What The Critics Say #1: A Whole Lot of Nothing
Peter Hill is a reasonable enough artist. An expatriate Scotsman who makes easy-to-digest conceptual art, he’s best known for The Museum of Contemporary Ideas and exhibitions in far away places like Tasmania and Melbourne. He’s not, however, known as a writer, critic or essayist - which made his appointment as the art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald’s Saturday Spectrum section something of a mystery.
After the horrible, depressing years of John McDonald, Sebastian Smee and the all-too brief years of Bruce James, it seemed as though the SMH had completely given up on visual arts. With the newspaper concentrating on subjects that would draw badly needed advertising dollars to Fairfax such as books, movies and music, visual arts at the Herald were hived off to adjective-happy journos, jobbing freelancers and photo ops for page 3.
They had book reviewers, they had film critics, they had dance, theatre and rock writers, but they hadn’t had a proper art critic in over a year. Let’s just put aside the fact that the art market is stronger now than it has ever been, that interest in the arts by the newspaper’s core demographic is at an all time high and that these are the very same people who are buying art – let’s just assume that the SMH had its reasons for not covering art.
So when Hill made his first appearance in Spectrum it seemed as though, at last, the newspaper was getting serious. It soon became apparent that Hill wasn’t that keen on voicing an opinion. It was true, he did like a lot of more cutting edge work than his conservative predecessors, but he was averse to telling you if it was any good or not. With the residual angst of the McDonald/Smee decade still hanging like a disgusting fug in the air, it was wiser to just let Hill have his time and get to grips with the demands of a weekly gig on a newspaper. He’d come good eventually – that was the hope.
Sadly, it hasn’t worked out that way. The best thing you can say bout Hill is that he's never seen an exhibition he doesn't like, he's always positive, always accomodating - buthe's also the most mediocre writer imaginable. His boss at the SMH, Michael Visontay, refers to Hill as a “reviewer” and not a “critic”, perhaps giving an indication of the section’s light-n-easy editorial policy. But by “review”, it’s fair to assume that that means some sort of critical evaluation. But Hill’s writing is almost completely beige – it has nothing to say and leaves the reader with the sensation of having just swallowed air.
In a recent “review” of four shows, Hill used this lead for his article:
Perhaps by “the future” Hill just meant what's coming up at your local gallery – not an actual Nostrodamus-style prognostication on the future. Still, it’s a catchy line even if it’s criminally wasted by the qualification that follows. Hill seems ignorant of the fact that books too are scheduled for publication many years in advance, often a decade for big series like Thames and Hudson and Phaidon’s recent publications – so we’ll leave that alone. What is more perplexing is how Magiciens La Terre took people by surprise – he doesn’t explain, and never returns to it in the rest of the article. But what the hell, right? It's just the lead to the article. There's much more exciting stuff to come...
Three more paragraphs followed that explained in tedious detail something Hill had already said at the end of his second sentence, namely, that exhibitions are planned in advance. For example:
Dig that casino analogy!
In all fairness, perhaps Hill has been briefed to address his column to a readership that knows absolutely nothing about art and think that gallery shows are pulled out of big freight boxes that get delivered by some trucks from somewhere. That doesn’t seem so likely, as the lit reviewers elsewhere in Spectrum can be as obscure as they like. On the one hand Hill assumes we know what the hell he’s talking about when he mentions Magiciens La Terre at the Pompidou but, on the other, not that exhibitions are planned events. Who are we, the readers of Peter Hill? Confused, probably.
Hills populist credentials are on display when he neatly segues from this exciting introduction when he big-ups Liverpool Street Gallery for having a group show of gallery artists called (suprise surprise), Group Show – something that all galleries do at the beginning and end of every year when artists, gallerists and audiences are too addled from the holidays to mount enough concentration for a proper show. We can be thankful for one thing, however, as Hill points out that Liverpool Street Gallery is “light filled” – something you would think would be a priority in an art gallery.
No detail is too small for Hill, quoting liberally from the catalogue to the show – he lists all the artist’s names, the prices their work sell for (“$3,300 to $125,000”) and includes a few un-attributed quotes that are presumably taken from artist’s statements supplied by the gallery
One artist, John Beard, has his work illustrated in the review and it looks like a head. In fact it’s called Head Self Portrait No. 10 (2000). Surrounded by some expressionistic daubs, it’s all very artistic and you can tell the artist is a real painter. Confronted with the work of art itself and freed of tedious things like setting up the story and filling up space with the names of artists in the show, Hill can let rip and tell us what he really thinks.
Well, there you go! It’s half a portrait and half a landscape and, what’s more, in Hill’s experience, it’s the best balance possible. Is that a 50-50 balance, or 70-30 – or what? Are those expressionist daubs a landscape? Hill doesn’t explain these cryptic remarks. It'd be interesting to hear his thoughts on something that really blows his socks off.
Later, discussing the work of Kate Tunerin the same show, Hill gives us some badly needed detail on her career, information that you’ll no doubt be quoting at dinner parties, while spicing things up with another scintillating insight into the world of contemporary painting:
While it’s surprising that Hill didn’t spell out New South Wales to waste more space and meet his word count quota, the sheer anodyne boredom that this kind of writing provokes is breath taking. Here we have an art critic whose only job is to describe a work of art and tell his readers if it’s any good or not resorting to a needlessly obscure and none too descriptive analogy involving a “perfectly struck tuning fork”. That ringing in your ears is the pain you’re experiencing from Hill’s writing, not from some out-of-body experience invoked by the beauty of Turner’s painting, which, by the way, is abstract with some figurative elements.
The rest of Hill’s column pulled the same tricks again and again, with some headache inducing statements of the bleeding obvious by Bill Nuttall , an advert for Artlink magazine - that august publication people turn to when they want to know what’s happening in post-Colonialism or “the body” - and a mention of a caligraphy show and an exhibition at Roslyn Oxkley 9 Gallery.
No kidding, eh? We're always looking to be disabused, and if it's about calligraphy, all the better.
John McDonald was a destructive, mean and conservative voice in art criticism. His protégé Sebastian Smee was simply an idiot with nothing to say – as his subsequent career as an international journalist for Oxygen , writing shallow and ridiculous articles on Picasso and Matisse ,has proven. Bruce James, a friendly fellow and supportive voice for contemporary art, ultimately turned out to be fickle, giving up on the politics at Fairfax for an anonymous career within the ABC.
It's hard to remember life before the current crop of nobodies - people like Elwyn Lynn, Terence Maloon and, way back in the 70s, Nancy Borlaise -people who had an opinion, could express it, and made a contribution to the art world. It just didn’t seem possible that it could get worse at the SMH – and then along came Peter Hill. As the boys in Spinal Tap put is so eloquently, Peter Hill is filling a badly needed void.
After the horrible, depressing years of John McDonald, Sebastian Smee and the all-too brief years of Bruce James, it seemed as though the SMH had completely given up on visual arts. With the newspaper concentrating on subjects that would draw badly needed advertising dollars to Fairfax such as books, movies and music, visual arts at the Herald were hived off to adjective-happy journos, jobbing freelancers and photo ops for page 3.
They had book reviewers, they had film critics, they had dance, theatre and rock writers, but they hadn’t had a proper art critic in over a year. Let’s just put aside the fact that the art market is stronger now than it has ever been, that interest in the arts by the newspaper’s core demographic is at an all time high and that these are the very same people who are buying art – let’s just assume that the SMH had its reasons for not covering art.
So when Hill made his first appearance in Spectrum it seemed as though, at last, the newspaper was getting serious. It soon became apparent that Hill wasn’t that keen on voicing an opinion. It was true, he did like a lot of more cutting edge work than his conservative predecessors, but he was averse to telling you if it was any good or not. With the residual angst of the McDonald/Smee decade still hanging like a disgusting fug in the air, it was wiser to just let Hill have his time and get to grips with the demands of a weekly gig on a newspaper. He’d come good eventually – that was the hope.
Sadly, it hasn’t worked out that way. The best thing you can say bout Hill is that he's never seen an exhibition he doesn't like, he's always positive, always accomodating - buthe's also the most mediocre writer imaginable. His boss at the SMH, Michael Visontay, refers to Hill as a “reviewer” and not a “critic”, perhaps giving an indication of the section’s light-n-easy editorial policy. But by “review”, it’s fair to assume that that means some sort of critical evaluation. But Hill’s writing is almost completely beige – it has nothing to say and leaves the reader with the sensation of having just swallowed air.
In a recent “review” of four shows, Hill used this lead for his article:
“It’s a brave person who attempts to predict the future, although trends in art are probably slightly easier to predict than trends in literature, partly because most exhibitions – from commercial to museum blockbusters – are planned in advance. The great contemporary example of this was Magiciens La Terre at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1989, which had a gestation period of a decade, yet still took many people by surprise.”
Perhaps by “the future” Hill just meant what's coming up at your local gallery – not an actual Nostrodamus-style prognostication on the future. Still, it’s a catchy line even if it’s criminally wasted by the qualification that follows. Hill seems ignorant of the fact that books too are scheduled for publication many years in advance, often a decade for big series like Thames and Hudson and Phaidon’s recent publications – so we’ll leave that alone. What is more perplexing is how Magiciens La Terre took people by surprise – he doesn’t explain, and never returns to it in the rest of the article. But what the hell, right? It's just the lead to the article. There's much more exciting stuff to come...
Three more paragraphs followed that explained in tedious detail something Hill had already said at the end of his second sentence, namely, that exhibitions are planned in advance. For example:
“What you will be enjoying at New York’s Guggenheim in 2007, or at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2006, or at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm is largely known. Catalogue writers have already been commissioned. Loans and exchanges are, even as I write, being negotiated and swapped like blue chips in a casino."
Dig that casino analogy!
In all fairness, perhaps Hill has been briefed to address his column to a readership that knows absolutely nothing about art and think that gallery shows are pulled out of big freight boxes that get delivered by some trucks from somewhere. That doesn’t seem so likely, as the lit reviewers elsewhere in Spectrum can be as obscure as they like. On the one hand Hill assumes we know what the hell he’s talking about when he mentions Magiciens La Terre at the Pompidou but, on the other, not that exhibitions are planned events. Who are we, the readers of Peter Hill? Confused, probably.
Hills populist credentials are on display when he neatly segues from this exciting introduction when he big-ups Liverpool Street Gallery for having a group show of gallery artists called (suprise surprise), Group Show – something that all galleries do at the beginning and end of every year when artists, gallerists and audiences are too addled from the holidays to mount enough concentration for a proper show. We can be thankful for one thing, however, as Hill points out that Liverpool Street Gallery is “light filled” – something you would think would be a priority in an art gallery.
No detail is too small for Hill, quoting liberally from the catalogue to the show – he lists all the artist’s names, the prices their work sell for (“$3,300 to $125,000”) and includes a few un-attributed quotes that are presumably taken from artist’s statements supplied by the gallery
One artist, John Beard, has his work illustrated in the review and it looks like a head. In fact it’s called Head Self Portrait No. 10 (2000). Surrounded by some expressionistic daubs, it’s all very artistic and you can tell the artist is a real painter. Confronted with the work of art itself and freed of tedious things like setting up the story and filling up space with the names of artists in the show, Hill can let rip and tell us what he really thinks.
“[Beard’s] work has reached a greater balance between portraiture and landscape than any other artists I know…”
Well, there you go! It’s half a portrait and half a landscape and, what’s more, in Hill’s experience, it’s the best balance possible. Is that a 50-50 balance, or 70-30 – or what? Are those expressionist daubs a landscape? Hill doesn’t explain these cryptic remarks. It'd be interesting to hear his thoughts on something that really blows his socks off.
Later, discussing the work of Kate Tunerin the same show, Hill gives us some badly needed detail on her career, information that you’ll no doubt be quoting at dinner parties, while spicing things up with another scintillating insight into the world of contemporary painting:
“Turner, a masters graduate from the University of NSW’s College of Fine Arts, has been an artist in residence at Arthur Boyd’s Bundanon studio. Her paintings project a fragility and an overall resonance that I can only compare to a perfectly hit note on a tuning fork. You need time to fully appreciate these paintings and, as you stand there, gradually a tree or a shadow will emerge from what at first seems like an abstract colour field composition.”
While it’s surprising that Hill didn’t spell out New South Wales to waste more space and meet his word count quota, the sheer anodyne boredom that this kind of writing provokes is breath taking. Here we have an art critic whose only job is to describe a work of art and tell his readers if it’s any good or not resorting to a needlessly obscure and none too descriptive analogy involving a “perfectly struck tuning fork”. That ringing in your ears is the pain you’re experiencing from Hill’s writing, not from some out-of-body experience invoked by the beauty of Turner’s painting, which, by the way, is abstract with some figurative elements.
The rest of Hill’s column pulled the same tricks again and again, with some headache inducing statements of the bleeding obvious by Bill Nuttall , an advert for Artlink magazine - that august publication people turn to when they want to know what’s happening in post-Colonialism or “the body” - and a mention of a caligraphy show and an exhibition at Roslyn Oxkley 9 Gallery.
"We tend to think of calligraphy as an art form of the past. Go along to this show and be disabused..."
No kidding, eh? We're always looking to be disabused, and if it's about calligraphy, all the better.
John McDonald was a destructive, mean and conservative voice in art criticism. His protégé Sebastian Smee was simply an idiot with nothing to say – as his subsequent career as an international journalist for Oxygen , writing shallow and ridiculous articles on Picasso and Matisse ,has proven. Bruce James, a friendly fellow and supportive voice for contemporary art, ultimately turned out to be fickle, giving up on the politics at Fairfax for an anonymous career within the ABC.
It's hard to remember life before the current crop of nobodies - people like Elwyn Lynn, Terence Maloon and, way back in the 70s, Nancy Borlaise -people who had an opinion, could express it, and made a contribution to the art world. It just didn’t seem possible that it could get worse at the SMH – and then along came Peter Hill. As the boys in Spinal Tap put is so eloquently, Peter Hill is filling a badly needed void.
Labels: art criticism, old media
This entry was posted
on Thursday, February 12, 2004 at 3:22 pm.
