the art life

The Guardian UK's art critic Jonathan Jones has written a blog entry on George Orwell and Salvador Dali. Jones's comments come as the Dali exhibiton Liquid Desire opens at the National Gallery of Victoria. Knowing that certain pundits are fond of quoting or citing Orwell when it comes to questions of social responsibility in the arts, Jones has an interesting take on Orwell's attitude to Dali and the avant garde:

George Orwell isn't usually thought of as an art critic. The author of 1984 is rightly remembered as one of the great political journalists and witnesses of the 20th century. But his contribution to the literature of modern art is also worth celebrating. In 1944 Orwell wrote an essay called Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí. It's a meditation on Dalí's book The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, and concludes that the artist's works are "diseased and disgusting, and any investigation ought to start out from that fact".

Never judge an article by its final sentence. Benefit of Clergy is a rare attempt to express, or to honestly attain, an ambivalent view of something that divides people into irreconcilable camps. Modern art is controversial; it was in Orwell's day and it is in ours. It's not meant to be consensual: it's meant to be a slap in the face.

In his notes on Dalí, it's clear that Orwell isn't a big fan of surrealism, the shock art of his time. He is genuinely repulsed by the scatological details of Dalí's art that today scarcely cause a shrug. But what's fascinating and laudable is his attempt to find what he calls a "middle position" between conservative philistines who condemn the avant garde, and its promoters who indulge everything that someone like Dalí does and refuse to see it in a moral or political context.

Labels: blogging, exhibitions

We really should have been paying attention these last couple of months.

First, we discovered that way back when, Andrew Bolt, that scion of climate change denialists and insightful political analysis had had a go at us.

Then, when the second Art Life TV series went to air in March Tim Blair - another right wing political pundit for the Terror and a stand-in on Insiders when Bolt is off checking annual temperature stats - got all upset about a turn of phrase in the voice over for episode two.

Then blow me down Dorothy Parker, "hard left one-woman media watch" [not Michael Duffy as posted here earlier, oops - thanks Dave for the heads up] had TWO MORE TILTS.

First up, Parker had a go over our op ed comment on the People's Choice winner of the Archibald. Her harshest criticism was to compare us to the great Jack McDuff:

Funny how the young turks, when they get a taste for exposure on the ABC and a page 3 picture story in The Sydney Morning Herald, turn into Esteemed Critics, having spent their time out of the sun sending up rotten Esteemed Critics like John McDonald and Sebastian Smee. Just a pity, and something of an irony, that as esteemed critics they seem incapable of saying anything sensible, or short of that, at least saying what they think.

Ow, that really hurts.

Parker also took us to task, in the guise of blogging on Tim Blair. Quoth Parker quoting Blair:

“The Kingpins are four artists exploring ideas about identity,” explains the ABC’s Andrew Frost. Then again, Frost also believes “ambiguity is the natural by-product of art that mocks the whole idea of certainty,” so who knows what the hell he’s talking about."

The standard approach of the blogger is take a quote, usually out of context, and then rain scorn down upon on it. It's something we've been doing for years but unlike our right wing brothers, we refrain from claiming that whatever it is that's been said is illogical. The great fake-out of people like Parker , Blair and Bolt [especially Bolt, good lord...] is to claim a higher understanding of "critical thinking", "logic" or "common sense". The statement quoted above is as simple as they come - when artists embrace ambiguity as part of their art, certainty is questioned. It's not that hard to understand is it?

When it comes to people who know nothing about art, a bit of book lernin' can go an awfully long way.

Speaking of people who know nuthin - Bolt had a go at us for - erm - made up reasons of his own invention

ABC art critic Andrew Frost says it’s wrong to judge art by its content as well as form, and attacks another critic as “biased” for doing so:

It’s quite a natural state for any critic whose credibility is staked on the dubious notion that art must be judged on quality and virtue alone...Recent art controversies have been largely fuelled by people without much of a clue about what contemporary art is about. The spectacle of Bill Henson’s good name being dragged through the mud, Mike Parr’s dead chickens “shock” at the Biennale, the naked kid on the front of Art Monthly, all of these events of the recent past are reflective of a view that believes that art’s only role is to be beautiful while reinforcing archly conservative notions of good taste and decorum.

What’s curious is that this criticism (which does not even state fairly the position it seeks to counter) is made of a judge for a prize for religious art. What’s sad is that this oh-so fashionable morals-free stand leaves critics like Frost unable to criticise the sexualisation and exploitation of even pre-pubescent children, or to differentiate between babble and profundity, between dead chickens and deep insight. They are like people judging conversation only by the grammar or raised voices.

This critic of the Barbarian Age seems dangerously detached from the intellectual tradition he now picks over like a scavenger sorting through sculptures, looking for bronze to melt into shop fittings. On the role of art, and the sin of disengaging from its moral content, I’d advise him to read the musings of finer creative minds which have grappled with these issues since the Renaissance - Georgio Vasari in The Lives of the Artists, Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy, and George Orwell in Benefit of Clergy.

We wouldn't be the first to note Bolt's predeliction for cutting and pasting slabs of quotes out of context, and that dot dot dot in the quote from the SMH article was a mighty big slice. But you know what? Who cares? We've come to love Bolt and his mad protestations that climate change is a liberal media conspiracy, his claims of common sense, critical thinking et al. He's great on Insiders, and even better when Malcom Farr tells him to shut the fuck up. He's great TV.

Bolt's comments came to mind when we discovered that The Guardian UK's art critic Jonathan Jones has written a blog entry on George Orwell and Salvador Dali. While it's pretty clear that dunces like Bolt know nothing about art, it's still shocking that HE hasn't even bothered to read the books he's suggesting we read [read more above]...

Labels: blogging, punditry

Post Secret

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"The referencing of historical styles or iconic works has been popular since the 1970s, but it seems that since Julian Schnabel, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince, the conceptual nature of this sort of work has become shallow to the point of engaging viewers on about the same level as commercial graphic design. Don't get me wrong though, I really do enjoy the works of John Currin and Richard Wathen, despite their reliance on earlier artistic imagery."



"The problem with this sort of work is that often I find my level of interest no deeper than the thickness of paint on the canvas. The notion of putting contemporary figures and personalities in a classical setting, or of depicting historical figures in a contemporary form is as conceptually engaging as those old-timey photographs you can take at fairs and amusement parks."

Experimental and referential histories, Lightening Histories

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"I feel the blogging tool is an excellent medium for artists, it has so much potential for networking and sharing ideas. Not only can you present your work and receive feedback, there is also potential for sales. The challenge is to make the most of this incredible tool, while it is not controlled and still free. Where else can you connect with other artists without selling your soul. Although I love visiting galleries, I find the supporting culture at times exclusive, snobby and overly protective. Why can't the new contemporary art gallery in Brisbane, show at least once a year a survey of various Queensland artists who are subsisting in the undergarments of contemporary art. There are quite a few out there, and there work at times is very interesting. I for one would love to see a big gallery represent the culture that supports it instead of the usual suspects, who have risen to the top of the heap."

Other places, other times, Art Smelter

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"The First Appearance of Street Art In Tehran Galleries .... As the first experience of graffiti in Tehran has happened by artists involved with “KolahStudio” Project, we are undoubtedly going to present some in Tehran galleries."

Art Hot Spots

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"Artopia pays no attention to the Chinese art bubble, nor to the bigger art bubble in general. Bubbles come and go. The Bigger Bubble is tied to the stock market. The stock market drops and the art market follows one year later. It has happened twice on my watch. Now it is real estate, everywhere but in New York City high-income zip codes, that is plummeting. Will art follow? Some say that the economy is now worldwide and that money piling up in the oil states will rescue art from the mortgage mess. Tell that to the citizens of Great Britain who are taking their money out of the banks..."


Zhang Huan, Stark Naked and Covered With Flies, Artopia

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Grant Beran, Life In The North


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"Photography is, by definition, about the interaction between time and light. In Hiroshi Sugimoto's photographs we are able to engage in a conversation with light. In a very real way, he opens the light to us. He lets the light speak to us in a way that would be impossible in any other medium. Sometimes the light is fast like in the Seascapes and the dioramas where the exposure time is some small fraction of a second. In other work the light is slow, so slow that one photograph is exposed for the length of an entire movie. In most of his photographs the light is reflected, so that the light seems to be emanated from the subject that he is photographing. This gives the dioramas, the wax figures and even his Sea of Buddha series an uncanny, life-like feeling as if the figures only settled into position a split second before he clicked the shutter. We feel the life of the objects that he photographs and not the hand of the photographer. He heightens the interchangeability between time and light in a way that gives his photographs a remarkable presence. Whether he is looking at animals, the plaster cast of a mathematical formula or even on a cliff high above the ocean, you can sense that he begins to learn about an object by the way that it interacts with light. The Hiroshi Sugimoto Retrospective that is currently on display at the De Young Museum in San Francisco until September 23 is a record of the themes that he has explored for the last thirty years..."

The Wisdom of Light: The Hiroshi Sugimoto Retrospective at the De Young Museum, PORT - Portland art + news + reviews

Labels: blogging, hip hop, hot pot

Tired of MySpace? Fed up with FaceBook? Looking for something that will waste time until the coffee break? Just relax and enjoy...

We get sent a lot of links to artist sites and blogs and one of the most interesting to come our way lately is the site of Peter Callesen , an artist working in the medium of cut paper. There are a lot of artists using the old scissors-and-paper medium [cheap to buy, hard to master] but few are as quite as good as this.


A couple of blogs recently brought to our attention really stretch the limits of taste. The blog Illustration Art is a celebration of illustration for all manner of outlets, from pop culturally acceptable comics, illustrated novels and poster art through to the pop culturally unacceptable outlets such as greeting cards, car company ads and fantasy art. That the blog makes no value distinction is refreshing and challenging.



The blog Tomorrowland is an old fashioned blog that wanders around many subject areas for kicks, from pot addled cult leaders to a post about why some gut got tasered by the cops. On a more art related front, the blog does have the occasional architecture related story, such as futuristic architecture in Dubai and the speculative art of NASA that envisions what a 1970s space habitat would have looked like.



It was through Tomorrowland that we discovered the joys of Astrona: Space & Astronomical Art, a copyright busting blog dedicated to gathering together the work of artists such as Chris Foss, Chesley Bonestell and Shigemi Numawaza. If you're asking "who?" then clearly you didn't spend the better part of your teenage years reading crappy SF novels and wondering why the cover paintings weren't in "proper" art galleries. Well, the answer to that last question is fairly obvious, but we're way past caring and Astrona is a mixture of nostalgia and guilty pleasure.


Judith Van Heeren, Garnet red birds in grey landscape, 2007.
86 x 183 cm.
We're always looking for suggestions from artists for new additions to our list of artists sites and blogs. A blog we found through a gallery invitation is the work of Judith Van Heeren, an expat Dutch artist living in Melbourne who is currently having a show at MurrayWhiteRoom. Just the right side of kitsch, Van Heeren's work is moodily abstract with a lovely addition of birdyness.

Finally, a site you might want to visit before you've had your lunch is the work of New Zealand artist Angela Lasinger. It's creepy and frankly disturbing. You have been warned.

Labels: blogging, web sites

Skanky Jane of the world-famous Skanky Jane's Ruses of Pleasure blog has written to The Art Life to announce the birth of her latest
blogging project - Skanky Jane's Bargain Box. It's a project that welcomes all visual art themed contributions. Jane writes:

SJ's B.Box will publish your images and (visual culture oriented) opinion pieces, rants, exhibition reviews and promos, academic essays, posers, poetry, creative prose, humour, and blog reviews and promos. You name it - it's a veritable Bargain Box full o' art! Whether you're a newbie blogger wanting to test the water before diving deep into your own publishing pool, or a seasoned blogger wanting to play... Skanky Jane's Bargain Box can accommodate! Be it anonymity or a personality cult you're after and whether it be for exposure, fun, Google-juice, or just for the hell of it, Skanky Jane has the box for you. When you're fresh outta joy juice and the punters are brash schlep down to the B.Box and jostle the trash, hustle a bargain, or angle for cash, it's time for a big-mouthed, big-hearted, Bargain Box slash!

So how do you put something in her box? First of all you must submit to Jane by sending her material. Visit the blog, click on the link and do the rest. Simple.

Labels: blog friends, blogging

"Tunnel – self portrait - is part of a series that focuses on the notion of stranger in a strange place; the challenges and outcomes of spending time in new and foreign lands. I am interested in exploring concepts of disengagement from place and self, and the notion of homesickness, and familiarity..."

The Carrot Joke

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"for those who haven't heard me bitching about this damned social network, have i got a blogpost for you!

"everybody's on facebook now. it's no news. all my friends are hassling me to join, the suit walking down liverpool st is pontificating about why facebook is better than myspace, hell, even time magazine is writing about it. and and yet i dig my heels in. why?

"because it totally shits me that facebook has just gentrified online social networking and suddenly, hey, it's OK!! myspace has been around for years and while i'm not one of those 'i've been doing it for years' type folks when it comes to this crap, what shits me about it is that all the 'adults' who didn't understand myspace, took the piss out of it, or just plain avoided it, are now on damned facebook. yes, myspace is rubbish. i know that. it fucks up a lot and is full of posing teenagers. but same goes for facebook - just posing adults and slightly better designed! it's just bloody AOR for online social networks, for fucks sake! huey lewis and the news for digital civilisation."

Bastard Facebook, She Sees Red

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Found Ely Street, Angel Park, Skanky Jane's Ruses of Pleasure

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"After reading the news report at the Internet Movie Database, titled Queen Storms Out of Photo Shoot, The Artswipe made the artwork you see before you..."



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"to put the following review in some reflexive perspective I'll admit that i'm feeling just a lttle mentally fragile.

"OK more than usual.

"My major form of stress management consists in reading obscure bits from "the Logic of Sense" and then posting random shit on various people's myspaces – of which the absolute highlight has to be ‘the motel sisters’ – well – my favourite bit is the britney Spears song – and recently I found myself singing along to ‘toxic love’ thinking of evil vicious ex-girlfriends and then I started reciting bits of the logic of sense about alcoholism splitting the eidetic into a permanent fissure from the present……

"And then I thought – shit I really need to see some art..."

Unheimlich Art & Mayhem

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"The idea of an infinite road, of perpetual traffic forever does not seem so far fetched. I am stunned whenever I happen to be out on the road during peak hour where people wait patiently for the traffic to crawl through the latest bottleneck. What happens when a 45 minute wait turns into a 2 hour wait? Then a 6 hour wait? You may as well set up camp at this point. Which is what happens when there is a brake-down outside of Sydney at the end of a long weekend just outside of sydney. Traffic slowly coming to a stop, passengers eventually overcome by boredom and curiosity get out of their cars and have a look around. Wander up the street trading speculation with neighbouring cars on the reason for the gridlock."

The Perpetual Traffic Machine of New New York, Super Colossal

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"The explanatory texts supporting conceptual art are often evocative, sometimes hilarious, but seldom illuminating. A dialect of mainstream ‘Academese’, they can seem to the outsider like a secret code, with their own rules and absurdities. What was it that the SMH’s ‘esteemed critic’ unkindly said of Charles Merewether’s Biennale 2006 (Zones of Contact) catalogue introduction? “A flotilla of clichés adrift on a sea of jargon” or something like that. An esteemed blogger’s recent SMH article about 2008 Biennale Director Christina Christov-Bakargiev’s exposition on her theme ‘Revolutions that turn’ was equally funny, if more benign..."

The Beauty of Incomprehension, Le Flanuer


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"Even for our most successful artists, art income is never regular, and most will need to access welfare at some stage. Indeed, a well defined and sympathetic welfare policy can benefit artists more than even government grant systems. Unlike many countries (most notably New Zealand) Australia has no welfare policy designed specially to assist artists, or to get them out of welfare and into their unique line of work. Often when artists receive government grants, Centrelink officers themselves do not know what to do. In 'Work for the Dole' schemes, the greatest community benefit people come up with for artists seems to be as bus-shelter painters, when our artists today work in many media, such as video or sound, and in sophisticated ways. And unlike actors - who can look for acting related jobs for the first year of professional practice - artists have to choose between lying on their forms or compromising their long term work prospects. Art and Dole exists to collect our personal tips, to help get around these basic problems. Art and Dole also supports lobbying initiatives, to help change the current out of date welfare system."

Art & Dole

Labels: blog friends, blogging

Bethany J Fellows wrote to us to advise Art Life readers she is performing her much anticipated Bethany J Fellows V Helen Hunt event on July 5, Centre Place, City [which we think means it's happening in Melbourne next week]. She also attached this invitation:



More exciting still, we discovered that Fellows also has a blog which includes behind-the-scenes shots of the artist getting ready for her upcoming event and documentation of her other various art activities. She also includes a video of her 'Helen Hunt' training method:



Contemporary art - does it get much better than this?

Maybe! We have recently updated our links to artist sites and blogs with some top new additions: Artist Running Index [which includes a picture of a man with a bucket on his head], audio artist Kate Carr's Myspace page with downloadable tunes, Clare Milledge's very cool and clean site and another good site featuring Susan Fereday's 'rephotographs'. Want to be added to the best blog roll on the web? Just send an email to our Hotmail address [link on top right of this page]...

Labels: blogging, links, music, new media

People have been writing to us and some of the emails have been very nice, very polite requests for links to new blogs and sites.

Margaret Mayhew, who used to be part of 2SER’s Artichoke team before the show got the axe, wrote to let us know that she has a new exhibition coming up but she was too scared to tell us the details in case we were mean. Ms Mayhew writes:

After your roasting of Shane Hasseman’s video/felt piece I chuckled - and then saw him striding down king street (without the bag). He wasn't meeting anyone’s eye and didn't return my hello, so I'm scared of sending you details of my show which opens on Tuesday - coz not sure if the oeuvre is ready to face the slings and arrows of fate and published opinion.

What’s really disturbing about that email is that we thought we gave Hasseman’s show a pretty good write up, but now he’s a shattered figure sans bag. Mayhew did provide a link to her new blog Art & Mayhem. We wondered if it was going to be another one of those “I did a painting on Monday and it was good” artist blogs but thankfully it’s a lot more entertaining than that and so much like the art life we all know and love:

It was Friday night and I'd had two really appalling gin and tonics at manning bar. You think it would be impossible to stuff up a G&T - but some people are up to any challenge. Consequence of sipping G&T on a wintry sunset even when crap: love of universe, open to anything…

Bob Abrahams is an artist from Western Australia who dropped us an email to say that he was impressed by our blog and maybe we’d be interested in a link to his own Visual Art Notes. Thanks to Bob.

Meanwhile, an American artist named James W. Bailey “cordially” invited us to view his blog Black Cat Bone - Burning The Flesh Off Modern Art. In his personal description Bailey says he is

...an experimental artist, photographer and imagist writer from Mississippi. His art focus includes Littoral Art Projects that explore the fleeting moments of cross-cultural communicative intersections; film projects, including the short film, "Talking Smack"; “Wind Painting”, a unique naturalistic art practice inspired by the vanishing Southern African-American cultural tradition of the Bottle Tree; street photography centered on the hidden cultural edges of inner city New Orleans life; and “Rough Edge Photography”, a hard-edge non-digital photographic style that celebrates the death of 35mm film through the burning, tearing, slashing and violent manipulation of chemically developed negatives and prints.

And what does being an ‘experimental artist’ actually mean? It means stalking women on the DC area subway system, taking photos of them [most without their knowledge] posting them on his website and then explaining how he “fell in love” with each and every one of them. We hope the experiment is a success but with such icky shades of Sin City we doubt it.

Meanwhile at The Art Life, no pictures? What’s the story? There’s what’s called a “technical problem” and we haven’t been able to fix it. This is the downside of free online blogging – like a Japanese backpacker stranded in the desert, when there’s a real problem there’s no support or if it comes it takes days to get there. If anyone knows the intricacies of FTP, Hello or Blogger photos, we’d appreciate an email to the usual address. In the meantime, it’s back to links.

Finally, last week we gazed upon the Esteemed Critic's face for hours and wondered, is that really him? The answer is YES:

Is that REALLY John McDonald?

Yes it is 63% [26]

No, but it really looks like him 37% [15]

total votes: 41

Labels: blogging, poll, reader comments

Lisa Kelly wrote to let us know that the Situation show at the MCA is accompanied by its own blog. At the moment the bloggers at Situation are coming to terms with a negative review from Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald. Perhaps we’ve become complacent but it was hardly probable that McDonald would have liked the show and a negative review comes as no surprise. The esteemed critic’s disdain for the MCA is well known and it is said that his office is decorated with the stuffed heads of certain former directors mounted moose-like on the wall as a coat rack. McDonald’s standard gambit these days is to compare something ‘trendy’ with something ‘worthwhile’. He recently claimed that William Robinson wouldn’t represent Australia at the Venice Biennale because he’s a) too good and b) not trendy, and therefore he is c) very good indeed. The esteemed critic’s ‘review’ of Situation used much the same gambit and should only be read as another in a long line of dismissive put downs of not just the artists, but of the institution as well. The mistake would be to rise to the bait. The Sydney Morning Herald management believes McDonald is ‘controversial’ instead of just boring so the best tactic the art world can assume is one of total indifference, a strategy that works just great for us. The Situation site is well worth a visit, if not for the angst then definitely for the links to artist sites that includes Alex Gawronski, Anne Kay, Kylie Wilkinson and a host of other artists, orgs and media whose links we plan to absorb Borg-like very soon.

Tom Carment’s wrote to us recently and asked us to add his web site to our list site and it is a lovely item featuring his watercolours and paintings along with some very enjoyable stories he has written. Carment mentioned that he likes reading The Art Life although but disagrees with our opinion of Euan McLeod. Oh well.

We’d also like to point readers in the direction of a non-art related site [although it may be considered an art work as it is called a 'portrait'] because it blew our minds.

Labels: blogging, old media, robotics, site news