Paris: Photography in the city of light

LF doesn't usually post pre-announcements but this festival of photography, commencing next Wednesday 31 October at venues across Paris, and featuring Ricky Maynard at the Australian Embassy, will be unmssable.
More info at www.photoquai.fr

Australia: on the road

LF has been too busy to post, but these are worth checking out (reviews forthcoming):

Melbourne: NGV
Gordon Bennet retrospective - outstanding show of a major talent

Canberra: NGA
Indigenous Art Triennale - Brenda Croft's long-awaited inaugural triennale is unmissable
Robert Raschenburg - quietly astonishing

Sydney:
Mori Gallery until 27 October 2007
Sanngeeta Sandrasega 'Untitled' - Not to be missed
Daniel Boyd 'The fatal impact: the invasion of the South Pacific'

ACP: Matthew Sleeth

Sherman Galleries: Heri Dono - great show from the Indonesian installation artist. Also Janet Lawrence.

SCA:Fauvette Loureiro schlarship finalists: Alex Gawronski. Paul Ogier, Rachel Scott, Bronwyn Thompson, Mimi Tong
Hmmm... worth a look.

Martin Brown: Roy Jackson - the abstractionist's abstractionist? Luverly.

Grantpirrie: Tim Silver - always compelling.

That's it for now.

Azaria Chamberlain is alive and well and living in Puducherry

The Kingpins
Great Undead
Kaliman Gallery, Paddington
until 27 October

Left: ©The Kingpins (and Jaya Arts and Digital), Crotchet Trilogy 2007, oil on canvas. Courtesy the artists and Kaliman Gallery Sydney.

Oh what fun! Art as entertainment.

Thursday night's opening on Sutherland street denuded other worthy exhibitions as hipsters flocked to the show of the moment - the fab four's garish installation of painting, embroidery and sculpture (but no plasmas, whew!), which is a gorgeous goddess-fest; an orgy of kitsch that encapsulates all sorts of delicious cultural connundrums.

Having others do your paintings is a tradition that goes back to the ateliers of the rennaissance, ironically refreshed along the way by Duchamp, Warhol and Koons, and the danger is that if that's the only joke then we've heard it many times before. Thankfully with the KPs, it's not - it's just one more irony among many. All (?) the paintings were done by two Pondicherry (Tamil Nadu, or more correctly Puducherry Union Territory) outfits - Muthu Arts and Jaya Arts and Digital - and stylistically they evoke the lurid depictions of deities and (culturally interchangeable?) cinematic billboard narratives seen throughout India. The implicit cultual commentary is fabulous. I'm sure the artists were paid fairly, but the idea that Australia now sources art production (along with programming and call centre services) from the developing world is irresistible.

In terms of imagery, there's something for everybody (with a sense of humour). Azaria Lives! proclaim several small canvasses, and she manifests as a variable amalgam of Xena/Dingo/Thylocene Woman/Screen Siren (with crotchetted accessories, see left) across a range of larger works. There's also the appliqué backdrop from their Great Undead and Let's dance performances.

Oh, and Kaliman has a new blog, where you can see pix of the opening and find out more about the artists' antics: http://kalimangallery.blogspot.com/

Un Allemand en Paris: Gunter Forg at Lelong

Günther Förg
Peintures, aquarelles et photographies
Galerie Lelong Paris
until 20 October

© Gunter Forg, both Sans titre [Untitled], 2007. Acrylique et craie sur toile. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong Paris.

Günter Förg's large abtract paintings are on view for another couple of weeks and are well worth seeing. There's a huge freshness and vitality to this work, which utlises lush, painterly marks to create energetic gridded forms. Pure abstraction has been somewhat out of fashion in Europe these past years, and this show has a refreshing confidence that paint on canvas, without an elaborate conceptual subtext or ironic reference to the history of painting, is enough. Vive la surface!

According to the press release: "Grilles ou trames, entrecroisements de lignes verticales et horizontales, déploiement de touches de couleur libres, il n'y a dans les peintures de Günther Förg ni symboles, ni métaphores, ni sens caché. Ce que vous voyez est ce que vous voyez, la manifestation d'une liberté, d'une grâce, d'une simplicité et d'une audace : obtenir l'intensité visuelle la plus grande avec les moyens picturaux les plus réduits. «Se rappeler qu’un tableau, avant d’être un cheval de bataille, une femme nue ou une quelconque anecdote, est essentiellement une surface plane recouverte de couleurs en un certain ordre assemblées» (M. Denis)

[Grids or screens, intersections of vertical and horizontal lines, use of touches of free colour; in the paintings of Günter Förg there are neither symbols, metaphors, nor hidden meanings. What you see is what you see, the manifestation of a liberty, grace, simplicity and audacity: to derive the greatest visual intensity with the most reduced means. "One refects that a picture, before being a war-horse, a naked woman or an unspecified anecdote, is primarily a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain way" (M. Denis)]

Forg is professor of painting at Munich's School of Fine Arts.

Sydney: Urban Myths & Modern Fables at UTS Gallery

Urban Myths & Modern Fables
Hamra Abbas (Pakistan/Germany), Khadim Ali (Pakistan), Henna Nadeem (UK), Hitesh Natalwala (Australia), Tazeen Qayyum (Canada), Nusra Qureshi (Australia), Sabeen Raja (Pakistan/USA), Naeem Rana (Australia), Amin Rehman (Canada), Sangeeta Sandrasegar (Australia), Alia Toor (Canada).
UTS Gallery, Ultimo
until 26 October

Left: Alia Toor 99 names of Amman 2004. Dust masks with cotton embroidery. Courtesy of the artist and UTS Gallery Sydney.

This exhibition of new work, curated by now Toronto-based Haema Sivanesan, features work by artists "of Indian and Pakistani background, working in Australia and the international diaspora" according to the press release. It's a fine show, and reinforces LF's perception, from travel on the Indian subcontinent, that an entirely different visual sensibility pervades contemporary art from that part of the world. The frequent appearence of 'miniatures' is a manifestation with obvious cultural origins, but there is a delicacy and restraint in much of this work that is not a common feature of Australian and much Western art, which often goes for the jugular in terms of size and conceptual ambitions. LF's standout's are Sangeeta Sandrasegar's delicate two-part installation Untitled (The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon her Sleep), Alia Toor's embroided dust mask installation, 99 names of Amman (pictured) and Tazeen Qayyum's series of 'specimen boxes' Test on a Small Area before Use .

Sydney: Linde Ivimey

Linde Ivimey
Martin Brown Fine Art, Potts Point
until 7 October 2007


Left: ©Linde Ivimey, Myra 2007. Steel armature, cast acrylic resin, stone, dyed cotton and silk, earth, natural fibre, sheep and chicken bones, feathers, porcupine quills, human hair, rabbit fur, black pearls, 9ct gold ring. Courtesy the atist and MBFA Sydney.

So much has and will be written on this superb show that we hesitate to add more superlatives. Darkly funny, spookily whimsical, sophisticatedly rustic... Ivimey just gets better. MBFA have also done a beautifully photographed mini-catalogue. Go see.

Sydney and regional NSW: Godwin Bradbeer

Godwin Bradbeer Aspects of the Metaphysical Body
Drawings
until 3 November
Annandale Galleries, Sydney

And touring;
Godwin Bradbeer The Metaphysical Body
Grafton Regional Gallery from 28 September 2007
Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery from 29 October
Mosman Regional Art Gallery from 8 December 2007

Left: © Godwin Bradbeer Imago 1 Folio 2 2006. Chinagraph, pastel dust and silver oxide on Arches. Courtsey the artist and Annandale Galleries Sydney.

Godwin Bradbeer's Imago series of giant heads makes the Dobell Drawing Prize shortlist just about every year, however it wasn't one of these that won the award in 1998. That was an almost full figure, Man of paper VII. This year's entry, Imago XVI, is still on view at AGNSW, and Imago 1 Folio 2 (pictured left) was last year's Dobell entry, and is part of the exhibition just opened at Annandale Galleries. Bradbeer is not a 'hip' artist, and not everyone likes his figure studies, but LF is a definite fan of the Imago series in particular, and of Bradbeer's sensual mark-making.

The NZ-born artist is a senior lecturer in drawing at Melbourne's RMIT, and his large, one-off works on paper have a significant collector base, however he remains somewhat undervalued commercially, and is under-represented in institutional collections. LF has at times heard his work disparaged as overly sentimental, and we can understand that some people might find the recurrent Imago series, with its androdgynous, Asian child's face, not to their taste, while others find them serene and somewhat Buddhist. They are not, we understand, drawn from life, and it's as if Bradbeer is repeatedly receating a spiritual vision that exists in his mind - it always appears to be the same child, but each head is markedly different. This is by no means his only motif, and there are many other fine works in both the Annandale and touring shows. Bradbeer is one of our great drawing talents and creates surfaces of extraordinary sensuality and depth.

Also at Annandale, in the main room: Guy Warren Still Flowing
Watercolours, Diaries & Sketchbooks Installation, until 3 November
Although certainly worth a look, LF did not especially warm to Warren's faux-naive 'Aboriginal-inspired' watercolours on the walls, but found his vitrine-displayed notebooks and journals to be fascinating, and far more indicative of Warren's huge talent.

Sydney: Multiple Personalities at MOP

MOP's move to the old Esa Jaske Gallery space has proved a good thing and cements its status as a SOCS fixture that hopefully is here to stay. It's one of the few ARI's to successfully make the transition to the 'mainstram fringe', and this is no doubt due to the commitment, taste and dedication of MOP's committee, and the consitently interesting and risky work they show. Collectors buying work by MOP's emergent artists have a good chance of making a wise investment.

Multiple Personality
Adrienne Doig, Matthew Hopkins, Robin Hungerford, Sari Kivinen, Mat de Moiser, Ms & Mr, Luke Roberts

and Anastasia Zaravinos Numb
MOP Projects, Chippendale
until 7 October

Left: © Luke Roberts, Pope Alice at Giza. Courtesy the artist and MOP Sydney.

Curated by the ubiquitous Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Multiple Personality, according to the press release "brings together artists whose work engages with ideas of persona and the multiple". It's a small show, and consequently struggles to achieve a critical mass around its curatorial theme, but this is more a comment on the space limitations than on the individual work. The Luke Roberts/Pope Alice pieces are not really a good indicaton of this artist's rich and textured installation/performance practice, and it's a shame that most of the DVD/video works rely on plasma screens (as opposed to projections), with the exception of the confronting Gallery 2 video, Numb by Anastasia Zaravinos. Whatever you think of this work, the darkened room and wall-size projection certainly enhance the viewing experience. LF's overrall fave is Adrienne Doig's Australiana series of kitsch embroidery pieces. We'd love to see this curator and these artists with a couple of floors at the MCA and a proper production budget, but until then, more power to MOP.

Sydney: MCA Spring shows

LF has received a few emails asking why we haven't reviewed the current shows at the MCA. It's not deliberate, however we do try to cover stuff that hasn't been reviewed, or is unlikely to be, focussing on smaller independent galleries and ARI's/ARS's. The Arse End? Might start using that. Messrs McDonald and/or Smee are likely to give the MCA shows a withering spray, so we weren't in a hurry to cover them. However, by popular demand...

The Trouble with Julie

Julie Rrap Body Double
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
until 28 january 2008

Left: ©Julie Rrap, Camouflage #4 (Eiko) 2000. Digital print. Courtesy the artist, MCA and Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery Sydney.

This show has been open for some time, indeed it's some weeks since LF joined the canapé-wolfing movers and shakers for the launch of the accompanying (independently-published) monograph. It's hard not to like, or at least approve of, Julie Rrap's consistently interesting and confident body of work over the last two decades, and most art followers (and, one suspects, enthusiastic adolelescent boys in school groups) know Julie's statuesque body better than their own. There is a rigorous intellectual and socio-political underpinning to be found; she is a feisty, warm and intelligent woman, and this well-mounted and conceived mid-career retrospective is a fine example of what the MCA does well. So what's not to like?

Women love it. Men, it seems, less so. The same is sometimes said of Tracey Emin. LF knows a good few women who are apalled by Emin's populist antics, yet love her art, and enjoy her jeering attitude to the tweedy British art establishment. It leads us to wonder whether, as in literetaure and movies, there is such a thing as 'Chick-Art', perish the thought? As with the notion of 'Gay Art', the soul shrivels at the very idea, yet there are plenty of examples of it in twee little galleries in West Hollywood, Miami Beach and Puerto Vallarta. Let's be clear, LF does not subscribe to such categories in any way, but the existence of such concepts is worth noting.

Back to Julie. In my singular view, there's an essential quality missing from much of her work. Despite the apparent humanism and immediacy of 'the artist's body' as subject matter, paradoxically much of this work feels to me theoretical, cerebral, driven by installation production values rather than by intuitive creative impulse. There is a lack of mystery, of complex layers of meaning, of deep psychic stirrings... we do not come away with new synapse connections, with a new way of looking at the world. Or not this viewer anyway. However that's a rare experience, and highly subjective, so let's just say that Rrap's show is a fine survey, well worth seeing.


Primavera
Young Australian Artists
until 4 November

Left: ©Briele Hansen Untitled 2003-04. DVD projection, queen bed, white sheets, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and MCA. Photo: Briele Hansen

Hmmmm... last year's was better? Primavera's such an easy one to knock, but we don't intend to do so. What defines this annual (national) survey of emergent artists is that it is selected each year by an also-emergent young curator, artists are under 35, and with no more than ten or so exhibited, selections are inevitably highly subjective. LF is tempted to describe this one as a particularly 'Ikea' year (half-assembled furniture etc), but that would be glib and unfair. Amanda Marburg's ("MacLean Edwards on bad drugs") small paintings are terrific, as are Patrick Doherty's large, energetic, unstretched canvasses. LF was also impressed by Briele Hansen's silent DVD/intsllation Primavera, Untitled consising of a vertical DVD projection onto a queen-sized matress on the floor, covered in white sheets. Video footage of a slowly moving form, apparently 'under' the sheets, sets up an absorbing and dreamlike visual illusion. This work has a fresh simplicity of vision that is so much better than a lot of very laboured video art by more renowned practitioners. Honour Freeman's delicately ironic ceramics rate a special mention, as do Justine Khamara’s 'photo-sculptures', but the rest is pretty dry conceptual stuff for the most part.


CROSS CURRENTS: FOCUS ON CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN ART
until 26 November 2007

Left: ©Tobias Richardson, paintings, installation view. Courtesy the artist and MCA.

Contrasting with the young Turks in Primavera, this (again national) survey show by guest curator John Stringer features works by 16 established artists of some repute, including some quite venerable figures. It's a great show with something for everybody, with some of LF's standouts being Ah Xian's (not new, but always breathtaking) ceramic busts, Elizabeth Cummings' monoprints, and Darwin-based Tobias Richardson's whole room installation (pictured left), which repeats a vigorously painted (with enamel paint?) box motif over and over again. Stuart Elliott's architectural fantasies made from industrial detritus are also impressive. There's a high proportion of solidly good painting on show and it's on for the next 2 months.

A toute a l'heure.

Sydney: Michelle Ussher

Michelle Ussher
The Last Great Wilderness
Darren Knight Gallery, Waterloo
until 6 October 2007

Left: The colour of concrete 2007, watercolour, pencil & acrylic on paper, courtesy tha artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

There's nothing slick about Michelle Ussher, but there are moments when she sails perilously close to a kind of hippy-dippy fantasy art, and this may be what makes her so interesting. Watercolour is her medium, and her approach is painstaking and 'descriptive' (as opposed to gestural and expressionistic), yet she is not seeking to document the world around her in any literal sense. This series of (mostly large) works on paper exhibits a fascination with built structures, monolithic statuary and architectural order, yet the resulting paintings have a translucent delicacy, as if she is peeling away an outer skin to reveal a slightly dreamlike world within. In the wrong hands this could fail terribly, but Ussher displays an honesty of observation and a refusal to make glib marks, and this visual 'sincerity' is what makes her work stand out from much of the work of the genre. There is undoubtedly a worldwide resurgence in both drawing and watercolour, surprisingly coming from youger artists, and the watercolour medium can impart a samey-ness, which Ussher thankfully transcends.

More images at: http://www.darrenknightgallery.com/artists/ussher/110907/index.htm

Sydney: Pulp Non Fiction

DEVILS IN PARADISE: Nine artist on the trail in Tasmania
JOANNA BRAITHWAITE, LUCY CULLITON, NEIL FRAZER, DAVID KEELING, CHRIS O'DOHERTY (aka REG MOMBASSA), EUAN MACLEOD, ADRIENNE RICHARDS, LEO ROBBA, DAVID USHER
Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern
Until 29 September

Left: Federal Greens leader Bob Brown, fresh from the Senate, addresses the opening night crowd.

Le Flaneur has always thought of Damien Minton as a man with heart, and this show is further proof that he's not afraid to tangle with tree huggers and environmental poitics, all the while upholding the highest artistic standards. Bob Brown is certainly not shy about linking art to politics, and his opening night address, while acknowledging the 'genius' of the artists, became something of an impassioned Senate-style speech denouncing the proposed Gunns pulp mill project in the Tamar Valley, and old-growth logging in general. His audience was pretty much the already converted, and one could well imagine Tasmanian loggers dismissing them as effete, chardonnay-swilling (why is it always chardonnay?) Paddo socialists that have never set foot in an old-growth forest. It's partially true, of course, but we were struck by how diverse the crowd was for a 'serious gallery' opening. Packed to the rafters, with a fair number of chunky-knit sweaters, ponchos and pony tails in evidence, hordes of kids, and a sausage (organic, of course) sizzle on the street, it felt more like something you'd attend in Launceston than Sydney.

As to the art, it's a hard show not to like, given the love of landscape that lurks in every Aussie heart, and appeared to be pretty much sold out. We wondered if it was in fact a fundraiser, but the materials do not say so, and its interesting that many of the artists appear courtesy of their regular commercial galleries as part of this special group show - further evidence of Minton's unusual approach in the brittle gallery scene perhaps? LF's standouts were Euan McLeod's sombre landcape studies (on paper), Joanna Braithwaite's tongue-in-cheek renderings of Tasmanian Devils at play (perfect for the kids bedrooms!) and, surprisingly, Reg Mombasa's iconic little studies - his vision is starting to transcend his signature style and just gets better.

Not unmissable, but heart-warming and unusual.

Latino Visons #6: Doris Salcedo at White Cube and Tate Modern, London

Doris Salcedo
White Cube, Hoxton Square
until 20 Oct 2007

Complementing Salcedo’s installation (from 9 October) at Tate Modern, WC presents a mini retrospective of sculptures made in the last ten years. According to the press release: 'In her ongoing series of furniture sculptures – eleven, including three new works, will be exhibited at White Cube – Salcedo alters found wooden objects such as beds, chairs and wardrobes, transforming them into sculptures that take on the resonance of something lost, broken or mended. Apertures are closed in – what were once drawers or glass doors are now filled with fragments of clothes and concrete – as if the objects were suffocating or suffering from an act of violence as things are forced unexpectedly, brutally together. They bring to mind loss as much as survival and, like emergency architecture, evoke a sense of making-do, a desperate reconfiguration of fragments to enable one to keep going.'

More at: http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/ds_exh_hox/

Also: Tate Modern: The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo, 9 October 2007 – 6 April 2008
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/dorissalcedo/default.shtm

Campbelltown: News from Islands

News from Islands
Campbelltown Regional Gallery
Campbelltown Arts Centre
until 28 October 2007

Below left: ©Sam Tupou, Anniversary Skulls (detail) 2006, image courtesy the Artist, CAC and Artbank.
Below right: ©Newell Harry, Untitled (gift mat #I) Cape Malays / Cape Malaise, 2007, Pandanas and dye, courtesy the artist, CAC and Roslyn Oxley 9 gallery.

Les flâneurs et flâneuses uncharacteristically found themselves in Campbelltown on a warm Friday evening, to witness the opening of this important contemporary show, curated by Aaron Seeto at the ever-interesting CAC. It was a night where the local Islander and Aboriginal communities sucessfully met with the world of high art, and the courtyard acted as an amphitheatre for an excited and lively family crowd, to witness hakas, song and storytelling, and Michael Tuffery's superb interactive projections (onto the 'sails' of the Arts Centre's facade), all part of his First Contact installation.

The exhibition in the exceptional spaces of the Campbelltown Regional Gallery encompases diverse artists (with 'island' connections) from Australia and the Asia Pacific region , from the late David Malangi (Manyarrngu), Ganalbingu elder Johhny Bulunbulun, established artists as Simryn Gill (Aus/Malaysia), Guan Wei (Aus/China) Dadang Christanto (Aus/Indonesia) and Michael Tuffery (NZ), to emergent talents such as Dachi Dang, (Aus/Vietnam), Newell Harry (Aus), Rueben Paterson (NZ) and Samuel Tupou (NZ), as well as work that has emerged from community history projects and arts workshops. All the work is well worth seeing, with LF's standouts being Guan Wei's impressive whole-room installation, Newell Harry's woven gift mats (different ones to those exhibited at Roslyn Oxley earlier this year), Sam Tupou's acrylic Anniversary Skulls, and some superbly 'contemporary', anonymously decorated shields from Papua New Guinea, collected by the eagle-eyed Newell Harry.

You can find the full program at: http://www.campbelltown.nsw.gov.au/default.asp?iNavCatID=491&iSubCatID=2469

Sydney: Old Blood for New: Louise Bourgeois at Kaliman Gallery

Louise Bourgeois
Kaliman Gallery, Paddington
until 29 September















Though done some years ago, 96-year-old Louise Bourgeois' exquisite 36-page fabric book Ode à l'Oubli (Ode to memory), 2 pages of which are pictured, is the hottest thing Le Flaneur has seen this week, and is a must-see. It is a complete set (#9 of an edition of 25), with each 'page' separately framed. There are also some excellent etchings and drawings.

The wonder of Louise Bourgeois is that her practice is steadfastly personal, refuses to indulge in facile art-historical or social references, yet sits at the hip pinnacle of late 20th century art, and she is revered as one of the most important 'feminist' artists of her age. This upper-class frenchwoman (who is reputed not to have left her New York apartment for a decade) has for sixty years pursued her intensely idiosyncatic work with single-minded purpose, producing extraordinary sculptural tableaux and objects loaded with potent overlays of meaning – by turns sinister, lyrical or ominous, distilling her simple materials into objects of archetypal power. It is this quality that quietly imbues Ode à l'Oubli. It may be interesting to know that her well-to-do family had a Left Bank tapestry gallery in Paris in early 1920s, and that the young Louise used to make drawings for tapestry restorations, but this knowledge is not required to appreciate the work. Go see.

Vasili Kaliman deserves special praise for bringing this exhibition to Sydney, and for a fine cataloque. At a mere $500K for the set, we predict an Australian insitiution will purchase this work, especially with AGNSW and MCA so flush with new benefactor funds. I wonder who'll get in first?

Sydney: New Blood for Old

A big week past for young Art-a-Turks, with openings at the MCA (Primvera), Artspace (Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship), and Stills (New Blood), among others. The Dobell Prize for Drawing (featuring somewhat older and more venerable blood) was also announced at Agnes Capon's on Thursday.

New Blood
Magnum Photo 60th Anniverary Exhibition
Stills Gallery, Paddington
until 22 September

Left: ©Trent Parke, Sharkbay 2006 from Welcome to Nowhere. Courtesy the artist, Magnum Photo and Stills Gallery

What is it about Trent Parke's work? The sole Australian member of legendary photo agency Magnum is notionally a documentary photographer, but his photographs are about so very much more than verité. Contrasting with his urban images more recently shown at stills (eg the Coming Soon series), this time round Parke goes walkabout in regional Australia, resulting in some beautiful, arresting and panoramic photographs (Welcome to Nowhere series). These large and often vivid colour works are very different in style from the moody and disturbing black and white work with which he came to fame (Minutes to Midnight etc), and are much more 'descriptive', but they all contain an edgy quality, a spooky emptiness where small town Australia meets the vastness of the land perhaps?
Although Parke is the unspoken star of this show, everything is excellent, with stunning work from Jonas Bandiken (Satellites series - outstanding), Antoine d'Agata, Mark Power and Alec Soth. Treat yourself.

Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship finalists
Artspace, Wolloomooloo
until 8 September

Left: ©Sam Smith, installation view Video Camera [HDW-F900/3]/ Video Lens[HJ11x4.7B], courtesy the artist and Artspace, 2007

A damp and chilly Wednesday night saw Artspace packed with a lively and thirsty crowd to hear Sam Smith announced as this year's winner, from a strong field it must be said. We'll leave you to decide whether Smith's giant wooden video camera and lens (with screens) is a worthy recipient. There were a quite number of 'highly commended' entries, so the judges probably had difficulty deciding themselves. Le Flaneur's standouts include Mitch Cairns' paintings (and DVD), Rolande Souliere's car tail-lights, Emma White's witty fimo-clay wall installation, Grzegorz Gawronski's seriously cynical ARS flowchart (and DVD), and of course the irrepressible Soda_Jerk's sublimely low-res video remix of Aussie 'outback' cinema classics (called Picinic at Wolf Creek), complete with talkings 'roos, lurid fake blood and jump-cut editing. It's interesting to compare this work with Tracey Moffat's widely criticised video remixes. Whereas Moffatt essentially creates thematic compliations of film moments, S_J take it much further, scratch it up, and produce work that is much more than the sum of its parts.

Will any of this work stand the test of time? The jury is out, but in the meantime it's good, clean fun.

A la semaine prochaine, salut.

Lux & Logos at Carriageworks

Jonathan Jones and Ruark Lewis
Homeland Illuminations
Performance Space at Carriageworks
until 8 Sept

Last week Le Flaneur saw the launch of this powerful and atmospheric installation, a collaboration between two artists working in (until now) seemingly quite diifferent idioms. Ruark Lewis has sometimes described himself as a poet rather than an artist, and his trademark use of stencilled texts has resulted in a distinctive body of work over the years. Jonathan Jones has developed his own equally recognisable style using flourescent tubes. The two visual languages come together successfully in this large floor installation, with a text drawn from the oral history of a senior Warudjari man – Jones' grandfather – and his accounts of working as a wool classer in Western NSW in the 1930s and 40s. The text is stencilled onto packing crate planks – quite colourfully for the often monochrome Lewis – with the illuminated flouros on the underside, and my understanding is that the configuration is variable and experimental. The work has many possible layers of meaning and repays thoughtful study, with the words, strung together without breaks, resonating in the mind as a kind of abstract poetry. There is of course a thoughtful accompanying artists statement. It's a work ripe for institutional aquisition.

Embarrassingly, LF completely missed the audio component. This addition from the artists:
Visual hierachies aside, this work(sculptural installation) was sub-narrated by developing a parallel score from the oral history. This was structured in the form of an audio-collage. We assembled this aural component with the help of vetran new music composer Rik Rue. This accompanies the work on a set of headphones.

The beauty of incomprehension

The week past was a busy one for Sydney contemporary art, with RoslynOxley9, GBK, Grantpirrie and Kaliman all opening new shows of significant ‘early-career’ artists. Some of these shows come with an elaborate subtext which may or may not be necessary to full appreciation of the work, hence this week’s ‘beauty of incomprehension’ title.

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.

Let’s face it, if words could explain art, there’d be no need for the art, and the power or presence of a work of art is essentially a mysterious thing. Le Flaneur always approaches art ‘explanation-less’ - initially anyway - and tries to let the work speak for itself on its own terms. If it does, then the artist’s or curator’s text can be interesting. Or not. But if the work fails to be eloquent on its own terms, the supporting text will not improve it.

And incomprehension can be an excellent thing - opening us to all sorts of associations and ensuring a mini voyage of discovery when we encounter complex, difficult and conceptually obscure art. Far better than ‘getting it’ in 20 seconds, a sure sign of lack of depth. Jeff Koons has made a career out of this kind of exquisitely shallow joke-art, but we only really need one Jeff Koons.


TV Moore
Fantasists in the Age of Decadence
Roslyn Oxley9
until 25 August

Left: © TV Moore, Installation view, 2007
Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

TV Moore certainly understands this, and his artist's statement accompanying this show leaves us really none the wiser, instead inviting us to explore and find in it what we will. I’ve always enjoyed his sense of mise-en-scène, turning white cubes into evocative mediated spaces, and this show is no exception, featuring several projections, DVD screens, stills and objects/installation. The dimly lit main space was thronged with people at the opening, and seemed to invite us to hang out there, but it would be interesting to visit on a quiet day – I’m sure the experience is very different. In the small room, Michael Bell-Smith’s series of DVD animations Home Mechanics, is also well worth seeing.


Chris Fox Lubricant City
Hitesh Natalwala Let’s Talk
Galley Barry Keldoulis
until 25 August

Left: © Chris Fox, Installation view, 2007
Courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis

GBK continues its commitment to showing diverse contemporary work from both Australia and the developing world (India, South Africa), and facilitating the re-configuration of the Danks Street space in interesting ways. Chris Fox’s large floor installation Lubricant City presents us with a particle-board peninsula and islands on which sit a series of oil-rig-like structures - elaborate constructions made from old food-machinery parts and wooden struts. Though available for sale individually, these objects obviously derive a large part of their meaning from their juxtaposition, and to view them as stand-alone sculptures would be a completely different experience. I’m not sure the objects are resolved enough in themselves to hold up outside of their installation context, but it’s certainly an interesting show. Hitesh Natalwala’s works on paper are also good, and highly collectable.


David Rosetsky
Nothing Like This
Kaliman Gallery
until 25 August

Left: © David Rosetsky, installation view, 2007
Courtesy the artist and Kaliman Gallery


David Rosetsky is another artist that understands context and mise-en-scène, for example the complex and atmospheric multi-screen installation Untouchable which won the inaugural Anne Landa Award in 2005. Which is why I found this show a let-down. I think it has as much to do with the gallery context and the plasma screen medium as with their content. I had just been at the TV Moore show (see above), and by comparison this work seemed completely overwhelmed by Kaliman’s brightly-lit white cube. Plasma (or LCD) as a medium has a kind of depthless glossiness that well suits the Sunrise program, and the screen-based works, situated in a pristine blue swimming pool/beach and shot on film with a DOP no less, appear to be ‘about’ the banality of youth media culture, Big Brother style. Fine. The antiseptic white cube may well be part of these intentions, for Rosetsky is a renowned ironist, but I suspect not. To me it’s an example of the exhibition context diminishing rather than enhancing the work, which fails to be interesting enough in its own (cinematic) terms to really bother with the subtext. Ouch. I'll pay for that I'm sure.

Todd Hunter
All Times Through Paradise
Recent paintings
Grantpirrie
until 1 September

Left: © Todd Hunter 'Dead Wood Aches', 2007
oil on canvas, 172 x 160 c
Courtesy the artist and Grantpirrie

Todd Hunter’s abstract-into-landscape paintings are refreshingly free of any subtext, being just what they are, and able to stand admirably on their own feet, so to speak. In fact my one criticism of this show is that there may be too many similar paintings hung too close to each other, and this works against our ability to perceive each one as a world in itself. Take any one canvas and isolate it and you have a luscious, ‘lickable’ and sensual celebration of paint, and its ability to do what no other medium can. Lovely stuff.

Till next week, adieu.

The state of design?

Sydney Design 07
11th International Design festival
Powerhouse Museum and other venues Sydney-wide
from August 4
Full program: www.sydneydesign.com.au

Sydney Design kicked off on rainy Friday evening, and the black-clad ones were out in force to hear the often acerbic (unpierced)-tongued architecture writer Elizabeth Farrelly deliver that rare thing – a genuinely funny and interesting launch speech. Praise the Lord. The exhibitions and events program is extensive and Sydney-wide, but it’s a great opportunity to revisit the often-underrated Powerhouse, whose permanent exhibitions are constantly evolving and which has a strong emphasis on interactivity and engagement. Take the kids, they won’t be bored.

The PH deserves credit for driving Sydney Design, working between the major disciplines, and fostering links with other galleries and design orgs, and its distinctive event communications are beginning to achieve the media critical mass needed to penetrate public lethargy and create a sense of excitement and ownership among Sydneysiders, many of whom have discovered design in a big way in the last decade.

This process has a way to go of course. Think of Milan’s Salon del Mobile. While some Milanese probably groan and leave for their coastal villas, it is an event that has come to almost define and envelop the city, spawns an immense fringe, brings billions into the economy, and does much to reinforce not just Italian design, but design in general, with Milan as the centre of the universe. Venice has done it with art. For several centuries in fact.

For a city of 4.5 million Sydney Design ain’t bad, but Melbourne is doing better, having established the National Design Centre at Fed Square, and Victoria even has a Minister for Design. The results were manifested in the Melbourne Design Festival last month. Obviously Melbourne’s city centre (and laneways), with its concentration of galleries, showrooms and ateliers, lends itself better to generating a sense of involvement and excitement, and the NDC’s position in Fed Square situates it at the heart of Melbourne life. It’s also interesting that while the Labour state government is an enthusiastic advocate for design, the original vision (including Fed Square itself) we must grudgingly admit, was Jeff Kennett’s. No equivalent bipartisan vision is evident in NSW.

If Sydney is ever to move into the big league as a ‘design city’ the State Government needs to better support the City Of Sydney’s efforts and to put some substantial resources behind this. Forever putting out transport fires (not literally I hope), constantly on the defensive over planning and infrastructure, obsessively focussed on bringing in the big events we probably DON’T need (eg APEC), our government seems to have no conception of how to harness the existing ingenuity and vitality of its creative and design communities, and leverage this into economic benefit for the city and the state. In fact I'm not sure they even see the opportunity.

Perhaps there’s a case for umbrella-ing even more design events into a Design Month in August? It’s a time of year when people are paying attention and resigned to being indoors. Last Saturday’s Saturday Indesign, (a biannual initiative supported by Raj Nandan's Indesign publishing group since the demise of Designers Saturday) is an industry day focussed on commercial showroom visits, and effectively already part of it. The biannual (?) Sydney Esquisse, which has never managed to achieve its own critical mass, the Object Gallery sponsored St Margarets Architecture and Design Festival (September again?), and various initiatives by Marrickville Council (where many artists and designers actually live and work because of more affordable rents) could be too. Then there are the various design awards run by the DIA, AGDA, and Inside magazine. Individual organisations can’t do it all alone. It need an overarching organization, to say nothing of policy vision and funding at state government level.

Shoot me down if you think this is a naïve and utopian vision. Perhaps spreading disparate events across the year is better? But while I'm making rash suggestions, what about Elizabeth Farrelly in the NSW upper house as Minsiter for Design? Her meetings with Frank Sartor would certainly be interesting.

A toute a l'heure.

A Bill of Rights for Australia

Kevin Rudd has been much criticised by left and right for ‘me too-ism’ on the economy, the NT intervention and The Haneef Affair, and the government is making much of this, while simultaneously objecting to Labour’s differences on such issues as IR, Iraq and Climate Change. It’s time this debate grew up.

The fact is that Australia, like most developed democracies, is moving towards a centrist, consensus style of government, and Rudd is that kind of politician. We most resemble countries like Canada, Switzerland, Sweden and the UK, both in terms of our political culture and our egalitarian values. The vast majority of Australians agree on the kind of society we want to live in, and what kinds of services governments should be providing.

For example: affordable universal health care; good public education; sustainable environmental management; an independent judiciary; respect for human rights; justice for Indigenous Australians; a fair go in the workplace balanced with a dynamic economy; efficient transport and infrastructure; effective defence forces; multilateral-based foreign policy; good-neighbourliness… and so on. One could haggle about the emphasis, but these are surely the common political values that have sustained Australia’s social contract since Federation, and allowed Australians to travel the world with pride in their country’s reputation.

Because these values are not enshrined in a bill of rights, we rely on a continuation of the tradition of political consensus. The problem arises when a Government, whether of the left or the right, uses its mandate to impose a narrow political ideology on the people, even in the face of widespread opposition, for example the invasion of Iraq, climate change scepticism, and arguably recent workplace laws. There are no doubt examples on the left, but our (self-avowed) most conservative leader since Menzies has imposed his personal ideology on Australian society to an unprecedented degree. He has seen his constituency as essentially business, both large and small, and his style of government has been largely inspired by the wedge-and-divide strategies of the Republican-governed USA. George Bush once smugly described his political base as “The Haves… and the Have-Mores”, and he wasn’t kidding. The world’s richest nation fails to deliver affordable health-care to a quarter of its citizens, has some of the worst education outcomes in the developed world, and its foreign policy continues to guarantee the recruitment of a new generation of jihadists.

Mr Howard fails similarly to govern for all the people. He’s way out of kilter with the underlying centrist trend in politics, and it’s time for him to go gracefully. The next decades will be defined by consensus-builders like Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull. Australians don’t need or want leaders to define our values, or to impose their personal morals on us. We need good technocrats – an executive that will effectively implement our commonly-agreed values, do it cost-effectively, govern for all of us, and be chucked out pronto if they don’t. Which is why a Bill of Rights should be incorporated into the constitution.

Grantpirrie's loss is London's gain

Grantpirie gallery on Saturday farewelled gallery manager James Steele, who is Europe-bound. A 'family' gathering of friends and artists, and a sprinkling of artworld heavyweights, heard Bridget Pirrie give a sweet speech, and James a characteristically ironic one, while knocking back the winter red. He will be missed, and Le Flaneur will be keeping an eye on his no doubt glittering career.

A tout a l'heure.

Latino Visions #5: Damián Ortega at White Cube, London

Damián Ortega: Nine Types of Terrain
until 8 Sep 2007
White Cube, Hoxton Square

Left; ©Damián Ortega Project for Social Housing 2007
Clay bricks, cement, silicone and steel. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and White Cube. Photo: Stephen White

Following last November's remarkable Gabriel Orozco exhibition Twelve Paintings and a Drawing (at the Mason's Yard space), featuring the gigantic work Dark Wave, fellow Mexican (Berlin-based) artist Damián Ortega's Nine Types of Terrain has opened at the Hoxton Square space.

According to the gallery: 'Damián Ortega often takes everyday materials - anything from car parts and furniture to light bulbs and toys - and channels them into objects of cultural, social and political import. His work maintains a determinedly hand-made appearance with an appreciation of linguistic nuance, in part a consequence of his early career as a political cartoonist. Ortega is interested in the meaning of materials and the relationship between object and action, as seen in works such as Nine Types of Terrain. Taking the form of nine short 16mm film projections presented in the ground floor gallery, this work references 'The Art of War', the 6th BC treatise by Chinese militarist Sun Tzu.'

Also featured is another work Project for Social Housing . Looks like a must-see.

Latino Visions#4: New Mexican art at MCA Chicago

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City
until September 2, 2007

Left: ©Dr. Lakra, Untitled (sillón rojo), 2004. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of the artist kurimanzutto, Mexico City and MCA Chicago.

If you are interested in the resurgence of Mexican contemporary art, and find yourself in Chicago, the excellent MCA has an exhibition focussed on Mexican 'Escultura Social' (Social Sculpture).

According to curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm: 'German performance artist Joseph Beuys's idea of social sculpture, translated into the Spanish escultura social, is used as a multivalent point of reference: the works are all socially engaged, they draw connections between people, animals, and nature, they revisit conceptual practices/actions from the 1960s, and promote a demystified and democratic idea of artmaking. In addition, the circulation and meaning of images, objects, and actions are at the crux of these artists' works and the exhibition provides an opportunity to showcase their recent developments. It includes site-specific, performative and ephemeral projects in addition to videos, photographs, and installations.

Featured artists are Maria Alós, Carlos Amorales, Julieta Aranda, Gustavo Artigas, Stefan Bruggemann, Miguel Calderon, Fernando Carabajal, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mario Garcia-Torres, Daniel Guzman, Pablo Helguera, Gabriel Kuri, Dr. Lakra, Los Super Elegantes, Nuevos Ricos, Yoshua Okon, Damian Ortega, Fernando Ortega, Pedro Reyes, and dynamic young architect Fernando Romero.

Latino Visions #3: Tomas Lopez Rocha in Mexico City

©Tomas Lopez Rocha Untitled 2006, courtesy Charra Negro Gallery, Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico
Photos below © Le Flaneur

Showing at MACO (see Latino Visions#1 below) by Charro Negro Gallery(http://www.charronegro.com), and simultaneously at the excellent Galería de la SHCP in Mexico City's Centro Histórico, was the exciting Guadalajara-based painter/sculptor Tomás López Rocha. It's interesting that his painting and sculptural styles are quite different, almost to the point of appearing to be the work of different artists. The SHCP show featured paintings, drawings and installations, beautifully hung and lit in a noble (inevitably muralled) space, and unusually I was allowed to take flashless photographs - see below. See more at the artist's site: http://www.tomaslopezrocha.com

Latino Visions#2: The Hours, Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
until 2 September 2007

Left: Nicola Costantino Soccer Ball 1999 From the series Human Furriery. Silicone and leather. Courtesy Daros-Latinamerica Collection and Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney. © the artist. Photograph: Peter Schälchli

This is an impressive show, notwithstanding (love using that word) my earlier post comparing it adversely to the vibrancy of the MACO art fair in Mexico. I re-visited it the other day, and although I still thought it somewhat sombre and monochrome overral, there's no denying the sheer quality of all the work. As it's one of those 'from the collection of' shows ( in this case the Rio de Janeiro-based Daros-Latinamerica Collection) it can be excused any omissions, for instance Mexican art star Gabriel Orozco. I didn't get the pricey catalogue, so forgive me for not knowing the names of some of the works referred to below.

Several things called me back for a second look. I was fascinated by Nicola Costantino's (Argentina) extraordinary objects, fashioned from latex, but apearing to be human skin, complete with delicate nipples and puckered anuses. Apparently cast from the skin of a male friend of the artist, her technique is astonshingly realistic, and the vitrine-displayed objects (see the soccer ball, left) resonate with a peculiar power. These works have featured prominently in publicity material, and you can by a limited-edition tote bag in the MCA shop. Vik Muniz's (Brazil) portaits of iconic faces - realised in media like black bean soup (Ché Guevara), ink (Warhol) and diamonds (Mariyn Monroe), then photographed, have also been prominent in publicity material. Though somewhat gimmicky, they are certainly highly skilled, visually arresting, and accessible.

I'm often underwhelmed by video art, but José Alexandro Restrepo's (Columbia) single video installation is mesmerising. To wailing voices (of Columbian tribal women), a dark figure punts a canoe along a dark, jungly waterway. There is of course a cultural and environmental subtext which you can read, but the power of this work sustains itself without explanation. It reminded me, if not in content then in atmosphere, of Susan Norrie's video work - there is a sense of foreboding and menace that isn't easy to convey in words.

There's some beautiful (as aways) work from our very own Maria Fernanda Cardoso Columbia/Australia)and a lot more, including some excellent photography and remarkable carpentry, so if you haven't already, go see it - it's free and it's warm inside.

Hasta lluego, crocadillo.

Latino Visions#1: MACO (Mexico Arte Contemporáneo) Mexico City

MACO - Feria de Arte Contemporáneo
April 25-29 2007

Mexico is the most exciting place on the planet for contemporary art - you read it here first.

The MACO artfair, held in a partly-built luxury apartment development in the ritzy northern suburb of Llomas de Chapultepec, is one of the more vibrant and energised art events I have attended in a while. Maybe it was the free tequila carts, or the fact that Mexicans smoke indoors like crazy, or the fact that every art student and artslut in DF (Distrito Federal) had managed to get into the inauguración (vernissage), or perhaps it was the blur of the after-parties that makes me procalim this. But I think it was the art.

MACO is a relative newcomer to the international art fair scene, but has become quite an extensive one, with galleries represented from all over the Americas, Europe and further afield, with the common, but not exclusive, focus being artists with some sort of Latin American connection. With the exception of David Zwirner, the New York and London super-heavyweights (Gagosian, Marian Goodman, White Cube etc) stayed away, but a fair number of the more adventurous NY, Paris and Madrid galleries were there, and this may have been to the advantage of the overall vitality of the event. ALL the art on show was, if not great, then at least fresh and exciting. It wasn't quite up there The Armory Show or Frieze, but it made the Mellbourne Art Fair, arguably our most prestigious one, look very tame, if not lame. It made even the curated part of Art Sydney look like a naff interior decoration show. No doubt this is due to a careful exhibitor selection process and the curatorial sophistication of co-directors Zelika Garcia (who invited me to the opening) and Enrique Rubio, but it is also a clear reflection of the quality and depth of Latin American artists in general, and of Mexico's resurgence, straddling the cusp between second and first worlds, as an internationally important force in the visual arts.

I'll come back to the art in a moment, but the well-heeled crowd is worth a mention in itself. If you half-closed your eyes it was much as you would encounter in any of the world's capitals - svelte young women and strikingly handsome men in well-cut dark clothes, with the same half-bored, half-aroused art-lust in their eyes as in Tokyo, London or Sydney. The same stressed-out first-night gallerists drinking too much wine and pressing (too much?) flesh, the same exqusitely delicate girl-interns at the same information desks. And the conversations, in staccato Spanish, were much the same too, with the then impending trio of international 'art-musts' - Art Basel, Bienale de Venezia and Documenta (Kassel) on many lips.

But somehow it is different in Mexico, which after all has an ancient and passionate visual arts tradition. One manifestation of this at the MACO opening was the phenomenon of several Frida Kahlo dress-alikes. One realises that she occupies a place in the national psyche not quite like anything else, anywhere. And then there's Diego Rivera, whose art was unashamedly polemical, aimed at fostering national pride, social change, respect for the worker, the impoverished and the landless. One of the most touching experiences is to visit the Casa Azul (Blue House, now the Frida Kahlo Museum) in Coyoacán and see Frida's little bed, her desk, her paints and brushes and kitchen things, and reflect on the extraordianary times she and Diego had there. The status these two enjoy is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of Mexico's embrace of colour, representation, narrative and symbolism into its national imagination, in a way only equalled by India in my experience. The ornate shrines to saints and 'virgens', the garish Jésu-kitsh, dashboard San Cristobals and exhuberant floral tributes serve a very similar cultural role to the Ganeshes, Durgas and Laxmi's among ordinary Indian people. They are part of life, presiding over homes, markets and businesses, not consigned to the temples. And this is just the post-Columbian stuff - underlying it all are the immense Aztec, Mixtec, Zapotec and Mayan visual legacies.

I think this may be an important difference - the fact that art is everywere in Mexico - from the narrative murals in almost all government buildings to the sculpture in its city squares, rococo churches, malecóns and street markets. Somehow its contemporary artists seem more connected with the visual life of the country. While representational painting remains important, Latin American art is by no means devoid of conceptual depth, cleverness, irony or humour. All the main trends are evident, spreading with viral speed through a globalised artworld. But it seems to me less cerebral, more engaged, more likeable, more human, less theoretical. Mexicans have had a tough time as a people this last 500 years, and sit next to the world's current mega-power, in a weirdly entwined cultural embrace.

It's interesting to compare the chaotic energy of MACO with the excellent, if somewhat sombre, survey of Latin American Art, The Hours, currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Sydney. I'll write more about this show in my next post, but somehow the exhibition fails to communicate the exhuberant and irreverent energy of Latino art, and renders it all down to grisaille - the humour and colour has gone missing, or to use a facile metaphor, something has been lost in the translation. Obviously a show representing a whole continent has to be selective, but there are some (to my mind) noticable omissions, for instance the supreme ironist Gabriel Orozco, whose cardboard Mexican Flags (with cut-outs) were exhibited at MACO (by hot Mexico City gallery kurimanzutto), below left.

It's difficult to single out artists from an expo where so much was good, but I'll try in my next post.
Hasta mañana.
'El Flaneristo'

Photos © Le Flaneur

A week is a long time in the grafitti world

From Rinpa Eshidan, Japan
http://rinpaeshidan.jp

Mi querido Mexico

(My beloved Mexico)
A small selection of images © Le Flaneur













Hasta lluego, crocadillo

Indigenous Health: Close the Gap

From ANTAR (Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation)'s May newsletter:

Olympic champions Catherine Freeman and Ian Thorpe returned to Sydney's Telstra Stadium recently to launch Close the Gap, Australia's largest ever campaign to improve Indigenous health. They joined more than forty Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations in urging the Federal, State and Territory governments to commit to closing the life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a generation. An Indigenous child born in 2007 will live for 17 years less than a non Indigenous child, on average. Indigenous babies are twice as likely to die before their first birthday than non-Indigenous babies. At the launch, Ian and Catherine became the first people to add a hand to our new virtual Sea of Hands website. We are encouraging all Australians to add a hand to show their commitment to justice for Indigenous Australians. Once you add a hand, you can also send a letter to politicians asking them to commit to closing the gap.

Show your support:

Sign the Close the Gap pledge at: http://www.antar.org.au

Bon Soir

The Shaman in Academia: ritual, metaphor and transformation in the arts

ACLA Conference 2007
Puebla, Mexico 19-21 April

This is the full text of a paper presented at the above conference by David Corbet, sans footnotes
© Le Flaneur

1. Art and language

This paper investigates the intersection between so-called ‘shamanic’ practice in the visual arts, and the academic/curatorial/critical context within which such practice emerges, with particular reference to the contradictions inherent in academic research in this area. This arises, appropriately to this conference, from my research into the role of text (and other symbol-based language systems) in the contemporary plastic arts. While painting, sculpture and printmaking have historically often been concerned with depicting events from literature and mythology, their present entanglement with the forms of written language is essentially a postmodern phenomenon. At some point the division between spoken language and the realm of object-making has became irrevocably blurred, with texts increasingly used to add layers of meaning to works of plasticity, at many different levels, from the overt to the implied. As we shall see, certain kinds of artists have always been confident practitioners across image making, language and performance, and their work provides a prism through which to view and explore some of the philosophical issues affecting creative practice in our time. It seems to me that the visual arts are still in many respects playing out an endgame arising from the immense intellectual upheavals of early last century, and that the next great shift of consciousness is not yet upon us, but is certainly coming.

Which brings me to the word ‘shaman’. The enormous literature on the subject would make a two-hour-paper in itself, but a brief diversion into the word’s etymology is worthwhile. According to the Hungarian anthropologist Mihály Hoppál it is the Turkic-Tungus word for a traditional healer and spirit guide found in Turkic-Mongol areas of Northern Asia such as Siberia and Mongolia, and translates as ‘he or she who knows’ (from the Tungusic root “sa” – “to know”. The word has passed from Sanscrit (śramana – ascetic) through Pali (śamana), Chinese (sha men), Tungusic (sămán), Turkik-Tungusic (shaman), Russian and German into English. The religious historian Mercia Eliade has described a shaman as “a medicine man, priest, and psychopomp. He cures illness. He directs the communal sacrifices and he escorts the souls of the dead to the outer world.” ‘Shamanic illness’ is also a concept referred to by many scholars – whether literal or metaphorical, and shamans frequently achieve their status by way of extreme personal trauma and out-of-body experiences. These trials and subsequent enlightenments are of course a common feature of many religious figures in history. There is no universal gender requirement, however in some societies (for instance Korea) shamans are always women. Hoppál questions whether the term ‘shamanism’ is appropriate, and proposes the use of the term ‘shamanhood’ as less suggestive of a fixed set of practices, emphasising shamanic knowledge:

A shaman is a person who is an expert in keeping together the multiple codes through which this complex belief system appears, and has a comprehensive view of them in his/her mind with certainty of knowledge. The shaman uses (and the audience understands) multiple codes: he/she expresses meanings in many ways (in musical, verbal, choreographic forms, and meanings are manifested also in objects, e.g. amulets). Thus his/her audience knows the used symbols and meanings — that's why shamanism can be efficient: people in the audience trust it. Such belief system can appear to its members with certainty of knowledge.

He cites Finnish anthropologist Juha Pentikèainen’s view that shamanism is a “grammar of mind, because shamans need to be experts in the folklore of their cultures”. Shamanic practices occur, with wide variation, in most regions of the world, most prominently among indigenous peoples, but with some important manifestations in late 20th century and contemporary western art.

Naturally, there is often a whiff of pseudoscience and mysticism in the air as soon as shamanism or occultism is mentioned, and to a degree this goes with the territory. The term ‘paperback shamanism’ has been coined in reference to some of the popular literature, for instance the works of Carlos Castaneda, with which most Americans would be familiar. This paper embraces a broad usage of the term, drawing on anthropology, comparative religion, linguistics, art history and aspects of popular culture. In this broad sense shamanism can be described as a set of practices concerned with metaphysical or psychic processes, and the focus of my research is on three key attributes that appear to be common to all such practice:

knowledge + ritual + transformation


2. The artist as shaman

Two overlapping spheres of contemporary shamanic practice in the arts are observable. The first is the Euro-American tradition from Dada and Fluxus through much contemporary performance, body, installation and environmental art. All such practice occurs within heavily mediated societies where an influential Academia gestates, and often sustains, the artist. The second sphere is the vast body of ritual practice still actively ‘lived’ by many indigenous peoples, where technology is only gradually penetrating rural areas, and oral histories and tribal knowledge remain far more powerful cultural factors than media or formal education. In such societies shamans are often important figures at village level, fulfilling an acknowledged role of seer, maker of sacred objects, conductor of rituals and keeper of arcane knowledge. Although this is changing, historically the artefacts made by such individuals have been consigned to ethnographic museums and excluded from consideration as mainstream contemporary art. Alongside this has prospered the western, primitivist idea of the pure, untouched ‘wild man’ at one with nature. A growing body of scholars, for example the contemporary anthropologist Michael Taussig, interrogates the evolving post-colonial encounter between indigenous and settler peoples, and has comprehensively demolished many of these notions. It is perhaps more useful to think in terms of degrees of 'mediation' when considering cultural production in tribal societies. Based on my own experiences travelling in Africa and Australia, it seesm evident that at the farthest end of the scale (from the tertiary-educated western urban ‘neo-primitivist’) there exists the unmediated tribal shaman, uninfluenced by Academia, and living in such a way that 'ritual' and 'life' are not separate, but are one and the same thing. The expanding nexus between these poles is in fact where we can learn most, and gives rise to a dynamic third force – the third-world artist who is sustained by a tribal network at home, but also functions partially within the international curatorial system, through cultural exchanges, biennales and the like.

In Australia the largest growth in recent decades has been in the ‘genre’ of Indigenous painting (on bark and on canvas), which regularly achieves unprecedented sales figures at auction, and has become an extremely lucrative industry, sustaining many remote communities, dealers of varying reputation, and a considerable curatorial and institutional infrastructure. If one reflects that making paintings – in the sense of discreet, portable artworks that can be bought and sold – is a recent phenomenon among Australian Indigenous artists, with synthetic paint and canvas becoming widespread only in the last fifty years or so, then some might find it surprising that the best work is so very good, and has been rapidly taken up by the major contemporary art collections of the world, transcending the ethnographic tag that has dogged aboriginal art for centuries. The 10-year old ‘art career’ of the celebrated contemporary painter Paddy Bedford (Goowoomji), an 84 year-old senior ‘lawman’ of the Gija people in northwest Australia, is revealing. Bedford began painting on canvas and board only in 1998, and he is one of many extraordinary individuals, such as the revered late artists Emily Kame Kngwarreye (who began at 80) and Rover Thomas (at around 70) who more or less instantaneously began to make significant ‘modern’ paintings at an advanced age. This phenomenon is by no means confined to Australia, and I will return to it presently.


3. Does art matter?

It seems evident that humankind’s undying love affair with the plastic arts is driven by the perception that there are rare works of art have a unique power to move us profoundly – to reveal to us our humanity, our mortality, and our place in the universe. The same can of course be said of great literature, theatre, cinema, dance and music, with some important differences. Walter Benjamin spoke of the “aura” (which he equates with authority and/or authenticity) of unique works of art. In our digitally mediated world of images his central thesis that “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of a work of art” is worth revisiting. He defines authenticity as “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced”. Benjamin’s concept of aura proposed qualities inherent in the physical object, but he importantly, he acknowledges its ritual origins: “We know that the earliest works originated in the service of a ritual – first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of a work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function.”

When we talk today about the ‘power’ or ‘aura’ of a work of art, either ancient or modern, we are surely describing a personal experience which transcends the purely formal or aesthetic attributes of the work – something we ourselves bring to the encounter. Yet I’m sure we have all had the experience, for example when contemplating a major Rothko, of an almost palpable ‘hum of power’ which seems to ‘emanate’ from certain works. Is this the same thing as Benjamin’s aura/authority/authenticity? And if it is, why do many reproductions of Australian Indigenous works retain strong elements of their ‘hum of power’ even on the printed page? Does the Mona Lisa have the the hum? Hard to say – its stratospheric value, dimly lit shrine and bullet-proof glass generate their own potent aura. Does the Rothko still have the hum, if we encounter it out of context? What about an ‘original multiple’ screenprint of Warhol’s Marilyn? What about a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde (Damien Hirst), or more problematic still, Explaining art to a dead hare (Joseph Beuys)?

A 2004 British poll of 500 art experts named Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) – a ‘readymade’ (i.e. mass-produced) ceramic urinal – as the most influential artwork of all time. It is inscribed “R.Mutt” – a homonym for the German word armut, meaning poverty, and in this single act the international phenomenon of Arte Povera was prefigured. The British press and public of course heaped vitriol on the poll, and seemed to assume Fountain was a recent work by some attention-seeking young ‘art star’, but of course it has been sitting quietly in the Tate Gallery for decades, and its presence there illuminates a critical articulation point in 20th century culture – the birth of conceptualism, and the subsequent eclipse of ‘retinal’ art. Duchamp’s readymades revealed an important truth – that the significance of a work of art is not inherent in the formal structure of the work, only in the overlay of cultural meaning brought about by the act of creation, or in his case transformation. Although he would not have put it thus, Duchamp was practicing a kind of intellectual shamanism, giving us clues to the cosmic organising principles of the universe. Not only that, but he was engaging in that most shamanic of practices – transmutation.


4. Art and ritual

In considering ritual as a key attribute of shamanic practice, it is interesting to revisit the ontological theories of the once influential writer Jack Burnham, who in the 1970s analysed in some detail Duchamp’s immersion in esoteric knowledge, particularly Kabbalah, and the arcane alchemical and occult references throughout the maestro’s art and writings. Following Jung, Burnham advanced a general theory of universals, which is worth considering for a moment:

Universals account for the formation of three basis types of human communication: speech, gesture and iconicity. All forms of human facturing are surrogates for these fundamental means of communication. This fact [and Jung’s diagram] are crucial to the idea of religious paradox. The primary symbols of many organised religions constitute a formal or geometric basis for the system of universals controlling human thought. They are the containers of the various levels of knowledge. They represent metaphysical insight into the organising principle of life itself. They possess enormous power as sources of psychic energy. They recapitulate the ontology of natural growth, and more specifically the evolution of the human race and the intellectual and emotional development of every child. In effect the code of human universals lies in two contrasting forms: the first is in every human brain, the second is in all artefacts comprising the manmade world. Consequently the code is carried from generation to generation by two separate means: organically through the brain of every living individual, and inorganically through the trans-lingual relationships embodied in every artefact, writing and spacial arrangement. This invites a great paradox. All profound art and writing lies in conflict between being as the essence of spiritual revelation, and the illusional permanence of the written word, the icon, or the sacred space.

The ritual theory of myth espoused by ancient Greece specialist Jane Harrison and explains how storytelling, theatre, dance and music have evolved out of ‘primordial’ ritual, and the plastic arts (iconicity) must ontologically, have a common genesis:

In time ritual sustains itself through the use of icons and religious artefacts. At a later stage these degenerate into works of ‘art’. Just as we lose the art of living through formalised ritual, we began – many thousands of years ago – to transfer our hopes of maintaining the code of universals to inanimate objects: scrolls, books, paintings, sculpture and architecture.

In considering the work of Australian and other Indigenous artists who have created profound and universally acclaimed modern paintings with no formal ‘training’ as painters, and often without a preliminary sketch or any revision, we can see that these artists are in fact painting what they already ‘know’ – essentially the dreamings – creation stories and relationships to land – of their people. They are initiates into an ancient system of knowledge, and lifelong practitioners of body painting and other rituals. Their knowledge is handed down from generation to generation independent of any preserved physical code, and is sustained by ‘lived’ ritual. There are of course many layers of knowledge contained in such works – some of it only accessible to the members of the group whose particular dreamings or tribal totems are invoked, however the western enthusiasm for aboriginal art, independent of any special understanding of its motifs, suggests that something bigger is going on. These works may are very likely triggering within us innate and ancient psychic resonances and therefore, in Burham’s conception, giving us “intrinsic pleasure”.

If this is true, then one can postulate that the power and significance of any work of art lies in the clarity with which it expresses the ontology of our universe – the organising principles of life itself – hardwired into our DNA. This negates the search for ‘meaning’ in the causative sense, and very possibly undermines the basis of much artistic scholarship. Burnham suggests that “this continual coming-into-being has no definable origin or meaning; it in fact appears to be meaning itself.” These ultimately metaphysical attributes are common to all significant art, whether a cave painting, an Etruscan vessel, a ceremonial mask, a Da Vinci portrait, a Rover Thomas painting, a roomful of Roscoes or, in my opinion, a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde. And if the ontological thesis holds up, it is the same code that informs significant architecture, design, writing, performance, music and mathematics.


5. The intellectual as shaman

The problem with this metaphysical approach, and the work of the artists discussed here, is that like poetry, it is resistant to Academia’s taxonomical methods – the tendency to codify formal, aesthetic or cultural qualities assumed to be inherent in the physical object, in a highly structured and hierarchical fashion. According to Burnham:

By living from generation to generation through the medium of objects around us we create a series of surrogate styles and epistemological worlds, but even more important, we induce the permutative reduction of the universals themselves. Gradually the code is separated into thousands of pieces by our arts of historical progressivism. While the code is used daily in everyone’s mental operations, we unknowingly dissect it historically into thousands of pieces for spiritual insight, entertainment and scientific advancement. In the human war between causality and synchronicity, causality slowly wins in the shape of culture and its inorganic handmaidens. Certain classes of objects become enormously valuable without us really knowing why, on the other hand he word ritual become synonymous with boredom, tiring repetition, outdatedness and meaninglessness. And the inversion is complete.”

Duchamp’s cryptic late work The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) is considered by many to be an elaborate allegory for the systematic destruction of the ‘authenticity’ of art by its practitioners, the outward form revered long after its original power has been progressively leached away by contemporary practice, curatorship and scholarship. In this context, much contemporary practice can be seen as a self-conscious project by western artists to recreate the conditions where the art object is once again be seen as “an expendable container for the transmission of lived truths”.

Duchamp’s intellectual successor is widely considered to be Joseph Beuys (1921 – 1986), the über-model for the 20th century western artist-shaman – part psychic healer, part seer, part guide, social provocateur, volkisch idiot-savant and nemesis of Academia. He was Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (where he had studied after WW2) from 1961 until his expulsion in 1972, following a lengthy stand-off with the school’s authorities over his abolition of any entry requirements to his class, presumably in pursuit of his famous dictum that “everyone is an artist” .

Beuys was himself rather dismissive of Duchamp’s legacy, in a 1964 Aktion (action, or performance) famously proclaiming (and also painting) “das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet” (The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated), “because [Duchamp] stopped at the point where he could have developed a theory based on the work achieved, and the theory he could have achieved I am developing today”. The eighty year-old Duchamp, who died four years later in 1968, no doubt just smiled and said nothing.

The literature on Beuys is vast, and I have to assume the reader has a basic familiarity with his persona and self-created ‘legend’, if not the details of his prolific work and writing.

The art critic Robert Hughes has written witheringly of Beuys: “The late conversion of the Luftwaffe pilot, and the spiritual anguish that preceded it, have become an important part of the legend for his fans. … For them, Beuys’ wartime sufferings have joined van Gogh’s ear in the hagiography of modern art: and particularly the occasion in 1943 when he crashed in a JU-87 and was saved by wandering Tartar tribesmen who wrapped his traumatised body in felt and fat, thereby planting the germ of his later obsessive interest in fat and felt as art materials, emblems of healing and magic”.

The art historian John Moffit has analysed in detail Beuys’ shamanic imagery and personal mythology, and his obsession with anthroposophy – the “pseudophilosophy” enshrined in the writings of Rudolf Steiner. He has explained the artist’s trademark attire, and many of his otherwise inscrutable actions, as a series of ekphraseis – direct text-to-picture illustrations or ‘pictorialisations’ of Steiner’s written texts, particularly those dealing with the evolutionary process leading from chaos to order. He concludes that “despite taking as his immediate subject matter a sprawling body of pretentious and garbled writings … [Beuys] transcends this dross, transmuting his esoteric source materials into haunting, often unforgettable images, many of which breathed an undeniably great poetic and evocative power, some of which are invested with strange but undeniable beauty.”

If forced to choose one seminal Beuys’ work, my choice would have to be the legendary 1974 action at the Rene Block Gallery in New York, I like America and America Likes Me, in which, having been transported from JFK airport wrapped in felt, he cohabited an area of the gallery for 5 days with a live coyote, wielding a shepherd’s staff and protected by a felt cloak. There are many possible interpretations of this encounter. The coyote stands for America itself, but also for persecuted nature and the colonial encounter with Indigenous peoples, for whom the coyote has great mythic significance.

Beuys’ potent mix of arcane knowledge, mythology, Jesu-kitsch, animal spirits, ritualised actions, metaphorical materials and the physical processes of decay and rebirth, has created an artistic legacy that resonates visibly through the contemporary art of our time, although the extraordinary conceptual leap from a urinal signed ‘R.Mutt’ to cohabiting with a coyote is arguably yet to be repeated.


7. Material as metaphor

This sprawling legacy, which I term Povera Internationale, is apparent in the work of a multitude of contemporary artists of many cultures who share a preoccupation with aspects of tribal or ‘folk’ knowledge and ritual, and with complex transmutations – often with ‘poor’ materials acting as potent metaphors for psychic and metaphysical processes. One example is the ‘Cool Briton’ Damien Hirst, who has created some of the most profound and confronting works of the late twentieth century, and will no doubt create more One Thousand Years (1990) presents the viewer with a a large vitrine in which a grisly tableau continuously unfolds – a decaying cow’s head being slowly consumed by maggots in an endlessly repeating life cycle. Hatched flies buzz around the enclosed space, sometimes terminated abruptly by an insect-o-cutor. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1992), the aforementioned dead shark in tank of formaldehyde, exerts a horrific fascination even on the printed page, presenting us with a meditation on our own mortality, our ability to contemplate it (or not) and our deepest fears, chemically arrested from natural decay and ironically sanctified as ‘gallery art’ – and purchased in 2004 for $12 million by an American collector.

The French American Louise Bourgeois has largely ignored the art world and pursued her intensely personal work with single-minded purpose for decades, producing extraordinary tableaux and objects loaded with potent overlays of ‘ritualised’ meaning – by turns sinister, lyrical or ominous, seeming to distil her simple materials into objects of archetypal power. The late Jewish Iranian (sic) Choureh Feydzou spent a lifetime creating an immense and ‘living’ record of the accumulated materials of her life, incessantly worked upon, endlessly re-combined, labelled, boxed, bound, woven, bottled, preserved, coated in a patina of black pigment (her metaphor for death and rebirth) – a momentous journey into the life of a stranger through the ‘poor’ detritus of her existence, each tottering shelf or table supercharged with an unbearable pathos. By contrast, the Cherokee American Jimmy Durham, self-described ‘political’ artist, exhibits a deadpan humour worthy of Duchamp, ransacking art history, tribal ‘tourist’ art, found objects, written messages and his own Cherokee mythology, and transmuting his materials into objects of astonishing power and simplicity, “durable because they contain intensely meanings which they can no longer pour out.”

If time allowed, there is a fascinating journey to be had, both chronological and geographical, through the many contemporary manifestations of transformative art. I was fortunate in 2002 to spend several days at Documenta 11 in Germany, which was directed by the Nigerian-born curator and writer Okwui Enwezor, and provided an extraordinary overview of world practice, with an unusually high representation of artists from developing countries. These artists all operate somewhere on my notional scale between unmediated object-making and the heavily mediated western Academy, in a postcolonial biennale-land where tribal work now rubs shoulders with video and sound art, and where cultural identity, individual mythology and personal documentary have become as important components of many works as the physical object or installation.

8. In the beginning was the word

It is difficult to discuss the culrural context of such varied artists without detailed reference to their work, so I will close with a general observation. It is evident that much of this work cannot be solely understood within the framework of the visual arts, for these artists are the shamans of our time, operating across language forms, excavators of the future, spirit guides to our common destiny.

The linguist Roman Jakobson’s famously said that “in relation to language other (semiotic) systems are concomitant or derivative. Language is the principle means of information communication”. As the plastic arts appropriate the forms of writing, storytelling, theatre and cinema, we might conclude that they are just returning to an earlier state, before the specialisations that developed out of the European Rennaissance and Enlightenment. They are after all just different manifestations of the same universal meta-language, the same ten stories told over and over down the ages, the hero with a thousand faces. In response to the self-referential, fashion-driven mannerism that characterises so much contemporary ‘gallery art’ (as well as design, architecture and urban planning), could we be witnessing the re-emergence of the artist as a kind poet-scientist-philosopher-shaman, revealing to us profound truths about our common humanity, “re-living the Mysteries” and guiding us towards psychic wholeness? And if so, how does it affect our practice as creative artists, educators, curators or critics? This may ultimately be a question for pure philosophy, but perhaps there is a general case to be made for a more cross-disciplinary approach to the teaching of the creative arts. Such insights as I have gained from my semiotic adventures through the empire of signs have been immeasurably enriching to my own studio practice. The jury is still out on whether the art lives up to the thesis, but that must be the subject of another paper.

I will close with this thought from the Sioux writer Black Elk:

In filling a pipe, all space (represented by the offerings to the powers of the six directions) and al things (represented by the grains of tobacco) are contracted within a single point (the bowl or heart of the pipe), so that the pipe contains, or really is, the universe. But since the pipe is the universe, it is also man, and the one who fills he pipe should identify himself with it, thus not only establishing the centre of the universe, but also his own centre; he so expands that the six directions are of space are actually brought within himself. It is by this expansion that man ceases to be part, a fragment, and becomes whole or holy, he shatters the illusion of separateness.

From Black Elk Speaks : Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

Thank you.