the art life

From John Kelly...

Entering the TARDIS - an acronym for Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space , I go walkabout within the monolith that contains The Meaning of Life. I race across time eating Mad Max's dust as he tears across the Australian desert, his speed revealed in the same way as Major Steve Austin's was in The Six Million Dollar Man. The bionic Major could run so fast that in the 1970s the only way to reveal the pace of his motion was to show it slowly, a paradox that still bemuses me today. The TARDIS shudders as we leap the 30 years into the future and land at the 2009 Australian Venice Biennale pavilion where we meet Dr Blair French, who is describing in high definition a "major" exhibition that has not yet happened.

A key scene in this film is when a "helmeted figure in black emerges from inside the moving car through the side window, slowly mounts the roof... Every nuance of his movement is emphasised in slow-motion, transforming a potentially dangerous act into " a formal study in physical virtuosity..." Outside the pavilion are the stage props, Mad Max's replica car. This 'Interceptor' embedded itself in my memory when the film was shot in the bleak town of Clunes where I spent my childhood holidays. Like my 1970s memories, a motorbike has crashed into the wall of the pavilion, whilst back inside, the projections "on either side of a suspended screen...effectively links both levels of the Pavilion...In this context no single work dominates any other, but located as it is at the centre of the Pavilion...Interceptor Surf Sequence will without doubt linger in one's memory."


Shaun Gladwell, Roadkill positions, 2009.
Photographs. Photo Josh Raymond.
Courtesy the artist/Anna Schwartz Gallery.

When Australians fly to Venice, we, like Doctor Who, become natural time-travelers for we are always going back in time. Art mediums that are time-based can also manipulate it directionally and, being digital, it means communication can be globally instantaneous. This, however, does not explain the efficiency of the Australia Council for the Arts, who have already published the catalogue essays, acknowledgements and descriptions of site-specific installations six weeks before the Venice Biennale has actually opened. It creates a challenge. Can one review an exhibition before it exists? So step into my TARDIS and let's be "dimensionally transcendental.". Before we leave it might be worth considering the questions that one should ask the good doctor: can a memory linger, without doubt, before that memory has been experienced in context?



Doctor Who visited Venice where, along with an 'amphibian gondola' he "...met a curator obsessed with his art collection and your typical mad cult leader." Venice is a city that can be easily stereotyped, as Monty Python did in the 1979 film in which John Cleese delivered that memorable line "...not more of those fucking gondolas." Australia is a country that can also be cliché-ridden, with imagery being used to simplify the complexity of a continent - stereotypical images that might be viewed as coming from "a long time ago on a Sunday far, far away'" and not from the sophisticated cosmopolitan postcolonial Australia of today.

Doug Hall, the Australian commissioner for this year's Biennale pavilion, emphasizes that Venice is not about cliché, whilst telling us he is aware of 'cultural diplomacy'. He believes that Australia's presence in Venice is "...about international representation and not...banal or twee or heavy-handed political gestures." According to Hall, there were three elements to his role: "...the selection procedure, then fund raising - and that's about people with interest, influence and money, the ricochet effect beyond the immediate goal. Then there's the advocacy of Venice: making Australia look very, very good." One might ask how much the second element directly impacted on the first and third?

Shaun Gladwell was selected to represent Australia on the back of his success at the 2007 Biennale, where a video work was included in the Robert Storr exhibition, Think with the senses - feel with the mind. Storm sequence (2000) was commented upon by Richard Dorment, art critic for the London Telegraph, who stated, "If I had to pick the single young artist in this Biennale destined for future greatness, it would be the Australian Shaun Gladwell..." Dorment gave no reason for this prediction; however, soon after Venice, the DVD ricocheted into auction and sold for a "blockbuster" $84,000Aud.

Dorment is not just an art critic, he is an important cultural commentator who writes for the New York Review of Books. He is a well-read cultural critic who in 2007 heavily criticized the British Biennale representative for being a "phony." Is Tracey Emin a phony reality-TV artist as Dorment suggested? If she is, Tracey has built a career on this negative criticism that seems to paradoxically add to her ‘success’ as an artist – some might think she welcomes it. Strangely, Emin shares Dorment's view about Gladwell because as a curator she selected him for her room in last year's Royal Academy summer exhibition. It begs the question: can you be a phony reality-TV artist at the same time as being a cultural visionary?

Others also knew that Gladwell was destined for great things. "In 2006 he was awarded a two-year Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts Board to research and produce five major works for several international biennales and commissions..." With the help of the Australia Council, MADDESTMAXIMVS was "begun in earnest in 2007..." a year before he was selected to exhibit this work at Venice. Four other artists were also selected to show in the other space, the Ludoteca. They were Vernon Ah Kee, Ken Yonetani, Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro.

If Doctor Who had been in the room of vigorous democratic debate, he would have heard some other ideas put forward by Doug Hall. In February 2008, upon being appointed by the Australia Council as Commissioner for Venice, Hall said that he wanted something that "...didn't mark Australia as derivative..," something "...genuinely different...that I think makes it peculiarly Australian."

He was not referring to an actor 'surfing' on top of Priscilla, the Queen of the Desert, but his admiration for the indigenous 'Western Desert' painting movement. However, he was very quick to point out that "...no decision has been made, and a program of virtuous cultural democracy has yet to tu[r]n its course." Hall was obviously out-voted, for Western Desert painting was not selected for Venice, unless you regard Gladwell's images of the landscape around Broken Hill, with its road-kill kangaroos, blue skies and red desert, looking like a typical Aussie beer commercial, as the archetypal, stereotypical, clichéd and barren western desert? I wake in fright in "...the Pavilion that is itself treated by the artist as a form of sculptural vessel, conveying a coherent yet vigorously associative expression of a place a world removed from the Giardini."


Vernon Ah Kee, Cant chant (Wegrewhere), 2007 - 2009.
Video production still.
Photo: the artist.
Courtesy the artist/Milani Gallery.
All that is missing from Gladwell's imagery is a large monolith and some token Aboriginals with a spear and shield. Vernon Ah Kee rises from the pages of The Australian to create an interesting debate with his 'Commissioner': "The problem with art produced and retailed through art centres - if you want to call it art - is that the artists don't understand their role ... I'm talking about the narrow definition of Aboriginal art that the people in remote communities live up to, to their own detriment." The article suggested that Ah Kee believes "...it's important for Aboriginal artists to understand that art in Western culture is a commodity, and the art market an industry that runs like a well-oiled machine. The artist's role is to work within that system to create exceptional art." "Ah Kee will be showing a video in which an Aboriginal surfer appears like a new-age warrior, skimming the waves on a board transformed into a weapon, with the bright markings of a shield from the rainforest region of north Queensland."

Sitting in the catalogue between Ah Kee, an aboriginal artist with Chinese heritage, and Ken Yonetani, an Australian who recently immigrated from Japan, is Felicity Fenner's essay, where she tells us "...a politically-led reassessment of Australia's place in the world has resulted in a surge of interest...in Aboriginal art, and a new Australian preparedness to engage with the cultures of neighbouring Asian and Pacific nations." What was Doug Hall saying about cultural diplomacy and heavy-handed political messages? With the selection of work that has "... a 'brand personality' that has characteristically Australian qualities of being down-to-earth and accessible," all we need is an environmental message about the Great Barrier Reef, and Ken Yonetani delivers it.


Ken Yonetani, Sweet Barrier Reef (detail), 2005.
Sugar, 160 x 1200 x 600 cm, installation view, Artspace, Sydney.
Photo: Darren Hopton.
Courtesy the artist/Dianne Tanzer Gallery.

"Sweet Barrier Reef is an installation about coral bleaching, made from white sugar and inspired by the form of a Japanese Zen garden. A symbol of colonisation and modernisation, sugar also represents human desire and consumption, both of which fuel the industries impacting disastrously on fragile ocean environments."

This large, dainty and pretty-looking sculpture is 12 metres long, so to remind you to look hard at the detail, a close-up photo in the catalogue reveals the obvious genitalia references. I can only assume that the work matches the recently introduced genitalia protocols laid down by the Australia Council. Before I am bleached upon by an exquisite-looking phallic sugar reef I travel through the website of Imperial Slacks, where I see that Sean Cordeiro and Clare Healey participated in an artist-run initiative with Gladwell. Their work, Life span, is a:

"...site-specific installation..." that "...gathers the world's dreams, fears and desires into a neatly ordered stack... There are 195,774 videos in this towering monolith...Collectively the content of this VHS monument ruminates on the human condition, on the meaning of life and on mortality...The juxtaposition between popular videos and the church setting serves to heighten the significance both of the work and of the church...an apt metaphor not only for society's contrived packaging of experience and emotion, but also for the ultimate transience of life itself."

I find my camouflaged TARDIS in the church, underneath this mausoleum of Video Art. I enter and travel along the Meaning of life, picking up one last mint before buying myself a replica 'interceptor' from www.madmaxcars.com. I drive recklessly to the British pavilion "a few years from now..." where I am told another Time Lord, Tracey Emin, who is really a Dalek, has refused to give back the space beyond Thunderdome, whilst holding John Cleese captive in a gondola. I tell her that recording one's experience of a site-specific installation, before it is installed, is a "contrived packaging of experience and emotion" that becomes a monolithic visual merchandising display for a curatorial little shop of horrors. Tracey turns to me and says in that piercing but well-oiled mechanical scream - "Exterminate, exterminate, exterminate!"


This an edited version of an article that appeared in Circa Art Magazine.

Labels: international exhibitions, John Kelly, Venice Biennale, x-post

From John Kelly...

Having arrived in Australia from Europe we book our accommodation online. Wotif.com finds us in a hotel in Kent Street Sydney. As with many of Sydney’s boutique hotels the foyer is dominated by a large decorative Australian artwork, Cadence #3, a tapestry by Robert Owen.

During our week in the harbourside city the news informs us that the global economy has fallen off a cliff, caused by what has become known as the international credit crunch. In a dramatic move the Australian Prime Minister announces an economic stimulus package that will use the billions of dollars of budget surplus to pump prime the local economy. It is an attempt to avoid the international financial tsunami engulfing the local economy. This destructive wave is the signal that a global recession is on the way. However what good might come out of such an event? For recessions are obviously painful for many, including artists, but also opportunities for fundamental structural evolution in society.


Yinka Shonibare MBE, Dorian Gray.
As the world’s stock markets go into meltdown we head down the road to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Two exhibitions are on show. The first is Primavera, a survey of young Australian artists. When quizzed, a well-informed attendant tells us that the name is from the Italian meaning spring and is an annual exhibition. I ask how many Australian’s speak Italian and she informs me that Primavera is also the title of a Botticelli painting.

Upstairs is Yinka Shonibare M.B.E. Shonibare is a British born artist with a Nigerian background. He is probably just about as British establishment as any artist can be. He has the Medal of the British Empire (M.B.E.) to prove it. According to the catalogue. “He accepted the award with relish…” although it is noted elsewhere that the use of the title by the artist is “…an ironic dig at the British Honours system.”

Emphasizing his established reputation the Tate has collected his work. Originally the Tate was set up to collect and promote British Art and has now evolved to contextualize British art alongside international Art through the Tate Modern. It does it extremely successfully. Interestingly, the Tate is named after a benefactor whose sugar coated fortune was made using slave labour in the most brutal of fashion so its history with black artists is complex. Shonibare shares some of this history having descended from a nineteenth-century Yoruba King who was also a slave owner.

As I struggle to understand how irony can be coated with relish we read of Shonibare’s importance. This is based on his use of wax fabrics that are strongly identified with Africa. Shonibare realized that they are actually designed and made in Europe and were sent to Africa because the Dutch exporters could not sell the fabric into Indonesia, their intended market. Instead they sold the material into western Africa where it became popular, particularly during the fifties and sixties, when many African states were gaining independence. Apparently people decided to wear this material instead of obvious western clothes as a sign of African liberation, which is how the material paradoxically came to be identified as African. It is an odd piece of history and the exhibition to my eye is the visual merchandising of it, utilizing repetitive window display techniques, including headless mannequins. The exception to this are the paintings, which are painted on the material in an awkward and clumsy manner and do not share the slickness of the ‘video’ piece or the photography where ,unlike the mannequins, everybody keeps their head.

The catalogue twice repeats that Shonibare’s work is a link “to the tangled interrelationships between Africa and Europe.” This may well be true - but what makes this exhibition truly intriguing is not the work but that the exhibition has originated from within an Australian art institution and afterwards will travel to the Brooklyn Museum and the National Museum of African Art in the US. As I understand it, an Australian art institution has imported a British establishment artist, value adding further international credibility and scholarship to his work and is then exporting his exhibition to America where he has already exhibited and been written about extensively. Robert Hobbs states in Yinka Shonibare, [p.25] that Shonibare has had 108 group shows and 33 solo museum and gallery exhibitions. He has featured on the covers of Art and America, Artforum, Art News, Sculpture, as well as “an elaborate New York Times Style magazine spread.” It raises this question. Is the MCA mimicking the role of a colonial Dutch company in importing European art into a local market only to then export it to a third country?


Sticking it in...
Installing Giuseppe Penone's bronze tree for the Biennale of Sydney.
After the MCA we head off to the Art Gallery of New South Wales where we find two enormously large Kiefer paintings dominating the galleries. They are powerful works, however, having been placed in a Eurocentric mood, I ask what is the relevance of post-war German angst to this collection and Sydney in general? Is the AGNSW, like Tate Modern, attempting to contextualize Australian art by juxtaposing it against the international? Or is it grandiose European trophy art that is being used to negate the complexity of the regional?

We move on to admire more European war angst in Otto Dix’s etchings and then for some Asian regional respite the Lost Buddha’s. However we avoid the Monet exhibition and the obligatory shop and instead go down to the basement where contemporary Aboriginal art is symbolically segregated. This seems to answer my earlier question - the AGNSW is no Tate Modern although its relationship with black artists is obviously just as complex and unresolved.

On the way back up we stop for lunch at the gallery’s splendid restaurant, which we regard as a great deal better than Tate Modern’s. I decide on the snapper and Christina has the pork chop. When the meals arrive our conversation is animated and the waitress wrongly presumes I am getting the chop and Christina the fish. Our conversation centres on a rock up a tree in the gardens opposite the gallery, which we encountered on our arrival. It is curiously placed and I am unsure whether it is part of the gallery collection. We approached the information desk where I asked the receptionist the name of the artist who had created the rock in the tree and the date of when it was made. “It is by an Italian artist who was involved in Arte Povera” she replied. “It was part of the Sydney Biennale and we are trying to raise the money to buy it.” I put on a straight face and ask; “Do you think the Italian artist might have been influenced by the Australian artist John Kelly and his ‘Cow up a tree’?” She laughs dismissively and informs me that; “Oh no I don’t think they look this way!” “Oh”, I reply, “John Kelly exhibited that work in Europe on the Champs Elysee back in 1999 - maybe he saw it over there?” “Oh no it is from the 40’s or 50’s” she continues. “Are you sure?” I enquire. Helpfully she rings the curator for the artist’s name and - upon being informed that the artist is Giuseppe Penone - we look up the catalogue and find the work was completed in 2007. Penone’s work often deals with the image of the tree and has done so for a considerable time. However there are some obvious similarities with Cow up a tree. Both quote previous artists work heavily influenced by events in WWII, both use bronze, are 8 metres in height and both are realistic looking trees with an object stuck in the fork of the branches. At the very least a visual dialogue seems to exist. In 1999 ‘Cow up a tree’ received widespread coverage in the European press during Champs de la Sculpture.


John Kelly, Cow Up A Tree. 1999.
Penone’s piece is obviously quoting Joseph Beuys work in Kassell, Germany (during Documenta 7) where Beuys wanted to plant thousands of Oak trees and place a basalt rock next to each one. It forms an obvious connection with Kiefer who was also heavily influenced by Joseph Beuys. Beuys and Kiefer “share a concern with German trauma in the wake of the Second World War.” As I look out the restaurant window, over the gardens to where the Japanese attacked the USS Chicago in Sydney Harbour I again ponder why German angst dominates the AGNSW and can only think it is a transference from our own colonial past that resides in the basement of our minds.

Well before WWII, Cezanne also painted trees and during our short stay in Sydney we learn that the AGNSW is currently on another fund raising adventure tapping up generous donors to buy a ‘new’ Cezanne. I would have though all the best Cezanne’s were now in museums but apparently not. The price, over sixteen million Australian dollars!

Recessions are interesting times and it is when the unthinkable can be thought and structural evolution is possible. So it might be time for Australia to take its cultural cringe to a new level and think about post-war Europe as a model in the way our art institutions are organised? For ‘wotif’ we created a type of ‘European Union’ of State and regional galleries with the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) acting as the cultural equivalent of ‘our’ Brussels. The state and Territorial galleries would then form the member states of this Union. This institution could even have a rotating Presidency to further mimic the EU!

Our Brussels, the NGA, would take care of foreign policy when it comes to collecting internationally lifting the burden from the State and Territorial galleries. This would allow them to promote and exhibit their state and territorial interests within the context of a broader Australian art history whilst the NGA would be charged with contextualizing the national against the international across Australia.

Why should we do this? Well, think how ludicrous it is that at the start of a deep global recession the AGNSW is spending over sixteen million dollars on a Cezanne when the NGA and the NGV already have two paintings by this artist and the NGV’s is currently in storage! It is appropriately titled An uphill road. If you are anti continental Europe and prefer a British model, think of this new institution as being like the Tate Modern with the other seven-state and territorial galleries playing the role of satellite institutions just as Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives do.

This unified institution would become a powerful and important player internationally. Australia’s combined resources would truly become a first class collection of international Art that each gallery struggles to achieve individually. The singular union of cultural institutions would then be in a position to place Australian art within a broader international context just as the Tate Modern does with British art.

Using this ‘European’ model, the AGNSW can exhibit a Cezanne without spending a penny - sorry a cent and that is not a euro cent! For the Art, just like Europeans would be able to freely travel between the members of the union. Then wotif the sixteen million Cezanne dollars was spent on Australian art in NSW? It might even be recession busting and then it wouldn’t matter whether the MCA mimicked Dutch colonial practice or not.

John Kelly is an Australian, English and Irish artist. See – www.johnkelly.eu

Labels: art museums, John Kelly, public galleries, sculpture