early conceptual artist, but this is a term he refutes. Always political and outspoken, by 1972 he stopped exhibiting as an artist to work in the Green Bans movement. In thethirty years since, he has defined a radically different model of the artist as activist.

In this exhibition the gallery space is activated through virtual audience participation and the internet, to provide a view of both Ian's public and personal work that the art world has rarely seen, allowing the audience to further investigate and comment.

Floor talks by Ian Milliss, Wed 17 May at 11am & Sat 27 May at 11am

Lunchtime talks; Wed 24 May at 1pm, Wed 31 May at 1pm, Thursday 8 June at 1pm, Thursday 15 June at 1pm.

Special Event, Saturday 10 June 3pm-4.30pm Media Action Group, a re-enaction Presented by Ian Milliss & Prof. Terry Smith.

Ian Milliss has been working with the concepts and relationships between the artist, object and audience in a museum context, since working with Christo and Jean-Claude on the Wrapping of Little Bay in Sydney,1969.

Artist talk & Collaborative Workshop Duration: 2 hours Cost: $10 include GST Bookings Essential (time and date flexible)

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gloss enamel cd launch with special guests dave graney and clare moore saturday 13 may 3-5pm tomasetti house 277-279 flinders lane melbourne free for further information contact uplands gallery

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Mark Titmarsh, DSD, acrylic on aluminium, 90 x 110 cm 2005

Earth

Mark Titmarsh

at

Loose projects
Level 2 168 Day St, Sydney CBD. Opening Wed 3rd May 2006 6-8pm. Continues to Sat 20th May. gallery hours, 12-5 Thursday and Friday, 1-6 Saturday

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Click on Image

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The Packet Agency
Curated by Jesse Birch (Canada)

For 2 weeks, May 2 - 14, TCB gallery will be transformed in to 'The Packet Agency". Jesse Birch has invited 20 artists from around the world to send an artwork to The Packet agency headquarters, when on the evening of May 3rd, members of the public will gather together, and be asked to choose an envelope and display the contents within the space as they see fit. The installation is based on relationships between the viewers, the artists and the space.

Packet Agents:

Yuki Kimura (lives in Kyoto, Japan)
Takao Minami, (lives in Kyoto, Japan)
Momoko Usami, (lives in Kyoto, Japan)
Kae Masuda, (lives in Kyoto, Japan)
Leslie Grant, (lives in New York)
Leah Newman, (lives in New York)
Pourus Walker (lives in San Francisco)
Christoffer Rudquist, (lives in London, England)
Brian Lye, (lives in Kenya)
Michele DiMenna, (lives in Frankfurt)
Kerri Reid, (lives in Toronto)
Warren Hill (lives in Montreal)
Scott Evans, (lives in Victoria, Canada)
Jane Lee, (lives in Vancouver)
Jacob Gleeson, (lives in Vancouver)
Sonja Ahlers, (lives in Vancouver)
Marrise Aguilar, (lives in Vancouver)
Robert Niven, (lives in Vancouver)
Serena McCarroll, (lives in Vancouver)
Abbas Akhavan, (lives in Vancouver)

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Click on Image

A Very Special Day

Monday, May 01, 2006

Celebrate young pioneers of art!

Critics At A Glance III

Title: I Advanced Masked

Author: Justin Clemens, art critic, lecturer in psychoanalysis.
Newspaper/DOP: The Monthly, April 2006
Subject: Volte Face: Mike Parr Prints & Pre-Prints 1970-2005, Museum of Contemporary Art.

Bottom line: Parr is both an expressionist and a conceptualist, acutely aware of the theatrical nature of the construction of ‘self’ in both art and life: “Parr’s art is anti-theoretical: he forces you to become something more than a simple regardeur. Parr accomplishes this by going through, not against, theory and theatre.”

Why a psychoanalyst can be a great art critic: “What do you make of someone who can happily move between such thinkers as Reich, Marcuse and Lacan, and everywhere alludes to Wittgenstein and Freud? Parr has never apologised for nor given way on his intellectual fidelities; an anomaly in the Australian art world, where theory can be high as long as it's thin, and where artists scrabble for newly discounted thinkers like punters at a Boxing Day sale. Parr mobilises psychoanalysis to help him bind the cerebral to the physical, the aesthetic to the political. It provides him with problems on which he can operate, and subjects on which to experiment. Reich, for example, inspired the question: "So there's something lodged within the body, how do we find this thing?"

Hello Esteemed Critic! “In response to a review by Elwyn Lynn in The Australian, Parr once protested that his works were "far more accessible than Lynne would lead his readers to believe". The great English art critic Peter Fuller later brayed, "Parr's work is simply too unpleasant to describe in any detail." Committed to an entirely different tradition - a conservative interpretation of nineteenth-century English aestheticism - Fuller at least had the decency to nominate a powerful enemy when he saw one. Recently, Parr has been denounced by other conservative critics, less decent, less intelligent, way more boring and timid than Fuller. If such critics are right about nothing else, they at least make this clear: Parr's work forces you to take sides”

Fun Fact: “The word ‘theory’ derives from the ancient Greek theoros, meaning ‘spectator’”.

Title: Image Fatigue

Author: Sebastian Smee, ‘national’ art critic.
Newspaper/DOP: The Australian, April 29, 2006
Subject: Contemporary photography.

Bottom Line: There is a lot of photography around and it has lost it specialness, and it may not have been very artistic to begin with anyway. “The reason for photography's eclipse as an art form has […] has to do with dramatic recent changes to the medium.”

Party Like It’s 1899: “The arguments about whether photography deserves to qualify as an art form may seem redundant today, but they once were complex and gnarly and never quite conclusive. Why? Because the various possible answers to the question ‘What makes a great photograph?’ never stood in a straightforward relationship to the question ‘How much artistry is involved in taking a great photograph?’”

Actually, The Party Was Five Years Ago: “After the heyday of only a few years ago, when photography seemed everywhere and Australia's most internationally acclaimed artists (Tracey Moffatt, Bill Henson, Patricia Piccinini and Rosemary Laing) were all working in it, museums are becoming increasingly reluctant to pin much hope on photography's capacity to keep people enthralled. Apart from the Henson retrospective in Sydney and Melbourne in 2004-05, no great photography exhibitions have been mounted in Australia's main public galleries in years."

The World Is A Mean Place: "Photography today has been thrown back on itself and the question of what it must do to retain interest as art is once again freshly alive. The problem is that, thanks to the digital revolution, the frisson of excitement that used to accompany photographs (the knowledge that the image was evidence for something real, a trace of something that happened) is slowly disappearing. It's not as if photographers haven't been involved in fabrications and manipulations since the outset. The early days of the medium were full of trickery and theatre, cases of day being turned into night just to suit the photographer's purposes. But today the whole context has shifted: the layers of artifice seem unending and the thread connecting photography to the real has been snapped."

Incredible Claim: "Thanks to the digital revolution, there is virtually nothing that can't be done to a photograph to alter its once unique relationship to reality.”

Poll Shock: It Doesn't Matter

Is it really that...

It doesnt really matter? 38% (24)
Its all about context? 11% (7)
Originality is a sham? 8% (5)
Only tradition truly matters? 3% (2)
That there has to be an open bar? 23% (15)
Some people are never satisfied? 17% (11)

Total number of votes is 64.

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