the art life: November 2006

Vote Like You Mean It

Saturday, November 25, 2006

There's less than a month to go until the begining of the holiday season. In our lead up to taking a break, we're asking you to vote in our now annual poll of the best exhibitions for the year.

It's a bit like a league table - vote for the best show from the first half of the year, then we'll ask you to vote for the best show of the second half, then the two shows voted best will go into a grand finale vote-off. The winner [or winners if it's a group show] will be crowned 'best' in a special ceremony to be hosted by Edmund Capon, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor and Mikey Robbins to take place on New Year's Eve at Umina Recreation Area [just near the skate park]!!!*

The vote this year is open to abuse which means you can vote as many times as you like. You can vote once a day every day until the second part of the list goes up on December 5... [ or if you'd like to cheat, here's how: delete cookies or cached info from your web browser, then reload the page. You can then vote again.] The finalists were drawn from the exhibitions we reviewed rather than all shows that were open in 2006, which probably would have made the list too long, no?

Part 1 will be up until December 4th.

Now vote like you mean it.

[*subject to confirmation]

Labels: poll

Art Life Podcast Episode #4

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Click here to get your own player.

Monika Tichacek's 'controversial' Anne Landa Award winning video The Shadowers; Tony Schwensen and the big medicine ball; Daniel Crook's time bending video work and Philip Brophy's haircut and his busted installation; Kristian Burford's Melissa and Robert at Sullivan & Strumpf; is it real, too real or not real enough? How expressing yourself is neither sexy nor fun... RJD2 - Ghostwriter; Robert Hughes memoir Things I Didn't Know - the minutiae of his life from childhood, the 1960s, Etruscan pottery and getting plastered with Noelene Brown in Kings Cross; what's on and what's happening - Dick Watkins at Liverpool Street Gallery Rachel Scott and Gallery 9; Fink [Feat. Frank Chickens] We Are Ninja.

Podcast Image: Tony Schwensen, Weighty Weight Wait, 2006. Video performance, 3 channel video installation, 11 hours duration. Courtesy of the artist.

Labels: art icons, installation, video art

Mad Villainy

Canberra based art duo The Contextual Villains have published a limited edition artists book that deals with the way we shape the past through our stories and envision the future through our dreams. The 74 page full colour case bound picture book, includes a CD soundtrack and the combined work of over 25 visual, sound and text based artists. The book will be launched in conjunction with an exhibition of original works at The Front Gallery on Wattle Street Lyneham at 6.30pm, Thursday the 23rd of November by Dr. Martin Jolly head of the Photomedia Department at the Canberra School of Art.

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Hi Art Life, Changing nature/06 The greenpeace exhibition is on from the 13th to the 30th of November at Darling Park, 201 Sussex St Sydney CBD. The "Gala" opening is on 22 of November at 7pm. I am sure you must have been sent something about this but I am just being thorough, cheers, Sean O'Keeffe.

In a blatant piece of self promotion I have attached a still image from my work at the show called 5am, its got emus in it and everything.

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Rachel Scott: Walk the line
James Dorahy Project Space
Exhibition dates: 21 November – 3 December
Opening night drinks Wednesday 22nd November 6-8pm
Suite 4, 1st Floor, 111 Macleay St (enter via Orwell St), Potts Point

James Dorahy Project Space is excited to announce a new exhibition by emerging Sydney artist, Rachel Scott. Walk the line is a mixed media installation that includes painting, video, photography and detritus from the painting process, investigating the inherent struggle between control and chaos within the human subject. The project operates within the expanded field of painting, examining the controlled gesture in 20th century painting modes and the role of process in experimental art practices.

The process of making the multi-layered hard edged paintings includes the use of many rolls of blue masking tape. After they have served their purpose, the painted strips of tape become piles of gestural excess: the messy, rubbishy, alter ego of the finished paintings – usually discarded and unacknowledged. Operating as a counterpoint to the control and precision of the paintings, the video work and related masking tape detritus offer a behind-the-scenes exposé of the everyday anxieties and banalities of making art.

Rachel’s practice is invested with self-deprecating humour, honesty and pathos. In her low-fi, reality-style performances, she exposes her fantasies, failures and weaknesses via the voyeuristic eye of the camera. For the audience, the work is simultaneously uncomfortable and compelling.

Having completed a Master of Visual Arts at the Sydney College of the Arts in 2004, Rachel was a co-director of artist run gallery Phatspace in 2005, and is one of the editors of contemporary art magazine, runway. She has won numerous university scholarships and has exhibited widely in Australia and overseas. In June 2006 her video work I’m waiting for my real life to begin (2005) was screened in Digital Narratives, curated by Per Platou, in conjunction with the Norwegian Short Film Festival.

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It's time for Pecha Kucha Volume 02

6:30 Thursday 30th November - Commercial Travellers Association - Under the mushroom on Martin Place

The first Pecha Kucha was the radness, so we hope to see you all again for a second helping. If you would like to present something, email marcus[at]gravestmor.com

A summary of the first Pecha Kucha night may be found here

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The Perfect Future Game
Arrive at 7pm to catch the live performance of a closet drama I've written, "The Perfect Future Game". The script will be available at the Gertrude CAS counter and online at Lilyhibberd.com

Studio Artist Exhibition 2006
Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces
200 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, VIC 3065

Opening 5.30 - 8.30pm
Dates 24 November - 16 December 2006
Hours Tues - Fri 11-5.30pm Sat 1-5.30pm
T: +61 3 9419 3406 F: +61 3 9419 2519
www.gertrude.org.au

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firstdraft
Natalie Woodlock - Hand Powered
Tori Ferguson - It's OK
Sarah Newall - Abstraction and Representation

Exhibition open: Wednesday November 22 to Saturday December 9, 2006

Opening night drinks: Wednesday November 22, 2006 6-8pm

Firstdraft opening hours: Wednesday - Saturday 12-6pm

Natalie Woodlock - Hand Powered

Natalie Woodlock is Firstdraft’s fifth studio resident for 2006. Firstdraft’s Emerging Artist Studio Program is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Tori Ferguson - It's OK

Old handkerchiefs and napkins, collaged and hand embroidered with text.
Natalie Woodlock is intrigued by these largely overlooked domestic objects, and their potential as metaphors for the interior. They have, with time and use, acquired a flimsiness reminiscent of a layer of skin: the membrane that endeavours to keep our inner selves enclosed, safe from the outside world. What is it these objects have witnessed, literally absorbed? What conversations can be played out on their surface?
Language bridges the lacuna between idea and matter. Her words are thoughts not yet spoken. These memories, fantasies and anxieties are a meditation of our internal private selves in the public, social realm.

Sarah Newall - Abstraction and Representation

Sarah Newall fabricates nature from everyday domestic culture by creating paintings out of pooled acrylic house paint and floral bouquets from crocheting acrylic yarn. Newall's monochromes are continuing to simplify and unify experience from the chaos and clutter that is daily life; tapping into the idea that identity is a socially constructed idea that is formed out of interaction with ones community. The everyday thus becomes central to the ongoing process of acquisition or invention of signifiers to align and indentify with. By reproducing the everyday (and everyday objects) with pooled paint and crochet, a new layer is added through the handcraft process - the world is abstracted and recreated in Newall's own terms. What is experienced, interpreted, becomes an ongoing feed back loop of input, reflection, and assimilation.

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DICK WATKINS

13 LANDSCAPES

18 November–14 December 2006

LIVERPOOL STREET GALLERY

Dick Watkins, “the chameleon of Australian art” according to the recently published catalogue of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Contemporary collection, reveals the mercurial scope of his talents in his new solo exhibition, 13 Landscapes at Liverpool Street Gallery.1 13 Landscapes will be on view from 18 November to 14 December 2006. It is a unique opportunity for audiences to view figurative landscapes; a rarely exhibited genre from Watkins.

Dick Watkins is one of Australia’s most significant and uncompromising abstract painters. He is widely regarded for his large scale abstractions in vivid and daring colours, seen in the bold yellow and black composition, 5AM in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ collection. Yet 13 Landscapes shows a distinct stylistic departure, revealing the accomplished breadth and diversity of Watkins’ oeuvre.

The exhibition consists of thirteen canvases that move from abstraction to figuration. Watkins effortlessly oscillates between these artistic genres. His subject matter ranges from French villages and hilltop castles set in the Umbrian countryside to Australian coastal headlands or quiet estuaries with a single skiff nestled in the riverbank. In Early light (2006) Watkins captures the still and tranquil qualities of day breaking over a misty seascape. The surface of the painting is unusually pared-back with subtle tones of vivid colour. Similarly, Castello di Reschio (2005) is intensely evocative (illustrated above). Here, Watkins captures all things Italian; tall green pencil pines, sweeping hills covered in leafy vineyards, castles impossibly perched over cliffs and fields of bright sunflowers. With these elements combined, the viewer experiences a distinct longing to smell, taste and touch.

Influenced by the painters Jackson Pollock and Picasso, and often painting while listening to jazz, Watkins works daily – prolifically and intensely - capturing the dynamic qualities of what paint can do on a canvas. For Watkins, colour is the essence of his paintings and dictates the fluidity of form and content.

Watkins states: “what comes out onto the canvas is not preconceived. It is never a conscious attempt to emulate. It just happens”.2

Dick Watkins is a pioneer of colour-field painting in Australia and was a key participant in the National Gallery of Victoria’s landmark exhibition, The Field in 1968. In the late 1960s Watkins was a driving force amongst the artists of the Central Street Gallery and in 1985 he represented Australia at XVIII Biennial de Sao Paulo in Brazil. In 1993 the National Gallery of Australia mounted the exhibition Dick Watkins in Context, a show of work drawn from the Gallery's collection. Dick Watkins is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, numerous Australian regional gallery collections and distinguished corporate art collections.

1.Contemporary: Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2006, p. 56
2. Grazia Gunn, “Dick Watkins”, Art and Australia, vol. 21, no. 2, Summer 1983, p. 210

For more information and high resolution images please contact Liverpool Street Gallery on 02 8353 7799 or email [email protected]

Image: Castello di Reschio (2005) acrylic on canvas 122 x 167 cm

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2007 Samstag Scholarships

The University of South Australia has announced the 2007 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships.

Sarah CrowEST, The joy of beauty, 2004.
Stills from digital video, duration 11 minutes,11 seconds.
Performed and directed by Sarah CrowEST
Six artists from around Australia have been presented the prestigious awards for study overseas in the visual arts, commencing in 2007. They are: Paul Knight and Nick Mangan (Victoria); Anthea Behm and Jess MacNeil (NSW); Sarah CrowEST (South Australia); and Kirra Jamison (Queensland). Each artist will receive a twelve months living allowance of US$32,000 (approximately $42,000 Australian) as well as travel expenses and the cost of institutional study fees, commonly in excess of $30,000 a year at leading international art schools. A total of 111 Samstag Scholarships have been awarded since 1992.

Now in their fifteenth award year, the Samstag Scholarships are renowned for identifying artists of genuine talent and exciting promise. Commenting on this year’s awards, Samstag director Ross Wolfe notes that very significant numbers of past ‘Samstagers’ have enjoyed major – and often quite rapid – professional success following their announcement as Samstag Scholarship recipients. These, for example, include Anne Wallace, Shaun Gladwell, Deborah Paauwe, John Kelly, Megan Walch and Timothy Horn, to name only a few. Meanwhile, Samstag alumni Callum Morton and Daniel Von Sturmer have recently been selected to represent Australia at the 2008 Venice Biennale, signalling the high-level attention the Samstag name attracts from the profession, especially among curators, dealers, collectors and art magazines.

This year’s catalogue essayist is Brisbane-based curator and writer, Timothy Morrell, who has contributed regularly to periodicals on Australian art for the past 20 years. A former curator at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Queensland Art Gallery, his freelance curatorial work has included exhibitions in Australia, Asia and Europe, as well as public art projects in Brisbane.

The Class of 2007 catalogue also includes the innovation of a DVD insert. With half of the 2007 scholarship recipients presenting digital video work, the DVD acknowledges the growing shift towards technology-based mediums among the new generation of visual artists.

Judges for the 2007 Samstag Scholarships were Professor Kay Lawrence, head of the South Australian School of Art, Paul Hoban, artist and lecturer at the School of Art, and Jon Cattapan, the prominent Melbourne-based painter.

Labels: painting, press releases

Tammaramma Door Slammer

Thursday, November 16, 2006

You go into something like this with good intentions. You want to like something and with so many people around you clearly having such a great time, you end up feeling like utter bastards for hating it so much. Yet you can’t stop – one thing after another is not just an assault on good taste but an attack on common sense. Surely, no one can like this can they? They can and they do and they prance on the cliffs like tattooed mountain goats. We are of course talking about Sculpture By The Sea, the annual sculpture extravaganza that finishes this weekend. This is the exhibition’s 10th year. Over the last decade it has continued to grow as it attracted some heavy hitters to the ranks of its patrons including sundry Shermans, Balnaves, Belgiorno-Nettis and Penfolds, corporate sponsors - take a bow NAB - not to mention offering a range of prizes from the top Sculpture By The Sea Prize of $30,000 to the NAB Kid’s Choice Prize of $1000 – and all up, there’s $62,500 in prizes to be won. You’d have to be a mug not to enter.

And therein lays the problem. For all its good intentions Sculpture By The Sea is at the mercy of its entrants. Anyone can enter and by the looks of the finalists everybody does. This year’s show is by far the worst we have seen in many years, and this despite the efforts of the organisation to raise the tone by inviting overseas sculptors, creating a celebratory invited artists program – Philip King, Ken Unsworth, Guy Warren, Ron Robertson-Swann and others – and a few half decent winners of the 11 individual prizes. Sebastian Smee in The Australian suggested that there should be a prize for the worst sculpture and then went on to nominate a bunch of very deserving candidates, but there is also a guilty pleasure in being so outraged by unrelenting mediocrity, fun at first, grinding about halfway through, then wrist-slittingly bad at the end. It’s not just a question of what is bad and what is good – the whole damn set up is rotten.

Big day out... Klas Sundkvist's Trans Circulus [latin: beyond the horizon]
'Looking out to the horizon what will one experience? Curiosity, joy, or perhaps astonishment? Beyond the horizon there are possibilities, the continuation of the world and an uncertain future.' $250 each, many still available.

The exhibition is over crowded by ‘garden sculpture’ – the kind of stuff you find in parks and the front gardens of the tasteless rich - nudes arching their backs, bits of geometric abstraction looking for a friendly atrium, distressed and prematurely aged bronzes, all of it a three dimensional version of a suburban art contest where crap paintings come alive and spoil a perfectly good view of the ocean. Then there are the art school graduates, some with gallery representation, who really should know better but who are locked into their horrible practices making grim, determined stuff that attempts to be playful but which is lost behind a patina of envy and disgust that so much attention is paid to painting. Mixed into all of these artists and their works fighting for space are the professional invitees like Unsworth and Robertson-Swann, whose work must likewise fight for space and a clear sight line on Bondi’s South Head. The whole place is like a sculpture dumping ground. If there was ever a time we truly wished we had air support it was as we looked at the crowded field of weilded metal – we’d just call the boys in the air force and wait for the jets to scream over and napalm the whole lot into the sea. Get your people back and get your heads down – this is gonna be a big one!

Many of the artists in the exhibition seemed to have the same ideas too, either they were staggeringly literal in their concept of putting a sculpture next to the ocean, or they just ignored the location altogether. Some artists did however take an obvious idea – there must be half a dozen works about Australia’s treatment of, and relationship to refugees – and still manage to make a worthwhile piece. Our favourite work of the whole show is Emma Wise’s Cut To Fit, a dotted line on a cliff edge that says everything about Australia’s random exclusion of bits of its sovereign territory as can be said, and Wise does it simply and elegantly. Made of flour, paper and water, this human made line will disappear as the elements wash it away. Graeme Pattison and Enrique Esquivel’s The Big Red Traffic Light tackled a similar idea. Their construction is a gigantic array of traffic lights. Located nearby is a button of the kind you press when you want to cross the road. When you press it, the lights – which are pointing out to sea – go green. But only for as long as you keep the button pressed. It’s obvious and not very subtle and although it conveys the message ok, the viewer feels like they’re being run over by the artists’ good intentions.

The Glue Society's Hot With A Chance of A Late Storm [detail].

The winner of the big $30K prize was Orest Keywan whose steel, stainless steel, limestone and sandstone work …And With A Name To Come is unique for a three dimensional object in that it only looks good from one angle. The work is deeply and profoundly mediocre with very little to suggest it should win a big prize, especially since the whole piece, with its variety of materials blackened and dead, looks as though it might have been rescued from the sea rather than set thoughtfully next to it. Comparatively Keywan looks very good next to an array of metal ribbons, metal arabesques, jittering poles and lovingly sited minimal geometric shapes. In this company of sculptures that appear not to have been made anytime in the last 30 years something with a bit more quotidian good humour wins the day - Bjorn Godwin’s Pavilion/The Daily Double – a quotation of the classic Aussie dunny with all mod cons – was a crowd pleaser as was The Glue Society’s Hot With A Chance of A Late Storm, a melted Mr. Whippy van made of goopy urethane. The only metal sculpture we saw with any life was Angus Adameitis’s Traceur, a massive collision of crushed and crumpled industrial boilers, rusted armatures and huge right angles. We never thought we could use the word ‘playful’ to describe something that looks like it could kill you, but it is a magnificent work that is both humorous and lively.

Two works in the show are excellent. They show a real understanding of site and materials and they are both easy to miss. They are the kinds of works that may or may not be popular but they point to a direction Sculpture By The Sea should pursue. It’s serious art in a playful mood that may not be as popular with the muscle boys and their girlfriends or the old folks on their Zimmer frames, but they have real substance. One of these artists is Richard Tipping whose works are spread around the length of the exhibition. Tipping, the conceptual joker, has made a work called Free Art! Before It Frees You and takes the form of crash barriers, bollards and safety tape with the title printed on their sides. Tipping has set them up in genuine concern for safety, bits of ground cordoned off, bare ground made into art. The other artist is Guy Warren whose work we did not see but read about in the $8 catalogue. A ‘distinguished invited artist’ Warren is not a sculptor per se, but a painter and it’s perhaps because of this he decided to stay above the mess below. His work was called Icarus, a drawing of a bird executed by a skywriter over Sydney one sunny day. Look up, see the bird, watch the white vapor trail blow slowly away. Lovely.

Labels: outdoor art, reviews, sculpture

For the People, By The Government.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Last weekend, one of our neighbours, the happy island city-state of Singapore, finished hosting its very first Biennale. Eschewing the all-expenses-paid-for press junkets and glitzy launch parties of early September, we chose instead to cover the final days of the event with consideration and a clear-mind to survey what the neighbours do, and, more crucially, how they do it.

The Biennale grew out of Singapore’s annual arts festival which had been eagerly promoted throughout the region as a proper, grown up visual art event, but graduating to the ranks of serious ‘biennale’ has been an entirely new concept for a country with little artistic identity or contemporary art credentials to speak of, and which was micro-managed by a government which proudly controls so much in the lives of its 4 million citizens, not least of whoch is through censorship. With no commercial gallery scene comparable to Australia, Europe or the UK - and with most art dealing taking place discreetly behind closed doors [appointment only you understand] – the only commercial ‘contemporary art’ accessible to the visitor is strictly of the tourist kind.

The local arts festivals of the recent past have tended towards the wincingly mainstream. This time, however, with the highest level government approval, close cooperation between its various institutions (as well as with two other, concurrent biennales in Shanghai and Gwangju) and an imperial ton of cash, Singapore has given its people the chance to see contemporary art from around the world in the flesh; pretty much uncensored it seemed and presented with great imagination.

Tang Maohong, Sunday, 2006.
Digital animation (detail).

For its debut biennale Singapore’s National Art’s Council imported a team of highly experienced curators headed up by Fumio Nanjo [whose day job is deputy director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum] but the seed for the whole enterprise came from within Singapore. The construct of the Biennale was the display of the work of some 90-odd artists with a 60 percent presence of Asian artists from around the world and the heavy artillery included Jenny Holzer, Mariko Mori, Barbara Kruger, Mark Wallinger and Xu Bing.

Jane Alexander, Verity, Faith and Justice, 2006.
Mixed media installation
For the Biennale the entire city was annexed; not just the public Art Gallery and Museums but places like City Hall, opening the very heart of Singaporean politics and justice to artists and allowing the public to wander through courtrooms and even judges' chambers. Site specific installations were also to be found in a number of churches, a mosque, a synagogue, and Chinese and Hindu temples. The disused army barracks of Tanglin Camp was transformed along with the main focus of pretty much everything that happens in Singapore – the shopping drag of Orchard Road.

Suwage & Tita Rubi's Crossroad 2006 at Tanglin Camp

Jumping on the thematic bandwagon that just about everyone else seems to be abandoning, Singapore’s Biennale came with the timely, thumping-big theme of Belief – chosen, we’re sure for many reasons, but ostensibly to reflect the cultural diversity of the Chinese, Malay, Indian and Eurasian populace. Someone is trying to make a point. Typically the Singapore State goes about anything via cheerily Orwellian dictates - Have a baby! Have three! Tax breaks available! - while it routinely enforces draconian laws with regard to ‘congregation’ and the right to protest. In this context it seemed that Belief was there to actually encourage the Singaporean people to, well, believe..

Ana Prvacki, Leap of Faith, 2006.
Super-magnetic wall, metallic vest installation (video still).

The Singapore dream is a mantra to consumerism - the 5 C’s of Success - career, credit card, condominium, car, and country club. Education, while free, is primarily a head-downs rote learning system with a big leaning toward ‘measurable’ subjects like math and science. These and other factors in combination create a problem. Singapore has bred a nation of obedient, largely well-off but unquestioning consumer citizens, while the country is experiencing a brain drain as a sizeable number of its young talent, many with a foreign education under their belt, choose to stay overseas. With all of that in mind, Director Nanjo says he didn’t want to create a biennale that was controversial, but rather one that created dialogue. And so, welcome to the brave new world of Art as Social Engineering!

In tandem with the Biennale, the NAC (National Arts Council) formulated an extensive education program. First, teachers were invited on a tour of the various venues where they were given education packs with the instruction to come back with their class. A series of collectable badges (in freebie, collectable mad Singapore) were also strewn throughout the various sites as added incentive. The School of the Arts, a brand new art school is set to open in 2008 and will offer six year courses for students from the ages of 13 to 18 to complement the two existing graduate art schools. To encourage the grown-ups, the small charge for a pass to the major sites was waived over the public holidays and eventually scrapped altogether in the final weeks. Local press coverage was flag-waving with a super-enthusiastic tone of ‘hey, this is art. It’s fun! Try it you might like it!’ And so we did.

YKON, M8 – Summit Of MicroNations, 2006.
Mixed media installation.

YKON are a Finnish collective. This project is called M8 - Summit Of MicroNations, 2006. In one room, an octagonal table (i.e. not quite round) is venue to a summit of eight fictional mini-states with names such as Space Frontier Republic and NSK State In Time and one called, oh, The Republic Of Singapore – each represented by it’s own little flag but with nobody actually there. From another room emanates the sound of continuous, uproarious laughter and it’s here you could see a video of the summit’s representatives in action around the aforementioned table. And that’s what and all they do – piss themselves laughing. A little give-away booklet informs us further. The section about the Republic of Singapore introduces us to Lim Kong Soon (76) retired politician (who can they mean?), whose dream it is “to make sure every button in Singapore works” and who considers air-conditioning the ultimate invention, one which has brought “ control, comfort and prosperity to South-East Asia.”

The whole idea is wonderfully Swiftian but Singaporeans are not accustomed to satire, and certainly not directed at the State. Those we spoke with laughed along, though politely and a little sadly once the mockery sunk in. The point was certainly not lost on them, particularly as everyone is aware of the recent hosting of the IMF/World Bank conference here and the resounding silence of protest banned.

Tomas Ochoa, The Myth of Sisyphus, 2006.
Two channel video installation.
We spoke to a teacher (who asked to remain anonymous) who’d seen the following pieces - both labeled video installations but documentaries really - and had drawn her own interesting conclusion. First was The Myth of Sisyphus by Ecuadorian artist, Tomas Ochoa. In it, random people from Marrakech and from Zurich are asked what they think the last thoughts of a suicide bomber might be. And then there was The Last Supper by Swedish artists Bigert & Bergstrom. In this work we are taken on a meditation on the last meal served to those about to be executed from a number of perspectives- death row reprievees, the last-meal chef of a Texas Pen, executioners etc. The thrust of the argument built was that the last meal/last supper has lost its meaning in terms of symbolic absolution and redemption (in the Christ-like sense). Now, they argue, it’s become a kind of cruel contract by which the soon-to-die accept their guilt (and the punishment) by having their last act of free -will (in choosing their food) be served up as an act of generosity by the state.

The conclusion our teacher friend had arrived at was that the suicide bomber had offered his own life to a cause as ordained by God in pursuit of a better world – a self-imposed death penalty in the form of a sacrifice. The sacrifice the state had made however was to have to put someone to death in the cause of “maintaining society’s way of life”. The difference, as she saw it, was that “the bomber was willing, the state obligated.” Most people we tried to engage on the subject of the death penalty, of which Singapore is a leading proponent, were resolutely tight-lipped on the subject. But at least work like this is in the public arena, albeit niche.

Lim Tzay Chuen, The Opposite Is True #2, 2006.
Performance documentation.

Meanhwile, a Singaporean artist Lim Tzay Chuen whose nicely insidious, interventionist action in City Hall, was performed before any artworks even entered the building. Dressed in a full-protection chemical suit and face mask, carrying a Skyhawk Thermal Fogger, he sprayed the entire building with synthesised human pheromones (biochemicals that affect such things as mate choice, the recognition of one's own family members, and the ability to "smell" the difference between friend and foe). Because it wasn’t there as a work to be seen, we felt we couldn’t really talk to people about it as such. Instead we smiled at everybody. Most often they smiled right back. A job well done then.

Back l-r: curators, Roger McDonald, Fumio Nanjo and Sharmini Pereira.
Front: irate free-badge collector.

In the closing Q & A session last Friday, Roger MacDonald, one of the curators, said, “Even if the government has an agenda, we’ve planted seeds in the community which the community does with as it wishes…these things cannot be controlled fully” The rough, end-of-show figures claim 900,000 visitors to the various venues and events (though the inclusion of the pieces on mall-to-mall shopping stretch Orchard Road in shopaholic Singapore could be argued to have inflated that number).

So has the Biennale had the desired effect? Well, not yet. You don’t shift a people’s perspective that easily after 40 years of social engineering. If the problem of a lack of creativity is to be truly addressed it’ll take a lot more than a big art exhibition every two years to fix it. Open-mindedness and the willingness to engage in debate as a precursor to a more general ‘creativity’ has to be encouraged at a societal level and accompanied by certain freedoms of expression; including those of the press and the ability to voice dissent through protest. But perhaps a start has been made. Will there be another? Well, we hope so. While the next director wasn’t announced at the end, as happens in Sydney for instance, there’s no doubt this was an interesting event. As someone pointed out with a certain Singaporean logic, “You can’t call it a Biennale if there’s only going to be one.“

Labels: exhibitions, reviews, sculpture, Singapore, video art

Darth Vader of the Cross Fader

Sunday, November 12, 2006

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Peloton
19 & 25 Meagher Street
Chippendale, Sydney 2008
16th of November until the 2nd of December 2006

Opens Thursday the 16th of November 6pm - until late

-- 25 Meagher St --
Jenny Watson in collaboration with Martin Grant and Arno Caravel at the Paris Fashion week 2006

-- 19 Meagher St --
Jeremy Kibel works from The Glass Asylum 2006
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Peloton is pleased to announce the expansion of Peloton with a new gallery space at 25 Meagher Street Chippendale. We are proudly presenting two exhibitions in our gallery spaces, opening Thursday 16th of November. In our new space we will be exhibiting Jenny Watson and at 19 Meagher Street we will be showcasing the works of Melbourne emerging artist Jeremy Kibel.

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NOTICE: To any artists that may want the opportunity to take a 6 month residency (housing quarters upstairs, studio/workshop/gallery and bar downstairs for the three artists in residence). Wardlow is in a warehouse in Fitzroy, Melbourne and is 2 minutes from the city. Wardlow is interested in artists who can capitalise on the opportunity to create a body and progressive movement over the duration of their residency and those with a sense of personal and societal narrative.

For more info: Wardlow

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Loose Projects

HIGH ANXIETY

Dane Mitchell
Michael Morley
Ruth Watson

curated by Scott Donovan Projects

opening wednesday 15th november 6-8pm

exhibition continues to 9th december

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Michelle Hanlin

BLACK BOX
curated by Scott Donovan projects

Loose projects

level 2
168 Day St
Sydney

gallery hours.
thursday and friday 12-5pm
saturday 1-6pm

0417 024 957
[email protected]

Loose Projects

Loose acknowledges the in kind support of d/Lux Media Arts.

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Paul Worstead, The Wonderment, oil on board, 2006.
220mm x 270mm. Price: $550.00

PAUL WORSTEAD
PASTRIES AND PASTICHE
a series of new paintings

you are invited to the opening of the exhibition on
tuesday night 14 november, 2006 from 6 to 8pm

“It’s probably due to Paul Worstead that I can tell the difference between
post-box red and Paloma Picasso red. Before Paul, red was just…red.” - Stephen Cummings

exhibition dates nov 15 to dec 2, 2006
open wed to sat 11 to 6
damien minton gallery
61-63 great buckingham street redfern nsw 2106
T: 02 9699 7551 e:daminton[at]ozemail.com.au

*

Mirrormirror
an exhibition of photographs by samantha edwards

opening chrissie cotter gallery
saturday 2nd december
4.00pm – 6.30pm
2006 pidcock streetcamperdown NSW 2052

Samantha Edwards, TV man, 2005.
Courtesy of the artist.

This exhibition explores the transient visual landscape associated with marginalised communities. It exposes the subversive realm with particular insight into the notion of identity, authenticity, appropriation and recontextualisation. The resulting body of work is relevant to our understanding of the effects of cultural pressure and social change and will provide a lasting chronicle of aspects of deviant behaviour and urban life in the marrickville area. The photographs though devoid of people, are not barren. Shop fronts, mannequins, streets, abandoned buildings; back alleys, graffiti and industrial sites come to life. The images reveal that as individuals, cultures and communities we mirror each other on many different levels. As a result the work is layered, voyeuristic and reflective. This artist is primarily concerned with the increasingly bland urbanisation of our city landscapes and the characterless investment apartments and property developments that are over running them. On one level this work is an attempt to capture our architectural heritage before it is forever lost. It is where the beauty truly lies in the eyes of the beholder. Edwards is interested in where these places led us to in our hearts and minds (not our bank balances). She believes that as a society we are being conned into believing that the future is all about cultural hegemony, conformity and normalisation.

Samantha Edwards’s professional background has had a profound impact on this collection. She is an artist, archaeologist, lecturer, masters candidate and graphic designer. The artist lectures in design and visual branding, in the School of Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney. She lives in Katoomba, NSW, with her fiance Michael and their little dog ‘piglet’. The artist has exhibited her work in a national and international arena. This collection is part of a travelling exhibition which first opened at Parsons School of Design, Paris in November 2004. This event was promoted by the Australian Embassy in Paris as part of the Mois de la Photo. Edwards has been published in Empty Magazine, Inside, B/W Photography and Australian Creative. The artist is represented by in Paris by Galerie Emotion, 93 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris.

For more information visit www.samanthaedwards.com.au or phone 0408 218 721
Anna Bazzi Backhouse, Arts & Cultural Development Coordinator, Marrickville Council. Ph 02 9335 2233

exhibition continues
27th november – 10th december, 2006
chrissie cotter gallery gallery hours
pidcock street wednesday – sunday
camperdown NSW 2052 11.00am – 4.00pm

*

click to enlarge

TIN SHEDS GALLERY
Ryder - Souliere- Wilkes - Zarro
Transpainting
Giles Ryder Rolande Souliere Vicki Wilkes Michelle Zarro

Opens Friday 10 November 6-8pm
Continues until Saturday 2 December 2006

Faculty of Architecture
148 City Road, The University of Sydney NSW 2006
Tel: 02 9351 3115
Gallery Hours 11am-5pm Tuesday - Saturday

*

DARCH is happy to present Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham Architects at Tusculum on Monday 20th November.

Klein Dytham are a based out of Tokyo and have pretty solid portfolio of work to their name, not to mention thier own club, Super Deluxe, where they started Pecha Kucha among other things. Sweet. For more on Klein Dytham, take a look at their website

rsvp-ing is essential as we all know the Institute lecture theatre at Tusculum fills quickly...

*

TBC

FRONTSPACE

nik heykal & ben rowett

BACKSPACE

pamela see (brisbane)

opening
november 15 6 - 8pm
exhibition
november 15 - december 02

TCB artinc. artist run space
level1/12 waratah place
melbourne VIC 3000
+613 96638233
tcbartinc[at]optusnet.com.au

*

MOP
23 November - 16 December 2006
Opening Thursday
23.11.06 6 - 8 pm

GALLERY + PROJECT ROOM

The Christmas Specials – a group exhibition curated by The Christmas Special Committee (Brian Fuata, Chris Hanrahan, and Pete Volich.)

Artists: Kate Murphy, Shane Haseman, Agatha Goethe-Snape, Tim Silver, Viki Papageorgopoulos, Ms & Mrs

with opening night performances by Brian Fuata, Agatha Goethe-Snape, The Fondue Set

This is a Christmas Show. It is nothing more, nor less. It is a decoration overload, a drunken dance with an older aunt, a hot lounge room full of kids pumped on sweets, expensive toys and melted ice blocks, an awkward conversation between indifferent cousins about how their lives in the past year spent in the office, the backyard, the football field, the P.T.A meeting has culminated to a joyous festivity around the carcass of some barbequed animal or skewered crustacean, it is the grand reveal of a newborn child or a nephew’s growing teeth, a grandfather’s exposition over betting on the horses. It is a dry mouth, a full stomach, a tipsy head, a loud burp, a randy hand, a holy birth, a bin full of wrapping paper, a loose leg carving up the dance floor and a series of empty purses.

Christmas is the time for family. If we take the idea of the family to be a primary source where the idea of our selves are formed, where behaviours are assimilated under the rigmarole of the everyday and familiar, then Christmas essentially becomes a time where these banalities are ritualised and heightened and then, celebrated for that basic reason. This season of holiday has evolved into a phenomena of the banal, an ironically spectacular festival where the familial stricture to love each other is made more self-conscious with the co modification of present giving and reception, the obligation to “have fun with each other”, all under the guise of a redundant Judaeo-Christian pagan belief.

The probabilities for dysfunction and failure are rife, the chances of fun, even more so. Christmas is a festival of schadenfreude. We, of the Christmas Special committee wish to invite you to our family Christmas. MOP is going to be transformed into a commune of Christmas cheer, the main gallery, our place of hearth. Come experience and enjoy as the artists drink a bit too much egg nog, over-stuff the Christmas stocking, stuff up the dinner Turkey, choke on tinsel all whilst singing a merry ole carol around someone’s organ. All of the artists in this exhibition will be making new work installed to create an overall environment of cheer, randomness, thought, depression, activism, and excitement. The exhibition space will also be extended to include the elevator and possibly the foyer where the drinks are served. There’ll even be an intervention of philanthropy. Thinking it would be a great time to give back to the community around the local area, we plan to have a “Christmas Conscious tree” where we will ask visitors to bring a gourmet can of food to place under the tree that we will give back to the greater community

MOP Projects
Room 16 Level 2 617 Elizabeth Street Redfern Sydney NSW 2016 Australia
Hours: Thur – Sat 1 - 6 pm Sun 1 – 5 pm Ph: 02 9699 3955 [email protected] www.mop.org.au

*

Just a reminder that WE'RE ONLY HERE BECAUSE I DREAMT US UP (the beautiful group exhibition curated by Beci Orpin) is only open for one more week! Gallery hours are 12-7pm Wednesday to Saturday and 12-5pm Sunday. The exhibition ends on Sunday 19th November - don't miss out!

SOMEDAY GALLERY
Level 3, Curtin House
252 Swanston Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
Australia
P: +613 9654 6458
E: [email protected]

*

FROM:MR.AMA AL IDRISA.
AFRICAN DEVLOPEMENT BANK
BURKINA FASO (ADB)
OUAGADOUGOU-BURKINA FASO.

DEAR FRIEND,

IT WILL BE A SURPRISE FOR YOU TO RECEIVE THIS MAIL. WELCOME THIS LETTER IN THE NAME OF ALLAH.

I AM MR. AMA AL IDRISA,THE DIRECTOR OF THE ACCOUNTS & AUDITING DEPT.AT THE AFRICAN DEVLOPEMENT BANK OUAGADOUGOU-WEST AFRICA. WITH DUE RESPECT I HAVE DECIDED TO CONTACT YOU ON A BUSINESS TRANSACTION THAT WILL BE BENEFICIAL TO BOTH OF US. AT THE BANK'S LAST ACCOUNTS/AUDITING EVALUATIONS,MY STAFFS CAME ACROSS AN OLD ACCOUNT WHICH WAS BEING MAINTAINED BY A FOREIGN CLIENT WHO WE LEARNT WAS AMONG THE DECEASED PASSENGERS OF AN AIRLINE CRASH ON 6TH NOV. 2002.SINCE THE DECEASED WAS UNABLE TO RUN THIS ACCOUNT SINCE HIS DEATH.THE ACCOUNT HAS REMAINED DORMANT WITHOUT THE KNOWLEDGE OF HIS FAMILY SINCE IT WAS PUT IN A SAFE DEPOSIT ACCOUNT IN THE BANK FOR FUTURE INVESTMENT BY THE CLIENT. SINCE HIS DEMISE,NOBODY,NOT EVEN THE MEMBERS OF HIS FAMILY HAVE APPLIED FOR CLAIMS OVER THIS FUND AND IT HAS BEEN IN THE SAFE DEPOSIT ACCOUNT UNTIL WE DISCOVERED THAT IT CANNOT BE CLAIMED SINCE OUR CLIENT IS A FOREIGN NATIONAL AND WE ARE SURE THAT HE HAS NO NEXT OF KIN HERE TO FILE CLAIMS OVER THE MONEY.AS THE DIRECTOR OF THE DEPT,THIS DISCOVERY WAS BROUGHT TO MY OFFICE SO AS TO DECIDE WHAT IS TO BE DONE.WITH THE FEW PERSONEL IN MY DEPT,WE DECIDED TO SEEK WAYS THROUGH WHICH TO TRANSFER THIS MONEY OUT OF THE BANK AND OUT OF THE COUNTRY TOO.

THE TOTAL AMOUNT IN THE ACCOUNTS IS TEN MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS(USD 10,500,000.00).WITH OUR POSITIONS AS STAFFS OF THE BANK,WE ARE HANDICAPPED BECAUSE WE CANNOT OPERATE FOREIGN ACCOUNTS AND CANNOT LAY BONAFIDE CLAIM OVER THIS MONEY.WHILE WE WERE CONTEMPLATING ON WHAT TO DO,A FRIEND OF MINE WHO WORKS WITH THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY RECOMMENDED YOUR PERSONALITY TO ME AND ADVISED I SHOULD ASK YOU FOR HELP TO TRANSFER THIS MONEY OUT OF THE COUNTRY.THE CLIENT IS A FOREIGN NATIONAL AND YOU WILL ONLY BE ASKED TO ACT AS HIS NEXT OF KIN AND I WILL SUPPLY YOU WITH ALL THE NECESSARY INFORMATIONS AND BANK DATA TO ASSIST YOU IN BEING ABLE TO TRANSFER THIS MONEY TO ANY BANK OF YOUR CHOICE WHERE THIS MONEY COULD BE TRANSFERED INTO.

I AND MY PARTNERS HAVE DECIDED TO GIVE AWAY FOURTY %(40%)TO YOU FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE AND TEN (10%) FOR ANY EXPENSES THAT MIGHT ARISE DURING THE TRANSACTION OF THIS TRANSFER.WE WANT TO ASSURE YOU THAT THIS TRANSACTION IS ABSOLUTELY RISK FREE SINCE WE WORK IN THIS BANK WHICH IS WHY YOU SHOULD BE CONFIDENT IN THE SUCCESS OF THIS TRANSACTION BECAUSE YOU WILL BE UPDATED WITH INFORMATION AS AT WHEN DESIRED.

WE WILL PLEASE WISH YOU KEEP THIS TRANSACTION SECRET AS WE ARE HOPING TO RETIRE WITH OUR SHARE OF THIS MONEY AT THE END OF TRANSACTION WHICH WILL BE WHEN THIS MONEY IS SAFELY IN YOUR ACCOUNT. WE WILL THEN COME OVER TO YOUR COUNTRY FOR SHARING ACCORDING TO THE PREVIOUSLY AGREED PERCENTAGES.YOU MIGHT EVEN HAVE TO ADVISE US ON POSSIBILITIES OF INVESTMENT IN YOUR COUNTRY OR ELSEWHERE OF OUR CHOICE.MAY ALLAH HELP YOU TO HELP US TO A RESTIVE
RETIREMENT.AMEN.

PLEASE FOR FURTHER INFORMATIONS AND ENQUIRIES FEEL FREE TO CONTACT ME THROUGH MY NUMBER 00 226 78 02 22 43 FOR ORAL DISCUSSION.

AM AWAITING FOR YOUR URGENT RESPONSE!!!

THANKS AND REMAIN BLESSED.

Labels: press releases

Living The Art Life

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

We were obsessed with the to-doings of the famous and not so famous, people who we met on the street, the exhibitions we had been to, and many, many musings on television…

We’d talk endlessly about the hot woman in the Brand Power ads and her provocative love of the skivvy; the on-again, off-again relationship of FOX 8 presenters Alex and Amy [the former now appearing in that ad as the Brad Pitt lookin’ mofo talkin’ on a blue tooth mobile in the lift with the ditzy Coke drinker chick, the latter still on cable TV] and of course, our sightings of Bruce James [we were convinced he was stalking us - we’d go to the shops to buy biscuits and he’d be there, his stubby little fingers pawing at a packet of Tim Tams; we’d go to a gallery and Bruce would be hanging around the entrance with his shopping bags or we’d be crossing the street and he’d be on the other side waiting for us to cross, smiling a weird smile, his eyes glinting]. The celebrity spotting around Victoria Street hit a peak in 2001-02. We’d be wandering along and we’d see Billy Connolly in Goodfellas [supermarket], Matthew Newton and gf having breakfast at Morgans, Keanu Reaves walking in a weird “don’t look at me but yes you can because we both know you know who I am but don’t look at me [etc]” manner. Sometimes you didn’t even have to go out, celebrities would come to your door. Russell Crowe and Danielle Spencer walked down the middle of Surrey Street as all the neighbours came out to gawk at them [before someone went and spoiled it by yelling “C__t!”] or you could be laying on your couch listening to Regurgitator’s Art* CD and there’d be a knock at the door and you’d open it and Quan Yeomans would be standing there…

So in the middle of all this celebrity madness we decided to do an experiment. We went to Morgans and ordered a round of coffees and vowed we’d stay there until we had seen some celebs. It didn’t matter if they were A list or Z list, TV, music or movie people, artists, art critics or someone who was merely doing promos on FOX 8, Victoria Street was so celebrity rich we’d wait there for as long as we had to. We waited. And waited. Nothing happened. People were drab. Boring. Across the road at the Tropicana people pretended to be famous but no one was. Then Richard McMillan came walking along in that casual roll he had, as though he was just out for a stroll in Greenwich Village walking an imaginary dog. We can’t remember if he had his hands in his pockets or if he was whistling a happy tune, but let’s say he was, because he was that kind of guy. He came over, bludged a cigarette, joined us for a coffee as we explained how depressed we were that the celebrity spotting experiment as going so badly. In the space of 45 seconds Richard had pointed out two amazing personalities: Gunter Christman (old painter bloke) and Les Murray (the completely barmy poet). We're not sure if he was joking about the second one but he certainly looked mad and eccentric enough to be really Les Murray because he had a big straw hat on. Richard bade us farewell and set off down the street rolling on the balls of his feet like a cheeky cartoon kid.

This was the nature of our relationship with Richard McMillan. He’d pop up, say hi, then he’d disappear again. We’d first met him way back in the early 1980s when he was, with Ross Wolfe and Peter Thorn, a founding editor of Art Network, the Australian art magazine that was way ahead of its time, mixing serious art articles with gossip and news, causing a ruckus, then it went out of business. Among his accomplishments with Art Network, McMillan oversaw the publication of an entire issue dedicated to contemporary photography. McMillan was also a respected art scholar, an acknowledged expert on the work of Tony Tuckson, a member of the Oceanic Art Society, an artist who exhibited with King Street Galleries and, with his partner John Plapp, an art world benefactor donating works to various collections including the National Gallery of Australia. Unlike so many people you meet in the Australian art world, he was always nice to us when he didn’t have to be and, incredibly, he always remembered everybody’s name. We’d see him at openings and he was witty, urbane, knowledgeable, passionate, always fond of good gossip – exactly what you want out of the art life. The last time we saw him was in 2004 at the Works on Paper Fair at Fox Studios. He was in good spirits despite the fact he was missing most of his hair. We didn’t know it at the time but he was undergoing a course of radiation therapy, and then chemotherapy, to fight an aggressive brain tumor. Richard eventually died in July this year.

To celebrate his life, an exhibition A LIFE IN ART is currently on show at the Depot Gallery at Danks Street, Waterloo. The show is a collection of Richard’s sculptural reliefs and other objects made over the last ten years. On Saturday November 11 between 2pm and 4pm, a small drinks party will be staged to celebrate Richard’s life.

When people die, it’s always great to remember a time when you met them, something they said or did that made you laugh. We can’t say that Richard McMillan was a friend of The Art Life, or that we knew him very well, but as one of those people you meet along the way, he was a fantastic person to know. Let’s then finish with this. One windy morning we had run out of coffee at The Art Life office. Forced out into the freezing street we staggered to the corner shop. As ever, being the last person in the world you would expect to see on Oxford Street at 8am, who should come walking up the street but Richard McMillan. He came from an older generation of art world types and as such, we only ever understood about ten per cent of what he said. Richard, true to form, told us some stupendous gossip about people we had no idea about, to wit; "I was at Michael Reid’s house and I was talking to Jenny Scott and she introduced me to this guy from New York who was making a TV show about auctions called "You’re In It" – he’d just come from Paris where he was trying to secure rights to coverage of the Andre Breton sale – it seems Teeny Duchamp or someone – actually, I think it was Breton’s daughter by his first wife – had got in contact… Anyway, Jenny introduced me to this guy and we swapped business cards – and did you see Jenny’s article in Australian Art Collector called My First Time? I mean, do they have no shame?”* Etc and on and on. We had no idea what he was talking about but it was delivered with such gusto that we were fascinated. It was like being in Andy Warhol’s diaries or maybe a page out of Exposures.

Farewell Richard McMillan.

Richard McMillan 1944 - 2006
A LIFE IN ART
Sculptural reliefs and other objects
Depot 1, 2 Danks Street, Waterloo
Tuesday 7th - Saturday 11th November 2006
Gallery Hours: 11.00 - 5.00pm

* Details of this conversation not recorded verbatim.

Labels: article, tribute

Art Life Omen Bet

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Labels: punting

Unimpeachably Hefty

Monday, November 06, 2006

Kevin Robertson is an artist who lives in Western Australia. He dropped by to leave this comment regarding our recent 25 Predictions for The Future post:

“This is really dire. Apart for being a vacuous piece of writing, I have heard other people quote the artlifes before "drawing is the new video", etc, etc. You are running out of ideas, guys. Well you are only middle class hypocrites/human. You deserve to be judged by your work, and for being so autocratic.”

We are certainly guilty of recycling some of our jokes, especially when they’re being presented in a new context, [such as when we gave a talk at Firstdraft’s 20th birthday and where these non-too-serious predictions were presented], but on the other hand, the comedy rule is that when you tell a joke it gets funnier the more you repeat it, then it’s unfunny for awhile, but eventually becomes incredibly funny. We’re on the upswing here Kevin, so please stick with us. But this accusation of being ‘autocratic’ troubled us, so we decided to look up the exact meaning of the word:

“Offensively self-assured or given to exercising usually unwarranted power; "an autocratic person"; "autocratic behavior"; "a bossy way of ordering others around"; "a rather aggressive and dominating character"; "managed the employees in an aloof magisterial way"; "a swaggering peremptory manner" authoritarian: characteristic of an absolute ruler or absolute rule; having absolute sovereignty; "an authoritarian regime"; "autocratic government"; "despotic rulers"; "a dictatorial rule that lasted for the duration of the war"; "a tyrannical government’” [ Wordnet]

It might be time to just state for the record that we do not recognise the legitimacy of the International Court of Justice, the right of anyone to pass judgment on our past or present activities, the puppets of the invaders or anyone else from “the west” who has led this invasion of our lands, etc, etc. [It’s not much of a defence, but it may be the only one left to us].

Impeccably dressed in Hugo Boss, The Art Life denies culpability in past 'autocratic' rule.

It’s always gladdening to see that even when someone is damning your efforts, they’re also holding out an olive branch in the form of a URL to their own web site. When we wrote that we didn’t like Dr. Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s show at MOP we figured we’d lost a potential friend but now his web site graces our list after he sent us an email requesting to be added. [We’re incredibly happy to link to a site that features pictures of a man with cheekbones so sharp and pronounced that tears would surely collect under his eyes like glistening pools where one might see one's own reflection] In a similar spirit of good natured self promotion, as Kevin Robertson damns us all to hell, he’s left us his web site featuring some lovely work which has been described by Robert Cook as “plotless”. Hoorah! If you’re an artist-critic-curator – or you just you have a web site that you’d like us to link to - just send us an email and we’ll include it on the list.

A few weeks ago we decided to lift our moratorium on reading newspaper art critics. We had somehow strayed back to reading the odd column by The Esteemed Critic and soon we were back on the horse full time. Last Saturday’s column by John McDonald in Spectrum was a completely inoffensive recounting of his recent junket to Singapore. Sponsored by the Singaporean Government’s National Arts Council, McDonald’s trip to take a gander at their first Biennale produced a piece of writing so even and carefully worded that, faster than you could say ‘Sarah Lee’ we’d drifted off into a long, peaceful sleep. No change there. Upon waking we decided to take a look at what Sebastian Smee was up to. You have to wonder what’s going on over at The Australian, completely obsessed as they are with overturning the rule of postmodernism and the oxymoronically demonized spectre of “theory” in the arts. The battle lines rage across education, point and counter point being blasted out with little actual explanation of what the conservative side of the argument is. Smee is their ideological art warrior, leading the charge for conservative values in the visual arts, talking up the legendary status of deeply mediocre modernists like Lucien Freud while writing off the efforts of young Australian artists without even bothering to mount an argument.

Smee’s typical m.o. is to alternate between two modes of writing; hectic, breathless celebrations of greatness or dismissive, trite and misguided pieces on subjects about which he knows very little. Both approaches are usually held up by the ponderous scaffolding of “think pieces”. Here he is from last Saturday in a review of Goddess at the Art Gallery of NSW:

“BREASTS of unimpeachable heft and bounce, bloody garlands of severed heads, a menagerie of wild animals and images of mesmerising spiritual intensity combine to make Goddess, the new show at the Art Gallery of NSW, the greatest exhibition mounted in Australia this year. An exploration of the roles of goddesses in Hindu and Buddhist art, it is one of those rare, transforming shows that should not only excite the public but, with any luck, set ablaze the imaginations and ambitions of local artists and curators, too.”

What do you suppose the editors thought when they came across the word “greatest” in this context? Can you think of the top ten “greatest” shows you’ve seen this year? Or did he just mean ‘best’ shows? And ladies, are your breasts unimpeachably hefty? Storm in a D cup warning! This is just Smee on autopilot throwing out meaningless adjectives as is his want. Nothing to get terribly excited about and nothing really to dissuade you of the view that it’s business at usual at Review. Smee’s recent review of For Matthew And Others: Journeys with Schizophrenia staged at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery and the Campbelltown Arts Centre, is a fabulous example of a critic betraying their prejudices. The review began like this:

“In Australia we have recently developed a strange mania for trying to use art to solve social problems. Why this is, I can't say. Perhaps, wanting to believe in art but being surrounded by relatively little in the way of true greatness (we have no Louvre, no Prado, no Metropolitan Museum) we are eager to find other purposes for it. Or perhaps, when it comes to social and political issues, we are just naive.
Aboriginal art is the classic example of good intentions being funnelled through art towards a higher social and political purpose. But you find the principle at work elsewhere, too. Whenever rips in the Australian social fabric start to show, people look to art - in the form of exhibitions, festivals and so on - to provide a solution. Something like this has happened in the sphere of multiculturalism. And it is happening again in mental health.
As with Aboriginal issues, government policy in mental health has been botched so badly and for so long that it may be no surprise to find people looking outside the political arena for a miracle cure. But why, time and again, art should get the guernsey is beyond me.”

Perhaps Australian’s are naïve – after all, we keep buying the same old newspapers day after day – and perhaps, just perhaps, if we had access to masterpieces by Europeans we’d come to realise that our crazy notion of wanting art to be socially engaged is just foolish. But hang on a second, wasn’t Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, perhaps one of the best known socially engaged works of art ever made, actually in the Prado? So would this not mean then that local, grass roots engagement with social problems in art – say, mental illness – be just as relevant here as it is anywhere else? And could we seriously argue that this “mania” for “turning to art” to “solve” problems is just Australian?

Smee recently made the claim that Tony Tuckson never painted a decent picture in his life. What’s happening over at The Australian is that Smee is getting high on his own supply which, as Tony Montana warned, leads ultimately to self destruction [and having your fortress of critical solitude invaded by gun toting drug dealers]. Freebasing opinions like these suggest the true autocratic ruler of this land resides elsewhere.

Labels: apologies, art criticism

The Art Life Podcast Ep #3

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Click here to get your own player.

Hello Pacific Northwest !!! Alex Kershaw's A Lake Without Water, - Tomorrow Again group show curated by Scott Donovan and Elastic Boundaries by Michelle Thieunissen @ Artspace. Tough guys and tougher talk - Two Birds with One Stone - Brendan Lee's install; @ The Art Gallery of NSW; Ken Nordine's My Baby; Koji Ryui all white on white, drinking straws and a ginormous paddle pop stick @ Sarah Cottier Gallery; James Angus - where do they make baloons? @ the Museum of Contemporary Art. Handsome Boy Modelling School Metaphysical; POLITICAL CONTENT WARNING - University of Western Sydney final year show, maybe ever! - Anne Landa Award - who will win? Thank you.

Podcast Image: James Angus, Rhino. Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art.

Labels: podcast, public galleries, sculpture, video art

Congratulations! You May Have Already Won $$$ One Million Dollars $$$

Congratulations David J Rose, the winner of our exclusive competition to win a FREE copy of McCulloch's New Encylopaedia of Australian Art. We were inundated with several entries and David's stood out for a number of reasons: his entry captured the ambivalent nature of Pro Hart and his relationship to art, the art scene and world at large, he did also it in verse [which is always a winner], and he observed the rules of the comp, something beyond most of the entrants.

PRO

An outback artist with singular vision

Flourished

Despite the critics’ derision.

Due to the praise of the Little Digger

(Despite images so trite

Which got the critics to bite)

His reputation (alas?) grew bigger

And so, Pro Hart is finding his place

- and the critics have egg on their face.

So if it is ‘rustic’ you want

Pro is your man

Outback Oz was his forte

With colours so bold

-- and the critics do admire the prices

at which they are sold!

Our runners up were are two well known personages in our Comments community - the highly talented Spiv and the misnamed Undiscovered. Congratulations, gentlemen, you get a whopping $50 Discount Off the tome's cover price of $295.

Labels: competition

Most Influential Artist-run Gallery in Sydney?
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Unimpeachably Hefty

The Art Life Podcast Ep #3

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