Above: DCM's winning proposal for the new Australian pavilion in Venice's Giardini
2011
attendance survey – a global view
The Art Newspaper’s international attendance survey is always eagerly awaited, and the
2011 figures confirmed the NGV Melbourne as the top Australian institution,
attracting 1.55 million visitors across its two sites, against 1.42 million for
QAG/GoMA. Both Brisbane venues were closed for a month by the January floods,
and it was dramatically down on its chart-topping 1.8 million visitors
in 2010. AGNSW achieved 1.27 million, Melbourne’s ACMI 895,410 and the NGA
Canberra 723,625. The most popular museum in the world was, as always, the
Louvre with 8.8 million visitors, followed by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of
Art (6 million) and the British Museum in London (5.8 million). Only two
institutions outside of the USA, France and Britain made the top ten: The
National Palace Museum, Taipei (3.8 million), and the National Museum Of Korea,
Seoul (3.2 million).
The most attended Australian exhibition
was Melbourne Museum’s ticketed show Tutankhamun
(796,000) followed by QAG/GoMA’s free show 21st Century: Art in the First
Decade (451,000 – the fifth most attended contemporary art show worldwide)
and AGNSW’s ticketed The First Emperor:
China’s Entombed Warriors (305,611). Internationally, total exhibition attendance was
led by Abstract Expressionist New York
(MOMA NY: 1.16 million); Claude Monet
(Grand Palais, Paris: 913,064); Landscape
Reunited (National Palace Museum, Taipei: 847,509); and Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (NY
Met: 661,509). The Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, had the
world’s highest number of daily visitors (9677) for The Magical World of
Escher (total 573,691) and had two other exhibitions in the top 20: Mariko Mori: Oneness (538,328) and
Laurie Anderson (535,929).
Venice
Pavilion update
Melbourne architects Denton Corker
Marshall have won the design competition for the new $6 million Venice
Pavilion, with a restrained, black granite-clad building designed to
accommodate art, architecture, film and photography exhibitions. The venerable
firm, whose projects include the Melbourne Museum, Museum of Sydney, Australian
Embassies in Tokyo and Beijing, and the Stonehenge Visitor Centre in the UK,
was unanimously selected from a shortlist of 6 local firms. Their submission
states their aim “to make a form of the utmost simplicity; a white box
contained within a black box. The pavilion is envisaged as an object rather than
a building; a presence that is simultaneously powerful and discreet within the
heavily wooded gardens”.
The Biennale attracts over 250,000 visitors during
its 5 months, and last year 192,000 visited the Australian Pavilion, featuring
Hany Armonious. Australia has occupied the site in the Giardini since 1988 –
one of only 29 countries to have a permanent national presence, and Phillip Cox
designed the existing pavilion as a temporary structure for the Arthur Boyd
exhibition of that year. Simryn Gill will represent Australia in 2013, the
final artist to show in the old Pavilion. The new building is due for completion
for the 56th Biennale in 2015. The project, managed by the Australia Council,
will be largely funded by private donations, and is being led by Australian
Commissioner, MCA chair and fundraiser extraordinaire Simon Mordant.
Fair
games
Art
Melbourne (subhead: Melbourne’s Affordable Art Fair) takes place again from May 24-27,
produced by global company Single Market Events (SME). The biennial Melbourne
Art Fair (MAF) returns in August (1-5), the first under new co-directors
Emilly-Rose Davis and Laetitia Prunetti. Gallerists Vasili Kaliman and Gerrod
Rawlins will simultaneously launch The
New Fair at KalimanRawlins in South Yarra, featuring 6 Aus/NZ galleries. Their
announcement proposes a “more measured approach to Australian art fairs,
tailored to a knowledgeable audience as opposed to the conventional bulk
approach … keeping it modest and boutique is the best way to focus on
presenting the highest quality contemporary art”. With 3 fairs in Melbourne
across 4 months, Sydney has nothing scheduled for 2012. SME’s Art Sydney (aka The Affordable Art Fair) was canned this year, but
there has been consistent talk of a return in 2013, with a late March date to coincide with Art Month Sydney, a new name, and the
expectation that it will be more selective than its hapless predecessor.
There has always been speculation about a Sydney edition of MAF in alternating years, always accompanied by doubts that the prestige market can sustain an annual event. However it has now been confirmed that SME will launch a new fair, titled Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, at the Hordern Pavillion from 12 - 14 April, to be run by SME's local subsidiary, Art Fairs Australia (AFA). In addition to the new Sydney event, SME will manage MAF from 2014. The 2010 MAF had 80 exhibitors, attracted 30,000 visitors and
generated $11 million in sales, 60% ($6.6 million) of which was returned to
artists through their galleries. MAF’s non-profit parent is the the Melbourne Art
Fair Foundation, and it is unclear exactly who will be responsible for what in the new management structure.
SME have plenty of experience running high-quality art fairs, having built the annual Art Hong Kong (AHK12: 17-20 May) into a hugely successful event, last year selling a controlling interest to Art Basel for an undisclosed sum.
China
markets
In the meantime AHK, which last year
attracted 63,000 visitors, will in May boast an impressive 264 exhibitors,
including 12 Australian galleries: Barry Keldoulis, Roslyn Oxley9, Anna
Schwartz, Tolarno, Nellie Castan, Tristian Koenig, Damien Minton, Tim Olsen,
Sullivan+Strumpf, Ryan Renshaw, Neon Parc and Anna Pappas. Australian
contemporary art also has a high profile at Australian expat Amanda D’Abo’s Cat
Street Gallery, which represents many established and mid-career artists.
According to the European Art Foundation, China is now the world’s largest art
market. Sotheby’s has announced the May launch of a new Hong Kong operation,
situated in the Admirality business district, with setup costs of $7.2 million.
Chinese law currently prevents foreign auction houses from selling on China’s
mainland, so the move will allow Sotheby’s to hold art more auctions in the
country. There is plenty of competition, notably from arch-rival Christie’s
International, which opened its own HK operation two years ago. With soft
markets in the USA and Europe, both companies hope to sell more Western art to
cashed-up Chinese collectors, and both have created Asian advisory boards. Last
year, scroll painter Zhang Daqian was the world’s top auction earner with an
astonishing $506.7 million, dwarfing the $325 million paid for works by the
late Andy Warhol. China accounted for a fifth of Christie's 2011 global sales,
and Sotheby's Asian sales jumped 47%.
Beltway
contemporary
Washington DC and environs have been
enjoying a good run of Australian contemporary art of late. The Corcoran
Gallery of Art featured Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s Are We There Yet? (closed 11 March), the duo’s first solo museum
exhibition in the USA, part of the gallery’s NOW series, showcasing the work of emerging and mid-career artists.
Occupying two spaces at the Corcoran, Healy and Cordeiro’s project consisted of
a site-specific installation and a number of wall works constructed from Lego
that continue the series Where We’ve
Been, Where We’re Going, Why (2010–11). Lie of the Land: New
Australian Landscapes, curated by Alex J. Taylor, was presented at the
Australian Embassy, closing 13 April. It featured over 60 works by twelve
Australian artists: Sam Leach, Michael Lindeman, Archie Moore, Megan Cope, Tom
Alberts, Gary Carsley, Dale Cox, Juan Ford, David Keeling, Sherry Paddon,
Rebecca Ross and Jake Walker.
Ah
Kee in Virginia
Across the Potomac in Charlottesville,
Virginia, Vernon Ah Kee had an April residency at the University of Virginia
(UVa). Ill-like, an exhibition of his drawings and textual works, is on
view at the University’s Kluge-Ruhe
Aboriginal Art Collection through May 10. More of Ah Kee’s works were shown
at other UVa campus locations, and his residency included talks, guest lectures
and an in situ artwork on Charlottesville’s community chalkboard on the
Downtown Mall. The Kluge-Ruhe is the only museum in the United States dedicated
to the study and interpretation of Australian Aboriginal art, with a stated mission
“to advance knowledge and understanding of Australia’s Indigenous people and
their art and culture worldwide. Working with living artists, international
scholars and arts professionals, it provides a wide range of learning
experiences to the University community and the public through exhibition,
research and educational programs”.
Google
Art Project
6 Australian galleries are among the
first in the southern hemisphere to join the Google Art Project (GAP): NGA Canberra, AGNSW, MCA Australia, NGV,
the Melbourne Museum and Griffith University’s Rock Art Research Centre. GAP
provides high resolution images of artworks from across the world, so detailed
that brushwork not visible to the naked eye can be analysed. AGNSW launched 415
key works across its collections. The Tate Modern in London was the first
gallery to digitise its collection for GAP, and there are now 151 participating
cultural institutions, featuring more than 30,000
images. Users have the ability to consult additional reading material or
videos, and take a virtual tour through 46 galleries using Google’s Street View
technology.
David Corbet's National Artnotes appear in edited form in Art Monthly Australia (www.artmonthly.org.au)
