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the art life

"...it's just like saying 'the good life'".

The Art Life

Thursday, January 27, 2005
Hello, and welcome to The Art Life for 2005. Before we get into the art world and all its exciting news and exhibitions, we need to mention a few things.

First off, the Art Life is a blog, an online web log, like a diary, kind of like a newsletter. It’s not the journal of record, it’s not here to take the place of anything, and we don’t hold our opinions above anyone else’s. You are free to read or not to read, that is your choice, and we are free to write and say what we like. Of course, we try to be accurate but sometimes we make mistakes or factual errors or perhaps go too far, and we are the first to admit it. That is the nature of the thing.

The Art Life is a semi-anonymous art collective with a career death wish. Little by little we are alienating ourselves from those who would support us, attracting the ire of those who hate us and even the occasional death threat (see below). But the thing to remember is that we are unaligned and do not have a vested interest in anything other than to glorify our own names in the pages of art history.

Another thing to remember is that The Art Life often employs what is known as “irony”, that is “the use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning; an expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning; a literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect.”

Sometimes we fail to express that irony properly so we have decided to use colour coding with irony, say, when we write something with an ironic meaning, we’ll make the text red. For example:


“But the thing to remember is that we are unaligned and do not have a vested interest in anything other than to glorify our own names in the pages of art history.”


The last thing we want to mention is that the Comments section below each post can be activated by clicking on the link. When that window pops up and you see what other Art Life readers have said, you’re on your own. We can’t take responsibility for anything that is written there except under certain circumstances: when someone is attacked, defamed or libeled; when someone uses a name other than a pseudonym or their own real name - for example singing your name “Nick Tsoutas” when you are not the director of Artspace; and when someone is gratuitously offensive. In these cases we reserve the right to edit posts, or, in extreme examples, ban readers. Don't make us mad...

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Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying

Although we had expected to go to sleep over the Christmas-New Year’s break, we were troubled and couldn’t properly drift off. Those die hard artists who run Peloton actually kept the gallery operating between December 25 and now, even having a group show. We salute their dedication and as we lay on the beach sunning ourselves and drinking our favourite summer drink (two shots of vodka, ginger beer, lime juice, a wedge of lime and a generous amount of ice served in a tall glass) we couldn’t help but think of those people sitting there on the mean streets of Chippendale, looking out the window like forlorn Christmas puppies, waiting for a visitor, any visitor, to come in.

The Sun Herald is designed for those in a coma and we read it religiously. The Party of The Week (Sun Herald, S, December 26, 2004) was Emma Balfour’s poetry reading at Hermes. Guests included actor bloke Aden Young, George W.’s daughter Lauren Bush and many others...


“Hosting the most chic pre Christmas soiree, Hermes transformed its terrace with bright orange confetti and hot pink stools to celebrate former model Emma Balfour's poetic debut. Formerly one of the fashion world's favourite faces, Balfour now prefers a lower profile, publishing a book of her highly personal poetry and photographs of various beds in which she's slept. (Tracey Emin eat your heart out.) No one doubted the elegance of the evening and the deliciousness of the miniature turkey sandwiches and mince pies, but what about the literature? Any good? "The terrace looked beautiful,” noted one anonymous guest, “but I studied literature at university, so no comment on the poems.”


We had only been on holiday two days and already we had reached the absolute nadir of summer. A few thousand miles away, the Indian Ocean was claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. You would have thought that such a startling and horrifying spectacle as the Asian Tsunami would have made everyone a little more circumspect in their idiocy, but we were wrong. While John Howard jetted here and there through the region looking like a “statesman”, Alexander Downer was flown to the disaster zone to make observations such as “the wave must have been very strong”. While the Australian government ended up pledging $1 billion in aid with strings attached (you must congratulate us on being so generous), Mark Latham kept a low profile, being on “annual leave” and reminding us all that a job at the top of the Labor Party is the same as it is for any other public servant – do not disturb until after Australia Day.

With such horribleness everywhere, we took our pleasures where we could find them. Normally we steer clear of the Sydney Festival but somehow we found ourselves at a performance of The Black Rider. In the great tradition of Sly without Robbie and Kruder without Dorfmeister, we had the opera without Marianne Faithful. Oh well – the bloke who played the devil looked like Bono and he had a great debauched German accent. The opera itself was like what you would imagine it to be - if someone said “experimental theatre” to you and you imagined Weimar cabaret with expressionistic sets then you were spot on – that is exactly what it was. It also had a great score by Tom Waites and a libretto by William. S. Burroughs that turned two and half hours of crazy body movements and visually spectacular set pieces into an elaborate metaphor for drug addiction.

The real excitement of the night was in the foyer. We often wonder what a “theatre crowd” looks like and to our disappointment they are much like your regular art crowd. We did see a woman sitting on her own in the middle of the mezzanine lounge ostentatiously reading a copy of Oscar and Lucinda while drinking a glass of wine, but the rest of the summer in Sydney people were a let down. We were about to give up hope when we saw a girl who was probably no older than 13 wearing a brand new Marilyn Manson t-shirt standing alone. Her skin was very light, her dyed black hair formed a high, regal hair line and with her matching black skirt and boots, she looked like rock royalty.

The Sydney Festival has put its stamp on a few exhibitions around town. The Bridget Riley show at the Museum of Contemporary Art is a corker. Featuring the best of her early work (and a lot else), this is the best show in town. Unfortunately, like the Marianne Faithful-less opera, this is a cut down version of Riley’s career retrospective that was on at the Tate in London in 2003. Some, like Sebastian Smee, feel as though we have got a better deal of it than having to see everything worth seeing (he claims the MCA show is better “paced” – whatever that means) but we can’t help but feel short changed. Where’s the beef?

Across town at the Art Gallery of NSW, the other big show of the moment is the Bill Henson retrospective. We’re not huge Henson fans. We know the work is good – you really only need to look at it to understand that – it’s just we’ve just never been that taken with the artist’s whole aesthetic. We like the cut screens and the collages, some of the early work is great too, but we feel oddly cut off from the enthusiasm of just about everyone else. It probably just boils down to personal taste – we prefer the cooler climate of Andreas Gursky or, at home, Robyn Stacey. It’s just us.

We did, however, like the shop at the end of the exhibition space with cameras for people who want to get into the whole photography thing, two books on Henson (the $85 catalogue already sold out), novels by W. G. Sebald and Franz Kafka, DVDs of Nosferatu and copies of the latest Australian Art Collector. We think that is what you call "covering your bases."

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Happy New Year 1999!

So here we are back from our holidays and although we expected everything to be the same, it’s different. Except that the difference is that it’s more of the same. The year is 1999, John Howard is your Prime Minister, Kim Beazley is the leader of the opposition and John McDonald is the art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald. And it’s just the way we like it – comforting, obvious and repetitious.

Our much loved Sydney Morning Herald art critic Peter Hill, filling out the end of his contract, gave up even trying, giving into repetition in a rather startling way. To run out the clock, Hill produced a series of snooze-inducing articles he could have written anywhere, any time – a page long discussion on “recent” acquisitions at the Art Gallery of NSW and the National Gallery of Victoria, his review of the Anne Landa Award after it had already been on for a month. His last column – Saturday, January 22 - was a preview of the year ahead in art. Reading the article was an eerie experience:

“The art world is one of the few areas where it is possible to predict the future, for the very good reason that most major exhibitions are planned so many years in advance. The blockbuster museum exhibitions that we will enjoy in London, Sydney, New York and Madrid in, say, 2007 are all in place now, and what is shown in the museums is also what will fill our art magazines and daily newspapers. A few exhibitions - the sort that redefine the art world - such as Magiciens de la Terre, which was mounted by the Pompidou Centre in Pans in 1989 - might have a gestation period of almost a decade. So the future is already here if we care to search it out.”


We checked back through our archives and found that one of the very first articles we had written on Hill was about an article he published on February 7, 2004 previewing the year ahead in art. It begun thus:

“It is 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 galleries to museum blockbusters are planned so many years in advance. The great contemporary example of this was Magiciens de 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. 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 in 2005 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. There will be a commercial art fair in Melbourne later this year, and a biennale in Sydney mid-year. A lot of people are already working hard to make these things happen.”


Some have suggested that criticising Peter Hill was like shooting fish in a barrel – it was too easy, too cruel – but let us just say one more time for the record, we were never against him. We liked that he liked a lot of what we enjoyed in art and although we decried his perennial references to his favourite artists, the space-wasting quotations of other sources, obscure Brit-relevant references and spurious, unsubstantiated claims, we still liked him. He wasn’t knee-jerk anti-contemporary art, he didn’t make a habit of parading his prejudices and he was, for the most part, upbeat. The problem we had was that he was a shit writer.

Someone must have been listening. The time of Peter Hill has passed and we have entered the age of the second coming of John McDonald. It must have being galling being forced to write puff pieces on Bill Henson for the Australian Financial Review Magazine when your true calling is as a crypto-conservative cultural warrior for the disenfranchised silent majority. Appearing balanced has always been McDonald’s toughest gig – the man is a fountain of invective disguised as reason and when he is forced to take a neutral view it comes off as strained and absurd.

We keep a copy of the first issue of Australian Art Review magazine in the Art Life office. We always like looking at the cover lines to remind ourselves of just how impossible it is for McDonald to play it straight. The cover story for that issue was on Robert Klippel and the scintillating cover line read:

ROBERT KLIPPEL Australia’s Greatest Sculptor – the art community agrees to disagree.

We have tried to maintain some sort of emotional equilibrium since we found out McDonald was back in the top job, having scuppered his beloved East West Arts magazine after just one tepid issue for the main game of the SMH’s arts pages. Maybe things would be different this time? Maybe he had mellowed? Then along came a story last Saturday by McDonald that served as a little taster – a completely pointless article on the cultural need for the concept of the “barbarian”. Reading through the story our hopes that things might have changed were dashed when McDonald decided that he could fire off a few poison darts in the middle of the article. The targets? Curators, contemporary art, the Australia Council, publicly funded museums, the self styled avant garde. The usual.

We’ve all been down this road before and none of this should come as a surprise, but it doesn’t make it any easier. With McDonald at the helm, there will be galleries he will never visit, artists whose work he will never consider, arguments and debates he won’t bother to understand and hatchets that will never be buried. It’s business as usual and we’d better get used to it. John Howard is your Prime Minister and John McDonald is your art critic.

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In The Interests of Accuracy, "Most" Video Art Is Hateful

Sebastian Smee wrote to us in December with a few complaints. We run his email in full:


“May I correct a couple of points? I never wrote “I hate video art.” I was so impressed with the various video components of the 2000 Sydney Biennale that, although I had already written one review of the biennale as a whole, I begged permission to write a second review exclusively devoted to video art (SMH, July 8, 2000). I started the review with the line: “I hate MOST video art” but everything that followed about the videos on show was entirely positive.

The artists I praised included Doug Aitken, Pipilotti Rist, Shirin Neshat, Tracey Moffatt, Bruce Nauman and Matthew Barney. You write that I say Matthew Barney is “shit”. But here is what I wrote about him in that review: Cremaster 2, I wrote, was “one of the highlights of this year’s Biennale”…”a ravishing, exquisitely shot montage of obliquely related scenes that build and build in tension.”; Barney is “one of the most jaw-droppingly ambitious artists at work today.” “If you can stand the obliqueness, the allusiveness and the tension-inducing pace, you are in for an experience that is disturbing, revelatory and poetic."

“Two or three years ago, I interviewed Barney and wrote a piece about him for the Daily Telegraph in London, which was adapted for The Australian and printed prior to the screenings of the Cremaster Cycle at the Art Gallery of NSW. I did, as you report, start that article by quoting Janet Malcolm to the effect that “the spell of any work of art can be shattered by the sound of the nasty little voice in one’s head saying, ‘But this is ridiculous.’” It’s hard to know how to improve on a well-expressed idea, but I suppose the point of the quote is that ANY work of art is vulnerable to this voice, since, on one level, all art is ridiculous. It is nonetheless worth suppressing the voice if we want the riches of art to be available to us, even if - as may be the case with the Cremaster Cycle - the voice is “unusually persistent” (because of the convoluted nature of the work, its deliberate sense of conceptual overload, etc). (That article, by the way, was not a review, but a feature, in which I was instructed to introduce Barney to skeptical readers who may not have heard of him.)

“As well as misquoting what I have written about Barney in a way that presents, as my opinion, the exact opposite of what I believe, you misquote my comments on the Anne Landa Awards at the AGNSW. Like you, I did not like much of what I saw in that show. But rather than wasting a 1500-word review picking it to bits, I used the vast majority of the piece to praise video works that I did like, including the Gladwell video, the installation by Van Sowerwine, and, above all, a video at the MCA by Destiny Deacon.

"I have been told that I am much in your thoughts. How nice. I am aware that my job as an art critic makes me fair game – and I would not do it if I minded. I believe that the more robust and intelligent discussion about art on websites and in newspapers and magazines, the better. But only the most magnanimous kind of fool would encourage this level of discussion and this total disregard for accuracy. - Sebastian Smee”


We wrote back to Smee and asked him if it were true that he gave away bottles of Calvados and pasta making machines but he did not choose to dignify our questions with a response. Which is a pity, really, because we would have pointed out that what we had argued was that Smee’s cynical default position regarding video art was consistent with pretty much everything he has ever written about contemporary art. We would have also pointed out that while Smee did in fact say some fairly neutral things about Barney, he might also care to recall that he described a heckler being present at the screening of Cremaster 2 and that, somehow, this was symptomatic of that niggling voice of doubt one apparently feels in front of contemporary art. (Perhaps if Smee had stuck it out to the end of the screening he would have discovered that the heckler was in fact a mentally disabled adult in the company of his elderly mother.)

Of course, we would have said these things but as Smee says he doesn’t want a debate with people such as us (with our flagrant disregard for accuracy and all), we can only imagine what his responses might have been. We’re just flattered that he took the time to write to us and to thank us for being so attentive to his writing - and we’re also pretty damn chuffed he used his usual formula of nice-up-front-disguised-insult-at-the-end he uses in his reviews.

But one last point. Smee isn’t so much on our “minds” as being rather like a persistent ringing in the ears – eventually it will go away but for the moment it’s very annoying.

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Mail Room

On the 30th of December we discovered the following brief but to-the-point comment attached to our review of the Year in Art exhibition at the S.H. Ervin Gallery from November.

“You are a fuckwit with no life.”


Perhaps ruminating on what they had said, the anonymous poster came back the next day to make it a little clearer:

“Sorry, I spilt that too quickly, a little like your blog, impotent at best, but you invective is infectious. What I really meant to say is as follows; you are a Dickless fuckwit with no life.”


On January 2nd, our mystery poster came out of hiding and sent us an email under the subject heading You Maggot:

“Unlike you, coward, I shall stab you in the front. Keep on hiding behind your nowheresville little blog, right where you belong, you insignificant shit eating maggot. Never insult my family name again - Xavier de Medici.”


We had to really think hard to remember what we’d said about eX de Medici to warrant what at first glance looked like a genuine death threat. Stab us in the front? We delved back through the posts:

“At first glance, two large drawings looked great and we resisted going up and have a gander until the end - sort of like saving the dessert 'til last so you walk away with a sweet taste. eX de Medici had two drawings, Skull (Willow) and Skull (Camo). They are big, clean and are meticulously done. Then we discovered something kind of crap - there was a written explanation of the works hanging next to the two pieces. What a package - pretentious name and an explanation that makes sure that you walk away with what the artist thinks you should know. To paraphrase Tony Montana, we don't need that shit in our lives.”


We’re still not sure how you get eX from Xavier, it must be some kind of Latin thing, and to be honest we liked the drawings, just not all the unnecessary writing and explanations. And we thought the nom de plume was silly. But if it really is his name, we're sorry about that. So, full of Xmas good cheer and New Year’s tidings, we advised, hey man, cool out, we just didn't like your art work. Chill. Happy new year.

But eX was having none of it:

“Next time you dont like someones work, be a grown up and consider the close line you draw to defamation in a public arena. By the way you little twit, I certainly dont like your skanky boorish work either nor will I 'chill' as you so patronisingly suggest. Get Fucked.”


It must be some kind of achievement to both a boor and a skank, but we didn’t really think about that as the hate steaming off the page was palpable. We mentioned the possible death threat to someone who told us that Xavier De Medici is a tattoo artist who lives and works in Kings Cross. We had images of Gypsy Jokers dropping by the Art Life office with a big chain so we decided to do some research. Imagine our total and utter confusion when it turned out that Xavier was a woman who lived in Canberra and was good mates with Peter Garrett!

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Ker-ching! Rosetzky $25,000 Richer!

Tuesday, January 18, 2005
The Art Gallery of NSW has just announced the winner of the Anne Landa Award. David Rosetzky is the happy camper who gets a cheque for $25,000 beating out stiff competition from favourites Shaun Gladwell and Guy Benfield.

"David Rosetzky receives $25,000 and his work, Untouchable, is acquired for the Gallery's collection. Commenting on winning the Anne Landa Award, David Rosetzky said: "I am very excited and appreciative about receiving the Anne Landa Award. To have a video installation in the Art Gallery of New South Wales' collection is a great honour. The award will enable me to further develop my practice as I plan to use the prize to buy equipment and time in the studio to work on new projects. I am very thankful to Sophie Landa in initiating this award and exhibition with the Art Gallery of New South Wales as it helps raise the profile of contemporary new media art in Australia and also provides artists with much needed opportunities and support."



What a nice young man.

(The Art Life returns next week).

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We want to wake up...

Thursday, January 13, 2005
It can't be true, can it? John McDonald to take over from Peter Hill as the art critic of The Sydney Morning Herald? We're taking the blue pill now...

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