the art life

You go into something like this with good intentions. You want to like something and with so many people around you clearly having such a great time, you end up feeling like utter bastards for hating it so much. Yet you can’t stop – one thing after another is not just an assault on good taste but an attack on common sense. Surely, no one can like this can they? They can and they do and they prance on the cliffs like tattooed mountain goats. We are of course talking about Sculpture By The Sea, the annual sculpture extravaganza that finishes this weekend. This is the exhibition’s 10th year. Over the last decade it has continued to grow as it attracted some heavy hitters to the ranks of its patrons including sundry Shermans, Balnaves, Belgiorno-Nettis and Penfolds, corporate sponsors - take a bow NAB - not to mention offering a range of prizes from the top Sculpture By The Sea Prize of $30,000 to the NAB Kid’s Choice Prize of $1000 – and all up, there’s $62,500 in prizes to be won. You’d have to be a mug not to enter.




And therein lays the problem. For all its good intentions Sculpture By The Sea is at the mercy of its entrants. Anyone can enter and by the looks of the finalists everybody does. This year’s show is by far the worst we have seen in many years, and this despite the efforts of the organisation to raise the tone by inviting overseas sculptors, creating a celebratory invited artists program – Philip King, Ken Unsworth, Guy Warren, Ron Robertson-Swann and others – and a few half decent winners of the 11 individual prizes. Sebastian Smee in The Australian suggested that there should be a prize for the worst sculpture and then went on to nominate a bunch of very deserving candidates, but there is also a guilty pleasure in being so outraged by unrelenting mediocrity, fun at first, grinding about halfway through, then wrist-slittingly bad at the end. It’s not just a question of what is bad and what is good – the whole damn set up is rotten.


Big day out... Klas Sundkvist's Trans Circulus [latin: beyond the horizon]
'Looking out to the horizon what will one experience? Curiosity, joy, or perhaps astonishment? Beyond the horizon there are possibilities, the continuation of the world and an uncertain future.' $250 each, many still available.

The exhibition is over crowded by ‘garden sculpture’ – the kind of stuff you find in parks and the front gardens of the tasteless rich - nudes arching their backs, bits of geometric abstraction looking for a friendly atrium, distressed and prematurely aged bronzes, all of it a three dimensional version of a suburban art contest where crap paintings come alive and spoil a perfectly good view of the ocean. Then there are the art school graduates, some with gallery representation, who really should know better but who are locked into their horrible practices making grim, determined stuff that attempts to be playful but which is lost behind a patina of envy and disgust that so much attention is paid to painting. Mixed into all of these artists and their works fighting for space are the professional invitees like Unsworth and Robertson-Swann, whose work must likewise fight for space and a clear sight line on Bondi’s South Head. The whole place is like a sculpture dumping ground. If there was ever a time we truly wished we had air support it was as we looked at the crowded field of weilded metal – we’d just call the boys in the air force and wait for the jets to scream over and napalm the whole lot into the sea. Get your people back and get your heads down – this is gonna be a big one!

Many of the artists in the exhibition seemed to have the same ideas too, either they were staggeringly literal in their concept of putting a sculpture next to the ocean, or they just ignored the location altogether. Some artists did however take an obvious idea – there must be half a dozen works about Australia’s treatment of, and relationship to refugees – and still manage to make a worthwhile piece. Our favourite work of the whole show is Emma Wise’s Cut To Fit, a dotted line on a cliff edge that says everything about Australia’s random exclusion of bits of its sovereign territory as can be said, and Wise does it simply and elegantly. Made of flour, paper and water, this human made line will disappear as the elements wash it away. Graeme Pattison and Enrique Esquivel’s The Big Red Traffic Light tackled a similar idea. Their construction is a gigantic array of traffic lights. Located nearby is a button of the kind you press when you want to cross the road. When you press it, the lights – which are pointing out to sea – go green. But only for as long as you keep the button pressed. It’s obvious and not very subtle and although it conveys the message ok, the viewer feels like they’re being run over by the artists’ good intentions.


The Glue Society's Hot With A Chance of A Late Storm [detail].

The winner of the big $30K prize was Orest Keywan whose steel, stainless steel, limestone and sandstone work …And With A Name To Come is unique for a three dimensional object in that it only looks good from one angle. The work is deeply and profoundly mediocre with very little to suggest it should win a big prize, especially since the whole piece, with its variety of materials blackened and dead, looks as though it might have been rescued from the sea rather than set thoughtfully next to it. Comparatively Keywan looks very good next to an array of metal ribbons, metal arabesques, jittering poles and lovingly sited minimal geometric shapes. In this company of sculptures that appear not to have been made anytime in the last 30 years something with a bit more quotidian good humour wins the day - Bjorn Godwin’s Pavilion/The Daily Double – a quotation of the classic Aussie dunny with all mod cons – was a crowd pleaser as was The Glue Society’s Hot With A Chance of A Late Storm, a melted Mr. Whippy van made of goopy urethane. The only metal sculpture we saw with any life was Angus Adameitis’s Traceur, a massive collision of crushed and crumpled industrial boilers, rusted armatures and huge right angles. We never thought we could use the word ‘playful’ to describe something that looks like it could kill you, but it is a magnificent work that is both humorous and lively.

Two works in the show are excellent. They show a real understanding of site and materials and they are both easy to miss. They are the kinds of works that may or may not be popular but they point to a direction Sculpture By The Sea should pursue. It’s serious art in a playful mood that may not be as popular with the muscle boys and their girlfriends or the old folks on their Zimmer frames, but they have real substance. One of these artists is Richard Tipping whose works are spread around the length of the exhibition. Tipping, the conceptual joker, has made a work called Free Art! Before It Frees You and takes the form of crash barriers, bollards and safety tape with the title printed on their sides. Tipping has set them up in genuine concern for safety, bits of ground cordoned off, bare ground made into art. The other artist is Guy Warren whose work we did not see but read about in the $8 catalogue. A ‘distinguished invited artist’ Warren is not a sculptor per se, but a painter and it’s perhaps because of this he decided to stay above the mess below. His work was called Icarus, a drawing of a bird executed by a skywriter over Sydney one sunny day. Look up, see the bird, watch the white vapor trail blow slowly away. Lovely.

Labels: outdoor art, reviews, sculpture

We would spend hours idling at Lamella Books, checking out the new imports, coveting super-expensive Japanese editions on Shinro Ohtake and thinking that surely, if we just committed ourselves to buying a copy of Charles Jencks’s What Is Post Modernism?, we’d be totally set up to deal with the zeitgeist. It was a big, glossy tome that had a lot of pictures and it even had a flow chart or two. We could walk around with copies off Zoneor Semiotext(e) in our pockets to whip out on the bus and, when people came over for dinner, they would see the big Jencks book sitting on the bookshelf. Thus, we too could be Post Modern. If only it could have been that easy.

We were prompted to these memories by the discovery of a spread on Jencks in the March/April 2004 issue of Vogue Living The article, an eight page spread wedged between the magazine’s usual fru-fru and chintz, was a photo story on Jencks’s Garden of Cosmic Speculation, a massive landscape art piece that he built in Scotland. A wild mixture of Alice in Wonderland shapes and forms spread over the property of the Keswick Family, the garden is an artwork that takes cosmology as its inspiration and features paving, ponds, hills and huge staircases that double as symbolic representations of theoretical space/time.

It’s kind of nutty, kind of mad and that’s exactly the kind of art that we like. Try as we might, we couldn’t find anything on line but did find a handy definition from a gardening books web site on Jencks himselfand some decent pictures at Amazon.

While discussing the garden with a friend who also happens to be a landscape architect specialising in water features, we were told that Jencks’s garden is not only famous in these circles but also notorious. Some of the garden features which include some spectacular artificial hills built Capability Brown-style for the design, are rated at about 70 degrees from the horizontal. The hills are so steep that the gardeners who maintain Jenck’s design have to use ropes to get to the top. And how do they mow the lawns? They use flo-mo mowers lashed to ropes dangled down the slopes of the hills to cut the grass at right angles to the ground.

We knew that Jencks was a celebrated architect, author and academic, but we had no idea he was so literally carrying on the best of post modernism – beauty combined with profound impracticality.

Labels: old media, outdoor art, sculpture

The Sydney Festival isn’t much of a visual arts event. Consisting of little more than a handful of exhibitions at galleries that would have held them anyway, without an overall curator or a single catalogue, the visual arts program is a grab bag of events sheltering under a logo and a PR budget.

While the Festival has had its successes in the past, its hit and miss organisation can be disastrous. Nam June Paik, the Korean-born American artist, was the 2004 Festival’s international inclusion and his two works Transmission and 32 Cars for the 20th Century Play Mozart's Requiem Quietly were installed at the Opera House forecourt.

Paik is often and aptly described as a seminal figure. A one time member of the Fluxus movement of the early 1960s (along with such luminaries as Josef Beuys and Yoko Ono), Paik’s early work with video was highly influential and as a musician and composer, his pieces with the cellist Charlotte Moorman saw him expanding the very limits of musical performance. Collector and arts philanthropist John Kaldor brought Paik and Moorman to Sydney in 1976 where, among other things, the cellist was tied to balloons and flown over the Opera House and at another performance played a cello made from three TV monitors (designed by Paik) screening images of Moorman in the nude.

But as with many seminal figures, Paik’s work has been remembered more for its historical importance than for its lasting artistic or aesthetic merits. The Fluxus artists were anti-art Neo Dadaists who were more concerned with the democratising of process than end results, so performance pieces, happenings and music were the norm rather than lasting art objects such as paintings and sculptures that could be bought and sold and put in museums. The Fluxus artists and Paik in particular, were also Zen humourists not averse to a joke at the expense of themselves and the audience. Paik’s best work wasn’t for the ages, it was for the here and now (or ‘there and then’ as it is today).

At the age of 72, Paik is alive and well and working but instead of performances and anti-art gestures he’s been making large scale commissions for public spaces. Anti-art doesn’t really pay the bills and Paik’s installations, in collaboration with artist Norman Ballard, have become grander and grander - an installation he did for the Seoul Olympics utilised over 1000 video monitors. (It's a long way from one of his bet known works, TV Buddha - that was a store-bought statue of the lion of dharma watching a live feed of his own image on a TV screen.)

Which brings us to Transmission and 32 Cars. Initially designed for New York’s Rockefeller Center and installed there in 2003, these two pieces would have made a certain kind of sense. The RKO tower referenced in Transmission once stood in the Rockefeller Plaza and the 32 Cars alluded to the fact that the Rockefeller fortune came from oil. Putting the rather ghastly aesthetics of the two works aside - crappy metals and old cars spray painted silver - the pieces were made for that space and although oblique, their references were apt.

In Sydney, however, the installation of the pieces was a shambles. We were presented with a “selection from” 32 Cars; that is, we only had 16 old Fords and Packards arranged around the tower, which itself was plonked down with little reference or regard for its location. The laser beams that shot out of the tower were kind of fun in an ooh-ahh fireworks way, but the images they traced out on the Botanical Gardens rock wall were an embarrassment of overwrought symbolism – a pictographic history from “primitive” animals and men up to a space age light show courtesy of some non linear equations. The two works - mistaken by many for a single piece - were jammed into the space between the stairs of the Opera House and the Botanical Gardens with a seemingly haphazard arrangement of cars and central tower.

Meanwhile, another Sydney Festival event just across the water called City of Light transformed the Sydney Harbour Bridge into a light show that was like a cross between a Nuremberg rally and Close Encounters of The Third Kind. Going off at the same time, Paik’s little tower and laser light show looked very modest indeed.

Paik’s older, better work was about repetition – both the implied kind and the actual kind - the forms suggesting a Zen-like infinitude in the recursive depths of pop culture, held in place by the framing device of the TV screen. That his work has had little time for traditional art aesthetics were both its charm and its liability – he might be historically important but you’d be mad to describe either of these latest works as beautiful. Anti-art will only take you so far and to ignore an installation piece’s new surroundings is to invite just the kind of calamity that occurred at the Sydney Festival.

There were tiny slivers of the older themes of Paik’s work in the show, but the installation was so poor and the presentation so inept, they were only faint echoes of an artist long past his prime. Without any real money from the Sydney Festival to mount a proper Paik retrospective or enough cash to create a new site specific work, the Festival’s inclusion of Transmission and 32 Cars didn’t do anyone any good. Now you can see it, if you dare, at the National Gallery of Australia, where it has as much to do with the Rockefeller Center as it did in Sydney.

Labels: installation, outdoor art, reviews, video art