the art life

From Julie Kearney...

In Brisbane’s new GOMA - which currently hosts the Sixth Asia-Pacific Triennial - a room has been set aside for a bubble-encrusted stuffed elk whose fur can be seen expanding and multiplying behind the distorting glass baubles. It’s one of the star attractions of the show and features as its advertising logo. Alone in the whiteness of its special room the dead animal carries the authority of Art by virtue of being so displayed. Art it undoubtedly is, but it’s also a sad slaughtered creature, killed not for eating but display, first stuffed by a taxidermist and now transformed into a bizarre aesthetic experience for bemused crowds of sightseers.



The quality of work in the current exhibition of Asia-Pacific art is far from the wonders of APT1 and APT2 but no one seems to have noticed. The tabloid reviews to date have been universally approving and the viewers, drifting through the galleries in their recently vastly increased numbers, enjoying their new-found role as public art connoisseurs, appear to be satisfied too.

On the other hand, it should be remembered that we the public, are the beneficiaries of Queensland’s woeful art education policies which deprived most of us in our formative years of our right to an education in the visual arts. And to this state of ignorance may perhaps be added the pernicious influence of house and garden magazines - the only journals concerned with aesthetics that most of us read – which for some years now have been informing us that the most desirable artwork we can hang on our living room walls is a piece of framed wallpaper. It’s a view that gives a new dimension to the hitherto derogatory term, wallpaper art. Today we live among wallpaper art. It flourishes not only above our sofas but in the public galleries to which we take our children.

The depoliticisation of art is nothing new. We have been schooled in acceptance of content-free work, art for art’s sake, ‘high art’ in other words, except for one astonishing digression: the first couple of Asia-Pacific Triennials. These earlier exhibitions, in 1993 and 1996, spectacularly broke that mould. They showed us, through the works of artists drawn from countries politicized by undemocratic structures, that art could be different, that it could be powerful and moving and deeply political while still remaining aesthetically diverse and exciting, often more so. In a range of media and genres, works by artists from our neighbouring Asia-Pacific countries gave the lie to the received view that ‘political’ art can’t be ‘high’ or even art at all because it is merely dull, dishonest work serving the needs of totalitarian states. Such propagandist political art exists, of course. We have seen it in exhibitions of Chinese art since the 70’s and we know about it from the degenerative forms of state art under Stalin which followed hard on the heels of the first fine flush of genuinely political, innovative works by the Constructivists. Non state-controlled, these earlier Russian artists left a legacy we still draw on today, in our modern concept of the artist’s book for instance, which was developed by them as a strategy for communicating with the people in the years following the Russian Revolution.

It’s interesting that the kind of state sponsored political art which followed the Constructivists is present also in the current APT, in a series of finely executed colour woodcuts and sensitive portraits from North Korea. Much has been made of the daring inclusion of these works simply because they are ‘political’ though in fact only a small proportion of them are propagandist. What is surprising about them, and political by implication in a different way, is that the non propagandist North Korean works bear a marked resemblance in style and technique to Australian work in the thirties. Printmaking flourished here in the 30s and most of the twenty-first century North Korean woodcuts on show could be mistaken for works by Jessie Traill or Violet Teague. The Korean woodcuts featuring bridges and other industrial structures are uncannily like the images of Sydney Harbour Bridge that were so popular with artists during the years of its construction. Like North Korea now, Australia in the 30’s was a culturally conservative society, the majority of its artists yet to break away from the restraining influence imposed by Robert Menzies’ feared Australian Academy of Art, in order to take advantage of the possibilities offered by Post-Impressionism and Cubism. It seems that North Korean artists today are in a similar situation. Many viewers, enjoying the accessibility of their works, would say that this is not a bad thing and this is a valid opinion though not the point here. Artists should always be free to make choices as to which direction they go in, whether we like that direction or not, for without freedom art becomes stultified and dies. Art is another word for creativity and by definition needs to be free to change if it wishes.

For those of us who remember the first Asia-Pacific exhibitions, there is another kind of political art, not state sponsored or controlled by the likes of Stalin, Menzies and Kim Jong-il, but work that comes from the hands of individuals living and working in inequitable societies or simply responding to the depredations by capitalism upon the environment. Who can forget the work of Japanese artist Shigeo Toya in the inaugural APT? Titled Woods 11 and now in the possession of the Queensland Art Gallery, it was and is a massive forest of chain-sawed trees, stunningly sculptural in its textural interplay of forms. It was also moving for many viewers as they walked among the branchless trees because it appeared to be a powerful comment on the destruction of the world’s forests.

Anyone who saw it will also remember the burning man installation in the Sculpture Garden at the second APT. The work of Indonesian artist Christanto Dadang, it was created in response to the burning and raping of many Indonesians of Chinese origin in May, 1998. At Dadang’s symbolic burnings at the Queensland Art Gallery, life-size effigies of men were slowly consumed by fire and crowds of Australian viewers, visibly moved, stood watching in total silence for up to an hour. Dadang’s hope for this work, that it would act as ‘a shock capable of illuminating our sense of humanity’ was fully realized. (APT2 catalogue p.200.)

Or who remembers the installation, also at APT2, titled All Stock Must Go! ? It was set up on the grass at the entrance to the gallery rather than inside, at the request of its designers - the Brisbane Campfire Group - and it featured a cattle truck stocked with Aboriginal artworks which were produced on site by the artists themselves and sold to anyone who wished to buy. All Stock Must Go! challenged among other things the perception of overseas buyers that Australian Aboriginal art is ‘takeaway’ art, and it drew attention, through the presence of Black artists painting cross-legged on the grass, to the reality for Aboriginal people of having to produce art for survival. The cattle truck, later dismantled and sold piece by piece, made reference to the cattle trucks used to move Aboriginal tribal people to reserves.
But most surprising of all was the Queensland Art Gallery’s connivance in a subversive act directed partially against itself. The refusal to place the installation within the walls of the gallery was a statement of outsiderness directed against the traditional practices of appropriation and decontextualistion by museums and art galleries both here and around the world. ‘We are invited to enter the museum but we choose to stay outside.’ (Margo Neale, APT2 catalogue, p.10)

Now it is possible, though perhaps not probable, that such a piece of political art directed against its host gallery would be condoned by the current gallery administration. It happened in 1996 with the help of indigenous curator Margo Neale but we have not seen its like since in any of the following four Triennials. What we have seen instead is a steady diminution in quality and diversity together with a move towards video viewing alcoves and away from the interactive installations that were enjoyed in the first two APTs. There were so many of these interactive artworks that the Queensland Art Gallery took on the atmosphere of a fun fair and resounded with chatter. People walked about with smiles on their faces and got into conversations with strangers about what they were seeing and doing. The National Committee formed to decide curatorial philosophy for the inaugural APT had clearly opted to make museum art friendly, to welcome people and make them want to come back again.

Heidegger suggests that an artwork has to be true to its name. That is, it must work. This seems a fair enough statement and if we agree with it, we should be able to ask of any given piece: is this working or is it unemployed? Does it give us joy or surprise through its formal arrangements? Does it have meaning for us, resonate with our experience of life or act to change it in some way? When we sit in a video alcove watching out-of-focus flickering images of grass which someone has taken with a hand-held camera while walking through the same grass, does it work for us in any of the above ways? If it doesn’t then it isn’t an artwork. It’s as simple as that. It may resonate for the next viewer, though in the case of the out-of-focus grass, it’s unlikely he or she will be in the majority.

In the catalogue foreword for the inaugural Asia-Pacific Triennial, Doug Hall tells us that the exhibition was designed to highlight ‘the dynamics of change, identities, and even twentieth century cultural dislocation.’ (My italics. APT1, p.6.) By the fourth APT, which also marked the launch of the opening of the new gallery GOMA, the aim had shrunk to revealing ‘the depth and diversity of individual expression.’ (APT4, p.12.) In the catalogue of the sixth APT now before us, Tony Ellwood makes no general claims for the show at all except to identify without comment the video of Reggae music, the Mekong River works and the North Korean exhibit, as being its key features.

The current exhibition is not entirely bereft of political art but there is less of it and it tends to be low-key so that often you don’t know it is meant to be political unless you take the trouble to read the accompanying placard. Political art that needs explaining, I would suggest, is not political, or at least not political enough to cross cultural boundaries and have meaning for an Australian audience.

All art does not have to be political of course. It simply has to work, but in many cases the exhibits in APT6 do not work, at least for me. There are a lot of video installations with very few people watching them, or watching them to the end, like the one of rickshaw drivers lying still and exhausted on their rickshaws. We get the point, the poor fellows are exhausted, but there’s not much motivation after a while to continue watching a moving film in which nothing moves. There’s a canopy of what looks like photocopy paper suspended by metal clips above the elevators which I didn’t know was an artwork until I learned from the catalogue that it was. There’s a wonderful old wooden house from the Sichuan Province that the artist has had dismantled by Chinese labourers and shipped to Australia for reassembly. It has real presence but is it an artwork or should it more appropriately be housed in an anthropological museum as an artefact? (Duchamp, eat your heart out.)

On a recent visit to GOMA I got into conversation with a member of the security staff while we waited for a lift. I told her I had enjoyed the interactive work called Liminal Air and she said that she had been invited by the artist, just after he finishing installing it, to try it out and that she loved it too. I wasn’t asking her any questions but she told me that the hanging photocopy paper above the escalators looked better at night when the light shone through it, making it ripple and look like a crocodile’s back. And she said that the theme of the current APT was domestic objects and repetition. I thought that sounded right and asked if it was the official theme. Oh no, she said, that’s just how it seems to me.

Everyone gets something different from art and this woman had found things I hadn’t. Perhaps I’m just a griper. Perhaps it’s the best APT ever. I doubt it though. Most of us lack the necessary tools to discriminate thanks to the failure of successive Queensland governments to address the issue of primary school art education, so most of us have to take what we can from visits to our public galleries. We will always take something away but we could take a lot more.
People know what they like. Who doesn’t? That’s one thing we can still be sure of despite being deprived of the proper tools to understand visual language. We know what we like, but because we feel we don’t know enough about ‘Art’ and therefore have perhaps failed to understand some vital point, we’re unlikely to speak up about our opinions. It’s too easy, from the standpoint of enforced ignorance, to make a fool of ourselves. We the public, products of the Queensland school system, know our place. In the case of the current APT, I would suggest, there is something to speak up about, but nobody is speaking. We have been sold a pup in return for our taxes when we could have had a fabulous beast. And by that I don’t mean a stuffed elk.

Labels: APT, blog contributor, Julie Kearney, reviews

Richard Malloy’s head is covered in clay. You can see his teeth behind the moist skein, an image disturbingly reminiscent of Buffalo Bill in Silence of The Lambs. Malloy’s work – on show at Gallery 9 until the end of the month – is a simple suite of four photographs and a video. You’d be no doubt thinking, oh man, not another performance video work, and you’d be right – it is. Malloy stands against a blank background in mid shot, daubing big, gooey blobs of clay onto his face, attempting to add new features. He labours for a long time trying to construct an elephant-like trunk, and later, meld his arm into his torso. The way to watch this piece is to not look at it – look at the framed pictures and think about the creation myths of humans rising from slime, the creepy CSI-like suggestions of facial reconstruction, or perhaps of bodies being excavated from shallow graves... and then move right along. For a field as crowded as body art and performance video, it’s refreshing to see something that demands your attention, and then rewards the effort.

The work in the next room is a bit of a salve after Malloy’s freak show. Grant Beran’s drawings aren’t all that surprising in their style, but they’re very good. Drawing on silver gelatine paper with ink and graphite, Beran’s pictures are scribbly and loose and the way he follows a line reminds you of, ahem, Salvador Dali and Saul Steinberg, two names that don’t get thrown around much these days. Beran himself cites an interesting cocktail of names U-Turn is after Bellini and McMahon, Infobaker is after Max Dupain and Late Night at the Natural History Museum is delightfully after Laurence Aberhart. As Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callaghan remarked at the end of Magnum Force, “Man’s got know his limitations”, so it’s pleasing to see Beran shooting for the stars.


The trip to Gallery 9 was to see Craig Bender’s Repeating Patterns in Nature. Looking at Bender’s work over the last couple of shows has been interesting insight into an artist’s creative progression. The Australian landscape is such a bastard to deal with since it’s all God and rocks. Making art out of it is tricky. An exhibition at Canberra Contemporary Art Space featured work by an artist who had taken photos of Cheviot Beach, the place where Prime Minister Harold Holt drowned [or swam out to meet a waiting Chinese submarine, depending on which version you prefer to believe]. The pictures were completely benign photos of the seaside. According to the artist’s statement it was all about creating interpretation by overlaying what was an otherwise unremarkable sequence of images of a beach with the viewer’s knowledge of the place’s history.

Bender’s past work has ventured along this line of inquiry, with his sequence of images of Belanglo Forest , and while Bender made a better fist of the idea by including small details in his large photos such as small memorial crosses, there was the persistent problem of disappearance. It’s all very well highlighting the interpretative process, but you wonder how this is any different to most pictures. One almost has sympathy for the misguided opinions of people like Christopher Allen who, in his recent review of the Andreas Gursky show for The Australian, made the claim that the further that photography gets away from “truth” [by which he probably means reportage] the less valuable it is. Nah. What we want is for the photographer’s work to be seen to be telling us something, and hopefully to do it with a degree of subtlety. For Bender’s show there are just two big images, one is of a car doing circle work in a field, while on the other wall there’s a giant time lapse photograph of stars leaving circular light trails. The dialogue between these images is simplicity itself, but a fractal kind of simplicity where the micro is reflected in the macro. That it should come in the context of something so quotidian makes it all the more delightful.



Clinton Garofano, untitled : (dead obvious), 2006.
Installation detail. Reverse painting on glass, antique frames.

Clinton Garafano’s show Another Nail in the Coffin at MOP makes a virtue out of a similar sort of plain speaking. Framed in elaborate Black Forest style are two word phrases rendered in spooky, horror movie text: DEAD BORING, DEAD WRONG, DEAD CENTRE, DEAD MEAT, and so on. With weak illumination from individual light sources, the words appear wraith like, a bit like a joke, perhaps even serious. Death stalks the land in the words we speak, says the artist. Fuck me dead.

Garafano’s stated aim is to “explore and the limits and possibilities of written language” and the limits are reached fairly quickly, beyond which is realm of aesthetic regard. The installation of the work is really rather beautiful with nothing extra or unneeded. It is Zen in its simplicity, which is a nice push ‘n’ pull with the Gothic detail of the frames and white on black lettering. Where does this approach come from? Maybe it has something to do with Garafano’s vintage, being in his mid 40s and recently divorced from his long-time commercial dealer, or maybe it’s the Buddhist influence talking, but whatever it is, death comes in a very attractive package. When you compare this installation to the show running in the front room, you see the generational attitude and experience at work.

The front room of MOP is occupied by Sean Rafferty’s Ghost Mountain. Where Garafano’s work is careful and precise, Rafferty’s big installation seems positively maximal, letting all the connections hang loose in a very literal way. The first thing you see of Rafferty’s work is a wall made out of cardboard with little notes, photocopies, photographs and plan drawings of the installation stuck here and there. The impression is that the whole thing is schematic, planned, but ad hoc. This is my process, says the artist. Feel me? Stepping inside the room there are three screens. This being a gallery you’re half expecting a DVD projection, but as your eyes adjust you see that two screens are in fact photographs drawings of a mountain in negative, mounted upside down. Then there’s a screen with an image of a mountain as seen from the front garden of a house somewhere. And the image fades up to the sound of passing traffic, and then fades down again. Repeat. The work has the nagging insistence of a dream, with plenty of suggestion, but not much in the way of definitive explanation. We feel you.

Labels: drawing, installation, photography, reviews

From Bonny Dot Cassidy...

There are are exhibitions that come along only once in a curator’s career; and I imagine a survey of Fiona Hall’s work to be one of those — the chance to interact with a living, local artist who has spanned multiple media, who is well-loved and yet surprising and challenging, who straddles cool and classical, and whose art shows a satisfyingly consistent conceptual order. This retrospective’s curatorial triumvirate has treated that task with deserved gravity. The result is a kind of Hall theme park whose only fault is that it dearly wants to occupy the entire Museum or, at least, to converse with other exhibitions in the space.


Fiona Hall, Leura, New South Wales, 1974
Gelatin silver photograph, 28x28cm.
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia
© the artist
It’s refreshing that Force Field - at the Museum of Contemporary Art until June 1 - is not chronologically sequenced. Time does not always make the best sense or justice of a career, particularly of an ongoing one. However the thematic design of the show—especially its rather extensive six (!) concept rooms—is unavoidably naff. Hall’s work doesn’t really break up into such neat categories as Consumption, Symbiosis and Trade—surely these constitute a single theme—and this is conceded by the catalogue’s reference to her conceptual preoccupations. In any case, her preference for reiteration results in the scattering of various motifs (brains, mostly vaginal genitalia, woven patterns and surfaces, and vitrine displays) over the six rooms, like spores that have drifted from their source. The affect of their concentrated study upon the viewer is intriguing: I came across one hippie who felt sufficiently softened to stretch prone on a solitary banquette before close-up footage of a munching aphid. Hanging around Hall, people seem to loosen up, spread out, and overuse the word “sensual”—a helpfully clean synonym for sexy, sexual or fecund, which doesn’t acurately describe the nature of Hall’s obsession with the organic. Some of her work is downright filthy, like the handpainted women cavorting through a surrealist catalogue of coitus in Syntax of flowers. Other pieces are tense, such as her early photographs of adolescent sexuality and physical relaxation, which anticipate Bill Henson’s work—and you wouldn’t find anyone calling Henson “sensual”.

It seems to be a convenient word for a female artist, and one who takes a great interest in craft—the ethos of the handmade and reused. But sensuality disregards the complexity of her work’s impact. Hall gets you in with the woven VHS tape, then knocks you sideways with the vulva. She also manages a disarming combination of rusticity and perfection, like the construction of marine forms from knitted plastic in Dead in the water. The finish of these objects is flawless, and yet their preciousness is undiminished. In ‘Castles in the air of the cave dwellers’, giant fibreglass brains are tumorous with various hive constructions, and nests reappear in Tender. A brilliant arrangement of works means that, as we approach a glass wall of numerals in Tender, we hear the hum of business: a recording of bee drones in the nearby Breeding ground. Indeed, Hall seems to have studied the precision of insects and swallows rather than the mimesis of machines. She is not one for punk ethos; taxonomy and credibility are everything, even when they’re ironic—and they usually are. The daggy, stacked cardboard boxes of Give a dog a bone are home to realist soap carvings of a bone, chicken carcass or crash helmet. This contradiction comes to a fine, thrilling point in Cash crop, perhaps the most stunning piece in the exhibition. Shelved according to size and gently coloured celadon and orange, beige and tan, the flora of trade—from the lemon to the cocoa bean—is labelled with both its common names and correlatives in the idiom of industry. Again, the use of ‘soap’ plays on the word’s mercantile connotations. Some of the labels make delightful visual puns (Insider trading is reserved for the smallest of all, the caper), while others are more oblique.


Kota Ezawa, The Simpson Verdict, 2002.
DVD still, 3-min. loop. Edition of 15
It’s hard to say exactly what would have been the ideal partnering exhibition for Force Field, but I’m unconvinced that the motley selection of works sheltering under the title Southern Exposure: Works from the Collection of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art [also until June 1] is it. Diffusing focus upon a single artist by moving us into a group show was probably wise; and relieving our attention to intricacy with big, brash installation and film was obviously considered. Yet I would have preferred, for example, the recent Shahzia Sikander exhibition (housed in the ground floor prior to Hall), to complement Hall, rather than this awkward and discordant selection. On the whole, the San Diego is a rather unenlightening little get-together. I was too excited at the idea of seeing a Chris Burden work to have had any hope of being satisfied by his banal 1979 The Reason for the Neutron Bomb. Lengthy statements accompany both this work and Jeremy Blake’s Winchester painting/film suite. The previous inhabitant of these rooms, Scottish formalist Callum Innes, seemed to have mistaken words for field by theorising on a monitor mounted in the corner of his show; similarly, Burden and Blake need to put words in space that can’t fill itself.

Other pieces in this show have been floating around for a while. Not long ago, I saw Bill Viola’s exquisite Eternal Return in New York, but here it’s unrecognisably diminished. Likewise, I’d encountered the depressing Baldessari in a survey at the impressive Nîmes contemporary art museum. Since, both seem to have been doing the rounds of the globe. But all is not lost: we have Viola’s impending appearance with new work in Sydney to look forward to; and, in this show, we have the inclusion of Kota Ezawa’s The Simpson Verdict, which single-handedly salvages this selection. Ezawa’s digital animation of the OJ Simpson trial is a truly interesting and inexplicably gripping work. A frame-by-frame recreation of the real trial’s camera angles, facial expressions and subtle movements is rendered in simplistic, blockish animation that seems incapable of registering detail. Accompanied by the actual audio of the verdict, however, these childish combinations of colour and shape somehow come to life with great verisimilitude and subtlety.

If it weren’t for The Simpson Verdict, I would deeply resent the separation of the Arnott’s Collection bark paintings They Are Meditating [until August 1] from Hall’s exhibition . Perhaps I do, anyhow. It’s a long bow to draw between twentieth century bark painting from northern Australia and Hall’s response to the wages of white man’s sin; and yet, in the realm of more-than-human life, intricate patterning and readily available materials, it’s a joyously short one. Her work echoes the fine line work in Arnhem artist Yirawala’s x-ray depictions of branching bristles and innards. Bolder are the Groote Eylandt paintings of single insects and marine creatures with thread-like dashes on clean black backgrounds. The highlight of this collection, though, is a series of barks from Port Essington that, like the spectral cousins of the Groote Eylandt works, are each uniquely devoted to a single animal, including emu and turtle. Glowing under spotlights, their ghost smudges are faded, tough white lines that flare and reform. Symbiosis, Trade and Territory could classify this selection, too; but, after levitating to the fourth floor, words of explanation and conceit seem less relevant to the nature and purpose of art-making than ever. We’re not theorising, San Diego, we’re meditating.

Labels: Indigenous art, pop art, public galleries, reviews

From Ian Houston


Mister Darren Sylvester's exhibition of photographic prints, painting and sculpture at Sullivan & Strumpf [until Saturday] is a beguiling and seductive collection of art poised, like a plastic surgeon's scalpel, over the skin of contemporary life.

This is a remarkable show of sophistry by an artist working so deeply in the realm of double blinded irony and signifier play that the possibility of meaning has become vertiginous. Yet this is no simple retreat from a task many of his peers shun as too difficult. The disavowal of meaning, particularly in contemporary photographic work is a familiar trope, often consisting of nothing but a refusal to commit to anything more than the surface of the print. We are all familiar with this type of work. Vistas of banality that resort to arguments of reflection to justify their contempt for depth.


Darren Sylvester, I Care For You, 2007.
Acrylic paint based on Clinique colour surge eye shadow super shimmer, superfit makeup foundation and colour surge butter shine lipsticks, acrylic,
240 x 480 cm (12 panels).
Courtesy Sullivan & Strumpf.

Mister Sylvester's work is significantly more ambitious than this. His fascination with surface and banality is clear. But this is simply the first move in a long chain of strategic decisions. Witness the collection of painting and sculpture that sits alongside the photography, almost, as a kind of codex. I Care for You a painting of the array of colours available in the Clinique make up range conflates Modernist ideals of the grid with the trash poetry of the beauty industry's nomenclature. Similarly two "mask" sculptures named after beauty care regimes bring notions of primitivism, even hints of Les Mademoiselles D'Avignon "face" to face with the tragically empty language of the world of "beauty".

These modernist echoes are subsumed within the suggestive and uncanny mirroring of contemporary life depicted in the photographic prints. Staged vignettes that speak of the mysteries of urban life almost as if they were frames from a narrative, untold but inferred. Teenage girls argue in a lounge room, a surgeon and his team stare toward the viewer, two lovers have their photo taken in a photographic booth. In each instance, we are familiar with the language of the vision, instantly understanding the content, yet it is content made strange, hauntingly inexplicable, each linked to the other in a web of innuendo.

Consider the work, All You Need To Know You Knew Early...


Darren Sylvester, All You Need To Know You Knew Early, 2007.
Lightjet print, 90 x 120cm.
Courtesy Sullivan & Strumpf
We are witness to a scene in which a journalist stands by her cameraman, she too is "witnessing" a scene we cannot see. We imagine she is part of an organisation that creates the world we see through the news media and she herself is a "face" of that organisation, yet now she stands reflective, relaxed, not "on" but instead contemplating her subject, just as we contemplate her. The cameraman squints through the camera doing his job. But of course it is really someone representing a cameraman, so that the cameraman who is actually taking the photo, can take a photo of a cameraman. Just as we now stand in the place of that cameraman, witnessing what that camera captured.

This complex interplay of "witnesses" "witnessing" is focussed on this "newswoman's" face. We think on her. Is the title a representation of her thoughts? Does she "know" enough? Or is it "how we know" that is at stake in a world of shadows and images. Are the pictures that surround us, part of the story the newswomen is reporting? This woman's face, a made up mask, so reasonable so natural, about to be mobilised in its role as a disseminator of mass information, becomes a focus of the exhibition's concerns. The painting of the makeup colors, the blank wooden masks become epistemology. The face becomes object, painted wood, the subject dissolves. Life becomes unknowable.

Labels: commercial galleries, painting, photography, reviews

From Bonny Dot Cassidy

They come loitering down a runway, into Linda Marrinon’s sixth solo show Figure Sculpture II at Roslyn Oxley9 [until March 1]. Beautiful troopers that they are, it’s hard not to wish for a battalion rather than the mere eleven figures that carry on from the sculptor’s last figure collection. But perhaps there’s something about the exclusivity of the bevy that adds to its sense of preciousness, a gem-like quality that makes these little (mostly) women seem as if they’ve been dug up from the earth after years of rest.


Linda Marrinon, Beautiful Troopers, installation view.
Courtesy Roslyn Oxley Gallery.
Marrinon has used tinted plaster, giving lumpy bases the effect of eroded clay. While the figures appear to be standing on rocky outcrops or blasted tundra, their upright bodies are smooth and sleek in the way of dogs; rustic and textured but with that tight, flat composure that begs a hand on the haunch. I was afraid—not of the figures but the CCTV—to touch, but I bet they feel as good as they look. Woman in high-waisted pants is crowned with a Lawrence of Arabia turban, blazing ochre yellow, that she pulls aside from her cheek with a truncated, oversized hand. The frozen fabric around her neck and shoulders billows into rough, sinewy clouds. It’s as if her face is peering out of a Caspar Friedrich sunrise. I wore some such thing when approaching mosques in Turkey, but emerged like a chipmunk from a holey sock. As for those titular slacks—they have the same golden hue as the fabric, but here the tint covers an undercoat of sky blue. The sun really is shining out of her pants.


Attracted by Marrinon’s deft arrangement of fabric, rivulets of sharp shadow are one of the most outstanding effects of this series. The lighting of the figures is sensitive and reverent, blinding from directly overhead so that their curious Hergé faces peer out from all manner of headdress. There’s the Outdoors woman dressed in pelts, whose cylindrical hat balances her stocky, bear-like limbs and capable Inuit boots. And the Knight in chain mail, who I mistook for Jeanne D’Arc, with a simple helmet edge incised around his face and barely any colouring. Again, Marrinon achieves the impact of terracotta soldiers with these ascetic lines and surfaces. The only indulgence of excess appears in their uniformly protuberant behinds, which are somewhat shocking to discover as you round the table. Sort of like finding that the Crucifixion on the wall has been given a bum as lifelike as his cranial agony.

And thus the other obvious point of reference for Marrinon is medieval Christian iconography. The works reminded me of one spare timber St Michael perched in the abbey atop Mont Saint-Michel in western France. For all the talk about mannequins and fashion surrounding this show, I find Marrinon’s postures more saintly than self-aware; even down to incongruous details like spat buttons on an invisible trouser. There are humour and warmth here, but I think her sculptures are on more important missions than glamour. Take, for instance, the utilitarian and ethnic nature of all the costumes, which seem to be prepared for stolid journeys into far-off lands. Indeed, Daisy Bates came to mind more than once—especially considering those outrageous hats. Marrinon captures, too, the heroic air of painterly legends: Goya’s Maya (that’s our high-waisted lady), and the women and goddesses of Ingres, Velasquez and Botticelli. This fabricated archaism, this Classical chic, this angel at my table has all sold out.

Labels: commercial galleries, reviews, sculpture

The latest poll results for the most influential artist of all time has thrown up some surprising results. As of today, it's a dead heat between Lloyd Rees, Brett Whiteley, Mike Parr and Mark Titmarsh, with Daniel Mudie Cunningham and Ken Done a close second. We would have bet money that Matthys Gerber would have been the easy winner. All roads lead back to that erstwhile lecturer in painting at Sydney College of The Arts, his invisible hand evident in an awful lot of painting, much of it awful, an equal measure not. The group show at Gallery 9 that's finishing out their big first year, has a few artists in it who seemed to have learned a trick or two from the happy Dutchman.


Nana Ohnesorge, Snow white, 2007. Courtesy Gallery 9.
Nana Ohnesorge's work is especially redolent of Gerber-esque colours and landscapes, mashed up with random bits and pieces of decoration, dividing lines and faux textures, a menstruating woman lost in a swamp possibly Ohnesorge's own invention. Along with the paintings are an accompanying series of works on paper called Nature Studies which layer images and patterns and, despite the sense that you've seen a lot of this kind of thing a before, they are spookily effective. If Ohnesorge could be said to be into Figurative Gerberesque, Phil Williams whose work shares the room, is also a disciple of Abstract Gerberism. His big paintings are like small Gerbers, swirls of colour very carefully and deliberately applied so you end up with a kind of Hesitant Abstraction, mixed with a florid representation of nature. In an act perversity typical to The School of Matthys, Williams has a series of portraits on paper that look like they are straight outta the 70s, like the illustrations you'd find on the front of school exercise books. With titles such as Kurt, Miranda and Jesse, the works combine a blocky image of a face with star bursts, star fields and rainbow prisms. Remember what they used to say in the 70s? Space is the place!


Phil Williams, Dark, dark house in a dark dark wood, 2007. Courtesy Gallery 9

While viewing the group show we were told that Timothy Price, whose work is out the back, is "big in Canberra". Trying to imagine his deliberately crude paintings in the windows of a Manuka gallery conjured up images of flaming torches, pitch forks and a pyre of paintings crackling in the cold air of a Canberra winter. Chilling.


Timothy Price, Space Precinct, 2007. Courtesy Gallery 9
Matthew Hopkins continues to be an artist of promise. Instead of Gerberism, Hopkins has turned to Stephen King for inspiration. Sometimes people tell you useful things while looking at art. In this case we were told that the Hopkins works - sculptures, drawings, paintings and video - were all related to the King book/TV show IT, which was very handy because we have never read a King novel and have only by accident seen the movies. Until that moment we did not know what to make of Hopkins mini-show. Had the artist gone mad? Was the whole clown motif an overworked and overwrought pop culture reference point? Maybe, but once we had our bit of contextualising information it was a relief, not mad after all, a rabid fan perhaps, an act of homage. 10 Corporate Portraits of IT might be Hopkins play at mainstream acceptance, being rather expertly applied paint instead of his usual spider drawings. That it sold and may yet end up in a coporate boardroom is a fantastic thought.


Matthew Hopkins, 10 Corporate Portraits of IT, 2007. Installation view. Courtesy Gallery 9.
In the next room is a big installation by Tom Polo. Although relatively young, Pollo seems to have won many, many awards - from language class and attendance awards to a special certificate for being the "quietest achiever". Lovingly saved by his mother over the years, these dozens of awards, certificates and prizes create an informal wallpaper of excellence against which Polo has created shelves featuring statuettes for his sporting activities and paintings featuring smiling faces and childish heads. On closer inspection you notice that the sports trophies aren't his, the name TOM POLO Dymo-labelled into place. Slowly, what seems to be a monument to achievement, becomes increasingly uncertain, partly jokey yet sincerely deprecating. Lovely.


Tom Polo, Winners are grinners, 2007. Installation detail. Courtesy Gallery 9 and the artist.

Over at Chalkhorse in leafy Surry Hills, are the last couple of days of a show featuring three artists - Alex Davies, Stephanie Smiedt and Renny Kodgers. It pays to go to exhibitions in artist run galleries, if not on the opening night, then certainly in the first few days following because as time passes most ARIs seem to find it harder and harder to keep up standards. At Chalkhorse, the lights were turned off and the gallery person unimpressed by our request for a roomsheet.

Smiedt's work is a big room of paintings with splats of paint dolloped onto huge acreages of white canvas. It looked great and might have looked even better if the lights had been turned on. In the small second gallery Renny Kodgers installation/performance/video was said to have been a huge hit on the opening night, featuring Renny nude in a specially constructed sauna meeting and greeting fans as they came in for a steam. On our visit, the sauna was cold and empty but a video screen showing the action of opening night beckoned. Popping on the headphones we saw [NAME REMOVED ON LEGAL ADVICE] gently stroking Renny's massive penis and offering to fellate it [or words to that effect]. On the bench next to Renny was [NAME REMOVED ON LEGAL ADVICE], also nude, explaining how they do it in Finland. Boy, did we ever miss out. You really had to be there.


The show we'd come to see was Alex Davies show Ultimate Stocking Stuffer Sale! a massive collection of prints of images shot over the last couple of years. Older people would call his style "reportage" but instead of objective photojournalism, there's something much more immediate and personal in Davies encounters during APEC, his portraits of friends, fellow artists and writers [thanks to this show we now know what Adam Jasper looks like, so we can put a face to the excellent pieces he writes for Frieze]. The photo that illustrated the invitation is amomng our favourites in this strong show Justin Shoulder APEC Ghost Protest which manages to be seem both utterly contemporary and timeless, like a throwback to Sydney in the 40s. There are a couple of series of images taken overseas - Thailand and Japan - and although Davies undoubtedly has an eye, these works seem unremarkable, touristy, and he's much better on places and subjects he knows more intimately, such as a great portrait of Shaun Gladwell.

We were sorry we'd missed the opening of these shows and regretted that we'd left reviews so late, so when we were admonished by Vicki Papageorgopoulos that her show with Jonathon Bailey The Stickers hadn't been appropriately 'big-upped' on the blog, we decided we'd make damn sure that we'd get down to Firstdraft and see the show proper. We'd also been hearing positive word on Emily Hunt and Sean Bailey's shows too. Unfortunately it was not to be. Despite checking and double checking the opening days and hours, when we got down there we realised we'd forgotten about the Curse of The ARI... Firstdraft was closed. We can't be too harsh on Firstdraft or any other ARI, gallery or institution at this time of year. Xmas rot has set in. There is a feeling of the end, the place closing down until late January.


Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Porcelain, 1985 / 2007. Courtesy the artist


That feeling of the end is embodied in Daniel Mudie Cunningham's show Funeral Songs at MOP. The set up is fairly simple, yet amazingly profound. Cunningham asked 150 people to nominate a song that they would have played at their funeral, from serious stuff like John A Douglas's nomination of 4th Movement Symphony #3 with text by Friedrich Nietzsche by Gustav Mahler to Margaret Mayhew's desire for her near and dearest to hear The Muppets version of Danny Boy. All of the songs have been compiled onto CDs and loaded up into an antique CD juke box. Visitors to the gallery can select favourites and imagine the end. On a video screen Cunningham mimes enthusiastically to his own song. We won't spoil it for you by telling you which song it is, but we have to say, he's go some serious moves in his dance repertoire.

Labels: artist run galleries, painting, photography, reviews

The Art Life begins it's end of year special with a walk down one of Sydney's art precinct thoroughfares, Glenmore Road in Paddington. It's meant to be a two-way street but the traffic is viciously one way, get out of the way or get run over.


Audrey Rhoda, Dog, Fish, Girl.
120x150cm, Oil,wax & charcoal on canvas.

Our Glenmore Road art experience starts before we even get to the second-most venerable art strip in Paddington. We pass Charles Hewitt Gallery & Framing Showroom on South Dowling Street and, in the spirit of adventuring off our well-worn cow-path art track, we venture inside. Audrey Rhoda is having a show called The Child Within. It’s an exhibition of paintings done with oil and wax on board. The artist has developed a concise language of child-like imagery done in an adults-posing-as-kids pastiche of children’s paintings – cats, dogs, cars, faces – built up and layered in a faux art brut style. The show is highly suggestive, mostly of those scenes in films where the camera wanders through a dark spooky house with a toy piano on the soundtrack going plink plink plink and a child’s voice tunelessly singing la la la … Mummy. The child within wants out.

On Glenmore Road proper the fun starts with Gallery Savah [founded 1990] and a big show of Utopia Region Artists. There are stars here - Gloria Petyarre, Minnie Pwerle and Emily Kame Kngwarreye – and for a secondary market gallery it’s no fills, all business. There’s an Kngwarreye called Flower Dreaming in powerful orange and black and a nice Pwerle in yellow and black called Awelye Atnwengerrp, $13,200 and $8,800 respectively. When resale royalty rolls around it’ll be interesting to see how galleries like Savah make a go of it. In the meantime, if you’ve got the cash, why not?


Nerissa Lea, Portal 16, 2007.
Pastel on board, 23 x 23 cm.

Next door to Savah is Australian Galleries Works on Paper Gallery, which is always a surprise even if you know it’s there. AGWOP makes a decent fist of it at the Oxford Street end of things and when we arrive Nerissa Lea is exhibiting pastel on board works in a show with the very promising title of Brain Portals. Lea’s major canvases are overwrought surrealist concoctions that appeal to the tastes of people who’d probably also like cigars, truffles and French maid’s outfits. Her smaller scale pieces in Brain Portals are much more succinct and effective and some of the best suggest Lea might be a distant relation of James Guppy, both artist’s sharing an interest in the quaint bizarre. Portal 16, hanging in the gallery window, is by far the best thing in the show.


Barbara Hilder, McDonnell Ranges.
Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cm.

It’s back to Earth when you walk out of AGWOP and into Harris Courtin Gallery. We suffer delirium in humid weather and Harris Courtin offer a deep freeze air conditioning and a very friendly gallery chap who offers a folder room sheet with a list of everything on sale – all of it under $1,000. In fact, the show is called Works Under $1,000. Some people like value for money, such as when you get your hair cut and you know a trim is all you need but since you’re paying good money you think, cut it all off! So at Harris Courtin the works may be small but they are generous with paint. You could probably find cheaper paintings with more paint on them, but what the hell, that’d be like going to Gowings. Perhaps something for the Xmas stocking?


Ben Goss, Music has the right to children, 2007.
Oil, acrylic & shellac on linen, 61.5 x 61 .5.

MaunsellWickes at Barry Stern [across the road from the other galleries at this end of Glenmore Road] is hosted by very generous men who offer clearly distressed visitors glasses of mineral water and anecdotes about pasta dishes in Venice. It’s very refreshing. It’s the final days of Ben Goss’s show and it looks like just about everything has been sold. We like the fact Goss doesn’t seem too concerned with filling up the canvas with paint, and the loose gestural drawing-like quality of the paintings, but the surfaces are too bright and shiny for our tastes. Any doubts are dispelled when we discover that one painting is called Music has the right to children. If you get the reference you quickly realise that Goss is a man of taste and wealth, alright.

The next stop on the Glenmore Road experience is like the middle bit of Apocalypse Now – after the all the fireworks of the beginning it’s a long trip through not much but just remember one thing; never get out of the goddamn boat. Andrew Crawford Gallery is in the old gallery space established by Maree Mizon [now on Queen Street, Paddington] and it’s another secondary market joint. Crawford has worked out the art/life nexus as a hastily hand-written sign in the window advises OPEN SATURDAY 12-6 or BY APPT ONLY. There are some artist run galleries open fewer hours than this but not too many. We looked through the window and could see a light on and an empty port glass sitting on a table but not much else. Next is the Sara Roney Gallery a few meters down the street. The gallery is so narrow that it’s almost just a shop front, albeit a shop front that sells paintings by people you’ve never heard of for $16,000. It’s a weird space and the artists shown there range from Ana Pollack – who recently won the Dobell Drawing Prize – to Dennis Hopper. Yes, that Dennis Hopper. It’s group show time at “the Roney” [as the locals call it] and it is a very polite, light toned abstraction suitable for sunny apartments or hotel rooms in Super Cannes. It is all very tasteful and respectable.

The Freeland Gallery & Ceramic Gallery is closed and we are quietly thankful. Some galleries can afford to be closed mid-week and it gives us reason to press on to Five Ways.

The famous streets near the round-a-bout are being torn up to remove the round-a-bout so the Royal Hotel and various restaurants, the chicken shop and [off to one side] Sherman Galleries on Goodhope Street are marooned behind bollards and battlements. Some shops have just closed until the unpleasantness is over but Paddington Contemporary Fine Art is open for business. A sign in the window states Open as usual. There’s a painting in the window of the gallery by Richard Maurovic of the round-a-bout at Five Ways and its like experiencing a weird mirror, one done in the style of Jeffrey Smart. Once inside the friendly man eating spaghetti explains that Maurovic was a jockey who fell off a horse and lost the use of his legs. He trained himself as an artist and Mr. Smart took him under his wing, teaching Maurovic how to paint. Looking at Maurovic’s work is little like experiencing what it might have been had Smart not forsaken Australia for Italy and was still making pictures of Sydney. In all likelihood he would have ended up like James Willebrandt, but it’s interesting to ponder the possibilities. Meanwhile, Maurovic makes a decent stab at painterly realism.


Robert Hannaford, Green apple, 2007.
Oil on canvas, 152x185cms.

The final leg of our journey is happily all down hill to Harrison Galleries where perennial Archibald Prize bridesmaid Robert Hannaford is having a major show of big paintings called, appropriately enough, New Work. He works to huge scale and in oils, so one must genuflect before the man’s undoubted talent with his medium. The framing gives the impression of old masters and the subject matter – sheep skull, nudes, bags of fruit, gum trees – is William Dargie for the new millennium. There is really nothing more one can say about the work, which is fine, as we rest our weary feet and gaze at a monumental work called Bag of Apples. That’s a good title.

Labels: exhibitions, reviews, Sydney

Labels: haiku, reviews

The recent exhibition of new work by Halinka Orszulok and Rachel Scott at MOP was shit hot. While not curated as a joint show, these concurrent exhibitions both utilised suburbia as a literal and metaphorical site for investigating what is common to individual subjective experience.

To my mind, Orszulok has produced her best group of works in this series Melrose Park, seven paintings depicting scenes from the suburb she grew up in. Her remarkable competence with traditional representational technique allows her to produce photo realistic paintings which evoke intense sense memories, not just of her experience, but of our own.


Halinka Orszulok, Melrose Park, 2007.


Orszulok’s suburbia is both personal and generic then. The homes, the streets, and the park lands that surround them are purposefully undistinguished, reminding us of the way in which our relationship to the spaces we inhabit is always, already mediated by our experiences of them. It is representative of a space in which conventional dichotomies break down and are in a constant state of renegotiation: private versus public, safety versus danger, home versus displacement. And perhaps the creepiest of all: fantasy versus reality.

Orszulok’s depiction of these spaces at night, concealed and revealed through the play of light and dark, is not accidental in relation to her preoccupation with the uncanny. The scenes she paints are of places filled with anxious anticipation. For example, a picture of a girl’s toilet block draws our attention to the ambiguity of its signification. This is just a fancy way of saying that one person’s nostalgia for smoking menthol cigarettes is another’s fear of a random act of violence.

Look inside one of Oszulok’s bedroom windows and you may just find someone like Rachel Scott making art.



Scott’s (Don’t) Beat Yourself Up Over It featured framed, original poems written by her as a teenager in the late 80s and a video depicting a long session of self-flagellation with rose stems in her suburban bedroom, set to a Robbie Williams smash hit.

In this exhibition Scott puts her money where her mouth is in relation to her general project of articulating an aesthetics of the psychology of ‘failure, longing, human weakness and self-consciousness’. The poems are cringe worthy, adolescent attempts at profundity – ‘A nothing, a nobody/But somebody deep inside’ - the video as dramatic as the inane arguments over the car keys one imagines have been taking place for years in the generic lounge room beyond: I Just Want To Feel Real Love, just like you Robbie, just like all of us.

Scott’s work, both as an act of art and life, pricks the pretension of Nietzsche’s beautiful idea that pain does not necessarily make one a better human being but certainly a more profound one. Maybe that’s OK for the Germans, she seems to be saying, but some of us grew up in Crows Nest.

This is not to undermine the seriousness of Scott as an artist. She deals with some big ideas, with modesty and humour. For instance, these latest works give lie to received ideas about art as a mode of self-expression: it is not simply the externalization of the creative individual’s innate psychological states and feelings but rather a performative act constitutive of the subject-as-artist (or poet, or love interest, etc). By exposing the amateur aspects of the performance of her own psychodrama she allows us to see, in a more general way, how our often pretentious aspirations to overcome the chronic mediocrity of day-to-day existence congeal, over time, into something perhaps equally mundane. Existential alienation as a lifestyle concept.

Carrie Lumby

Labels: artist run galleries, blog contributor, reviews

Poor creatures trapped
In the mind of the artist
On show for amusement

Craig Bender’s Struggle Area @ MOP




Silent forest stands
Waiting for night time visits
Smell of damp earth


Lynne Furgang's Discreet Violations @ MOP


Nature does our work
Chimpanzee struggles forward
Biscuit on its head


James & Eleanor Avery’s Our Day Out @ Artspace





Rough hewn wooden bench
Old moon shots in a tiny scope
Make up a story


Tobias Richardson’s singles, couples and queens @ Depot 2 Gallery




Faded stains like ghosts
Markings of old souls lost
Tears and whispers heard

Labels: haiku, photography, reviews, sculpture

Nature seems to be everywhere. Not the real thing of course, which is always inescapably everywhere, but rather the seemingly sudden and complete saturation of the art world with every other exhibition in Sydney taking nature as its metaphor. Nature is on our minds! We have pondered the meaning of this and wondered if it might have some profound connection to the very basis of the human relationship to the natural world and the expression of that relationship through art, and moreover, an expression of the animistic heart of our culture – but then, it’s probably got more to do with so much nature being on the tele at the moment.

Anne Zahalka’s Wild Life at Roslyn Oxley takes the representation of nature found in the antique dioramas of the Mammal Hall at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and updates them to more accurately represent the status of nature in the world today. Into these immaculately constructed dioramas Zahalka has photographically introduced new elements – in a diorama of deer the artist she has added a guy with a rifle [helpfully called Deer Hunter], an alpine scene of mountain goats now has a helicopter and a discarded water bottle [Alpine Scene] – in others tourists meet a lynx, exotic birds meet a lady in kimono and some tourists hassle a brown bear. The photographs have been mounted on the gallery wall that has been painted green and cream to create a faux museum setting and visitors can pop on a pair of headphones to listen to audio - a soundtrack of natural environmental sounds mixed with tour guide chatter and coach air breaks.

Like much of Zahalka’s work, the series has a certain visual appeal but it seems to have little to do with the hammy interventions of the artist. The American Museum’s dioramas are widely acknowledged as masterpieces of an outdated attitude to nature [killing and mounting as an act of ‘preservation’] but which are nonetheless time capsules of no longer extant environments. In Zahalka’s works, the artist uses these images not for what they are but as stand ins for the idea of the ‘museumification’ of nature, a slightly comic rendition of the world in full Victorian splendour. Perhaps if that is what these dioramas were meant to have been about Zahalka’s critique might have some bite but as it stands, she is appealing to the ignorance of people who don’t know anything of the original intention and then congratulating the viewer for being as cynical as the artist. The ecological message of the works is incredibly obvious and frankly, just not very well done. The most successful work is Rising Tide, a diorama of a tropical island with a flock of flamingos flying overhead as the new sea level swamps the island. The best part about it is that you can’t tell what the artist has done, if anything, to the original, which seems to be a sort of indictment of the rest of the series.


Rohan Wealleans, Head, 2004.
Paint, plastic, polystyrene on board, 160x120x150.
Courtesy Roslyn Oxley Gallery.

Rohan Wealleans has the big gallery space at the Ox and although the nature metaphor is somewhat tangential compared to Zahalka, the anthropological aspect is just as strong. Visually reminiscent of Hany Armanious and some of the older works of Karl Weibke, Wealleans is like a grunge lite hippy with maybe too much of a liking for Dances with Wolves - entitled Tatunka the show is a series of huge Native American ‘dream catchers’ painted with startling reds, shocking blues and other inappropriate colours glooped on. From an aesthetic point of view, the works are fantastic, but there’s something so inescapably naff about a non Native American making Native American objects, not to mention that dream catchers are the trinket shop equivalent of rainbow stickers and shaky snows with dolphins inside. Yikes. Wealleans’s Head, a huge head made of paint and polystyrene has an amazing psychedelic intensity and the marbling of the surfaces is vertiginous drop into the whirl of the unconscious, an effect deftly repeated in Disciple of The Pearl, a pear shaped monster that hangs from a purpose built stand a la Dr. Seuss. We’re not sure if Wealleans is actually seeking some equivalence of the unconscious between cultures and if he is, that probably makes it all alright. If he’s not, it’s time to stop taking acid.

Paul Adair, Crate, 2005.
Giclee print, 80x80cms. Courtesy Stills Gallery.

Stills Gallery is usually a pretty straight, old school photography gallery. Occasionally they do something a little different – sculpture, video – and the current show of Paul Adair, Daniel Kojta and Pete Volich is very much in this latter category with photography only acting as part – rather than the whole – of the artist’s practice. Volich’s series of works were seen in last year’s Helen Lempriere Scholarship show and we didn’t like them much on first viewing. Second time around we’ve warmed to them considerably, especially since one is about having your polo shirt chewed by a moose. Mounting shirts like commemorative guernseys, Volich’s pieces record events that are far more ordinary. Oh dear… You Won’t Do That Again is the moose-chewed shirt with the unsightly stain, on the torn shirt and a photograph of the moose attached to the bottom of the special frame. The stories behind the other works are a little more obscure, each element adding a clue but with titles like A panel beaten life and love for the sweets, the chain of command had shifted and jnr’s voice was up for it and Reach with you right hand, live with your left. Chin up and bear it for a big life and only piss in a pocket that us reinforced, the works cast Volich as an art world cross between Sufjan Stephens and Dave Eggers.

Kotja’s video installation Alien Presence H – [hand made echo] is a rectangular screen made up of 11 joined frames, each frame a shot of a different location around the world made by the artist and 10 collaborators. The shoot was synchronised and then, in Kotja’s set up, threaded together by lining up the horizon lines of each shot. What you get in effect is a single continuous landscape made up of sectioned landscapes. According to the room sheet “we are bombarded with high velocity information daily. As a result, the possibility of experiencing the present is removed, through the consistent effect of the ‘update’. Knowledge is obsolete before it can be comprehended.” We’re not quite sure how this methodology is meant to reflect this idea, but reading further the artist says that the desert environment is free of ‘updates’ and therefore apparently allowing magic to take place. It’s a hopeful formulation at best since we have always thought that we only ever experience the present, time being a condition of an eternal ‘now’, we must ask how a shot of a desert can alleviate the continual input of living in the present – with or without updates [and precisely what does he mean by that since every second is an update?]. One can at least luxuriate in the slight fuzziness of the logic and the image itself.

Returning to our nature trek, Adair’s works explore “the portrayal of reality in contemporary photography. More specifically, he is interested in exposing a reality that is quite sinister and, in a sense, radically incomplete.” In his Crate, for example, a photograph of a Ring-tailed Possum [not the more common Brush-tailed variety] encounters a milk crate. Poor possie, not only is the milk crate a poor substitute for its preferred environment of the Australian bush, he’s stuffed – literally. Indeed, the whole thing is an artificial set up created by Adair, then shot against a white backdrop, and printed as a huge giclee print. Adair has wandered into similar conceptual territory as Zahalka, but he’s taken it another step by creating more obviously artificial environments that are free of the sentimental obviousness that so badly mars Zahalka’s work. In fact, Adair’s large scale photographs share something of the sensibility of Hayden Fowler, deploying attractive Fahler-esque constructions, as if put together from a kit, with the colour saturation of a Miffy book. Not really sinister, but still creepy as hell.

We went to see two new shows at Chalkhorse, the gallery put together by the ½ Doz. team. Fergus Binns is in the big space with an untitled show and They Guard It So Carefully You’d Think It Was Gold by Kate Mitchell is out the back in the smaller space.


Fregus Binns, Colour and Pattern, 2005.

Binns was in Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art last year and he does paintings of icons of Australiana, Steve Irwin, Ayers Rock, cans of VB, barbeque aprons. For this show he has resuscitated some of the Primavera paintings and added some new ones - a painting of a tropical island with a Qantas jet crashed into the ocean,another with the tail of a Qantas jet on fire and burning airliner wreckage littered around Uluru. The one of Steve Irwin holding a snake with stripes of paint on it called Colouration and Pattern from 2005 makes another appearance. The painting ‘quality’ is as bad as we have ever seen and even though some big claims are made in the catalogue for the relevance of making these images, we are profoundly unconvinced. For example:

“…[A] work entitled Diggers (2003), […] presents two faceless Australian men in khaki tropical attire digging a hole, seemingly without purpose. The myth of the Anzac Digger, perhaps our pre-eminent image, is totally undermined. What is left though is not the image of the two diggers, but a question. Why are the Diggers so important to me? This approach is also seen in the number of men dressed in animal suits, koalas and kangaroos etc, who can be found at the pub or just hanging about. What do these animal totems mean? How does a koala come to represent our nation?”

How exactly does this "totally undermine" the Anzac Digger? Brave men and women gave their lives to create the wonderful country that is Australia today and moreover, to guarantee the freedom of someone like Binns to make shit paintings. Like those troublesome Muslim youths, Binns should get down to his local RSL and learn a thing or two about the Anzac tradition. Hell, they might even offer some rudimentary painting classes.

Kate Mitchell’s show is performance art documentation of the artist digging a hole to China, she has compressed it down to 1½ minutes on a video shown on a tiny screen so small you can’t quite make out what she’s doing. In Danger Is My Daily Bread she climbs out on a rope bridge over a river and then cuts through the rope with a knife, and then falls into the water when the bridge collapses. Repeat. A sculpture called You should listen to rocks; they can tell you things (Rocky 8) is a fiberglass rock that you’re supposed to put your ear against and hear something. Unfortunately, it wasn’t turned on or it was broken. A pity.

Labels: artist run galleries, bad art, photography, reviews