Letter from Hong Kong

Above: © Choi Jeong Hwa, site-specific installation, Art Hong Kong 2012, photo David Corbet

Next year The Hong Kong International Art Fair (ArtHK) will be re-branded Art Basel Hong Kong, and is widely judged to have hit the big time in 2012. With 266 exhibitors from 38 countries, this is now one of the world's largest fairs, and looks set to grow even larger. For major galleries worldwide it has already joined Art Basel (Basel and Miami), Frieze (London) and Armory week (NY) as an essential event. For the big players, not to exhibit at ArtHK will henceforth not be an option.

The prestige fairs are as much about networking as floor sales, and by any measure ArtHK12’s celebrity quotient was considerable. Coming between the inaugural Frieze NY (4-7 May) and the venerable Art Basel (14-17 June), some major gallerists evidently sent their B-teams to ArtHK, but increasingly celebrity artists are encouraged to attend these events. John Baldessari’s much-quoted comment that hanging around your gallerist’s booth is “like watching your parents having sex” may still hold true but, outside of the vernissage, the booths are not where the real action is. What matters are the numerous cocktail parties, lunches, dinners, after-after parties and harbour cruises laid on by galleries and wealthy individuals, and entrée to these is in high demand. At ArtHK12 the privileged could rub shoulders with Maurizio Cattelan, Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Kosuth, Mariko Mori, Takashi Murakami, Pipilotti Rist, Luc Tuymans and Jeff Wall, along with many lesser luminaries. The big fairs also attract influential museum directors and curators, and Australians Elizabeth Ann MacGregor (MCA Australia), Melissa Chiu (Asia Society NY) and Aaron Seeto (4A Centre Sydney) joined the likes of Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine London), Klaus Biesenbach (MoMA PS1 New York), Philippe Vergne (Dia NY) and Sam Keller (Fondation Beyeler Switzerland). Added to these were a host of private museum owners, a fast-growing phenomenon worldwide, but especially in Asia. These included Judith and Paris Neilson (White Rabbit Sydney) Guy Ullens (Ullens Centre Beijing) and François Pinault (Paris).

In a recent New Yorker piece, Peter Schjeldahl characterised the phenomenal rise of art fairs as the commercial dealers’ counter-offensive against the growing market share of the auction houses which, at around $30 billion, now accounts for half of all fine art sales worldwide. Less noted are the ways in which the quality fairs also challenge the role of contemporary art museums and biennales, commissioning ambitious site-specific works from renowned artists, usually in conjunction with major commercial galleries. ArtHK12 presented 10 such ‘Projects’ curated by Yuko Hasegawa (MCA Tokyo). These included major installations by Yayoi Kusama, Ai Weiwei, Shen Shaomin, Yin Xiuzhen, Tatsuo Miyajama, Choi Jeong Hwa, Daniel Buren and José Patrício. These offerings were hugely popular with the throngs of fair-goers, and the dense crowds of ordinary HK families was a phenomenon in itself – testament to the growing ‘entertainment’ value of contemporary art. ArtHK12 drew an impressive 67,000 visitors over its four days, yielding a daily figure far exceeding the wildest dreams of the world’s most popular blockbusters. The large, mixed booths of the major galleries appeared less of a draw than the 49-strong Asia One section, where smaller and middleweight galleries each presented the work of a single artist. Australia had a strong presence here, including Damien Minton (showing Peter Gardiner), Nellie Castan (Bindi Cole), Ryan Renshaw (Martin Smith), Tolarno (Brendan Huntley), Tim Olsen (Sophie Cape), Sullivan & Strumpf (Alex Seton) and Tristan Koenig (Karen Black). The Futures section, featuring artists under the age of 35, was also very popular and included Anna Pappas Gallery (Sue Dodd and Michaela Gleave) and Neon Parc (Viv Miller and Katherine Huang). All reported brisk business.

From the exhibitors’ point of view the crowds, though gratifying, are more of an irritant than an advantage, requiring constant vigilance and distracting attention from potential buyers. The conventional wisdom with art fairs is that most business is done at the VIP/collector previews before the public opening, however ArtHK seems to be different, with many exhibitors reporting sustained buyer interest throughout the four days. All the booths featured a small storage room, which were firmly closed once the public surged in, but opened during VIP hours to reveal discreet arrays of massively valuable works – I saw many Picassos, numerous Warhols, a minor Léger and even a small Courbet landscape, some with asking prices in the high seven figures. The status of such historical works is unclear – whether owned by the exhibitors, or opportunistically shipped over on behalf of private sellers – it was certainly interesting to see so many significant Picassos still in private hands.

Many contemporary artists have multiple representation and some appeared ubiquitous. A good number of booths featured shiny Tony Cragg sculptures, and works by Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Huan, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Louise Bourgeois and Damien Hirst were also a common sight. Many galleries simply ship over a selection from the stockroom, and in the main galleries section Roslyn Oxley9 and Barry Keldoulis showed a discerning pick from their stables. Anna Schwartz bucked this trend, presenting a technically demanding whole-booth neon installation by American Joseph Kosuth. The well-heeled Galerie Gmurzynska (Zurich) had a booth designed by Zaha Hadid, and a museum-quality survey of paintings by the late, great Cuban cubist/surrealist Wilfredo Lam. Michael Werner (NY/Cologne) presented a survey (curated by Dimitri Ozerkov, Hermitage St Petersburg) of 20^th century German modernism featuring key works from artists such as Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Markus Lupertz, and Georg Baselitz. Galleria d’Arte Maggiore (Bologna) showed a superb collection of Morandi still lives. The fair saw several million dollar plus sales, and scores in the six figure zone, including work by Chuh Teh-Chun ($3m), Alighero Boetti ($1m), the late Robert Motherwell ($1m), George Baselitz ($700k) and Paul McCarthy ($450k). Alex Seton’s life-sized marble hoody-figure (Soloist, 2012) sold promptly to an Australian collector for around $110k – a snip I’d suggest. Heedless of Baldessari’s adage, Seton and other Australian artists made themselves cheerfully available to talk about their works.

It seems undeniable that HK has successfully re-asserted itself as the international gateway to the exponentially expanding Chinese contemporary market - for both international and Chinese buyers and sellers of many persuasions – a big change from a decade ago, when the city was perceived as something of a contemporary backwater. Although there has always been plenty of money, collectors were seen as more interested in traditional Chinese art and antiquities, French impressionists and perhaps, at the adventurous end, the odd Picasso or Warhol. The contemporary action was to be found in the dynamic art districts of mainland cities like Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai, where a new generation of artists was transforming the contemporary scene, often selling direct to local and international buyers, and giving rise to a new breed of dealer-gallerists.

HK now has its own emergent art districts, located in several grimy industrial locales on HK island and further afield. ARIs abound, and many new commercial operations have crowded in. Most telling of all is the recent and much-noted arrival of some of the world’s most prestigious commercial galleries. On a cramped street in the Central shopping and financial district lies the unremarkable entrance to the historic and famously expensive Pedder Building where, stacked floor-upon-floor, are the cool spaces of Gagosian, Simon Lee, Pearl Lam, Ben Brown and others. Even more impressive, indeed setting a new benchmark for the city, is the first White Cube gallery outside of the UK, not far away on Connaught Road. Having opened in April with Gilbert and George’s London Pictures, it was in May/June showing Anselm Kiefer’s Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom. Whether you love or loathe the work of the celebrated German, this exhibition of large paintings and sculptural installations was a statement of supreme confidence - mounted on two levels with production values befitting a major institution. A few blocks away, Sotheby’s in May launched their own dedicated gallery space, occupying a whole floor at 1 Pacific Place, Admiralty, with two large selling shows: Yayoi Kusama’s Hong Kong Blooms in My Mind and Modern Masters: Corot to Monet – French Landscape Paintings in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

It may take a while for the HK market to deliver a return on these outlays, but such multi-million dollar developments are not made lightly. One thing most people agree on is that ArtHK has been the significant, if not dominant, driving factor in all of this. While rival events such as Art Stage Singapore, the Korea International Art Fair and Australia’s Melbourne Art Fair all have good reputations, the rapid growth of ArtHK is nothing short of remarkable, the more so for having been achieved in just five years. Founder Tim Etchells is a savvy businessman whose global company Single Market Events (which owns Art Melbourne and the upcoming, in 2013, Sydney Contemporary Art Fair) has a successful track record with events from fashion to hospitality. However it is ArtHK Director Marcus Renfrew who is credited with steering the event to its current winning status, and he will stay on, at least for the time being, under Art Basel’s ownership.

Nothing succeeds like success, and the HK administration has clearly decided to build the city’s creative profile as rapidly as possible. Symptomatic of this was the opening, at the Heritage Museum and coincident with ArtHK, of the touring show Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, seen earlier this year at the AGNSW. And it likely that as an ‘art destination’ HK will only get better, for it is not just commercial operations investing in the city. New York’s Asia Society has just opened a spectacular new HK base, and across Victoria Harbour the $2.7 billion West Kowloon Cultural District will feature, along with theatres and concert venues, the new M+ museum. The future for contemporary art in HK looks dynamic indeed.

David Corbet's National Artnotes appear in edited form in Art Monthly Australia (www.artmonthly.org.au)

Restless: The Adelaide International

David Corbet's review of Restless appears in edited form in the July 2012 Issue of Art Monthly Australia

Above: Nancy Spero, Maypole: Take No Prisoners II, 2008 (detail), Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, (March 3-May 2, 2011), © 2011 Jerry Hardman-Jones.

Victoria Lynn’s second Adelaide International, titled Restless, left some people feeling a little … well, restless. The disquiet focussed on venues and presentation – I heard it remarked that Restless struggled to achieve thematic ‘momentum’. Some suggested this wasn’t the best work from some very distinguished artists, for example a decade-old video work (Gringo, 2003) by celebrated Belgian/Mexican artist Francis Alÿs. Spread across four widespread venues, none of them ideal, this selection of eighteen international artists had none of the advantages of the Biennale at AGSA (see article), i.e. a contiguous, dedicated space and a generous production budget.

Do such second-hand gripes have a place in any serious critique of contemporary art? Probably not, but in any discussion of ‘critical culture’ the popular response has a place. Exhibitions once the preserve of scholarly journals are now regularly critiqued by the mainstream press – indeed it’s been decades since Carl André’s bricks (Tate Britain) made the front page of Britain’s Daily Mirror (‘Whaddaloadarubbish!’). Which isn’t to say that all contemporary art gets a bad press – British art thrives on a kind of tabloid notoriety (think Tracey Emin), and Australia is gradually getting the hang of it – you only had to witness seniors chortling over Wim Delvoye’s anal kisses at MONA to appreciate this. If once it was old masters or impressionists who could reliably drum up the crowds, we now live in the age of the contemporary crowd-pleaser, Christian Marclay’s hugely popular The Clock (MCA Sydney) being an excellent example. Attendance figures are pored over as never before, and state tourism bodies fall over each other to compete for contemporary kudos – I recently heard MONA described as ‘Hobart’s Bridgeclimb’. Viewed in these terms, it’s perhaps not surprising that the International’s quiet seriousness might fail to connect with the public taste for sensation and spectacle. But enough with the popular zeitgeist, let’s get to the art. And to the ideas – the Artist’s Week forums were an important part of the overall visual arts program, of which more below.

Samstag hosted the greater part of Restless, and the downstairs space featured the late Nancy Spero’s major opus Maypole/take no prisoners (2007), alongside N.S. Harsha’s Extraction (2012) and Lisa Reihana’s PELT (2010) series. This room was the closest thing to spectacle offered by Restless, and Harsha’s engaing whole-wall painting, of figures falling towards installed piles of stone, rope and sugarcane, was rendered in naïve style and bright, flat colours. The notion of extraction was most readily apparent in the juice leaking stickily from the crushed sugar cane, but the artist talks in more general terms about the human need to ‘extract meaning’. Spero’s majestic maypole, each strand culminating in a 2-D severed head cut from plate aluminium, dominated the room, but would have benefited from a dedicated space, and more dramatic lighting. The 200 heads, graphically rendered in paint and collage, represent the victims of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and are stylistically evocative of Goya’s Misfortunes of War etchings, and also of Dadang Christanto’s severed heads.

Lisa Reihana’s large photomedia works are described by the curator as “interpretations of imagined beings presented in digitally-rendered utopian landscapes” and the artist invokes the Maori concept of an ‘under/other’ world. The works, depicting alabaster-white women glamorously adorned with animal pelts, explore the vocabulary of idealised fashion images, but the titles (Aquila, Camarillo, Sabino, Pilosus) refer to horses, monkeys and eagles, all powerful totems in many Indigenous mythologies. Reihana is well known for her powerful depictions of Maori figures, and these works expand her themes into an interrogation of hybrid cultural identity. Greek/Cypriot Socratis Sacratous also uses photomedia in his series Architectural Strategy series (2011). These images initially read as abstractions and could, at first glance, have been computer rendered, but are in fact photographs of shards of metal and wood thrown into the air and frozen in time. For the Athens-based artist, these are evocations of social upheaval and civic disorder. They left me emotionally cold, but perhaps that is the point. I do get their liminal allure, and it’s interesting that a Socratous work was the key image for the International’s marketing.

Everything else at Samstag was video, and this may explain the lukewarm response. However it was here that I found the curatorial themes resonating most strongly, with three works of particular note: Anri Sala’s Answer me (2008), Danae Stratou’s The Globalising Wall (2011) and Saskia Olde Wolbers Pareidolia (2011). Albanian/German Sala’s claustrophobic and aurally unsettling piece was shot under an echoing (Bucky Fuller) dome, once a Soviet-era ‘listening station’ in Berlin. In his words “A woman tries to end a relationship, her companion refuses to listen and plays the drums fiercely to silence her. Next to her, the drumsticks resting on a vacant drum play to the echo of his drumming”. Stratou, an Athenian woman, has compiled a grimly compelling, rapid slideshow of stills taken in the shadows of walls in Berlin, Kosovo, Palestine, Kashmir, Korea, Northern Ireland, Mexico and California. Wolbers’ (Netherlands/UK) piece is truly strange in the best sense of the word. Computer-generated plant/bird-like forms are intercut with shots of Japanese interiors, but it is the soundtrack that equally beguiles, drawn from the book Zen in the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel. Alÿs’s work, referred to earlier, features a low-res re-enactment of a dog attack encountered on one of the artist’s marathon walks, in the Mexican province of Hidalgo. Alÿs has said how he “instinctively used the camera … as a shield to protect myself from the dogs’ aggression”. The work sat well within the International’s dystopian undercurrents, but nevertheless struggles in its own terms to be more than a record of a banal incident, quite possibly the artist’s intention.

At the Flinders University City Gallery, the Indigenous USA collective Postcommodity presented an excellent multi-channel work: With salvage and my knife tongue (2011-12), in which American and Australian Indigenous people speak direct and close-up to camera, their utterances digitally comingled and iterated into an absorbing meditation on global indigeneity. ACSA presented three artists: Chosil Kil (South Korea), Rabih Mroué (Lebanon) and Jinoos Taghizadeh (Iran), with selections evidently restricted by space limitations. Kil, a renowned large-scale installation artist, presented a series of smallish ‘three-dimensional’ geometric paintings. Mroué and Taghizadeh showed wall-hung works with strong stylistic similarities – both working in low-res graphic montage, around documentation of the missing and displaced.

Finally to AEAF, and Teresa Margolles – perhaps the component that exemplified the problems faced by a project like Restless. To a critic armed with a knowledge of Margolles’s ouevre, 127 cuerpos (127 bodies, 2006, installation with remnants of autopsy threads), it was a case of ‘De que otra podremos hablar?’ (What else can we talk about?, the title of her 2007 Venice Biennale installation). To the uninitiated it was a grubby string (actually 127 short pieces tied together) suspended across an otherwise empty gallery. Margolles’s refusal to engage in facile spectacle presents an age-old curatorial conundrum – how to present difficult but important conceptual art in an accessible way? A showman like Delvoye makes death kinda fun and shiny, but Margolles presents its aftermath, in an unadorned, if strangely elegiac style. Hers is the language is of the mortuary, and her long-term collective SEMEFO (Forensic Medical Service) implies a no-nonsense investigative role in her country’s frightening culture of narco-slaughter.

Many writers have discussed the apparent disconnect between the contemporary art of North and South, and the critical/curatorial discourses around it. For me this crystallised during Artist’s Week, in keynotes by two extraordinary thinker/curators –  Jan Verwoerd (Netherlands/Germany), and Cuauhtémoc Medina (Mexico) who curated Margolles’s Venice pavilion and is director of Manifesta (Genk, Belgium, from 2 June). Both delivered absorbing presentations, dense with critical allusion and cultural detail, but I had the sense they were speaking of, and from, different worlds. Verwoerd’s methodology of ‘radical empathy’ is a resonant one. In a tour-de-force that began with Adorno (on mimesis) and ended with a joke about a chicken and a frog borrowing library books, he spoke with originality and humour for an art that reconnects us with natural energies, with magic, with psychic wholeness (not his term). Co-convenor Nick Papastergiadis spoke of it as a kind of paean to ‘the sublime’. Medina took us in a different direction, on a journey into the art of ‘the New South’ – urgent, social, political; engaged with dislocation, murder and mayhem, blood and belonging. “Debates about art”, he said in response to a question from Verwoerd “are the business of the North”.

It seems evident that much of the art of the ‘old’ North is largely self-referential, suffering terminal mannerism and loss of relevance, and spends its time navel-gazing at its own decline. It is engaged in a kind of search for a lost authenticity, and looks for it increasingly in the work of Southern artists. The South just doesn’t get the agonizing. It has emerged, vigorous and vocal, from centuries of colonialism and cultural marginalisation, with its own language of global assertiveness. Straddling this cultural faultline, in the shadow of the wall if you will, is the problematic work presented in Restless. Australia may be miraculously immune, but out there much of the planet is in social turmoil. Like all evils, injustice and oppression have their banalities, and some of their more dispiriting cultural manifestations can feel like a blow upon a bruise. We may not be temperamentally inclined to confront Diaspora and despair as subjects for contemporary art, but in its quiet way Restless brought these things to us. It’s not a relaxed or comfortable feeling, and it’s not supposed to be.

Australian Art Notes: May

Left: JASON WING 'Blacktown Dreaming' 2012 (installation view, beds and hypodermic syringes). Part of the exhibition 'People of Substance' at the Kluge-Ruhe Collection, Charlottesvile, Virginia USA.

NCP and The Budget

News of the postponement, in the face of budget pressure, of Simon Crean’s long-awaited National Cultural Policy (NCP) has been greeted with a combination of disquiet and cynicism. This follows a less-than-enthusiastic response to the NCP discussion paper released last year, with a diminution of engagement with Asia a sore point for some commentators. In Platform Papers, Finding a Place on the Asian Stage (Currency House), Asialink founder Alison Carroll and former diplomat Carrillo Gantner point out that OzCo’s Asian arts spending has fallen from 50%+ of international funding under the Keating government, to between 10–20% now. Ozco acknowledges this but says the dollar value has increased. The paper, perhaps surprisingly, praises the commitment of Alexander Downer and admonishes the Rudd/Gillard governments, and arts mandarins in general, for their tepid commitment to our region. There has been little media analysis of either the discussion paper or the many hundreds of submissions received, but Stephen Crittenden (The Global Mail, April) suggested that Australia's institutions, including the libraries and museums, feel “sidelined by a strong push to dislodge the arts from the centre, or to de-privilege the arts”. These concerns were perhaps alleviated by the announcement of $64m in new money for the arts over 4 years, $40m of it allocated to the major collecting institutions, in part to help them digitise their collections. $3.2m was allocated to the Australia Business Arts Foundation to promote arts sponsorship and philanthropy. Other noteworthy allocations are for a new Islamic Museum of Australia ($1.5m), the Antipodes Centre for Greek Culture, Heritage and Language ($2m), both in Melbourne.

Auction action

The autumn sales are upon us, and Menzies Art Brands achieved a total of $8.42m (including buyer’s premium) in March. Deutcher and Hackett had an encouraging result at their May auction with a 71% clearance rate and total of $6.5m. The record-breaking sale of Arthur Streeton’s Settler’s Camp (1888) for $2.52m set a new auction benchmark for the artist, eclipsing his previous record of $1.4m for Sunlight Sweet Coogee in 2005. Settler’s Camp joins the all-time top 10 in sixth place, coming in behind Sidney Nolan, Brett Whitely and John Brack, the latter two with 3 paintings each in the top 10. Sotheby’s May auction of 80 lots was solid if not spectacular, with a clearance rate of 81% and overall sales over $8m, including two $1.2m sales – Arthur Boyd’s Dry Creek Bed, Alice Springs (1954) and Frederick McCubbin’s Whispering in Wattle Boughs (1886). One noticeable pass-in was Fred Williams’ Summer Snow at Perisher (1976) which had $750-850k expectations. It must be a distracting time for Sotheby’s Chair Geoffrey Smith, who has been in the news for all the wrong reasons, with an unedifying legal stoush with (ex-partner) Melbourne dealer Robert Gould playing out in Victoria’s Supreme Court as AMA went to press. Putting all this into perspective, the only privately held version (there are 4) of  Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1895) fetched $119.9m (IBP) at Sotheby’s New York, beating the previous record of $106.5m paid for Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (1932).

Photofinish

The $50k Head On Portrait Prize (HOPP) was awarded to 3 co-winners: Tracey Nearmy, Chris Budgeon and David Manley. The annual Head On Photo Festival, only in its third edition, has already grown to be Australia’s largest, with over 200 events and 100 venues across greater Sydney. The HOPP finalists are on show at the Australian Centre for Photography until 17 June, and Hijacked 3 opens on June 30, with Hijacked 2 on tour, currently in Mannheim, Germany. The Moran Prizes organisation has appointed Graham Howe judge for the $100k Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize, to be announced on July 17, along with the $150k Portrait Prize (for a medium other than photography). After a decade at NSW’s State Library, the exhibitions will move to a new venue – the heritage-listed Moran House in Bridge St, Sydney. In Canberra the NPG ‘s 2012 National Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition has closed, and will tour to Moree, Port Macquarie, Adelaide and Griffith over the next 12 months. Submissions for the NPG’s $10k I.D. Digital Portrait Award 2012, open to 18-30 year-olds, closes on 17 June and will be on display from 2 August. Across the Tasman the Auckland Festival of Photography kicks off on 21 June.

dOCUMENTA (13)

12 Australian participants are included in the quinquennial dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany from June 9, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who also curated the 2008 Biennale of Sydney. They include artists Khadim Ali, Gordon Bennett, Fiona Hall, Simryn Gill, the late Doreen Reid Nakamarra (1955-2009), Stuart Ringholt and Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri. Also participating are writer/curators Jill Bennett, Romaine Moreton, Stephen Muecke, Nikos Papastergiadis and Hetti Perkins. Gordon Bennett will also be the subject of a prestigious solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art (AAMU) in Utrecht (Netherlands) from mid June. Currently showing (until 10 June) at AAMU is Heart and Soul, drawn from the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty.

Jason Wing at Kluge-Ruhe

Following last month’s item about Australian artists in the USA, Aboriginal/Chinese artist Jason Wing’s installation People of Substance is on show at the University of Virginia’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. Curated by Liz Nowell, the work was previously shown at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery in Sydney. A previous Kluge-Ruhe exhibitor, Melbourne artist Reko Rennie, will collaborate with American Indigenous artist Frank Buffalo Hyde on a work for Hyde’s upcoming show at the Museum for Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico from 13 June.

NGA appointments 

Tim Fairfax has been appointed Interim Chair of the NGA Council, replacing Rupert Myer after 9 years. Mr Fairfax, who will serve until 31 December 2012, is President of the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation, Chair of the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation, the Tim Fairfax Family Foundation, the Salvation Army Brisbane Advisory Board, and a member of the Philanthropy Australia Council. Ron Radford was also re-appointed as NGA Director for a third term, until 30 September 2014. Also announced was a landmark partnership with the Royal Academy of Arts (London), to stage a significant survey exhibition of Australian in 2013.

NMA acquisitions

The National Museum of Australia has acquired two valuable pen and ink drawings by the Aboriginal artist Tommy McRae (c.1835 – 1901): Buckley’s Escape and Murray Tribal Warfare. The Museum paid $79k and $24k respectively at auction. Tommy McRae lived in the Upper Murray, Victoria, where he made and sold books of drawings, one of very few Aboriginal artists to depict life in 19^th century Australia. Both drawings had been with the same NSW family since they were bought from the artist in the 1890s. They join another sketchbook by McRae acquired in 1986, as well as other works by 19^th century Aboriginal artists including William Barak and the pen and ink drawings by the artist known as Oscar of Cooktown.

Federal PPSR

The Personal Property Securities Register (PPSR), created under the Commonwealth Personal Property Securities Act 2009 commenced on 30 January 2012. Artists and dealers who provide or accept art on consignment are affected by this new law. Information is also available about what the new law will mean for Indigenous artists and art centres. www.ppsr.gov.au

David Corbet's National Artnotes appear in edited form in Art Monthly Australia (www.artmonthly.org.au)