the art life

The Australia Day Honours announced on Friday celebrate everything this country is about – fairness, honesty, having a go, mateship… and shitting it in at the last second. Who better personifies everything our great nation has come to stand for than Steven Bradbury, gold medal winning skater at the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympic Games? Honoured with a Medal of the Order of Australia for “services to sport” Bradbury is a bloke after our own hearts having won his gold in Salt Lake City by being the last man standing after the rest of the field were taken out in a freak collision. It might have actually meant something if Bradbury had even been trying, but as the great man said himself:

I was the oldest bloke in the field and I knew that skating four races back to back, I wasn't going to have any petrol left in the tank. So there was no point in getting there and mixing it up because I was going to be in last place anyway. So I might as well stay out of the way and be in last place and hope that some people get tangled up.

Fuckin’ yay.

 

In completely unrelated news, the visual arts were recognised in the Australia Day honours, but unlike sportspeople who are recognised simply for doing, visual arts tends to be recognised for making art visible rather than by actually making it. Janet Holmes a Court therefore as awarded a Companion of The Order of Australia [AC] for being a patron of the arts, lobbying for free-to-air children’s TV and “supporting victims of torture and trauma”. She also has her own eponymous art gallery in Perth which is a very nice air conditioned place with many fine works of art to rival the collections of the East Coast. Arise Madame Holmes a Court! [Fun Janet fact: the great lady’s assistant will not pass on faxes or emails that contain spelling mistakes or bad grammar as she is a busy woman and cannot abide such things!] In a similar vein, Guido Belgiorno-Nettis was awarded an Order of Australia [AM] for building infrastructure projects as head of his late father’s company Transfield Holdings. He also has something to do with the arts too, some sort of show that’s on every couple of years, but we’re not sure if that’s all that significant.

Tony Bond was awarded an OAM for “stimulating debate and public understanding of contemporary international art” through his work as a curator at the Art Gallery of NSW. Not many curators in Australia deserve an actual award for their work but Bond certainly does, and especially so considering the amount of crap he’s had to put up with for the last couple of decades for stimulating the “debate”. The current conspiracy theory is that The Esteemed Critic nominated Bond as some sort of fiendish “so crazy it may just work” ploy but it seems to have backfired terribly. Arise Sir Tony! Across town at the College of Fine Arts two staff members have been awarded OAM’s – Professors Elizabeth Ashburn and Peter Pinson Ashburn for “service to the visual arts, contemporary Australian art, education and the community” and Pinson for “service to the visual arts and as an educator, painter and writer and through contributions to arts organisations.”

The only actual artist we are aware if receiving an award is Denise Green who was awarded an AM for “services to the arts, particularly abstract painting and promoting Australian art and artists." How does someone who has lived in New York since 1966 manage to promote Australian art and artists? It all became clear when we remembered what a nice wicket Green is on, touring US Embassies promoting her book Metonymy In Contemporary Art: An Approach To Art Criticism and Modes of Creativity by Australian Aboriginal and Indian Thought. We have to confess to not having read her book but it’s on our “to read” pile just under The Great War, that new Andrew McGahan and the 2007 Guinness Book of World Records left over from Xmas. Since Green has been doing a great job perhaps Alexander Downer had a word to someone?

Labels: art politics, awards, press releases

When we heard that Eddie Maguire had been awarded an AM in the Queens Birthday Weekend honours list we decided to call our nearest Flight Centre and arrange to leave the country as soon as possible. Eddie is responsible for good works in the form of raising $5 million to support families affected by cancer. Fair enough we thought, until we also saw that Eddie was to be honoured for his services “to broadcasting”. If the Australian nation wants to honour Eddie Maguire for the Melbourne Footy Show and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, we may as well honour him for his services to knowledge and humility.

We hung up the phone when we saw that one of the country's greatest artists had been honoured. Martin Sharp was made a
Member of the Order of Australia for his services to “the pop art movement and support for young artists.” The Sydney Morning Herald ran a short profile:

"I feel quite young myself, apart from physically," said Sharp, who last year underwent a triple heart bypass and had a stroke. The artist is embracing new experiences delivered by his health shock with youthful zeal. "Air's a different experience - I used to smoke 75 cigarettes a day; it's how one copes," Sharp said.

Yet even as he savours an atmosphere unfiltered by tobacco, Sharp said the salvation delivered by St Vincent's Hospital surgeons has also sentenced him once again to the responsibilities of his calling.

"I thought I was going to leave a big mess behind - that at last I didn't have to do all that work, but now thanks to them, I have a lot more work to do," said Sharp, whose resume includes the iconic covers of Oz, the "obscenity trial" magazine published in 1960s London by expatriate Australians.

Fans of Sharp's hard edged comic book style and his gear 'n' groovy paintings would also note with glee that Sharp was responsible for the cover of Cream's Disraeli Gears, perhaps the 60s album cover, certainly equalling if not actually bettering Peter Blake's Sgt Pepper's cover for The Beatles. Sharp also took writing credit next to Eric Clapton for the song Tales of Brave Ulysses, the result of a meeting between the artist and guitarist in London in 1966. A good account of the artist's adventures and film making exploits with Garry Shead, and later with Tiny Tim, can be found at Miles Ago

It's nice to see Sharp getting the award, especially after surviving a triple bypass operation and a 70+ a day cigarette habit, and vowing to get back to his work after lingering on the edges of the world. We'd love to see a full scale exhibition of his work at some suitably ritzy gallery, perhaps as part of our fantasy exhibition we have been imagining for a while called From Bodgie To Grunge: Bad Boys Whatcha Gonna Do? that would feature the work of Sharp, Mike Brown and Adam Cullen (among others). The interview with Sharp in the SMH concludes withg a couple of observations that prove that Sharp has seen beyond:

"You can't live in the world of drugs; you might get some ideas there, but living in this dimension's hard enough," Sharp said.

"Looking at the world I do think it's been very well art-directed - there's a design there and it seems to make sense to fit into the design as best as possible."

Labels: awards, painting, pop art

You may not have noticed, but new media art is now collectible. That's the word from Australian Art Collector magazine who devoted a recent article to the phenomenon and interviewed collectors who are willing to plonk down anywhere from $300 to $10,000 for a DVD of an artist's work.

Melbourne artist David Rosetzky, for example, is riding the crest of this wave and at 34 years of age, is one of the leading artist of the medium. Works by him in editions of six go for three grand each. Compared to a painting these are low, low prices - but about $2995.00 more than you'd expect to pay in overnight rentals.

Realising that a huge body of work is emerging from artist's studios and they've doing sod all about it, the Art Gallery of NSW have announced the Anne Landa Award. Created by Edmund Capon and the late-Landa's daughter Sophie, the award

"will be part of a biennial curated exhibition of innovative film, video, and photomedia. It will also be the first acquisitive award in Australia to focus on this area of practice. One work will then be selected to enter the permanent collection of the AGNSW. The inaugural exhibition is to be curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe,Curator of Contemporary Australian Art."

Yay Wayne! Never has anyone done so much in recent years to up the quality of contemporary art at the AGNSW. (Well ok, yes, Victoria Lynn).

Anne Landa, a former AGNSW trustee who died in 2002, was co-ordinator of the Landa scholarship for young pianists, a member of the committee of the Sydney piano competition, an advisory council member for the College of Fine Arts and a director of Greater Union.

The AGNSW pulled a pretty decent coup by getting Academy Award winner and nominee Peter Weir to front the prize to the media. It was a pity that the Sydney Morning Herald writer covering the press launch was more interested in asking Weir what he thought of Lord of The Rings: The Return of The King's chances up against his own Master and Commander: The Far Side of The World than the to-doings of young new media artists. Still, the announcement of the prize made page 3.

Labels: awards, new media, public galleries, video art