The voting was intense - hours were wasted, friends were recruited, reputations were put on the line. In the end, our poll for The Most Influential Commercial Contemporary Art Gallery in Sydney was one of the most heavily contested ever posted on the blog. Oxley took an early lead and if Vasili Kaliman hadn't wasted all that time on Facebook, the gallery might have had a chance, but in the end there could only be one - step forward Barry Keldoulis and claim your prize!
The Most Influential Commercial Contemporary Art Gallery in Sydney?
Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery 19% 78 Sherman Galleries 4% 15 Kaliman Gallery 12% 51 Sullivan & Strumpf 2% 7 GrantPirrie 6% 26 Boutwell Draper 2% 7 Yuill/Crowley 1% 5 Darren Knight Gallery 5% 19 Damien Minton Gallery 7% 27 Sarah Cottier Gallery 2% 9 Martin Browne Fine Art 0% 1 Gallery 9 7% 30 Groundfloor Gallery 1% 5 Tim Olsen Gallery 0% 2 Stills Gallery 3% 11 Ray Hughes Gallery 1% 6 Gallery Barry Keldoulis 24% 97 Rex Irwin Fine Art 2% 7 Liverpool Street Gallery 1% 3 King Street Gallery 1% 5
411 votes total
We're currently running round two - the most influential artist-run gallery in Sydney. It's a tight but friendly contest between Firstdraft and MOP at the moment, but anyone could win - even the entirely fictional Sport Space! If you want to rort the votes, remember, you can vote once a day until the voting ends this Friday at 5pm. Like they used to say in Queensland, vote early, vote often.
Chalkhorse Gallery 56 Cooper St Surry Hills, Sydney. November 29th 2007 at 6pm
In The Heat is…On! Renny Kodgers will perform in a fully operational sauna installed in Chalkhorse Gallery. In this environment Renny will exchange his most intimate bodily fluids in one of the most generous artistic displays in the history of Australian performance. Each pore will be completely dilated releasing a torrent of unfettered visceral information. This is an opportunity for any person, animal or thing to engage with Renny on a visceral level previously unheard of. Bodies will be obliterated in a swell of sweat, building new relationships and creating new levels of interpersonal engagement.
Renny Kodgers is a renegade performer on the Sydney burlesque and performance art scene known for his camp send up of the country singer Kenny Rogers and his broad range of performance stunts. These have included his performative opus, “One Love” an event that turned Jensen’s Tennis Centre, Surry Hills into a celebration of artist’s egos, failed dreams and ball girls in hot pants.
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PAUL WORSTEAD
WHOOPERS
you invited to the opening of the exhibition this Tuesday night November 13 2007 from 6 to 8pm
Insufficient superannuation syndrome. Oil on board, 320mm x 260mm
Paul Worstead was once selected in the Archibald Prize for his self portrait as a bunny and in 2006 was a finalist in the Sulman Prize.
His posters and screen prints were recently acknowledged at a survey show in 2005 at the Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney.
After regularly exhibiting at Gleebooks, Sydney, this is the second exhibition of new work at the Damien Minton Gallery.
In 2008 the Hazelhurst Regional Art Gallery will present a survey of his art practice curated by fellow artist Reg Lynch.
EXHIBITION DATES 14 NOV TO 1 DEC, 2007 SECOND GALLERY ROOM WED TO SAT 11 TO 6
DAMIEN MINTON GALLERY 61-63 GREAT BUCKINGHAM STREET REDFERN 2016 T: 02 9699 7551 E: [email protected] www.damienmintongallery.com.au
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2. International Art Exhibition – Venice Biennale 2007 10.06.07 > 21.11.07
Pensa con i sensi—Senti con la mente. L’arte al presente/ Think with the senses—Feel with the mind. Art in the present tense Curator – Robert Storr
Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette Christian Capurro et al.
To complete his 2007 Venice Biennale of Art project in Think with the Senses-Feel with the mind. Art in the present tense, Christian Capurro will be staging 3 more events, complimenting the 3 that were staged in June, in the last week of the show. These events are dialogues with, or generated from, the Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette work that is currently installed in the Corderie (Arsenale) exhibition space.
There will be a concert or ‘sonorous occupancy’ in the installation space by the Treviso-based ensemble l’arsenale, plus 2 talks at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa; one by the Englishman, Dr. Roger Cook (ex-artist, -actor, - Vogue Hommes model and current Research Fellow in the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of London) and one by the Islamic scholar Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti from ‘La Sapienza’ University in Rome.
November ‘on/off-site’ events:
ensemble l’arsenale - (occupazione sonora/sonorous occupancy) 17/11/07 - 16:00h, ‘Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette’ installation in Pensa con i sensi—Senti con la mente. L’arte al presente, Corderie, Arsenale
Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti - ‘Pensare, dire, produrre immagini: il punto di vista parziale di un islamista’ (incontro/talk: italiano) 19/11/07 - 18:30h, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Palazzetto Tito, Dorsoduro, 2826 - 30123 Venezia
Roger Cook - ‘I Was a 1980s Commodity Fetish: thoughts provoked by Christian Capurro’s “Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette”’ (incontro/talk: inglese, transl. italiano) 20/11/07 - 18:30h, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Palazzetto Tito, Dorsoduro, 2826 - 30123 Venezia.
... to vote in our "most influential commercial contemporary art gallery" poll. Current voting puts Gallery Barry Keldoulis in an almost unbeatable lead with 79 votes, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery second with 65 votes and at the tail end of the field Tim Olsen Gallery, Liverpool Street Gallery and King Street Gallery are looking for more friends. For those wondering how to rort the system, you can vote every day until the close of voting at 5pm on Friday.
Slight Correction: It was pointed out to us that Mori Gallery is missing from the poll. There's no conspiracy there, we just forgot. We had thought of doing a round-up poll for second place, something like "what's better than a pork chop - Mori Gallery or apple sauce?" but decided against it. Let's just say Mori Gallery got five votes and apple sauce is just as popular as ever.
Join our mailing list and receive a complimentary haiku! That's right, when you join our Feedburner mailing list you get a complimentary haiku by Japanese master Basho at no extra charge. In addition to priceless 5-7-5 verse, you'll also receive, delivered directly to your email, updates of new Art Life content at no charge! How do you get in on this amazing offer? Simply enter your email address into the box under Email Subscription, hit the 'subscribe' button. Follow the instructions to verify your address to make sure you're not a robot, then you'll be asked to activate your account via email. Once your signed up, an email will arrive the morning after new material is posted complete with images, links and all the full-flavoured Art Life content you've come to expect. It couldn't be simpler!
From The Sydney Morning Herald's Melbourne Cup form guide
Incredibly, the Melbourne Cup features a horse called Sculptor at number 17. Look no further than this fine equine specimen for your Melbourne Cup omen bet. With long odds of around 30 to 1, the odds sensibly reflect the actual position of sculpture in the art world - "can be a ratbag in the gates". We're looking at a sober place bet [crossing the line at first, second or third] for just 50 cents, but at those odds you'd be crazy not to. This is what your betting slip should look like:
We're super excited to announce the premiere screening of our new made-for-TV special A Year in The Art Life. Screening at 10pm on Tuesday November 13th at 10pm on your ABC, the show features a run down of both the best and the most regrettable art moments of the past art year.
There will be some very special surprises for regular Art Life readers who [we believe] will be thrilled to see a virtually pure translation of the blog to the televisual medium. And for those of you who lamented that our three-part show that screened earlier in the year didn't measure up to your sky-high expectations, we can also happily advise that we've taken your suggestions and incorporated them into the new show. As a result we think that A Year In The Art Life isn't just a good show, it's the best art show ever made.
Opening Wednesday 21 Nov, 6 - 8pm. Thursday 22 Nov to Saturday 15 Dec, 1 - 6pm At Factory 49, 49 Shepherd St, Marrickville 2204
Variation on a still point 19, 2007. pencil on paper 14.5 x 20.5 cm
Aitken is interested in expanding the inventive and formal aspects of the line and the grid through painting and installation.
Monuments of Nothingness has an uncertain vision of the structured grid. This vision has indeterminacy, ambiguity and irrationality, a combination that ultimately leads to non-structure.
Repetition is a condition of action before it is a concept of reflection. We produce something new only on condition that we repeat.
Monuments of Nothingness will expand the expectation of perception of vision, leading to a new ability to see something in the nothing.
Melbourne 3000. (03) 9663-4991. [email protected] Tues-Sat 12.00 to 6.00
Trevelyan Clay’s unpretentious approach to painting characterizes his work which is chaotic, humorous and full of movement. Since bursting onto the Melbourne art scene late last year he has added new energy and possibilities to painting in terms of both expression and content. My Megalith is Clay’s second solo exhibition in Melbourne, and continues his dialogue with the Australian landscape and it’s relation to cultural identity. His approach is risky; appropriating the markings that relate to the cultural property of indigenous communities is not a politically correct gesture.
But through this Clay makes a bold statement: the landscape is mine to interpret too. The paintings are executed in a fierce and eye-catching manner; the colours are vibrant and applied in big strokes, giving the work a deliberately childish and chaotic quality. The conspicuous expanses of colour render the painting flat and without illusionistic depth that adds to the naïve impression, yet allude to a metaphysical space that reconciles seemingly irreconcilable epochs.
Trevelyan Clay was born in the UK in 1982 and graduated from the Canberra School of Art in 2005. Since then he has exhibited at Stark White Gallery, Auckland, Neon Parc, Melbourne and CCAS, Canberra. His work is held in various public and private collection in Australia and New Zealand including the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, New Zealand; Peter Fay Collection, Sydney; Australian National University Collection, Canberra; Artbank, The Ergas Collection, Sydney, Joyce Nissan Collection, Melbourne.
For more information, interviews and print-ready images contact: Tristian Koenig +61 3 96630911 +61 415 297 037 [email protected]
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Magmart | video under volcano, international videoart festival.
From October 2007 to February 2008, will take place the 3rd edition of Magmart | video under volcano, international videoart festival.
The Festival is realized in partnership with CAM - Casoria Contemporary Art Museum, and with the patronage of the Province of Naples.
Magmart festival's online media sponsor is the art news portal ShaVis.com. Marmart festival's broadcast media sponsor is the tv channel insu^tv.
The Festival activity begins on October 10 with the publishing of the call for participation, and will end with final event, scheduled for February, 23/24 2008, at CAM: On February 23, for the screening of 30 videos selected by Jury, in coordination with other artistic events. On February 24, 2008, the selected videos - which become part of permanent collection of Museum - will be screened on loop for the Museum's visitors.
RULES
The Festival is open to all international video artists. Participation is free. The Festival is dedicated exclusively to video art, and don't suggest any particular theme. Between all submitted videos, will be done a final selection based on vote of a Jury composed by experts. The 30 selected artworks will become part of CAM permanent collection. All sended materials don't will be return, and will be stored in the Festival's archive like documentation. Sending the participation form, the artist accept fully the present rules. The Jury verdict is incontestable.
The artist accept that his/her own videos will be broadcasted online and offline, on site www.magmart.it and on tv channel insu^tv; he/she accept that, if selected, the video become part of permanent collection of CAM, and should be freely screened within Museum rooms. All the videos, selected or not, can be screened in any other place or event related to Festival, online or offline, with exclusion of any commercial use. Still-frame from videos can be freely used for the Festival communication, mentioning title and author of artwork. All rights on videos remain property of author. The author assert, under his/her own liability, the complete right of use on used materials (images, sounds, videos) and that compose the artwork; the author undertake completely the liability for any breach of copyright laws.
To participate is necessary fill out the form available online, on official website of Festival. The omission, or the incorrect filling, of one or more parts of form itself, will involve the exclusion of video by selection of Jury. Will be accepted only the videos received within midnight of December, 31 2007. The shipment bill are on the back of author. The possible selection by Jury is in any case subordinate at an essential condition for the proclaim of winners: the author of selected video must send, via ordinary mail, and within midnight of January, 15 2008, the donation act to CAM of the copy of his/her own video, downloadable from official website of Festival. This donation act don't underlie in any way a transfer of right, but certify exclusively the willingness of author so that a copy of his/her own video artwork will be permanently keeped - and, with limitations above, utilized - in the permanent collection of CAM.
Without this donation act, the videos will be rule out by group of 30 selected artworks, and replaced by those immediately subsequent in Jury's ranking. Any author can participate with max 5 videos.
TECHNICAL FEATURES OF ARTWORKS The videos must be fully realized with digital tech. The videos must be sent in format .mpeg or .mov (PAL); any other format will be rejected. The max length of videos don't must surpass 10 minutes. The videos must be accompanied by participation form fully and correctly compiled. The videos must be accompanied by a still-frame from video itself, in format .jpg, and with dimension not less than 400 px X 300 px. The videos must have a quality (dimension, resolution) good for a public screening, without any further shipping of an high-res copy. Suggested size is 720px X 576px; minimum size required is 640px X 480px. If the video is a shooting of a performance, this must be fully visible within video length.
SUBMISSION WAY Is possible to send required materials for participation (video, form, image) in two ways: - online | Filling out the form, before midnight of December, 31 2007. In the form, must be indicate an URL http or ftp for downloading the video (i.e.: http://www.mydomain.com/myvideo.mov) and the still-frame from video (i.e.: http://www.mydomain.com/myimage.jpg); is possible to utilize a service for big files transfer. The video and the image must be effectively available at indicated URL within the deadline. - offline | After fully filled out the form online, the image and the video must be sent via ordinary mail or carrier at the address that will be communicate via email after online submission. The files must be on digital support (CD-Rom or DVD), Mac/Win or Windows compatible.
JURY The jury is composed by: Giuseppe De Marco - Mediavox Luca Magnoni - Journalist / Creative Director Antonio Manfredi - Artistic Director of CAM Arseny Sergeyev - Curator of Outvideo Festival Enrico Tomaselli - Artistic Director of Festival
On Saturday October 13, The Art Life were lucky enough to be guests of ARC - Art, Design & Craft Biennial 2007. We were invited to speak on a panel discussion called The Cult of The New. Here is an edited version of our presentation...
The contemporary art world runs on the fuel of the new. We need it to power our conversations, to push the next thing forward, to define ourselves against the forces of reaction. The new is an ideology, a descendant of the Enlightenment, a grandchild of Modernism.
Yet we’re also deeply ambivalent about the new, perpetually worried that it’s nothing more than a fad or a craze, a superficial fascination that will fade away just as soon as the next thing arrives.
Let's discuss a few aspects of the new. Some of them are related to the art world, some are more personal, others are about the bigger picture, about how these ideas of the new inform how we think and feel and act in the world.
So let’s start there, in the bigger picture and something that’s on a lot of people’s minds.
Very soon we’re going to be voting in a Federal election. There will only be one of two probable outcomes. A vast amount of time and resources are being expended on thinking about and discussing what the ramifications will be if one or the other of those options come to pass. The election will be a point from which the future of this country will head in one of two directions. Those directions are largely speculative, but one of the interesting aspects of this future event is that one side of the debate brand themselves “New Leadership.” The idea is to evoke newness as a concept of possibility over and above the concept of continuation. Newness is invoked as a future state under which we will be potentially happier with more possibility. This future state we’re heading towards is emblematic of certain aspects of the new – the new as a looming change, a speculative mind state about which many are hoping on a certain outcome.
This pre-election scenario also highlights other aspects of the new. One is the uncertainty we feel about what the future will bring; the other is the frustration that the future hasn’t arrived yet. In this sense newness is also a state of anxiety.
We were recently doing some freelance work for an advertising agency that is producing political ads for one of the parties. One ad they did had nothing more than text on a coloured background, but there was a great deal of discussion about what certain fonts meant and whether that meaning changed when the font was placed on different coloured backgrounds. Copperplate on a blue background as opposed to Helvetica New on a blue background? Should that be a rich deep blue, or an airy sky blue? The thing is, the minutiae of the ad and the type and the background all carried particular meanings that would be understood by various test audiences. In this case, the familiar was needed for the message to succeed.
Newness is a diverse state that is implicitly political.
The features of the new are fairly easy to recognise since we are so attuned to the familiar. Like those test audiences who will be asked to respond to something they already know, the implications of a set of understood variables are of limited interest. It’s only when two or more already known things are put together in an unexpected way that we encounter an authentic kind of newness.
In the art world, newness is nearly always a combination of things that already exist.
Take video art for example. Over the last couple of years there has been an increasing awareness in the general media that video art has become popular. By extension it’s often said video art is new. Of course, that’s nonsense. Video art – a vast, hard to define variety of art practices - has been around since the early 1960s, and even earlier if you extend the definition to include artists’ use of TV in the 1950s. So how could anyone say that video art is new?
What’s changed, and what gives video art an aura of newness, is that it exists in a different context. The proliferation of affordable video production equipment has meant that artists can make a video for comparatively very little. Where video art was once the province of artists with access to expensive equipment, now anyone with a Mac and iMovie and a DVD burner can get a show at an artist run space. The general media can be forgiven for mistaking video for something that’s new, because on a greater time line compared to drawing or painting it is relatively new. But in the strictest sense, video art just seems that way – it’s more visible and more distributed. To say its new is shorthand to say it has been admitted to a different order of consideration.
The title of this session is called Cult of The New. To be part of the new, to advocate it, is to believe that newness is worthwhile. It has cultish qualities and the information of what is new, or said to be known, is passed around, an information commodity.
As writers we are often asked to help keep this economy going by writing about people or things that are new. What's interesting about this aspect of newness is the way certain artists come to embody the idea while actually being quite the opposite. Ben Quilty, for example, has made a name for himself as a deft and precise painter, his big thick impasto works mining Aussie culture for its imagery. Or perhaps the King Pins whose performances, videos and paintings provide a commentary on Australian middle class values while ironically mocking them. Or maybe Shaun Gladwell, whose formalist videos conflate drawing and dance and movement into hypnotic, repetitive screens.
All of these artists have enjoyed degrees of celebrity over the past few years, yet none of them are particularly new in the sense that what they are doing is unprecedented. All their work is accountable; all of it is connected historically, it comes from an explicable context. But more than that, all of these artists and their work are supported and promoted within the art world not because it’s new, but because it’s old. These artists represent a tradition of thinking, a desire to create newness, not exactly an institutionalised avant garde, but an ongoing commitment to the new even if it is paradoxically old.
And that is the weird thing about the new in the art world - we are both accepting of the new, acutely self aware that it’s pointless in a way, and willing to entertain it as a notion at least for a short while, yet reject the new as the new becomes dominant. We replace the new with something more new, even when, again, paradoxically it’s not.
There are a number of factors working together to create newness in the art world. One is the subjectivity of an artist. You never can tell how an individual is going to synthesise influences. Another is the audience that looks around for something different. Another is the market forces that push the idea of newness to create novelty and exoticism and sell the idea of the new back to the audience.
So is it possible for there to be anything really, genuinely new? Let's take a longer view.
We were born in the early 1960s at the tail end of the baby boom. For the first eight years of our lives, the western world was enraptured with the space race. Everywhere you went, there was talk about space. At school, on the bus, in the newspapers, on TV. Corn Flakes and Coco Pops cereal packets came with plastic moon landers and Saturn V rockets, there was a afternoon TV show hosted by an astronaut, every other movie was about space and the only good things on TV were Star Trek, Captain Scarlet and UFO. That was an incredibly optimistic side of the Cold War. There was a real war going on and the world, yet the idea that we were about to step into space was actually taking place. It was real. And it reeked of the new.
We think back on that time as adults and wonder whether we were was duped by Cold War propaganda or whether people really did feel those things. They must have because everyone certainly acted as if they did. As that sense of newness faded away, space became Star Wars and no one was actually on the moon.
Despite the fade, the technological imperatives of the Cold War and the space race filtered out into the public sphere and became integrated into our lives. Throughout the 1960s and 70s - and even into the 80s - there was a semi-regular feature in the newspapers and magazines where a journalist would ask; what will life be like in the year 2000? We remember one feature about how, in the future, you’d be able to go into a shop and use a plastic debit card to buy your groceries rather than use cash, or how, one day, you’d be paid electronically instead of waiting for a brown envelope stuffed with cash and coins to come from the pay office. It all seemed amazingly exotic.
This stuff is incredibly old hat, an antique type of new. But what’s significant about the technological imperatives of the mid-20th century is that they did change the way we live. It could be argued that the driving forces of our lives remain significantly the same, yet we are now being faced with variations of the past that are new – the web, social networking, an even higher integration of technology. These are genuinely new things, yet we are actually attuned to accepting that sort of newness because the last 50 years have primed us to accept innovations as just another part of the landscape.
The long range view of how things come along and change the way we live our lives is the only one that actually demonstrates that there can be new things. The smaller stuff, the pop cultural and art world newness are more like window dressing on the big picture analysis of the new.
While we were writing this essay we discovered fururetrendsgroup.com the website of a professional trend forecaster, a “business futurist”. His web site has a downloadable PDF of a big chart that traces trends from 1740 to 2100. There are three connected graphs – social, technical and economic. According to this graph, from here until the end of the century, we can look forward to the end of petroleum, the rise of fusion power, massively complex, distributed and sophisticated information processing, nanotechnology and biotechnology becoming the key drivers of the next 93 years. Interestingly, the part of the graph that charts social and economic trends is blank.
We mentioned that the idea of the new is political and discussed the advertisement where everyone at the agency was agonizing over what font and colour to use. It would come as no surprise to you that the final decision was totally predictable. But let’s say that they had decided to use, instead of Helvetica new on a mid-blue background, a gothic script on a tartan background... That kind of political ad simply would not have been taken seriously because it would have disrupted too many preconceptions about what a political ad is supposed to be.. Take the GetUp climate change ad that was run on TV recently. Hardly anyone realised it was a parody because it was so closely styled on a real political ad. It looked completely authentic. That’s an example of the old becoming so familiar that the message is lost in the medium.
The traditionalist, quality driven world of art – the world that runs parallel to contemporary art – is a world that has a lot of allure. History and tradition is deep grain, rich and inviting. The new, fashionable avant garde – it could be argued - is like Formica, a plastic that looks great at a distance but which lacks detail close up. But the problem with traditionalist view is that art becomes a generic expression – the individual artist is judged on how they deploy a set collection of cues within a limited range of expressive possibilities.
Contemporary art on the other hand - and the concept of the new - about disrupting those possibilities. These things do not go together, these colours are wrong, this art is ugly, it has no meaning – all of these are expressions of the new. They are the gothic script on the tartan background of the world. The idea of progress is a discredited notion yet without it at some level, art becomes moribund. We need the new to fill in that huge blank nothing of the future. That’s what the new is. And we like it.
It's that time of year again, end-of-year best-of's and meaningless lists... And we love 'em. The Art Life was recently asked to contribute to a glossy magazine ranking celebrities in the art world. Unfortunately, our nominations didn't make the cut, but it got us thinking that it was high time we threw down the gauntlet, opened up the floodgates, mixed our metaphors and came up with a list of our own. From here until the end of the year we're asking you, the discerning readers of this blog, to help create the ultimate art world thunderdome - most influential galleries, best shows, highest hijinks... Two artists enter, one artist leaves... Vote as you see fit [at right]
[If you're viewing this post via email, click here to vote...]
Just a reminder that TOMORROW [Tuesday, October 30] at 10pm on ABC is the FINAL episode of Not Quite Art!
The good news is that the show has been very successful. The audiences have been very good, the reviews have been incredibly good and the sheer amount of discussion on the Internet has been amazing.
If you've missed any episodes they are available to download from http://www.abc.net.au/tv/notquiteart but will only be available for a limited time - so make sure you grab while they're up!
If you want to leave any feedback about the show and you're not part of the Friends of Not Quite Art Facebook group you can also leave feedback via the ABC TV Guestbook (the show has no guestbook of its own) or you can just email me with your thoughts. On the off chance that I might get to do something like this again it would be great to get a wide range of feedback about what did and didn't work.
Anyhow, I hope you enjoyed it!
thanks,
marcus.
PS A soon to be unemployed former television presenter is currently looking for a job! All zany suggestions seriously considered!
Ep.3 THE BUSINESS OF CULTURE Tuesday October 30 10pm, ABC TV Australia
Where does art stop and business begin? Is the difference between art and commerce whether you make money out of it or whether you are making it to make money? Why does Melbourne have laneway bars and NSW have poker machines and what the hell does that have to do with art?
Marcus Westbury ventures into a video art bar, meets an artist who sells ideas, reveals the angst of being a sneaker designer and comes across a magazine that you can only read on a wall. Along the way he asks if are artists are just the underpaid R&D; guys for big fashion, design, music and business?
With sneakers on show at the National Gallery of Victoria and every new art movement the basis of an advertising campaign, as a society, are we just better consumers than art critics?
I have seen the future of painting and his name is Neo Rauch.
The Art Gallery of NSW has recently hung two works by the East German painter Neo Rauch, Gebot and Mazernacht.
These two works caught my eye quite some time ago, but I dismissed them initially for what ever shallow prejudice that happened to be running through my embittered mind at the time. Yet they would not be ignored. Every time I have visited the gallery since, they have tugged at my eye, the flat colours, just back from gaudy, their muddied brilliance, disdainful of any obvious pleas for attention eventually seduce with their wilful obstinacy.
But it is the forms they take on the paper that truly captures your heart. What strange men and women inhabit this world? What beast is this, so loosely sketched, so bizarre in form and manner, with its human face and blue fur? Yet despite its ludicrous invention it insists that it be taken seriously, its depiction almost cursory, as if its existence were commonplace and need only be briefly alluded to. It stands there like a creature from a dream, appearing at every juncture, its melancholy face, sphinx-like, inferring the possibility of a secret knowledge, a codex for an impossible world. And on its side, its name, “Hirst” the stag. The creature stands on all fours in a boxing ring. A fighter sitting on his haunches grabs the creature’s front legs and stares at the ground as if contemplating some great truth that he’s been told.
Standing behind the creature is another boxer, who holds a painter’s palette, its colourful pigment dripping down to land on another palette that seems to be there by chance, though it seems ridiculous that that should be so. The boxer’s hands are ungloved though it seems as if the two have just been fighting. The ropes of the boxing ring closest to the viewer are broken and sheer toward the picture’s surface in abstract loops and skeins. Has the referee been ejected? Above the ring, folded sheets of colour drift in the wind whilst in the background arcs of paint stain the night sky and there amongst them is the word – “Marznacht”, the painting's title.
Neo Rauch’s work seems always to be swollen with meaning and yet opaque and resistant to interpretation, his figures so complex, the allegories so arcane and personal as to confound the possibility of explanation. Yet it is this that makes them compelling, like the dream that one turns over in your mind as you move through the day puzzled as to its meaning but reluctant to let it drift away losing the beauty of its secret. I think it may be this possibility of meaning that has made his work so popular.
In an artworld as vast and diverse as the contemporary milieu it is ridiculous to make universal claims, yet there is some truth to the idea that “meaning” has become either the object of derision in the wake of Buren-styled nihilistic post modernism or else tied more directly to causes, or ideals (often curator driven). The notion that an artist, particularly a painter, should develop a language of imagery and iconography that is personal and in a certain regard consistently applied (figures such as the “Hirst” stag make regular appearances) seems old fashioned and yet Neo Rauch’s work is startlingly fresh. Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that he seems to have incorporated all of the ideologically driven discourse that has politicised the act of painting over the years and then incorporated it into the figurative play of his work. If the boxers in Marznacht have fought, then it was art that was at stake. His ouvre has such a sophisticated sense of the painting’s surface, of composition and colour that you cannot doubt the integrity of his thought. Just trace the manner in which the figures in Marznacht are rendered, the immediacy of paint and line and the way in which marks trail off from representation to expressive gesture. The work achieves a wholeness that is not just a matter of balance across the surface and the elements of the composition but an acknowledgement of the problem of painting itself.
And then there is the question of semiology. Rauch’s works are redolent with symbols, each figure seemingly standing in a careful relation with others as if they were part of a sentence. If the unconscious is structured as a language, then Rauch understands its grammar, elegantly mobilising a surreal sublimity that inveigles even as it confounds. Perhaps such talents arose in his time as a painter in East Germany. We have seen before the manner in which totalitarian governments tend to improve their artists, who, forced to rely on subtle gestures, heavy coding and the repression of revolt become adept at suggestion rather than statement. Rauch revel’s in this coded gesture, yet without the strictures of a despotic government to test, he has instead turned to his own identity, as if he were trying to find some outer limit of meaning, the creation of artworks whose worth is undeniable yet inexplicable. They are machines for implication, drawing your attention into a world of allusive play, suspending you above the ordinary dynamics of the work-a-day world and challenging you instead with your desire to understand the inexplicable.
Neo Rauch's Gebot
Beside Marznacht, is Gebot, a later picture from 2002. Three men and a woman are in a room. One appears to be a labourer. He wears shorts and a blue singlet and stands on a square of turf that sits on the floor. A small tree grows from the turf; its leaves rendered as expressive squirts of red. In the labourer’s hands is a strawman or scarecrow whose head has been removed. Across from him a man stands behind a bench. He appears to be quite stern and in his left hand he brandishes the head of the strawman. In his right hand is a hammer. In front of him sits "the accussed", his hands bound, his feet covered over with sacking as if he has just been released from a bag. To his side is a women. She touches his shoulder and shows him what could be a Stanley knife. The walls are decorated in a checkerboard fashion the centre panels of which seem to contain speech balloons. In the “speech balloon” directly behind the "judge", there is the drawing of a jawbone. Just as with Marznacht, there is an immediacy in the imagery that seems to suggest that the allegory is in some way obvious, that demands you participate with these figures and try to understand this narrative. But just as with Duchamp’s bride stripped bare, meaning is constantly deferred, slipping away from you like the meaning of a dream.
It is interesting to think of these paintings as part of a German tradition that trace, in their absurd profundity and surreal meta criticism, a line through the actions of Beuys back to Grosz, Dix and even onto the late pessimism of the Blau Reiter's post war paintings by Kirchner and Beckman. They are ultimately sad songs, paen's to the loss of innocence but with no understanding of the crimes, like Kafka's Mister K. A haunted visionary who tries to chase away sin only to find that the blood is on his own hands. You should see them before they go back to the warehouse. You never know, it might even make you want to paint again.
For your information and to clarify some apparent misunderstandings appearing on the thread discussion in regard to the Shaun Gladwell project at Artspace, Sherman Galleries did not 'put up the money to stage what must have been a very expensive show...' (fred friendly). That assertion is incorrect. They did, as did Gladwell himself, loan Artspace some technical equipment. Most of the equipment was provided by Artspace and/or hired/loaned from elsewhere. This isn’t unusual for Artspace with large technology-dependent installations. The exhibition was otherwise developed and produced by Artspace.
Usual times and places. See you at 19:00 for a 19:30 speak off at Sydney (302 Cleveland St)
Two super presentations this month! And a show+tell.
1. Stephen Jones will be demonstrating and talking about a number of video synthesizers that he built between 1978 and 1986 (see pictured below for one). Stephen used these synths when performing live with Australian electronic group Severed Heads and in other projects.
2. Nick Wishart will be presenting CeLL, a MIDI controlled pneumatic orchestra he has created in collaboration with Miles van Dorssen. They will be opening up CeLL to new composers via a new software interface that can receive compositions by email, play and record the composition then send that recording to the composer. www.cell.org.au
3. Show + Tell is open to anyone who has something they wanna bring along. Can be something interesting you have been working on or perhaps an event you wish to share with people. Just as long as it has something to do with electricity!
Also: Taking suggestions and volunteers for presentations for November's Dorkbot which shall be the last Dorkbot of 2007. Get in while the year lasts!
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between you and me
31 October - 17 November 2007 Opening 6-8pm, Wednesday 31 October Curated by Anneke Jaspers
Ben Denham, Paul Greedy, Sarah Jamieson, Rachel Scott, Sam Smith
Ben Denham, no strings: pre-cursive, performance/video, 2007. Courtesy of the artist.
between you and me explores ways in which artworks propose, present and perform mediating gestures. Taking as a starting point the particularities of viewing in a gallery context, these works interrogate the apparatus of their own making from various perspectives. Ideas are revealed by way of a certain self-awareness: a consideration of process, context and reception as it relates to the work’s own operation.The exhibition considers how the reflexive mode of ‘60s conceptual practices informs current strategies in art making, particularly in relation to performance and installation. A catalogue with in situ documentation and an essay by the curator will be available following the opening. Artist talks will be held on Saturday 17 November. Part of the Firstdraft Emerging Curators Program.press release
Ben Denham uses the concept of ‘re-writing’ to interrogate relationships between the body and the production of texts. Denham’s experimental performances use gesture, inscription, and the experience of text-as-matter as means to investigate the divide between expression and interpretation.Sam Smith investigates the relationship between the real and the virtual, using the processes of video making as visual content. In Smith’s work, the manipulation of space, time, matter and perception that is integral to video is exposed to viewers’ scrutiny and curiosity.
Paul Greedy creates environments that integrate sonic, kinetic and visual elements to reveal aspects of how we understand and relate with the physical world. Greedy’s installations render viewers conscious of their own bodily responses to different phenomena, and in turn register participatory interactions.
Sarah Jamieson uses the parameters of her body as a starting point to conduct speculative and temporal research that reflects on how we define our physical and social interactions in space, via such concepts as interior and exterior, self and other, public and private.
Rachel Scott works across installation, painting, video and performance to investigate the human subject in relation to the production and reception of art. Scott explores the slippages between unconscious and contrived actions, as well as the processes of obscuring and revealing that are integral to making and exhibiting work.
firstdraft: 116-118 Chalmers St. Surry Hills NSW 2010 t: +61 (0)2 9698 3665mail(at)firstdraftgallery.com open hours: Wednesday to Saturday 12-6pm
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JAMES DORAHY PROJECT SPACE is pleased to present
ELVIS RICHARDSON
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LOSING IN THE MIND OF SOMEONE WINNING
23 October - 4 November 2007
Opening Wednesday 24 October 6-8pm
Elvis Richardson’s art practice incorporates found objects such as 35mm slides, photographs, VHS recordings and trophies as raw materials in video and sculptural installations. She chooses these discarded items to investigate ways personal and social identity are constructed and as primary evidence of material culture and history itself. Richardson's interest in undermining the heroic iconography of trophies as emblems expressing social status, success and ideals of sportsmanship to question notions of desire, failure and nostalgia.
The works in THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LOSING IN THE MIND OF SOMEONE WINNING are from the artists silver trophy collection ranging from premiership cups and 21st mugs to wedding goblets, making explicit the competitive references of trophies to all facets of our lives. Richardson has then poetically transformed these items through an experimental trial by fire resulting in a variety of shocking but beautifully slumped and shattered outcomes. These fragments are then re-silvered and polished for public display.
Elvis Richardson has recently been selected as a finalist in the inaugural $100,000 Basil Sellers Art Prize with her sculptural work field. Sixteen contemporary artists have been chosen for the award reflecting on one of the central elements of our cultural and social life - sport (www.sellersartprize.com.au). This exhibition is reflective of the work Richardson is developing for the finalists exhibition at the Ian Potter Centre in July 2008. It is a very exciting nomination in recognition of the artists continued investigation and use of trophies and their meaning in her practice.
Please join us for the Opening on Wednesday 24 October 6 - 8 pm
JAMES DORAHY PROJECT SPACE Suite 4 1st floor 111 Macleay St Potts Point NSW 2011 ( enter 1st door in Orwell St ) Gallery Hours Tuesday - Sunday 11am 6pm Wednesday 2pm - 8pm Ph 02 9358 2585 www.jamesdorahy.com.au
Not Quite Art - Ep. 2 THE NEW FOLK ART Tuesday October 23 10pm, ABC TV Australia
Is culture a set of elaborate and elaborately funded life support systems, or an infection that’s trying to attack us? What’s the difference between a Symphony Orchestra and a covers band (apart from about $40million dollars a year) and why does the Australia Council spend more money on A SINGLE opera company than all the visual artists and musicians (not including symphony orchestras) in the country combined?
This week presenter Marcus Westbury meets artists that have turned the laneways of Melbourne into one of Australia’s prime tourist attractions (whilst dodging the police), finds out what uncollectable art is, hangs out with multi media musicians The Herd and wonders why the computer games industry has so much money and so little content. Creator of the Australian game, Escape from Woomera, Katharine Neil has some ideas why, which she shares with Marcus.
Just a quick (and final!) reminder that Not Quite Art FINALLY goes to air TUESDAY night [Oct 16]on the ABC at 10pm for the next three weeks.
The Age's Green Guide have listed NQA is this week's PICK OF THE WEEK and according to Jim Schembri, "Not Quite Art is the freshest, most illuminating, thoughtful and funny locally made arts program in years." (Ok, so that may not be the most competitive category going around, but still!)
Over at The Sydney Morning HeraldRobin Oliver has nominated "this extremely watchable series" as their SHOW OF THE WEEK. They also printed this excellent story about it in the TV Guide.
Now, if all that sounds like it's carefully selected and mad crazy positive well it is. For the sake of balance I should warn you that over at The AustralianGiles Auty described my views as "resolutely juvenile", said that I was "play[ing] the part of a disillusioned teenager on television" and that I should be congratulated for "being granted 90 minutes of good TV time to explore his grievances against the adult world."
Well, you can't win them all!
Anyhow, if you are in Melbourne, please come along to our LAUNCH PARTY at:
Horse Bazaar, 397 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne
from about 9pm (Tuesday 16th) - the show is on at 10pm. If you aren't in Melbourne watch it on TV!
Afterwards, feel free to email me and let me know what you think.
The National Gallery of Australia and its presentation of The Aboriginal Memorial have a long and chequered history. Originally conceived by Djon Mundine at the time of the Bicentennial as a memorial to 200 years of the victims of white occupation, it was bought by James Mollison after its first exhibition at the Wharf during the 1988 Biennale of Sydney. Once it arrived at the NGA it has been bounced around that infelicitous building in different configurations and contexts, from the downstairs sculpture gallery (where it was once contextualised as "installation art" in the Islands exhibition), to upstairs in Gallery One just inside the front door, to its present corridor location at the confluence between International abstraction and the shop. The Art Life, like everyone else, now scoots past it on the way to the temporary exhibitions area where the current exhibition Culture Warriors is to be found.
Under Brian Kennedy there seemed a concerted effort to de-sacralise the Memorial, to the extent that it was uprooted and sent with other Aboriginal art on an international tour, fetching up as far away as St Petersburg, the site of the infamous falling out between Consultant Djon Mundine and then Curator Wally Caruana. Last night, as part of a chilly and chaotic 25th birthday bash son et lumiere, the NGA wowed its masses with the projection of its collection on the exterior walls of the building. Including The Aboriginal Memorial .
This left the Art Life somewhat bemused. There was discussion that the new building extension would include a glass pavilion for the Memorial, which would at least be an expansive solution to the continual problem (which no curator has tackled in its nearly 20 year history) of the work being unable to be seen except against a cacophany of Indigenous Australian art from everywhere else. But now, as we see, it has become an emblem, a party trick. The Art Life now wonders whether it has become another victim to the symbol wars.
The work, entitled Shibboleth 2007, runs the full 167 metres of the cavernous hall on London's South Bank.
It begins as a crack then widens and deepens as it snakes across the room.
Colombian artist Salcedo said the work - on display to the public until April next year - symbolised racial hatred and division in society.
"I always try to relate my work to tragedy," she said.
Salcedo added: "It represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred.
"It is the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe." BBC news website 9 October 2007
Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth, the latest installation at the Tate Modern’s cavernous turbine hall is a huge crack in the ground that runs the entire length and width of this forbidding space, branching out in filigrees of doom, an intriguing, darkly mystifying piece, – well it was darkly mystifying, until she opened her mouth, “It represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred.” Thanks. Great, now I know what to think. No need to see it anymore really.
There is little in the world of art more deflating (aside from the news of another $100,000 plus auction for a Tim Storrier work) than hearing an artist tell you what a work represents. This ascribing of absolute meanings to a work of art by its creator really puts the kibosh on any of the allusive, associative detective work that makes art fun, dare I say it, worthwhile even. Indeed, the idea that an artist sits in their studio and decides that they are going to create a work that “stands for” something is vaguely nauseating. The language games of the art and text people aside, shouldn’t art be doing its best work when it stands beyond the interface of meaning and identity beckoning us instead into the deeper water, where we can stand no more? Where we might drown? Choking our last on the pure waters of a “meaning” beyond attribution, distillation or comprehension? Otherwise we could all save ourselves some time and have the artist email us their wall texts,
Doris Salcedo would like you to know that a crack in the floor represents borders, the experience of immigrants and the experience of racial hatred. She would also like you to know that racism is bad and that Europeans are bad for being racist.
Sure the notion is worthy, and it received plenty of press. No doubt people will read it, nodding their heads and inwardly agree “hmmm poor refugees, nasty racism” and who am I to differ with that sentiment? I rush to assure you that I don’t. But what about the poor crack in the floor? The artist has gone to so much trouble to make it and now with a few short words to the press it has become one thing, a simple placard in a protest, rather than the myriad, elusive, wonderfully poignant things it might have been.
Before she opened her mouth and started to blab, it could have been a humorous commentary on contemporary architecture, or a representation of Marxist Dialecticism, or maybe Saussure’s division between the signified and the signifier, or language and parole, or the haves and have notes or the fracture line of a soul whose heart had been broken, or a discussion of plate tectonics, maybe even the crack in the liberty bell and all of the references to American attacks on freedom around the world that would conjure. Or else it was clearly Freudian, a dirty crack in the floor, “a crack” which is a joke, which is an absence. Absent of what? The Phallus, of course. You could have visited the work and walked its length examining the depths it plunged, as you thought about your own dark nights of the soul, following the jagged architecture of its path as you traced the manner in which your life had unraveled over the years. But no – not anymore. Now it’s about racism. Good thing to, since we all know racism is bad. Still, what a killjoy. That crack could have been so much fun.