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.