The vote is in!
By request, and in no particular order, our standout exhibitions and other things from around the planet in 2008.
Top 5 Exhibitions (International)
- Louise Bourgeois (Tate, Pompidou, Guggenheim NY, MOCA LA)
- Juan Muñoz Retrospective (Tate, Guggenheim Bilbao)
- Wolfgang Tillmans - 'Lighter' (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin)
- R. Buckminster Fuller - 'Starting with the Universe' (Whitney, NY)
- WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (MOCA LA and P.S.1 NY)
and... The Whitney Biennale
Top 5 Exhibitions (Australia)
- Biennale of Sydney
- Tim Hawkinson - 'Mapping the Marvellous' (MCA Sydney)
- Gordon Bennett Retrospective (NGV Melbourne, GOMA Brisbane, AGWA Perth)
- Ai Weiwei (SCAF Sydney and CRG, Campbelltown)
- Optimism (GOMA Brisbane)
- and not forgetting: Bill Viola: The Tristan Project (AGNSW and St Saviour's Church, Redfern) and 'Lines in the Sand' at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Sydney.
Top 5 commercial gallery shows (International)
- Cy Twombly 'Three Notes From Salalah' (Gagosian, Rome)
- Jake and Dinos Chapman (White Cube UK)
- Richard Serra (Gagosian UK and USA)
- Damien Hirst’s Sotheby’s auction
- Antoni Tapiès (Lelong Paris)
Top 5 commercial gallery shows (Australia)
- Stuart Ringholt (Anna Schwartz, Melbourne)
- Mitch Cairns (MOP, Sydney)
- Newell Harry (Oxley, Sydney)
- Guy Maestri (Tim Olsen, Sydney)
- Patricia Piccinini (Oxley, Sydney)
Top 5 English language movies
- Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sydney Lumet, USA)
- In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, UK)
- Burn After Reading (Coen Bros USA)
- The Visitor (Tom McCarthy, USA)
- Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, UK)
and La cânard award goes to:
- Australia (the movie) - for the movie most likely to acquire bad taste camp classic status
Top 5 English language novels
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Díaz)
- The Believers (Zoë Heller)
- Netherland (Joseph O'Neill)
- Breath (Tim Winton)
- What is the What? (Dave Eggers)
Heureuse nouvelle année, nos lecteurs.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Monday, December 15, 2008
Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool
BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS: BIRTH OF THE COOL
EXHIBITION TOUR
February 7, 2008 - July 13, 2008: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
November 12 - March 15, 2009: Studio Museum in Harlem
May 16 - August 22, 2009: Santa Monica Museum of Art
October 17 - Jan 3, 2010: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
January 30 - April 18, 2010: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Above: © Barkley HendricksFela: Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, oil and variegated leaf on canvas, handcrafted burned frame and embedded computer camera
Following a recent post on Kehinde Wiley, the man sometimes cited as his artistic progenitor is showing at the Studio Museum, Harlem. From the Nasher Museum website: Barkley L. Hendricks. Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Hendricks's unique work resides at the nexus of American realism and post-modernism, a space somewhere between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. He is best known for his stunning, life-sized portraits of people of color from the urban northeast. Cool, empowering and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks's artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today's younger generation of artists. This unprecedented exhibition of Hendricks's paintings will include work from 1964 to the present. Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum, is organizing the show. The exhibition catalogue, distributed by Duke University Press, will include contributions from Schoonmaker, Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection.
Martha Schwendener, wrote in the Village Voice (August 19, 2008):
Wiley, though, isn't even in the first generation of black men to paint the figure. Kerry James Marshall's patchwork compositions are subversive confections of Eisenhower-era vignettes filled with tar-baby black figures and jarring texts. And then there's Barkley Hendricks—in fact, Wiley's paintings are a kind of juiced-up redux of Hendricks, with similar centralized figures and an emphasis on pattern. A recent painting by Hendricks of Nigerian Afrobeat star Fela Anikulapo Kuti showing him as a haloed saint has a yellow-wallpaper background that competes with the figure in the foreground, just as in Wiley's compositions.And despite the surface swagger, Wiley is a much tamer painter than either of these two artists. Marshall's paintings carry titles like Black Power and By Any Means Necessary; Hendricks's subjects range from women with foot-tall Afros and T-shirts that read "Slave" and "Bitch" to Fela, a musician whose 1977 hit album Zombie was an attack on the Nigerian military. (Hendricks's Fela painting shows the musician grabbing his crotch—something that, despite the infamous lewdness of hip-hop, Wiley avoids.)
EXHIBITION TOUR
February 7, 2008 - July 13, 2008: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
November 12 - March 15, 2009: Studio Museum in Harlem
May 16 - August 22, 2009: Santa Monica Museum of Art
October 17 - Jan 3, 2010: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
January 30 - April 18, 2010: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Above: © Barkley HendricksFela: Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, oil and variegated leaf on canvas, handcrafted burned frame and embedded computer camera
Following a recent post on Kehinde Wiley, the man sometimes cited as his artistic progenitor is showing at the Studio Museum, Harlem. From the Nasher Museum website: Barkley L. Hendricks. Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Hendricks's unique work resides at the nexus of American realism and post-modernism, a space somewhere between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. He is best known for his stunning, life-sized portraits of people of color from the urban northeast. Cool, empowering and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks's artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today's younger generation of artists. This unprecedented exhibition of Hendricks's paintings will include work from 1964 to the present. Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum, is organizing the show. The exhibition catalogue, distributed by Duke University Press, will include contributions from Schoonmaker, Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection.
Martha Schwendener, wrote in the Village Voice (August 19, 2008):
Wiley, though, isn't even in the first generation of black men to paint the figure. Kerry James Marshall's patchwork compositions are subversive confections of Eisenhower-era vignettes filled with tar-baby black figures and jarring texts. And then there's Barkley Hendricks—in fact, Wiley's paintings are a kind of juiced-up redux of Hendricks, with similar centralized figures and an emphasis on pattern. A recent painting by Hendricks of Nigerian Afrobeat star Fela Anikulapo Kuti showing him as a haloed saint has a yellow-wallpaper background that competes with the figure in the foreground, just as in Wiley's compositions.And despite the surface swagger, Wiley is a much tamer painter than either of these two artists. Marshall's paintings carry titles like Black Power and By Any Means Necessary; Hendricks's subjects range from women with foot-tall Afros and T-shirts that read "Slave" and "Bitch" to Fela, a musician whose 1977 hit album Zombie was an attack on the Nigerian military. (Hendricks's Fela painting shows the musician grabbing his crotch—something that, despite the infamous lewdness of hip-hop, Wiley avoids.)
Saturday, December 13, 2008
De Stijl or just stale? ... on museum architecture
Startling architectural juxtapositions can be beautiful and inspired. Consider the Piazza San Marco in Venice - the Basilica San Marco in white wedding-cake high Byzantine style, the Doges' Palace in terra-cotta Ottoman-Venetian gothic, the austerely 'Florentine' brick Campanile and the Napoleonic arcades all seem to hang together with a beautiful, crazed logic. Or perhaps we're just used to them because they're so old?
Well, what about Richard Rogers' Lloyd's Building, or 30 St Mary Axe (the gherkin) in London? Or Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao? The juxtapositions are startling, yet hugely successful. There are many other examples, and Utzon's Sydney Opera House could be considered one of them, although there is no juxtaposition... just a ship assail on a low-slung sandstone harbour. Zaha Hadid's ill-fated Cardiff Opera House, Gehry's Venice Public Library and Rogers and Piano's Centre Pompidou are further contemporary examples.
The reason these buildings are so successful is that each of them is utterly innovative and uniquely of their time. Can, or will, the same be said of the proposed new wing for Sydney's MCA by Sam Marshall? Phillip Cox has already has his spray, and reluctantly, LF agrees. It's not that we are advocating some sort of match-up with the MCA's existing facade, just that a Rietveldian assemblage of boxes is NOT INTERESTING ENOUGH!
Above: MCA proposed new wing: 2 views, courtesy MCA
Gerrit Rietveld, Schröder House, 1924
LF hasn't studied the interior plans, and we're persuaded it will be a lovely series of spaces inside, but Cox is right - this is a missed opportunity to do something innovative and daring, to create an entirely new architectural conversation between the orderly deco rhythms of the Maritime Services Building and a new wing. What we have with Marshall's facade is not a 'Rubik's Cube' (as it has been instantly dubbed by the press) - A genuine Rubik's cube (in those garish colours perhaps?) might actually be quite interesting. Marshall's unsettling jumble of intersecting rectangles owes everything to 20th Dutch 'de Stijl', and nothing to the surrounding sandstone vernacular, or its maritime setting. Deliberate, obviously, but willful in its refusal to have a decent conversation with its neighbours. And the there's that ghastly clocktower from the cheap, faux-historic shopping centre behind, raised above the edifice like a sore thumb. This is suburban 'try-hard' architecture upped to a monumental scale, and we don't think it works. Please re-consider. Maybe get Zaha Hadid to do a couple of concept drawings after a stroll around the precinct? Or Mr Murcutt perhaps?
Or Richard Johnson, whose firm Johnson Pilton Walker designed the new national Portrait Gallery, below. Low-slung, single storied, yet quietly distinctive, it sits near the half-decent legal catheral of the High Court, and Colin Madigan's flawed concrèt brut NGA, itself in the throes of building a promising new wing by the able Andrew Andersons, which will fix the disastrous entrance and add light and space.
Above: Street Facade and Interior (lobby) detail, NPG Canberra, courtesy Johnson Pilton Walker
It's not just the NPA's street facade, with its distinctively cantilevered concrete blade, that works. The spaces inside are lucid, humane and allow us to follow an instinctive journey around the collection. The finishes, in a variety of materials, have a restraint and simplicity - polished terrazzo, blackbutt (?) floors, unadorned concrete, simple diffusing blinds... we recognise this style from Johnson's serene Asian extension at AGNSW - a translucent lantern. It's like an architectural version of the best mod-oz cuisine - Asian inspired, yet imbued with a uniquely Australian modesty.
More soon on the collection.
Well, what about Richard Rogers' Lloyd's Building, or 30 St Mary Axe (the gherkin) in London? Or Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao? The juxtapositions are startling, yet hugely successful. There are many other examples, and Utzon's Sydney Opera House could be considered one of them, although there is no juxtaposition... just a ship assail on a low-slung sandstone harbour. Zaha Hadid's ill-fated Cardiff Opera House, Gehry's Venice Public Library and Rogers and Piano's Centre Pompidou are further contemporary examples.
The reason these buildings are so successful is that each of them is utterly innovative and uniquely of their time. Can, or will, the same be said of the proposed new wing for Sydney's MCA by Sam Marshall? Phillip Cox has already has his spray, and reluctantly, LF agrees. It's not that we are advocating some sort of match-up with the MCA's existing facade, just that a Rietveldian assemblage of boxes is NOT INTERESTING ENOUGH!
Above: MCA proposed new wing: 2 views, courtesy MCA
Gerrit Rietveld, Schröder House, 1924
LF hasn't studied the interior plans, and we're persuaded it will be a lovely series of spaces inside, but Cox is right - this is a missed opportunity to do something innovative and daring, to create an entirely new architectural conversation between the orderly deco rhythms of the Maritime Services Building and a new wing. What we have with Marshall's facade is not a 'Rubik's Cube' (as it has been instantly dubbed by the press) - A genuine Rubik's cube (in those garish colours perhaps?) might actually be quite interesting. Marshall's unsettling jumble of intersecting rectangles owes everything to 20th Dutch 'de Stijl', and nothing to the surrounding sandstone vernacular, or its maritime setting. Deliberate, obviously, but willful in its refusal to have a decent conversation with its neighbours. And the there's that ghastly clocktower from the cheap, faux-historic shopping centre behind, raised above the edifice like a sore thumb. This is suburban 'try-hard' architecture upped to a monumental scale, and we don't think it works. Please re-consider. Maybe get Zaha Hadid to do a couple of concept drawings after a stroll around the precinct? Or Mr Murcutt perhaps?
Or Richard Johnson, whose firm Johnson Pilton Walker designed the new national Portrait Gallery, below. Low-slung, single storied, yet quietly distinctive, it sits near the half-decent legal catheral of the High Court, and Colin Madigan's flawed concrèt brut NGA, itself in the throes of building a promising new wing by the able Andrew Andersons, which will fix the disastrous entrance and add light and space.
Above: Street Facade and Interior (lobby) detail, NPG Canberra, courtesy Johnson Pilton Walker
It's not just the NPA's street facade, with its distinctively cantilevered concrete blade, that works. The spaces inside are lucid, humane and allow us to follow an instinctive journey around the collection. The finishes, in a variety of materials, have a restraint and simplicity - polished terrazzo, blackbutt (?) floors, unadorned concrete, simple diffusing blinds... we recognise this style from Johnson's serene Asian extension at AGNSW - a translucent lantern. It's like an architectural version of the best mod-oz cuisine - Asian inspired, yet imbued with a uniquely Australian modesty.
More soon on the collection.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Kehinde Wiley's Blak irony
"RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture"
The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC
February 8–October 26, 2008
Kehinde Wiley
THE WORLD STAGE: AFRICA LAGOS~DAKAR
The Studio Museum, Harlem, NYC
July 17—October 26, 2008
Kehinde Wiley
DOWN
Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster Street, SoHo, NYC
November 01 -December 20, 2008
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Notorious B.I.G., 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: LLCool J 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet, courtesy the Artist and Deitch gallery
Kehinde Wiley seems to have been ubiquitous in the USA this past year. 2008 has been a big one for the LA-born, gay African American painter, best-known for his hip-hop stars and homeboys, as seen in the recent exhibition 'RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture' at Washington's NPG. His exciting new show 'DOWN' is on for one more week at Jeffrey Deitch's Wooster St space, featuring his usual suspects in pièta-like poses, again echoing, or interrogating, great Western history paintings, including Mantegna's foreshortened Christ. A high-camp homoeroticism has always been present in Wiley's work, and this time it's a little more overt, as widely noted. (See below).
Above: ©Kehinde Wiley, Sleep, 2008, Oil on canvas, 132 x 300 inches (335.3 x 762 cm), Source Imagery: Jean-Bernard Restout, Photo credit: Max Yawney
Above: © Kehinde Wiley, Christian Martyr Tarcisius, 2008, Oil on canvas, 83.9 x 180 inches (213.1 x 457.2 cm), Source Imagery: Auguste Falguiere, Photo credit: Max Yawney
Above: © Kehinde Wiley, Lamentation Over The Dead Christ, 2008, Oil on canvas, 131 x 112 inches (332.7 x 284.5 cm), Source Imagery: Mantegna, Photo credit: Max Yawney
And then there's his ongoing 'World Stage: Africa, Lagos ~ Dakar' project, for which he's been traveling two years and creating some of his trademark epic paintings in different African countries, recruiting young men off the streets to pose for him. The paintings from this project, shown recently at Studio Museum, Harlem, continue his exploration of 'heroic art poses', here referencing not European paintings, but the poses of African public sculpture. Young men dressed in Western clothes—jeans, shorts, soccer jerseys, button-down shirts—assume the positions of a 'Dogon Couple' or a sculpture in the Place Soweto (National Assembly). The catalog to shows photographs of the original sources, which range from tribal/pre-colonial to quasi-modern. See below.
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Flashy eye-candy: Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, 2008
Above: ©Kehinde Wiley: Rubin Singleton, 2008, Courtesy artist and Deitch Projects
Critics and audiences, especially white ones, are somewhat conflicted about Wiley - on the one hand there are delicious layers of political and social irony in his huge paintings, and he's undeniably an icon-maker of considerable skill and visual audacity. On the other hand his work sails perilously close (stylistically) to slick album-cover art. That's the whole point, really, we think... he's mining a rich vein of popular 'blaxploitation' art that goes way back... consciously using the techniques of commercial illustration and photography to manufacture his latter-day heroes. But art aficionados are never quite sure where the joke ends, and whether it might ultimately be on them.
There are strong echoes of Yinka Shonibare's sophisticated deconstructions of Western Art in Wiley's approach, and like Shonibare, he is highly articulate about his work. Talking recently to New York Magazine's 'Vulture ' blog, he had this to say:
Q: This work seems to have a more sexual and exposed feel to it.
Wiley: I believe it's the repose. Historically, we're used to female figures in the repose. It was designed as a type of early pornographic image in which the body in repose was laid bare for the male gaze. I think we're almost trained to read the reclining figure in painting within an erotic state. There's a type of powerlessness with regard to being down off of your feet, and in that sense, that power exchange can be codified as an erotic moment.
Q: Is the very nature of art political?
Wiley: I remember in my early education having to deal with why I choose to paint black subjects rather than choosing models of different ethnicities, which laid bare that question wasn't being asked of the rest of the student body as to why they were choosing to paint people in their own group. The black body is inherently political. Insofar as I have goals, which perhaps go in a more personal and poetic direction, it should never ignore the large social and political implications of pairing images of strength, domination, and control with the black body, which by and large has been defined by a type of hypersexuality and propensity toward antisocial behavior. It simply posits a big question mark into the world — how do we look at these bodies? How do we respond to them and their history? How do they build a sense of wonder and loss?
Q: This country has been at war with itself and with others? How does "Down" come into play?
Wiley: This body of work concentrates on a genre of painting that has to do with honoring leaders and religious figures in moments of death and also repose. So much of what turns me on about some of the great, strident figures that I've painted in the past, great military leaders, had to do with a sense of vulnerability that undergirded a lot of that artifice. There almost appeared to be a soft spot at the belly of those paintings that reveals a great insecurity that gave rise to need. This show is a part of that dynamic: how we stave the fear of death and the fear of loss of control, the loss of people.
Martha Schwendener, writing about the Studio Museum show in the Village Voice (August 19, 2008), nicely expresses the critical dilemma:
Wiley's version of neo–Black Power is complicated, since it centers on the corporatized fields of sports and entertainment, and captures Africans dressed in the cheap outfits (born out of sweat shops and globalized commerce) that mean a young man in Lagos wouldn't look out of place on 125th Street. Only one painting, Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, finds Wiley's subjects dressed in African attire—well, African tunics worn over jeans.
Wiley's work is also nearly devoid of women. He did a painting of the rappers Salt-N-Pepa and Spinderella in 2005, but the African canvases are like Elizabethan stage plays, with young men taking the place of women in paintings like Place Soweto and the even more clearly feminized Benin Mother and Child. Wiley's work may be "about representation" and power, but the women who exist in the public spaces of African cities are dismissed from "The World Stage."
There's a reason for this. Wiley himself states that the works are about a kind of coded homoeroticism. (In some of his paintings, vegetal patterns in the background wind around the figures in the foreground, replicating sperm.) But in a catalog interview, when curator Christine Kim tells Wiley that one of his American models "left the building" during a panel discussion in Columbus when gay sexuality was brought up, Wiley backtracks, stressing that, in the studio, he attempts to create a "neutral environment." You can't have it both ways, however, and this neutrality spills over into the paintings, which feel most of the time like a hedging of bets between multicultural political correctness and messier gay/black politics.
In many ways, Wiley is a symptom of the age—or maybe a victim of the era and his own success. He shows with Jeffrey Deitch, the impresario whose mission seems to be to fuse art with entertainment. Like much of Deitch's youth-culture-heavy stable, Wiley's flashy eye-candy painting is framed as edgy and subversive, but it sidesteps the heavyweight, head-on politics of artists like Glen Ligon. By comparison, Wiley is glossy, market-ready, and safe—unless the feel-good, one-world/one-love vibe is a ruse, a way of making a large population fall in love with paintings that they might, under clearer circumstances, reject.
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Petrus Blackenheim and Saint George, 2006, Oil and enamel on canvas, 6 x 8 feet (182.9 x 274.3 cm)
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Officer of the Hussars, 2007, Oil on canvas, 9 x 9 feet (274.3 x 274.3 cm)
Go see, or visit:
http://www.kehindewiley.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/572111
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/10/artist_kehinde_wiley_on_his_ne.html
http://www.deitch.com/projects/sub.php?projId=252
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize/
http://www.studiomuseum.org/the-world-stage-africalagos-dakar/
The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC
February 8–October 26, 2008
Kehinde Wiley
THE WORLD STAGE: AFRICA LAGOS~DAKAR
The Studio Museum, Harlem, NYC
July 17—October 26, 2008
Kehinde Wiley
DOWN
Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster Street, SoHo, NYC
November 01 -December 20, 2008
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Notorious B.I.G., 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: LLCool J 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet, courtesy the Artist and Deitch gallery
Kehinde Wiley seems to have been ubiquitous in the USA this past year. 2008 has been a big one for the LA-born, gay African American painter, best-known for his hip-hop stars and homeboys, as seen in the recent exhibition 'RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture' at Washington's NPG. His exciting new show 'DOWN' is on for one more week at Jeffrey Deitch's Wooster St space, featuring his usual suspects in pièta-like poses, again echoing, or interrogating, great Western history paintings, including Mantegna's foreshortened Christ. A high-camp homoeroticism has always been present in Wiley's work, and this time it's a little more overt, as widely noted. (See below).
Above: ©Kehinde Wiley, Sleep, 2008, Oil on canvas, 132 x 300 inches (335.3 x 762 cm), Source Imagery: Jean-Bernard Restout, Photo credit: Max Yawney
Above: © Kehinde Wiley, Christian Martyr Tarcisius, 2008, Oil on canvas, 83.9 x 180 inches (213.1 x 457.2 cm), Source Imagery: Auguste Falguiere, Photo credit: Max Yawney
Above: © Kehinde Wiley, Lamentation Over The Dead Christ, 2008, Oil on canvas, 131 x 112 inches (332.7 x 284.5 cm), Source Imagery: Mantegna, Photo credit: Max Yawney
And then there's his ongoing 'World Stage: Africa, Lagos ~ Dakar' project, for which he's been traveling two years and creating some of his trademark epic paintings in different African countries, recruiting young men off the streets to pose for him. The paintings from this project, shown recently at Studio Museum, Harlem, continue his exploration of 'heroic art poses', here referencing not European paintings, but the poses of African public sculpture. Young men dressed in Western clothes—jeans, shorts, soccer jerseys, button-down shirts—assume the positions of a 'Dogon Couple' or a sculpture in the Place Soweto (National Assembly). The catalog to shows photographs of the original sources, which range from tribal/pre-colonial to quasi-modern. See below.
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Flashy eye-candy: Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, 2008
Above: ©Kehinde Wiley: Rubin Singleton, 2008, Courtesy artist and Deitch Projects
Critics and audiences, especially white ones, are somewhat conflicted about Wiley - on the one hand there are delicious layers of political and social irony in his huge paintings, and he's undeniably an icon-maker of considerable skill and visual audacity. On the other hand his work sails perilously close (stylistically) to slick album-cover art. That's the whole point, really, we think... he's mining a rich vein of popular 'blaxploitation' art that goes way back... consciously using the techniques of commercial illustration and photography to manufacture his latter-day heroes. But art aficionados are never quite sure where the joke ends, and whether it might ultimately be on them.
There are strong echoes of Yinka Shonibare's sophisticated deconstructions of Western Art in Wiley's approach, and like Shonibare, he is highly articulate about his work. Talking recently to New York Magazine's 'Vulture ' blog, he had this to say:
Q: This work seems to have a more sexual and exposed feel to it.
Wiley: I believe it's the repose. Historically, we're used to female figures in the repose. It was designed as a type of early pornographic image in which the body in repose was laid bare for the male gaze. I think we're almost trained to read the reclining figure in painting within an erotic state. There's a type of powerlessness with regard to being down off of your feet, and in that sense, that power exchange can be codified as an erotic moment.
Q: Is the very nature of art political?
Wiley: I remember in my early education having to deal with why I choose to paint black subjects rather than choosing models of different ethnicities, which laid bare that question wasn't being asked of the rest of the student body as to why they were choosing to paint people in their own group. The black body is inherently political. Insofar as I have goals, which perhaps go in a more personal and poetic direction, it should never ignore the large social and political implications of pairing images of strength, domination, and control with the black body, which by and large has been defined by a type of hypersexuality and propensity toward antisocial behavior. It simply posits a big question mark into the world — how do we look at these bodies? How do we respond to them and their history? How do they build a sense of wonder and loss?
Q: This country has been at war with itself and with others? How does "Down" come into play?
Wiley: This body of work concentrates on a genre of painting that has to do with honoring leaders and religious figures in moments of death and also repose. So much of what turns me on about some of the great, strident figures that I've painted in the past, great military leaders, had to do with a sense of vulnerability that undergirded a lot of that artifice. There almost appeared to be a soft spot at the belly of those paintings that reveals a great insecurity that gave rise to need. This show is a part of that dynamic: how we stave the fear of death and the fear of loss of control, the loss of people.
Martha Schwendener, writing about the Studio Museum show in the Village Voice (August 19, 2008), nicely expresses the critical dilemma:
Wiley's version of neo–Black Power is complicated, since it centers on the corporatized fields of sports and entertainment, and captures Africans dressed in the cheap outfits (born out of sweat shops and globalized commerce) that mean a young man in Lagos wouldn't look out of place on 125th Street. Only one painting, Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, finds Wiley's subjects dressed in African attire—well, African tunics worn over jeans.
Wiley's work is also nearly devoid of women. He did a painting of the rappers Salt-N-Pepa and Spinderella in 2005, but the African canvases are like Elizabethan stage plays, with young men taking the place of women in paintings like Place Soweto and the even more clearly feminized Benin Mother and Child. Wiley's work may be "about representation" and power, but the women who exist in the public spaces of African cities are dismissed from "The World Stage."
There's a reason for this. Wiley himself states that the works are about a kind of coded homoeroticism. (In some of his paintings, vegetal patterns in the background wind around the figures in the foreground, replicating sperm.) But in a catalog interview, when curator Christine Kim tells Wiley that one of his American models "left the building" during a panel discussion in Columbus when gay sexuality was brought up, Wiley backtracks, stressing that, in the studio, he attempts to create a "neutral environment." You can't have it both ways, however, and this neutrality spills over into the paintings, which feel most of the time like a hedging of bets between multicultural political correctness and messier gay/black politics.
In many ways, Wiley is a symptom of the age—or maybe a victim of the era and his own success. He shows with Jeffrey Deitch, the impresario whose mission seems to be to fuse art with entertainment. Like much of Deitch's youth-culture-heavy stable, Wiley's flashy eye-candy painting is framed as edgy and subversive, but it sidesteps the heavyweight, head-on politics of artists like Glen Ligon. By comparison, Wiley is glossy, market-ready, and safe—unless the feel-good, one-world/one-love vibe is a ruse, a way of making a large population fall in love with paintings that they might, under clearer circumstances, reject.
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Petrus Blackenheim and Saint George, 2006, Oil and enamel on canvas, 6 x 8 feet (182.9 x 274.3 cm)
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Officer of the Hussars, 2007, Oil on canvas, 9 x 9 feet (274.3 x 274.3 cm)
Go see, or visit:
http://www.kehindewiley.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/572111
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/10/artist_kehinde_wiley_on_his_ne.html
http://www.deitch.com/projects/sub.php?projId=252
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize/
http://www.studiomuseum.org/the-world-stage-africalagos-dakar/
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Half Light at AGNSW
Half Light
Portraits from Black Australia
until 22 February 2009
Rudy Komon gallery, Upper Level
Above: Destiny Deacon Where's Mickey? 2003 light jet print from Polaroid. Private collection, Sydney © Destiny Deacon. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney.
LF joined the benefactors, pre-Xmas bash, for a viewing and talk by curator Hettie Perkins. Many of the artists were there, and La Perkins let them do the talking, which worked well for the most part. Richard Bell gave a fine harangue, to broad Aboriginal grins and a few rather fixed smiles from the white folks present, but it was all good clean fun – very much a family affair.
This all-photography show is solid, if unsurprising – much of it is well-known and has been exhibited many times before. LF's standout was Tony Albert's 'Polaroid' series (actually hi-res digital we think), and of course the late Michael Riley's studio portraits, seen not long ago in the 'Sights Unseen' retrospective. Tracey Moffatt is notably absent as an artist, which is a pity, but everyone else is there, so it's a useful catch-up survey all told.
Portraits from Black Australia
until 22 February 2009
Rudy Komon gallery, Upper Level
Above: Destiny Deacon Where's Mickey? 2003 light jet print from Polaroid. Private collection, Sydney © Destiny Deacon. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney.
LF joined the benefactors, pre-Xmas bash, for a viewing and talk by curator Hettie Perkins. Many of the artists were there, and La Perkins let them do the talking, which worked well for the most part. Richard Bell gave a fine harangue, to broad Aboriginal grins and a few rather fixed smiles from the white folks present, but it was all good clean fun – very much a family affair.
This all-photography show is solid, if unsurprising – much of it is well-known and has been exhibited many times before. LF's standout was Tony Albert's 'Polaroid' series (actually hi-res digital we think), and of course the late Michael Riley's studio portraits, seen not long ago in the 'Sights Unseen' retrospective. Tracey Moffatt is notably absent as an artist, which is a pity, but everyone else is there, so it's a useful catch-up survey all told.
The oppression we had to have
Thoughts on the election of Barack Obama, and Kevin Rudd's Australian Labour Government, one year on.
“Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation”
- James Madison, 4th US President 1809-17
Until a year ago it seemed that John Howard might go on for another decade, prosecuting an unwise war against the clear wishes of the majority, refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol or say ‘Sorry’ To Indigenous Australians, among many other signature ideological positions that had embarrassed Australian internationally for a decade. Yet, since the ‘correction’, no-one seriously questions Kevin Rudd’s remedial policies as anything other than the good and proper actions of a responsible government. The election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States was, until September this year, an impossible dream. Now the world can hardly wait for January 20 2009, when it takes effect.
The parallels between Australian and the USA are striking, and commentators have variously hailed the Obama victory as the end of the Reagan era, the demise of the Neocons as a political force, the realization of Martin Luther King’s dream, or The Age of Aquarius finally getting underway after a shaky start. Regarding the last, apparently it’s just before breakfast. And all because an intelligent, well-educated, charismatic black man has been elected President. Or, in Australia’s case, a swotty bloke with reasonable positions on almost everything.
Yet if we look at the elected leaders of most Western, Latin American and Asian democracies since WW2, it’s apparent that the trend has long been towards centrist, consensus politics. The hard-right exceptions prove the rule… Nixon, Thatcher, Reagan, George W Bush and, in Australia, John Howard.
But Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Jerry Ford (the Accidental President), Jimmy Carter, Bush Senior and Clinton could all be described as reasonable men governing from the political centre, and pursuing a broad consensus foreign policy. Even Nixon, for all his avarice and dishonesty, ended the war in Vietnam and reached out to China, and Reagan succeeded in ending the Cold War, albeit with a military build-up that eventually sent the Soviet Union broke.
In Australia you could broadly characterise Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating as centrists – if Whitlam’s policies seemed radical at the time, they are mostly uncontroversial now. In the UK John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the current Tory leader are broadly of the same political stripe, along with every postwar Prime Minister of Canada, Japan, most of Europe and the Balkans, including most former Soviet vassals.
If the USA and Australia have merely ‘corrected’ back to the centre with the election of reasonable and humane technocrats, they now resemble most other democracies, and have much in common with a generation of European and Asian leaders who support multilateral solutions, good-neighbourliness and diplomacy over bombastic unilateralism. The real aberrations have been John W. Howard (JWH) and George W. Bush (GWB), those brothers in arms, the nagging exceptions to the centrist thesis for most of the last decade.
If it’s true that people get the government they deserve, then Australians apparently deserved, for a decade spanning the millennium, a hard-right ideologue, dog-whistler, wedge-meister and dirty fighter who governed in the interests of his own supporter base – essentially the entrepreneurial class. There are some credits of course (gun control, East Timor) but Australia’s longest sustained economic boom was just their dumb luck… a result of the Hawke/Keating reforms and a worldwide economic growth bubble, now popped. The rich got a lot richer, and the trickle-down effect was enough to keep many voters employed, happy, and spending big on their mortgages and credit cards.
The USA has followed a similar trajectory. Clinton/Gore got the economy competitive again, and back in the black. They governed from the political centre, built multilateral approaches to security, terrorism, Israel/Palestine, the Middle East, climate change, trade. It was promising, for all Clinton’s shortcomings as a man, and there was every reason to expect a continuation under stolid Al Gore. And yet, with a ‘stolen’ election and no popular mandate, the USA took its hardest turn to the right since Reagan. The effect was immediate – relations with China, Russia and the Middle east soured almost overnight, and Palestine, where the Intifada had been quiescent, erupted again. Was 9/11, obviously long in the planning, fast-forwarded in response? We’ll never know if it would have happened under Gore, but we can suppose that the response would have been more measured, and wiser counsel would have prevailed.
Instead a cabal of arch-conservatives … Perle, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and of course the arch wedge strategist himself, Karl Rove, got their way on policy. And their political vehicle was a not very bright man – untraveled, unread, deaf to the lessons of history and his great forbears in office. It was a perfect match – “The haves, and the have mores”, to quote Bush himself.
The strategy was a simple, and much like John Howard’s approach – make the people afraid, then pick the issues that will divide them one against the other – abortion, intelligent design, gay marriage, prayer in schools, immigration, dole bludging, unions, ‘handouts’ for minorities, to name the most common ones. Obviously it helps if there is evidence of a real threat, and 9/11 and the Bali bombings were certainly real threats, easily conflated in the public mind with Iraq, Muslims, boat people (or criminal Mexicans), so that “defending our way of life” became a catch-all for any number of bad policies. We were sold a vision of the world designed to make us insular and compliant, and persuaded that civil liberties should be curtailed, compassion towards genuine refugees suspended, multiculturalism discredited, and Aboriginal reconciliation abandoned. And over it all hung the threat of a return to 17% interest rates under those dreaded bogeymen, the ‘Union Bosses’.
And it worked, surprisingly well, and for a surprisingly long time, in both Australia and the USA. So, why did the people turn when they did?
One might argue that in Australia GWH had become not just ‘out of touch’ with average voters, but had been seriously out of whack with the underlying centrist trend in Australian politics from the beginning. The unexpected capture of the Senate in 2004, and the consequent legislative arrogance, alerted (and alarmed) the electorate. George Megalogenis’s incisive demographic analysis of the 2007 vote (Labour Market Sees Red, The Weekend Australian Dec 1-2, 2007) quoted Paul Keating as saying “Every now and than the conservative parties of Australia decide to bare their fangs with the full ideological bite … They never really change, it is just sometimes they decide to disguise themselves. I think John Howard just ran out of disguises”. Or to put it another way, the dog-whistle suddenly became clearly audible, and voters grew tired of being taken for fools. I suggest the turning point was the Haneeff affair, but others see it as cumulative, from Tampa and ‘kids overboard’ through AWB, David Hicks, ‘blame-the-states’ and the whole sad litany of wedge issues that worked brilliantly for a while, then just suddenly just stopped doing so, to the evident annoyance of their architects. And now a similar change has rolled through the USA, for very similar reasons. The final straw was of course the financial meltdown – the one thing that conservatives are supposed to be good at is the economy, and credit is the opium of the people. When that fell over, it was all over.
In Australia and now the USA, it seems that this was an ‘oppression we had to have’. Perhaps we needed to see how easily bad leaders can hoodwink us with fear. Not only have we got a decent Prime Minister out of it, but also, finally, a half-decent opposition leader. And Obama looks to be a genuine consensus-builder and healer – something the USA and the world badly needs.
So are we squarely back on the centrist track, or will the pendulum inevitably swing back, and how soon? The architects of the United States constitution were worldly men, and highly cynical about the motives of those in power, so they designed a fairly robust system, which has been vindicated by the election of Obama. But in what dark places will the Neocons dwell until the next time, and can they conspire to ensure that Obama fails, so that Americans turn, afear’d again, towards the next jingoistic hawk of the hard right – Sarah Palin anyone? Will the discredited Australian ideological right heed the lesson? Malcolm Turnbull understands better then most to succeed again the Coalition must recapture the middle ground, and that people want consensus and co-operation. There really isn’t much policy difference between him and Rudd, but the chances of genuine bi-partisanship seem as distant as ever. Barrack Obama will no doubt appoint a number of Republicans to his cabinet, as Democrats do, and is serious about moving beyond the old 'Red State/Blue State' divide, but with our outmoded adversarial system that just can’t happen in Australia. A really bold move would be to break with tradition and appoint Turnbull to the cabinet’s economic advisory group. It would ensure a genuinely non-partisan approach to economic management – we face grave economic times after all – and perhaps Turnbull would stop saying idiotic, opportunist things that he plainly doesn’t believe.
And, finally, we should enshrine a Bill of Rights in the Australian constitution, and by so doing ensure our broad social contract is never again hijacked by megalomaniacs and ideologues of any persuasion. We are one of the few Western democracies without such an instument, and it is reassuring to hear that the Attorney General is serious about, if not full-on constitutional change, then a Charter of Rights which Parliament will be obliged to consider when passing legislation.
'Course we can.
“Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation”
- James Madison, 4th US President 1809-17
Until a year ago it seemed that John Howard might go on for another decade, prosecuting an unwise war against the clear wishes of the majority, refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol or say ‘Sorry’ To Indigenous Australians, among many other signature ideological positions that had embarrassed Australian internationally for a decade. Yet, since the ‘correction’, no-one seriously questions Kevin Rudd’s remedial policies as anything other than the good and proper actions of a responsible government. The election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States was, until September this year, an impossible dream. Now the world can hardly wait for January 20 2009, when it takes effect.
The parallels between Australian and the USA are striking, and commentators have variously hailed the Obama victory as the end of the Reagan era, the demise of the Neocons as a political force, the realization of Martin Luther King’s dream, or The Age of Aquarius finally getting underway after a shaky start. Regarding the last, apparently it’s just before breakfast. And all because an intelligent, well-educated, charismatic black man has been elected President. Or, in Australia’s case, a swotty bloke with reasonable positions on almost everything.
Yet if we look at the elected leaders of most Western, Latin American and Asian democracies since WW2, it’s apparent that the trend has long been towards centrist, consensus politics. The hard-right exceptions prove the rule… Nixon, Thatcher, Reagan, George W Bush and, in Australia, John Howard.
But Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Jerry Ford (the Accidental President), Jimmy Carter, Bush Senior and Clinton could all be described as reasonable men governing from the political centre, and pursuing a broad consensus foreign policy. Even Nixon, for all his avarice and dishonesty, ended the war in Vietnam and reached out to China, and Reagan succeeded in ending the Cold War, albeit with a military build-up that eventually sent the Soviet Union broke.
In Australia you could broadly characterise Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating as centrists – if Whitlam’s policies seemed radical at the time, they are mostly uncontroversial now. In the UK John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the current Tory leader are broadly of the same political stripe, along with every postwar Prime Minister of Canada, Japan, most of Europe and the Balkans, including most former Soviet vassals.
If the USA and Australia have merely ‘corrected’ back to the centre with the election of reasonable and humane technocrats, they now resemble most other democracies, and have much in common with a generation of European and Asian leaders who support multilateral solutions, good-neighbourliness and diplomacy over bombastic unilateralism. The real aberrations have been John W. Howard (JWH) and George W. Bush (GWB), those brothers in arms, the nagging exceptions to the centrist thesis for most of the last decade.
If it’s true that people get the government they deserve, then Australians apparently deserved, for a decade spanning the millennium, a hard-right ideologue, dog-whistler, wedge-meister and dirty fighter who governed in the interests of his own supporter base – essentially the entrepreneurial class. There are some credits of course (gun control, East Timor) but Australia’s longest sustained economic boom was just their dumb luck… a result of the Hawke/Keating reforms and a worldwide economic growth bubble, now popped. The rich got a lot richer, and the trickle-down effect was enough to keep many voters employed, happy, and spending big on their mortgages and credit cards.
The USA has followed a similar trajectory. Clinton/Gore got the economy competitive again, and back in the black. They governed from the political centre, built multilateral approaches to security, terrorism, Israel/Palestine, the Middle East, climate change, trade. It was promising, for all Clinton’s shortcomings as a man, and there was every reason to expect a continuation under stolid Al Gore. And yet, with a ‘stolen’ election and no popular mandate, the USA took its hardest turn to the right since Reagan. The effect was immediate – relations with China, Russia and the Middle east soured almost overnight, and Palestine, where the Intifada had been quiescent, erupted again. Was 9/11, obviously long in the planning, fast-forwarded in response? We’ll never know if it would have happened under Gore, but we can suppose that the response would have been more measured, and wiser counsel would have prevailed.
Instead a cabal of arch-conservatives … Perle, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and of course the arch wedge strategist himself, Karl Rove, got their way on policy. And their political vehicle was a not very bright man – untraveled, unread, deaf to the lessons of history and his great forbears in office. It was a perfect match – “The haves, and the have mores”, to quote Bush himself.
The strategy was a simple, and much like John Howard’s approach – make the people afraid, then pick the issues that will divide them one against the other – abortion, intelligent design, gay marriage, prayer in schools, immigration, dole bludging, unions, ‘handouts’ for minorities, to name the most common ones. Obviously it helps if there is evidence of a real threat, and 9/11 and the Bali bombings were certainly real threats, easily conflated in the public mind with Iraq, Muslims, boat people (or criminal Mexicans), so that “defending our way of life” became a catch-all for any number of bad policies. We were sold a vision of the world designed to make us insular and compliant, and persuaded that civil liberties should be curtailed, compassion towards genuine refugees suspended, multiculturalism discredited, and Aboriginal reconciliation abandoned. And over it all hung the threat of a return to 17% interest rates under those dreaded bogeymen, the ‘Union Bosses’.
And it worked, surprisingly well, and for a surprisingly long time, in both Australia and the USA. So, why did the people turn when they did?
One might argue that in Australia GWH had become not just ‘out of touch’ with average voters, but had been seriously out of whack with the underlying centrist trend in Australian politics from the beginning. The unexpected capture of the Senate in 2004, and the consequent legislative arrogance, alerted (and alarmed) the electorate. George Megalogenis’s incisive demographic analysis of the 2007 vote (Labour Market Sees Red, The Weekend Australian Dec 1-2, 2007) quoted Paul Keating as saying “Every now and than the conservative parties of Australia decide to bare their fangs with the full ideological bite … They never really change, it is just sometimes they decide to disguise themselves. I think John Howard just ran out of disguises”. Or to put it another way, the dog-whistle suddenly became clearly audible, and voters grew tired of being taken for fools. I suggest the turning point was the Haneeff affair, but others see it as cumulative, from Tampa and ‘kids overboard’ through AWB, David Hicks, ‘blame-the-states’ and the whole sad litany of wedge issues that worked brilliantly for a while, then just suddenly just stopped doing so, to the evident annoyance of their architects. And now a similar change has rolled through the USA, for very similar reasons. The final straw was of course the financial meltdown – the one thing that conservatives are supposed to be good at is the economy, and credit is the opium of the people. When that fell over, it was all over.
In Australia and now the USA, it seems that this was an ‘oppression we had to have’. Perhaps we needed to see how easily bad leaders can hoodwink us with fear. Not only have we got a decent Prime Minister out of it, but also, finally, a half-decent opposition leader. And Obama looks to be a genuine consensus-builder and healer – something the USA and the world badly needs.
So are we squarely back on the centrist track, or will the pendulum inevitably swing back, and how soon? The architects of the United States constitution were worldly men, and highly cynical about the motives of those in power, so they designed a fairly robust system, which has been vindicated by the election of Obama. But in what dark places will the Neocons dwell until the next time, and can they conspire to ensure that Obama fails, so that Americans turn, afear’d again, towards the next jingoistic hawk of the hard right – Sarah Palin anyone? Will the discredited Australian ideological right heed the lesson? Malcolm Turnbull understands better then most to succeed again the Coalition must recapture the middle ground, and that people want consensus and co-operation. There really isn’t much policy difference between him and Rudd, but the chances of genuine bi-partisanship seem as distant as ever. Barrack Obama will no doubt appoint a number of Republicans to his cabinet, as Democrats do, and is serious about moving beyond the old 'Red State/Blue State' divide, but with our outmoded adversarial system that just can’t happen in Australia. A really bold move would be to break with tradition and appoint Turnbull to the cabinet’s economic advisory group. It would ensure a genuinely non-partisan approach to economic management – we face grave economic times after all – and perhaps Turnbull would stop saying idiotic, opportunist things that he plainly doesn’t believe.
And, finally, we should enshrine a Bill of Rights in the Australian constitution, and by so doing ensure our broad social contract is never again hijacked by megalomaniacs and ideologues of any persuasion. We are one of the few Western democracies without such an instument, and it is reassuring to hear that the Attorney General is serious about, if not full-on constitutional change, then a Charter of Rights which Parliament will be obliged to consider when passing legislation.
'Course we can.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Yes We Can
Full text of Barrack Obama victory speech
Chicago, 4 Nov 2008 “Hello, Chicago.
“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
“It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.
“It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled, Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.
“We are, and always will be, the United States of America.
“It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
“It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.
“A little bit earlier this evening, I received an extraordinarily gracious call from Senator McCain.
“Senator McCain fought long and hard in this campaign. And he’s fought even longer and harder for the country that he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine. We are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader.
“I congratulate him; I congratulate Governor (Sarah) Palin for all that they’ve achieved. And I look forward to working with them to renew this nation’s promise in the months ahead.
“I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart, and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on the train home to Delaware, the vice president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.
“And I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last 16 years, the rock of our family, the love of my life, the nation’s next first lady Michelle Obama.
“Sasha and Malia I love you both more than you can imagine. And you have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the new White House.
“And while she’s no longer with us, I know my grandmother’s watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight. I know that my debt to them is beyond measure.
“To my sister Maya, my sister Alma, all my other brothers and sisters, thank you so much for all the support that you’ve given me. I am grateful to them.
“And to my campaign manager, David Plouffe, the unsung hero of this campaign, who built the best — the best political campaign, I think, in the history of the United States of America.
“To my chief strategist David Axelrod who’s been a partner with me every step of the way. To the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics, you made this happen and I am forever grateful for what you’ve sacrificed to get it done.
“But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you. It belongs to you.
“I was never the likeliest candidate for this office.
“We didn’t start with much money or many endorsements.
“Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington. It began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.
“It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give 5 and 10 and 20 to the cause.
“It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy, who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep.
“It drew strength from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on doors of perfect strangers, and from the millions of Americans who volunteered and organised and proved that more than two centuries later a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the Earth.
“This is your victory.
“And I know you didn’t do this just to win an election. And I know you didn’t do it for me.
“You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime — two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.
“Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us.
“There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after the children fall asleep and wonder how they’ll make the mortgage or pay their doctors’ bills or save enough for their child’s college education.
“There’s new energy to harness, new jobs to be created, new schools to build, and threats to meet, alliances to repair.
“The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.
“I promise you, we as a people will get there.
“There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can’t solve every problem.
“But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it’s been done in America for 221 years — block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.
“What began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night.
“This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.
“It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.
“So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.
“Let us remember that, if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers.
“In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let’s resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.
“Let’s remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity.
“Those are values that we all share. And while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress.
“As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, we are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.
“And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.
“And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.
“To those — to those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright: Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.
“That’s the true genius of America: that America can change. Our union can be perfected. What we’ve already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
“This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight’s about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.
“She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the colour of her skin.
“And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America — the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.
“At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.
“When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.
“When the bombs fell on our harbour and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.
“She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that ‘We Shall Overcome’. Yes we can.
“A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination.
“And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.
“Yes we can.
“America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves — if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?
“This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment.
“This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.
“Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.”
Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865), 16th President of the United States
The Gettysburg Address
Gettysburg Cemetery, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
London: The New Saatchi Gallery - The Revolution Continues
THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES: NEW CHINESE ARTSaatchi Gallery
Duke of York's HQ, King's Road, Chelsea, London
until Jan 18 2009
FREE
At last the much-anticipated new gallery in Chelsea has opened, in the vastness of the old regimental barracks on the Kings Road, and at vast expense. Critics, while loving the immense spaces, have been divided on the quality of this inaugural exhibition, which features most of China's contemporary superstars, with the notable exception of Ai Weiwei.
The Guardian's Adrian Searle (Saatchi gallery: A study in blandness, October 7 2008) is withering:
The former Duke of York's HQ has been transformed into a study in blandness. If not for the art, we might be at a King's Road corporate wellness retreat...
Too much here looks secondary, or like a tiresome kind of entertainment. There are few signs of language being stretched and one has the feeling that many works have been manufactured with a market in mind...
On the whole the sculpture is better than the painting. It is almost all figurative, sometimes aiming for abject hilarity, sometimes for mordant gravity. But this time, optimism and Saatchi's unquenchable enthusiasm might not be enough.
Although everyone seemed to make an exception for Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's extraordinary Old Persons Home, left, Charlotte Higgins (Guardian Blog) was also unimpressed by most of the art:The paint was still drying and the pale-wood floors still pristine this morning as the press drifted around the inaugural exhibition of Chinese art.
And therein lies the problem. It just is a truly grim show.
There is one mildly amusing piece - Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's room full of life-like sculptures of very elderly men in wheelchairs, each one looking something like (although hard to pin down to) a world leader in his dotage. These uniformed fellows in their medals, heads lolling on shoulders, white hair unkempt, reminded one of the broken Saddam, or of Yasser Arafat in his last days, or of what Bill Clinton might end up like in his twilight. The wheelchairs moved around of their own accord, such that the old blokes with their blankets on their knees bumped into each other from time to time.
Well, that was the highlight. Too much of the work here was on one note, or had one shouty visual trick up its sleeve. As often in the company of the work of Charles Saatchi, or at least the stuff that he has collected recently, I found myself being reminded that he is an ad-man. Visual puns are his bread-and-butter. That's why he likes this kind of thing: the miniature city (badly) constructed out of dog chews; the 'history-painting' containing Mao sitting in the back row at a McCarthy hearing; lord help us, the giant turd containing miniature toy soldiers. Hectoring art with little to say.It was not all bad - Richard Dorment (The Telegraph) was more approving, see the video link below, which includes footage of Old Persons Home.
Considering it's free, and there is a very promising line-up of shows to come, it would appear that London is just being characteristically bitchy about the flamboyant Charles Saatchi. LF disagrees with the naysayers - we think that more far-sighted zillionaires should follow his lead and fund great public galleries. If you don't like all the art on show, at least it's there to experience first-had, so get yourself along and decide for yourself.
Monday, October 13, 2008
London: Frieze Art Fair opens Thursday 16 October
16-19 October 2008
It's here again - so soon!
"Frieze Art Fair takes place every October in Regent’s Park, London. The fair provides an environment to introduce and showcase new and established artists to visitors from around the world."
http://www.friezeartfair.com/
London: Tate Modern unveils the new Turbine Hall installation
Dominique Gonzalez-FoersterTH.2058
Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, London
until 13 April 2009
Left: Centre-stage in the new installation, entitled TH.2058, is a larger-than-life model of a massive spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, who herself took on the Turbine Hall commission in 1999. Courtesy Tate Modern, London
Tate Modern has unveiled the latest in its series of Turbine Hall commissions - one of the most terrifying challenges in contemporary art, if also one of the most prestigious. French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has filled the vast space of Giles Gilbert Scott's former power station with recreations of sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, blowing them up by 25% and placed them among a sea of mattress-less metal bunk beds, complete with reading material. The aim is to present a vision of a post-apocalyptic world 50 years into the future, the artist says. (The Guardian, October 13 2007)
Sunday, October 12, 2008
London: Andy Warhol's exposures at The Hayward
Andy Warhol
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Films, screen-tests, videos and Polaroids
Hayward Gallery, London
Until January 18 2008
"Mr Land invented this great camera called a Polaroid. And it just takes the face of the person. There is something about the camera that makes the person look just right. They usually come out great. I take at least 200 pictures and then I choose. Sometimes I take half a picture and a lip from another picture. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's easy." – Andy Warhol
What's to say? A must-see from the inventor of '15 Minutes of Fame'. See Jonathan Jones' Guardian review below.
Below: Polaroid pictures taken by Andy Warhol: O.J. Simpson, Robert Rauschenburg, Joseph Beuys, Truman Capote. Photographs: Founding Collection, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh © 2008 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc
Video: Andy Warhol photographing Joseph Beuys
The Polaroid production line
© Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, Monday October 6 2008
"Mark Rothko was once at a party in New York when Andy Warhol walked in, with his entourage of superstars. Warhol heard Rothko complain bitterly to the host: "How could you let them in?" The two great American artists were not exactly drinking buddies - so it's a strange twist that a Warhol exhibition should open in London this week, coinciding with a retrospective of his antithesis, Rothko.
Rothko thought Warhol represented the worst things about America: consumerism, celebrity, superficiality, you name it. But the two artists may have had more in common than you might think. In the early 1990s, New York's MoMA put on a great display of abstract paintings from the 1940s and 50s. At the end, some curator put Warhol's Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963). It was totally right. Warhol's tragic subject matter, held in a saturated field of colour, shared the pathos and power of the abstract expressionists, but with less introspection, and more interest in others.
This was abstract reportage, and its compassion, its determination to bear witness, was almost unbearable.
Other Voices, Other Rooms was a novel by Warhol's favourite writer, Truman Capote. The Hayward's Warhol retrospective has adopted this as its title, as if to underline the artist's readiness to listen to, and look at, other people. It features Warhol's films, screen-tests, videos - and his Polaroids, which it rightly hails as works of art in their own right, even though they were actually used by Warhol as aids for painting portraits. They are strangely compelling images: one of the great humanising threads running through his factory-like output is his fascination with portraiture. The Polaroids provide a fascinating insight into this man who wanted to capture the world like a camera.
The Polaroids are, however, the most difficult of his works to reconcile with any lofty view of Warhol's output. In the early 1970s, he started to do society portraits. His subjects were stars and high-society types, from Chris Evert to OJ Simpson, Grace Jones to Joseph Beuys. Sitting for Warhol simply meant letting him take Polaroids of you. These were converted into silkscreen templates, printed on to canvas and painted over in lurid smears of bright colour that take the contrasts and saturations of the photographs as their starting point. In the Polaroid, Capote has bright blue eyes; in the painting, these become electric circles of sky blue within a pink face.
Just to make that observation is to home in on how precisely and intelligently Warhol's portraits work. Capote's eyes are not just eyes - they are the eyes of the great Truman Capote, whom Warhol revered and whose book In Cold Blood looks unshakingly into the worst elements of US life, just as Warhol did when he painted the electric chair. There's an emotional choice in the decision to heighten his eyes: a man becomes a myth, a face becomes an image.
The fact that Warhol liked famous people does not mean - as is usually assumed - that he worshipped celebrity for its own sake. In his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he gives celebrities this advice: you shouldn't value your fame in itself; you should "always have a product that's not just 'you'". An actress should count up her performances, a model her photographs. This way, "you always know exactly what you're worth, and you don't get stuck thinking your product is you and your fame". This is the opposite of the famous-for-being-famous ethic he often gets the blame for.
In the Polaroids, it's noticeable that no one is "just" a celebrity. These people do things: there are artists Warhol sincerely admires (Robert Rauschenberg, Max Ernst), pop stars, sports heroes. And many of the portraits are far from flattering. The camera does no one any favours, producing oddly lumpen, gross images of bright, damaged flesh - the raw facts, the rude material. Warhol said he deliberately miscast his films because the wrong person is always funnier and stranger. In these Polaroids, the stars, famous as they are, look miscast in their own lives.
Warhol's quest for the ungainly, even the freakish, reaches its fascinating climax in these Polaroids. Warhol thought himself ugly. He also thought of himself as a mirror. In front of the camera, as if in front of the mirror, he tries out disguises: drag, wigs, lipstick. He even poses as himself, plain Andy Warhol. The more you look at his work, the more you feel there really was such a person, who was not just an empty mirror but a dark, reflective lake - with hidden depths that have still not been fully charted."
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Films, screen-tests, videos and Polaroids
Hayward Gallery, London
Until January 18 2008
"Mr Land invented this great camera called a Polaroid. And it just takes the face of the person. There is something about the camera that makes the person look just right. They usually come out great. I take at least 200 pictures and then I choose. Sometimes I take half a picture and a lip from another picture. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's easy." – Andy Warhol
What's to say? A must-see from the inventor of '15 Minutes of Fame'. See Jonathan Jones' Guardian review below.
Below: Polaroid pictures taken by Andy Warhol: O.J. Simpson, Robert Rauschenburg, Joseph Beuys, Truman Capote. Photographs: Founding Collection, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh © 2008 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc
Video: Andy Warhol photographing Joseph Beuys
The Polaroid production line
© Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, Monday October 6 2008
"Mark Rothko was once at a party in New York when Andy Warhol walked in, with his entourage of superstars. Warhol heard Rothko complain bitterly to the host: "How could you let them in?" The two great American artists were not exactly drinking buddies - so it's a strange twist that a Warhol exhibition should open in London this week, coinciding with a retrospective of his antithesis, Rothko.
Rothko thought Warhol represented the worst things about America: consumerism, celebrity, superficiality, you name it. But the two artists may have had more in common than you might think. In the early 1990s, New York's MoMA put on a great display of abstract paintings from the 1940s and 50s. At the end, some curator put Warhol's Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963). It was totally right. Warhol's tragic subject matter, held in a saturated field of colour, shared the pathos and power of the abstract expressionists, but with less introspection, and more interest in others.
This was abstract reportage, and its compassion, its determination to bear witness, was almost unbearable.
Other Voices, Other Rooms was a novel by Warhol's favourite writer, Truman Capote. The Hayward's Warhol retrospective has adopted this as its title, as if to underline the artist's readiness to listen to, and look at, other people. It features Warhol's films, screen-tests, videos - and his Polaroids, which it rightly hails as works of art in their own right, even though they were actually used by Warhol as aids for painting portraits. They are strangely compelling images: one of the great humanising threads running through his factory-like output is his fascination with portraiture. The Polaroids provide a fascinating insight into this man who wanted to capture the world like a camera.
The Polaroids are, however, the most difficult of his works to reconcile with any lofty view of Warhol's output. In the early 1970s, he started to do society portraits. His subjects were stars and high-society types, from Chris Evert to OJ Simpson, Grace Jones to Joseph Beuys. Sitting for Warhol simply meant letting him take Polaroids of you. These were converted into silkscreen templates, printed on to canvas and painted over in lurid smears of bright colour that take the contrasts and saturations of the photographs as their starting point. In the Polaroid, Capote has bright blue eyes; in the painting, these become electric circles of sky blue within a pink face.
Just to make that observation is to home in on how precisely and intelligently Warhol's portraits work. Capote's eyes are not just eyes - they are the eyes of the great Truman Capote, whom Warhol revered and whose book In Cold Blood looks unshakingly into the worst elements of US life, just as Warhol did when he painted the electric chair. There's an emotional choice in the decision to heighten his eyes: a man becomes a myth, a face becomes an image.
The fact that Warhol liked famous people does not mean - as is usually assumed - that he worshipped celebrity for its own sake. In his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he gives celebrities this advice: you shouldn't value your fame in itself; you should "always have a product that's not just 'you'". An actress should count up her performances, a model her photographs. This way, "you always know exactly what you're worth, and you don't get stuck thinking your product is you and your fame". This is the opposite of the famous-for-being-famous ethic he often gets the blame for.
In the Polaroids, it's noticeable that no one is "just" a celebrity. These people do things: there are artists Warhol sincerely admires (Robert Rauschenberg, Max Ernst), pop stars, sports heroes. And many of the portraits are far from flattering. The camera does no one any favours, producing oddly lumpen, gross images of bright, damaged flesh - the raw facts, the rude material. Warhol said he deliberately miscast his films because the wrong person is always funnier and stranger. In these Polaroids, the stars, famous as they are, look miscast in their own lives.
Warhol's quest for the ungainly, even the freakish, reaches its fascinating climax in these Polaroids. Warhol thought himself ugly. He also thought of himself as a mirror. In front of the camera, as if in front of the mirror, he tries out disguises: drag, wigs, lipstick. He even poses as himself, plain Andy Warhol. The more you look at his work, the more you feel there really was such a person, who was not just an empty mirror but a dark, reflective lake - with hidden depths that have still not been fully charted."
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Memes and matresses - Alexander Seton at Chalk Horse
Alexander Seton
Memeoid
Chalk Horse Gallery, Sydney
until 25 October
Also (upstairs): Marley Dawson
This is LF's standout opening of the week, not least for a thirsty, happy crowd spilling out into the street on a sultry spring night - don't you wish it happened more?
Alexander Seton must be Australia's most skilled carver, with the possible exception of Ricky Swallow. But then marble (from Wombeyan) is a much more demanding medium than wood. The standout installation - actually catalogued as 4 separate works - is a series of minitaure bunk-style beds in unvarnished blackbutt, on which lie a series of baby matresses, on each of which lies a jarring and sometimes cryptic object(s), including a tiny, sleeping, swaddled infant. So far so interesting, although on opening night the blandly-lit space did nothing to enhance this subtle tableau, which seems to demand a darkened and hushed space. Those unfamiliar with Seton's work may take some time to realise that the matresses are carved, with exquisite detailing, from solid marble - the quilting, the creases, the pleating, the subtle textile qualities of matress lining... Wow!
This is a great example of material as metaphor, an old LF theme, but is just an added resonance in an already poignant installation. There is a further subtext - Seton is apparently referencing internet 'memes' - viral cultural multipliers on YouTube and the like. One of the matresses has a webcam as its object, another some sort of high-tech chrome 'wand', referencing memes such as 'The Dancing Kid' and 'Star Wars Baby'. LF isn't totally convinced that YouTube videos can be coinsidered memes in the original (Richard Dawkins) sense of the term, but they are certainly 'memeoid' in nature, and it's an interesting overlay on Seton's more enduring concerns, and the beautiful tension between the hard monumentality of marble, and the soft comforts of 'bedware' as also seen in his stunning Security Blanket series of 2007, below.
Left: (Not in current exhibition) ©Alexander Seton
Self-censoring helps everyone (2007)
Plastic & Womeyan marble
Couresy the artist and Chalk Horse Gallery
Dougal Phillips wrote about Seton's 2007 installation Security Blanket:
In Security Blanket, Alexander Seton brings the fine art of marble sculpting to a conceptual sculptural practice which draws upon themes of memory, play and safety. The works in this exhibition are beautifully crafted objects which marry hyper-real material effects with carefully chosen miniature icons - a row of houses, a Spruce tree, a jeep.
The common foundation of each of the works is the folded doona recreated in marble. Each doona is folded differently, someas if laid out at bed’s end, others as a heaped pile on a teenager’s floor or as a stage for combat in a child’s room. The materiality of the marble is key here. The doona folds have been carefully rendered, with colour of the marble matching the off-white and grey tones of an aging comforter. The marble itself incorporates the powerful impressions of childhood - not only does it remind the artist of his bedclothes, this particular marble is quarried from the Wombeyan area, close to where Seton spent time as a child.
What Security Blanket ultimately offers is a double-barreled question: What does security mean, and where is it found? People of all ages cling to their doonas physically and mentally, as landscapes for emotional turmoil, covens of vulnerability or, in the eyes of the child, a ground-level world to be built on and conquered. In the end, what Seton reminds us is how little really changes over the years.
- Courtesy Dr Dougal Phillips , Honorary Research Associate
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney Director and Curator, 1/2doz.
Back to Mimeoid at Chalk Horse - there is also a considerable cast multiple component, plus video, but it's the rocks that get us off. Marley Dawson's witty sculptural meditations on the world of men's sheds and tools is also worth seeing, and testament to Chalk Horse's ongoing commitment to mounting complex installations by emergent artists, and their brave transcendence of the demands of running a commercial gallery.
A la prochaine.
Memeoid
Chalk Horse Gallery, Sydney
until 25 October
Also (upstairs): Marley Dawson
This is LF's standout opening of the week, not least for a thirsty, happy crowd spilling out into the street on a sultry spring night - don't you wish it happened more?
Alexander Seton must be Australia's most skilled carver, with the possible exception of Ricky Swallow. But then marble (from Wombeyan) is a much more demanding medium than wood. The standout installation - actually catalogued as 4 separate works - is a series of minitaure bunk-style beds in unvarnished blackbutt, on which lie a series of baby matresses, on each of which lies a jarring and sometimes cryptic object(s), including a tiny, sleeping, swaddled infant. So far so interesting, although on opening night the blandly-lit space did nothing to enhance this subtle tableau, which seems to demand a darkened and hushed space. Those unfamiliar with Seton's work may take some time to realise that the matresses are carved, with exquisite detailing, from solid marble - the quilting, the creases, the pleating, the subtle textile qualities of matress lining... Wow!
This is a great example of material as metaphor, an old LF theme, but is just an added resonance in an already poignant installation. There is a further subtext - Seton is apparently referencing internet 'memes' - viral cultural multipliers on YouTube and the like. One of the matresses has a webcam as its object, another some sort of high-tech chrome 'wand', referencing memes such as 'The Dancing Kid' and 'Star Wars Baby'. LF isn't totally convinced that YouTube videos can be coinsidered memes in the original (Richard Dawkins) sense of the term, but they are certainly 'memeoid' in nature, and it's an interesting overlay on Seton's more enduring concerns, and the beautiful tension between the hard monumentality of marble, and the soft comforts of 'bedware' as also seen in his stunning Security Blanket series of 2007, below.
Left: (Not in current exhibition) ©Alexander SetonSelf-censoring helps everyone (2007)
Plastic & Womeyan marble
Couresy the artist and Chalk Horse Gallery
Dougal Phillips wrote about Seton's 2007 installation Security Blanket:
In Security Blanket, Alexander Seton brings the fine art of marble sculpting to a conceptual sculptural practice which draws upon themes of memory, play and safety. The works in this exhibition are beautifully crafted objects which marry hyper-real material effects with carefully chosen miniature icons - a row of houses, a Spruce tree, a jeep.
The common foundation of each of the works is the folded doona recreated in marble. Each doona is folded differently, someas if laid out at bed’s end, others as a heaped pile on a teenager’s floor or as a stage for combat in a child’s room. The materiality of the marble is key here. The doona folds have been carefully rendered, with colour of the marble matching the off-white and grey tones of an aging comforter. The marble itself incorporates the powerful impressions of childhood - not only does it remind the artist of his bedclothes, this particular marble is quarried from the Wombeyan area, close to where Seton spent time as a child.
What Security Blanket ultimately offers is a double-barreled question: What does security mean, and where is it found? People of all ages cling to their doonas physically and mentally, as landscapes for emotional turmoil, covens of vulnerability or, in the eyes of the child, a ground-level world to be built on and conquered. In the end, what Seton reminds us is how little really changes over the years.
- Courtesy Dr Dougal Phillips , Honorary Research Associate
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney Director and Curator, 1/2doz.
Back to Mimeoid at Chalk Horse - there is also a considerable cast multiple component, plus video, but it's the rocks that get us off. Marley Dawson's witty sculptural meditations on the world of men's sheds and tools is also worth seeing, and testament to Chalk Horse's ongoing commitment to mounting complex installations by emergent artists, and their brave transcendence of the demands of running a commercial gallery.
A la prochaine.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
A Nigerian in Sydney - Yinka Shonibare at the MCA
YINKA SHONIBARE MBEMuseum of Contemprary Art, Sydney
until 1 February 2009
Left: How to Blow up Two Heads at Once (Ladies), 2006
Two mannequins, two guns, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, shoes, leather riding boots, plinth
93 1/2 X 63 X 48 inches
This is definitely the show of the Spring season. The MCA have mounted a very impressive survey of the Nigerian/British artist, a couple of whose works were included in Contemporary Commonwealth at the NGA, coinciding with the Commonwealth Games in 2006, remember them?
This a large review show and includes all his best-known pieces, LF's favourite being 'The Scramble for Africa', featuring his signature headless manequins seated around a table, dressed in 'Dutch' printed cotton, dividing up a continent. Shonibare's work has great depth and sophistication, reaching far beyond the obvious post-colonial polemics, and he has an impressive knowledge of European art history and Enlightenment culture, which he wickedly subverts at every turn.
It's good to see some work by a major African artist in Australia - it's on for ages so get over there.
Primavera also opened last night, more on that soon.
A la prochaine.
Friday, September 19, 2008
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Wednesday, September 17, 2008
The Art of Light
Jonathan Jones untitled (the tyranny of distance)
Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), Sydney
14 ⁄ 08 ⁄ 2008 – 11 ⁄ 10 ⁄ 2008
NEON , curated by Tania Doropoulos
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney
30 August - 25 October 2008
Robert Irwin Light and Space
White Cube Mason's Yard, London
17 Sep—19 Oct 2008
Newell Harry Fish or Cut Bait?
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
21 Aug–13 Sep 2008
Glenn Ligon: Some Changes
Touring 2006-2008
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus
Musée dArt Moderne Grand-Duc, Luxembourg
Above © Estate of Dan Flavin, Site-specific installation, 1996, Courtesy the Menil Collection
Above: © Jonathan Jones, untitled (the tyranny of distance), 2008 . aluminium, tarpaulin, fluorescent tubes and fittings. 6 walls, each 3.4 x 1.9 x 8.27 m, courtesy the artist, Gallery Barry Keldoulis and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney
Above: © Jonathan Jones Lightscapes installation view, foyer, Westpac banking Corporation. Courtesy the artist, Westpac and Gallery Barry Keldoulis.
Above: © Robert Irwin Light and Space (Detail), 2007. 115 fluorescent lights, courtesy the artist, White Cube and Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Photo: Philipp Scholz Ritterman
Above: NEON – installation view, courtesy the artists and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Above: © Newell Harry, Fish or Cut Bait?Installation view, showing Beginnings and Endings / Endings and Beginnings neon work across far corner, and Ovid/Void: Rousing the Rubble (for David) to the right, courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.
Above: © Glenn Ligon Warm Broad Glow, 2005
neon and paint, 24 × 190 in, courtesy the artist and Fogg Museum, Harvard.
Neon and flouroscent tubes are more popular now than ever, it seems, and it's increasingly difficult for artists to carve out their own style in a medium that tends to suffer from 'sameyness'. Flouro tubes deliver an aesthetic that was comprehensively explored by the late, great Dan Flavin (1933-1996). The extraordinary retrospective of his work that travelled the world, ending up at LACMA in August 2007, reminded us just how elegantly he used the medium, and leaves us with the feeling that everyone else has been covering the same ground, with added irony.
Jonathan Jones is Australia's flouro and lightbulb king, although it's not all he does. He has a elegant way with 'threading', and this has manifested at times in some rather beautiful knotting and looping of electrical cabling. As an Indigenous man he subtly references traditional motifs, and his more recent flouro projects, including the work currently showing at SCAF and his massive lobby installation at Westpac Bank's Sydney headquarters manifest this kind of geometric patterning, but there is some spookily similar work around, for instance Robert Irwin's show which has just opened at White Cube in London. Which isn't to suggest that either is even aware the other's work, but that there are only so many things you can do with linear tubes.
Neon has a greater flexibility, literally, but the medium itself tends to be unsubtle, and carries all those corny old echoes of Vegas and cheap motels, which tends to impose a 'jokiness'. Imagery is difficult, so most artists end up doing words, the problem being that in formal terms one set of neon words tends to look much like another. In response, these texts have had to become increasingly cryptic - the medium referencing itself with ever greater levels of irony. The current show at Anna Schwartz's magnificent Carriageworks space is a perfect exemplar. Anyone who's anyone has to do a neon sculpture these days, and this show, which holds so much promise curatorially, is really a flashy collection of novelties assembled around a common medium, without much depth. Which isn't to dismiss the quality of some of the works, or the fact that AS has mounted such a technically difficult and expensive show.
Joseph Kosuth's deadpan 'Neon' of 1965 in some ways says it all - spelling out N E O N, in neon. Another much more recent Kosuth piece 'W.F.T. #1 [yellow]' (2008) is also impressive. Kosuth has said of its pregenitor 'The Language of Equilibrium': This project, in yellow neon, has as its basis language itself. It is a work which is a reflection on its own construction… The work engages the cultural and social history of the evolution of language itself, how the history of a word shows its ties to cultures and social realities being quite distinct and disconnected. It is only in the present when a word is used, as it is with a work of art being experienced, that all that which comprises the present finds its location in the process of making meaning. Here, in this work, language becomes both an allegory and an actual result of all of which it should want to speak.
Without 'independently wealthy' entities like AS and SCAF mounting such shows Sydney would be much the poorer - long may they continue. Go see, both have long runs.
Newell Harry has worked with neon quite a bit, and in his just-closed show at Oxley9 incorporated a number of neon elements into an interlinked series of installations. This was much more satisfying than the compilation show at Schwartz. Harry has a strong sense of material as metaphor, and much of his work (from paintings to woven mats) utilises fragments of text and notation, and the neon component acts as a stylistic extension of these concerns, rather than as a stand-alone novelty.
There are strong echoes of Glenn Ligon's approach here, and not just in the use of the medium. Ligon references black identity and cultural conudrums in similar ways, often working with texts, famously in 'Warm Broad Glow' (2005) referencing a passage in Gertrude Stein’s novella Melanctha (“the warm broad glow of negro sunshine”). This work made the cover of Artforum in 2006, coincident with the much-praised touring show Some Changes, which ended its run in Luxembourg in February 2008.
Finally, the definitive exhibition of light art Lichtkunst aus Kunstlicht (Light Art from Artificial Light) was mounted in 2006 at ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Karlsruhe, Germany. The fine catalogue from the show is still available and should be required study, along with the Dan Flavin retrospective, for anyone contemplating making a light sculpture.
A la prochaine.
Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), Sydney
14 ⁄ 08 ⁄ 2008 – 11 ⁄ 10 ⁄ 2008
NEON , curated by Tania Doropoulos
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney
30 August - 25 October 2008
Robert Irwin Light and Space
White Cube Mason's Yard, London
17 Sep—19 Oct 2008
Newell Harry Fish or Cut Bait?
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
21 Aug–13 Sep 2008
Glenn Ligon: Some Changes
Touring 2006-2008
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus
Musée dArt Moderne Grand-Duc, Luxembourg
Above © Estate of Dan Flavin, Site-specific installation, 1996, Courtesy the Menil Collection
Above: © Jonathan Jones, untitled (the tyranny of distance), 2008 . aluminium, tarpaulin, fluorescent tubes and fittings. 6 walls, each 3.4 x 1.9 x 8.27 m, courtesy the artist, Gallery Barry Keldoulis and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney
Above: © Jonathan Jones Lightscapes installation view, foyer, Westpac banking Corporation. Courtesy the artist, Westpac and Gallery Barry Keldoulis.
Above: © Robert Irwin Light and Space (Detail), 2007. 115 fluorescent lights, courtesy the artist, White Cube and Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Photo: Philipp Scholz Ritterman
Above: NEON – installation view, courtesy the artists and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Above: © Newell Harry, Fish or Cut Bait?Installation view, showing Beginnings and Endings / Endings and Beginnings neon work across far corner, and Ovid/Void: Rousing the Rubble (for David) to the right, courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.
Above: © Glenn Ligon Warm Broad Glow, 2005neon and paint, 24 × 190 in, courtesy the artist and Fogg Museum, Harvard.
Neon and flouroscent tubes are more popular now than ever, it seems, and it's increasingly difficult for artists to carve out their own style in a medium that tends to suffer from 'sameyness'. Flouro tubes deliver an aesthetic that was comprehensively explored by the late, great Dan Flavin (1933-1996). The extraordinary retrospective of his work that travelled the world, ending up at LACMA in August 2007, reminded us just how elegantly he used the medium, and leaves us with the feeling that everyone else has been covering the same ground, with added irony.
Jonathan Jones is Australia's flouro and lightbulb king, although it's not all he does. He has a elegant way with 'threading', and this has manifested at times in some rather beautiful knotting and looping of electrical cabling. As an Indigenous man he subtly references traditional motifs, and his more recent flouro projects, including the work currently showing at SCAF and his massive lobby installation at Westpac Bank's Sydney headquarters manifest this kind of geometric patterning, but there is some spookily similar work around, for instance Robert Irwin's show which has just opened at White Cube in London. Which isn't to suggest that either is even aware the other's work, but that there are only so many things you can do with linear tubes.
Neon has a greater flexibility, literally, but the medium itself tends to be unsubtle, and carries all those corny old echoes of Vegas and cheap motels, which tends to impose a 'jokiness'. Imagery is difficult, so most artists end up doing words, the problem being that in formal terms one set of neon words tends to look much like another. In response, these texts have had to become increasingly cryptic - the medium referencing itself with ever greater levels of irony. The current show at Anna Schwartz's magnificent Carriageworks space is a perfect exemplar. Anyone who's anyone has to do a neon sculpture these days, and this show, which holds so much promise curatorially, is really a flashy collection of novelties assembled around a common medium, without much depth. Which isn't to dismiss the quality of some of the works, or the fact that AS has mounted such a technically difficult and expensive show.
Joseph Kosuth's deadpan 'Neon' of 1965 in some ways says it all - spelling out N E O N, in neon. Another much more recent Kosuth piece 'W.F.T. #1 [yellow]' (2008) is also impressive. Kosuth has said of its pregenitor 'The Language of Equilibrium': This project, in yellow neon, has as its basis language itself. It is a work which is a reflection on its own construction… The work engages the cultural and social history of the evolution of language itself, how the history of a word shows its ties to cultures and social realities being quite distinct and disconnected. It is only in the present when a word is used, as it is with a work of art being experienced, that all that which comprises the present finds its location in the process of making meaning. Here, in this work, language becomes both an allegory and an actual result of all of which it should want to speak.
Without 'independently wealthy' entities like AS and SCAF mounting such shows Sydney would be much the poorer - long may they continue. Go see, both have long runs.
Newell Harry has worked with neon quite a bit, and in his just-closed show at Oxley9 incorporated a number of neon elements into an interlinked series of installations. This was much more satisfying than the compilation show at Schwartz. Harry has a strong sense of material as metaphor, and much of his work (from paintings to woven mats) utilises fragments of text and notation, and the neon component acts as a stylistic extension of these concerns, rather than as a stand-alone novelty.
There are strong echoes of Glenn Ligon's approach here, and not just in the use of the medium. Ligon references black identity and cultural conudrums in similar ways, often working with texts, famously in 'Warm Broad Glow' (2005) referencing a passage in Gertrude Stein’s novella Melanctha (“the warm broad glow of negro sunshine”). This work made the cover of Artforum in 2006, coincident with the much-praised touring show Some Changes, which ended its run in Luxembourg in February 2008.
Finally, the definitive exhibition of light art Lichtkunst aus Kunstlicht (Light Art from Artificial Light) was mounted in 2006 at ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Karlsruhe, Germany. The fine catalogue from the show is still available and should be required study, along with the Dan Flavin retrospective, for anyone contemplating making a light sculpture.
A la prochaine.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Sydney: Animal Antics - Daniel Wallace and Hayden Fowler
Daniel WallaceAre We There Yet?
Damien Minton Gallery
until13 September 2008
Left: © Daniel Wallace
The short cut Series (detail)
River rock pigment board and feathers on gum tree branches, 2100x 850mm (each approx)
Courtesy the artist and Damien Minton Gallery
Daniel Wallace's work is not quite like anyone else's. Painted in natural pigments on various 'found' surfaces, his paintings and objects are at first glance a playful take on Australian road signs and the iconography of the road, complete with silhouetted blackfellas, cute critters and ghostly gum trees. They go much deeper however, and you don't have to peer far below the surface to discover a dark underbelly. 'When the welcome is worn out' for instance, features an actual cupboard door, appearing 'trompe l'oeil' to be standing under a gnarled tree, on which perches an ominous black bird. The door opens to reveal an Aboriginal figure hanging from the tree. The exhibiition is laden with similar, and more subtle, references to Australia's treatment of Aborigines, and suddenly the title of the exhibition has new meaning. Wallace is tipped to go far, and his work is very reasonably priced, so get in there young collectors!
Hayden FowlerSecond Nature
Gallery Barry Keldoulis
until September 20, 2008
Left: not in current exhibition
© Hayden Fowler – Goat Odyssey 2006 looped digital video on DVD 15 min 10 sec, Nursling I - V 2006 digital type C prints 65.5 x 99.5cm photo credit: Michael Randall, Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney
Hayden Fowler is rather better known and couldn't be more different as an artist, being essentially a 'meteur-en-scène' who creates seamless high-res photographic images or videos, often situated in a featureless white space. Here the backgrounds are uniformly clad with bas-relief white plastic panels reminiscent of Star Trek interiors, and which are carried over in reality to a room where one of his cryptic interactions takes place on video. We don't pretend to understand Fowler, or his apparent obsession with domestic farm animals, but his work is always visually arresting, and throws back at us more questions than answers. Definitely worth a look.
More creature conforts soon.
A la prochaine.
Biennale#2: Cocakatoo Island - a beautiful desolation
Biennale of Sydney
closes Sunday 7 September 2008
There are just 5 days of Sydney Biennale remaining, and the trip out to Cockatoo Island is well worth taking if you haven't already. Free ferries leave hourly from in front of the MCA at Circular Quay, stopping at Wharf 2/3, and take about 30 minutes. Allow 3 hours on site. It's worth it for the William Kentridge rooms alone. LF thinks he may be the most intersting artist in the world today - 'son et lumiere' at its most basic, and magical. Mike Parr's whole block (appropriately the old Weapons Workshops) retrospective of video/film works is stunningly well conceived, whatever you think of the individual works, exhuding a dank and dangerous aura, complete with reeking buckets of urine, natch. Vernon Ah Kee's graffitti'd washroom explores parallel territory, and his large pencil portraits on canvas, in one of the turbine halls, have a quiet majesty. Jannis Kounellis' nearby sails installation is one of the few works that really feels 'site-specific', but apart from some boring videos, the standard is high throughout. If you've done no Biennale this year, then skip the MCA and AGNSW and Get On that Boat!
Some impressionistic images, ©Le Flaneur 2008.
Courtesy the artists and Biennale of Sydney
closes Sunday 7 September 2008
There are just 5 days of Sydney Biennale remaining, and the trip out to Cockatoo Island is well worth taking if you haven't already. Free ferries leave hourly from in front of the MCA at Circular Quay, stopping at Wharf 2/3, and take about 30 minutes. Allow 3 hours on site. It's worth it for the William Kentridge rooms alone. LF thinks he may be the most intersting artist in the world today - 'son et lumiere' at its most basic, and magical. Mike Parr's whole block (appropriately the old Weapons Workshops) retrospective of video/film works is stunningly well conceived, whatever you think of the individual works, exhuding a dank and dangerous aura, complete with reeking buckets of urine, natch. Vernon Ah Kee's graffitti'd washroom explores parallel territory, and his large pencil portraits on canvas, in one of the turbine halls, have a quiet majesty. Jannis Kounellis' nearby sails installation is one of the few works that really feels 'site-specific', but apart from some boring videos, the standard is high throughout. If you've done no Biennale this year, then skip the MCA and AGNSW and Get On that Boat!
Some impressionistic images, ©Le Flaneur 2008.
Courtesy the artists and Biennale of Sydney
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