The 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial, Brisbane

I finally made it up to the Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane.  It was my second Triennial, and I wouldn’t have made the effort ($400 flights return from Hobart just for a weekend) if I hadn’t enjoyed the previous Triennial in 2006-07 so much.  Granted, my 2006 visit immediately followed the most banal and disappointing Sydney Biennale of all time, but it wasn’t just the comparison that made the APT so great. 

This year’s APT was not quite as engaging as the previous one, but it was still an excellent exhibition.  I was excited to see that the water mall in the Queensland Art Gallery (yes, a massive pond in a building that requires strict climate and humidity controls) held another site-specific artwork by Ayaz Jokhio, and consisted of a six-meter tall octagonal room in the middle of the water, with a ‘bridge’ which allowed viewers to enter the work.  Described as ‘conceptual architecture’ on the curator’s podcast (which you could easily transfer onto your iPod or iPhone using the gallery’s wireless network), the work referenced Islam and traditional Eastern design and architectural form.  The structure sat easily in the space, and like the other site-specific works produced previously for this space, the pond acted both as an inspiration as well as a ‘frame’ around the contemplative work.

Also in the older Queensland Art Gallery was a massive pile of recycled materials - fabric, plastic bottles, egg cartons, paper, paddle pop sticks and thread – and an open invitation to build aeroplanes that would then be hung from the gallery ceiling.  The project was called In Flight, and was by artists Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan who moved to Australia from the Philippines in 2006.  Judging from the hundreds already suspended above me, I felt a wee bit intimidated, yet I pulled up a kid’s size stool and got to work.  The result was a bit wonky; yet, it was great to make something, channel all that creative energy in me, after viewing two galleries filled with inspirational art.

 my rather wonky contribution

Most of the APT is held in the newer Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) which is only a few hundred meters from the Queensland Art Gallery.  Unfortunately, in the three years since my last visit the coffee shop below the state library that separates the two galleries has turned into a coffee-molesting, self-serve kids-fest so it made the walk between the two galleries quite a bit quicker (I managed to find a good coffee in the not-so-nearby Barracks complex off Petrie terrace, however).  The cavernous spaces of GOMA were utilised by Wit Pimkanchanapong with his descriptively titled Cloud, made up of pieces of paper strung to long cords with paperclips.  The cords were strung across the length of the entrance hallway above the heads of visitors as they walked into the building.  It was an effective, albeit underwhelming work.

Cloud - as viewed from the 2nd floor

This year’s promotional artwork – Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu’s People Holding Flowers - was surprisingly small (in fact I was amazed at how familiar the image of the work was – the APT certainly advertises well).  From the various magazine and billboard advertisements, I thought the tiny, besuited, pink-faced men holding similarly coloured lotus leaves were life-size, yet they didn’t reach my knee.  In a way, it was kind of disappointing.

One of my favourite works (and apparently amongst my friends I’m alone in this affection) was the kitsch work by Indian artists: Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra.  They had mocked up a gaudy living room with pigeon wallpaper, mirrors, photographs, and a tipping table.  I wasn’t really convinced by the table and thought it detracted from the carefully staged scene, yet I enjoyed the atmosphere of the installation and the meticulous details.

Opposite was another ‘poster child’ of the APT – Kohei Nawa’s PixCell-Elk#2 (2009).  The taxidermied stag looked like it had a bejewelled version of the poor Tasmanian Devils’ facial tumour disease.  Various sized glass balls were glued to the stuffed animal, the balls magnifying, distorting and mirroring each other, the viewers, and the stag underneath.  The work’s aura was no doubt assisted by its location in a glowing white cube, but it was an overwhelming and enjoyable work, and one that was very popular with fellow visitors.

Another favourite was one of Tracey Moffatt’s videos.  I’ve seen other videos in this series (I think at the previous Sydney Biennale?) and they never fail to entertain me.  This particular video was called OTHER and explored themes of ‘other-ness’ and the exotic in popular culture through short clips of popular movies.  As works that critique social prejudices and assumptions, I believe they’re very successful because of the combination of humour, references to popular culture and distanced commentary.

A surprise inclusion was the revolutionary art, or chosunhua, from North Korea.  I quite enjoyed it, although a friend of mine was mildly furious about the appropriateness of having such ‘uncritical’ art in a contemporary art exhibition.  While much of the art in this year’s APT was conceptually rigorous, I don’t know if I could single out the work from North Korea as being the most shallow or lacking in criticality (I’m thinking that award goes to the one-liner works by Rudi Mantofani).  From a social and cultural point of view, I thought it was a nice comparison to the work from China - a country that not long ago churned out similar revolutionary art.

 Revolutionary Mosaic

The education and children’s programs associated with the APT are really amazing.  I didn’t have the excuse of an accompanying child, but like in the previous APT this mere detail didn’t stop me from sitting down at the low tables in the ‘kid’s APT’ area and making a thaumatrope – participating artist Runa Islam’s kid’s APT project.  The podcast mentioned earlier, was an informal and illuminating discussion between the exhibition’s organisers and a nice addition to the unusually well written didactic wall texts.  Unfortunately, I missed the APT films that were screening over the weekend of my visit.  Regardless, I still spent my two days in Brisbane totally absorbed by the APT.

The 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial runs from the 5^th December 2009 – 5^th April 2010 at the Queensland Art Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.

Melbourne is alive with Mimesis

I headed to Melbourne last weekend for a day and a half of coffee, beer, Chinese duck (please please someone open a decent Chinese duck-selling restaurant in Hobart), and most importantly Art Galleries.  Unfortunately it wasn’t a great season for ARIs, as many of them shut up shop over January, however I saw the both the International and Australian NGVs (National Gallery of Victoria), and a substantial amount of street art.

The two big ticket items in Melbourne currently are Ricky Swallow’s The Bricoleur, and Ron Mueck’s (self titled?) exhibition at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, and the NGV International respectively.  You’d have to be blind to miss the similarities between the two artists’ work.  Both are masters in creating the ‘wow factor’, they play with illusion, make self-contained sculptures, and take mimesis to the most extreme level of anal-retentiveness.  They’re also often criticised as being popularist for these reasons.  In both exhibitions, viewers can be seen clustering around the often plinth-dependent works, saying things like ‘wow, it looks so real’, ‘this would take so long’, ‘did he do all this by hand?’, or ‘this is so cool, man’ (guess the demographic of that last comment…).  

 

Ron Mueck at the NGV

They’re right.  The work is ‘cool’, and part of the works’ attraction is imagining the painstaking labour that goes into handcrafting these objects.  Critics do not necessarily see this ‘wow factor’ as a positive thing, however.  For instance, I remember reading a particularly savage Art Monthly Australia article written by Adam Geczy a few years ago called ‘Neo-medievalism’ (2005) where he argues that Swallow’s carved sculptures are ‘a petit-bourgeois art’ and a ‘lapse into a retrograde medievalism’ and concludes that the popularity of Swallow’s artwork is simply the fault of ‘nostalgia’.  Even Sebastian Smee’s more favourable review in The Australian (16 Dec 2006), warns that ‘Swallow’s dedication to the craft of woodcarving is self-conscious, even self-congratulatory.’ 

While not all of Swallow’s work is carved from wood (he’s now moved on to the equally as traditional bronze casting), the majority of the works in the show are carved from wood, and many of them I’d seen before.  There was the life-sized table covered in sea creatures, called Killing Time, which I overhead a gallery tour guide boasting to an awed crowd: ‘…and it was carved from a single piece of wood’ [I thought it was two, but no matter].  On the adjacent wall hung the other very familiar sculptural still life: Salad Days. 

I’d not seen The Bricoleur (2006) before, which depicts a single Converse sneaker wedged in a tree branch, carved from a single piece of Jelutong.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t get past the frustrating futility of carving a block of wood to look like a tree branch (‘self-congratulatory’ indeed).

Once you get past the wow factor, however, Swallow’s works are really very clever.  The title Killing Time, for instance refers to his experiences fishing, the notion of the still life, as well as the labour invested in creating the piece; and so the labour and the craft is not just incidental, but rather it contributes to the overall meaning of the work.

My favourite pieces were not actually the ones that Swallow had handcarved at all, but rather the bronze casts of decaying cardboard, which were akin to minimalist paintings along one wall.  As a group, the works were called Bowmen’s Record, and individually These Days Aren’t Different Enough, numbers 1-4.  Like his carved wood objects, the works still utilised a traditional sculptural medium – cast bronze – and yet this time Swallow had no hand in their production [no pun intended].  I’m still undecided as to whether it would make much of a difference if the artist handcast these works himself.

If anything, I actually enjoyed Ron Mueck’s work a bit more.  While Mueck’s works had the same annoyingly distracting ‘wow factor’, they really revelled in the theatricality, whereas the spotlighting and similarly sparse set up of Swallow’s exhibition just seemed a little tacky.

For those not in the know, Mueck has a background in designing creatures for movies and television (most notably the cult Labyrinth) and so perhaps it’s not surprising that there is an element of theatricality in his works.  What interested me at the NGV was the lack of any set or context surrounding his stubbornly independent photorealistic sculptures.  With the exception of three works (one of which was hung on a blue painted wall), most were presented on plinths set away from the high white walls, and I’m guessing the aim was to create a ‘neutral’ background.  This attempt to erase all context made the strange human figures with their distorted scales (a massive new born baby, a tiny Dead Dad or Sleeping Old Woman in Bed), seem even more surreal.

 

Sleeping Old Woman in Bed

Before I end this massive post, I also want to quickly mention the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award on now at the NGV Australia (outside the Swallow show), as I actually preferred this free exhibition to both the (expensive) Swallow and Mueck shows.  The exhibition includes fantastic works by Julie Gogh, a bizarre car and trailer set by Domenico de Clario, a painting/installation by Guan Wei, a disconcerting multi-media/sculptural work by Destiny Deacon, and a mysterious Janet Lawrence work amongst others.

Lastly, I just want to acknowledge the lack of published reviews on MONA FOMA despite my excited promises in my last post.  I did write an extensive review, but then realised the significant conflicts of interest made it unpublishable:

a) At least one of the artists will probably be marking my PhD (hard to avoid in Tassie), and

b) I volunteered at MONA FOMA. 

I should note that I really really enjoyed MONA FOMA however, even if I didn’t follow up with published reviews.  I didn’t sleep for 3 weeks!

MONA FOMA 2010 - anticipation post

I’ve been itching to write on a Hobart exhibition again, but the galleries seem to be recovering from they annual Christmas shows and have either shut up shop (CAST, Entrepot) or have an uninspiring spread.  Fortunately, this Friday (8^th) the second annual music/sound/art festival MONA FOMA begins. 

The inaugural festival was, to be honest, the best festival that I’ve ever attended, and got a few embarrassingly gushing posts as well as an Artlink review from me (which was criticised as being too positive – what does that say about professional review writing?) 

With the exception of the final night’s concert with the Dirty Three, John Cale and Bridezilla and a small event at the Theatre Royal, all the events at this year’s MONA FOMA are free.  The festival is obviously well funded for this to occur, and the 2010 festival’s apparently co-funded by David Walsh (who’s currently building his Museum of Old and New Art), the Salamanca Art Centre, and the Tasmanian state government.  This post is starting to sound a bit like a PR schpiel, however the reason why I don’t hesitate to point out the funding bodies is because MONA FOMA is so equitable.  Other Tassie festivals, such as 10 Days on the Island might have great line ups of international artists, actors and musicians, however I can only ever afford to attend one or two events at most unless I wrangle myself a reviewing job (in which case I can’t truly relax and enjoy the performance because I’m too busy making value judgments).

One of the must attend events for me is John Cale’s Dyddiau Du/Dark Days.  The work was exhibited at last year’s Venice Biennale in the Wales Pavilion but despite my frenzied attempt to see all the exhibitions in Venice in less than a week, this particular work was missed.  Thank you fate. 

The other must-see work is in the Bond Store of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, one of my favourite exhibition spaces in Hobart due to the fact that its walls are dank and covered in historical convict graffiti, the stairs are precariously steep and made of roughly hewn wood, the floors are uneven and the entire building is held up by massive solid wood columns and beams.  The combined exhibition and performance is called 48 Fugues for Frank, and is described in the programme as “a musical homage to the life and work of Frank Zappa”:

Dodgy screen shot of the online MONA FOMA programme

Of course, I’ve also had a long love affair with the sounds of the Dirty Three, so I’m eagerly awaiting the closing concert. 

I’ll try and post a few reviews on my MONA FOMA experiences over the next couple of weeks.  Happy times.

Olafur Eliasson and tiny sculptures

I have an obsession with maquettes.

At the recent Olefur Eliasson exhibition at the MCA in Sydney, despite all his wonderful finished works, the real lure for me lay in one of the side rooms: the maquettes of imagined or eventually realised works.  Yes, the copper wire was messily soldered, the forms were perhaps unresolved, yet these tiny sculptures held something (other than potential) that really intrigued and excited me.

There’s something very special also about tiny sculptures.  They’re not on display currently, but the Art Gallery of New South Wales used to have an almost permanent exhibition of tiny Robert Klippel sculptures just next to the (now extended) café.  While I live in Hobart now, I grew up in Sydney and used to gravitate towards these strange forms whenever my parents took me to the gallery.  Maybe it was their minuteness, perhaps the fact that they kinda looked like other things (bicycles, swings, see-saws…), the forms had some sort of hold over me.  Alas, in the last few years, the Klippel sculptures have been removed, unfortunately coinciding with my ability to articulate exactly what I like about certain artworks.  If only I could see them one more time in my adulthood…

Advertising for canvas prints on my blog, oh no!

I thought I'd give this advertising for blogs a spin, as it seems a relatively harmless experiment.

However, I've noticed that a lot of the ads coming up are for canvas prints, which is a source of great distress for me.  A couple of months ago, I let go with a rant about the evils of this new trend in 'home decorating', but apparently google ads don't pick up on tones in writing.

I can see the funny side of the whole dilemma, but all the same does anyone out there know how to pick and choose your google ads?

ArtStart Grants: what do they do with the artists after fertilising them?

I'm not sure what Australia does with all the artists after they've grown and fertilised them, but I thought I'd stick up this link to the new Australia Council 'ArtStart' grant (mainly because I like the logo):

The thing that worries me is that all these grants stress that the cash is not intended to cover the living costs of artists.  In other words, it looks like the government is supporting artists (particularly emerging, if you talk to any mid-career starving artist) through all these grants with fancy logos etc., but in actual fact they're not prepared to invest in creating full-time, or at least long term, meaningful jobs for those in the arts industry.  Talk to any fine arts graduate and they'll tell you how hard it is to get a job relevant to their field (that does not include managing the photo hub at Kmart).  I know that there are a ridiculously large number of people enrolling in art schools around the country, and not all can be expected to get a job in the arts, but it would be nice if I knew that more than one of my fellow BFA graduates now has a fulfilling arts-related job.

So how do you employ artists and fine arts graduates? Off the top of my head, I'd say that the easiest way would be to pour more money into museums and acquisitions, and thus provide more museum jobs. At the moment the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery does not have an acquisition budget for instance (Luckily for Tasmanian artists, the privately funded, soon-to-be-opened Museum of Old and New Art, is commissioning away...).  Fund arts festivals which have a significant visual arts component, encourage both the public and private sectors to fund public artworks, and recognise the worth of artists in terms of creating a diverse and rich national culture (think about it - are most great cultures remembered in terms of their sporting prowress or their arts?).

Just an idea....

Hobart Art Galleries: a personal overview

[note: this is an old guide. An updated one can be found here]

The other day, an old friend from Sydney asked if there are many art galleries in Hobart. I don’t think she was being disparaging, because to be honest, it took me about three years to become even mildly familiar with the Hobart gallery scene. So I thought I’d do a quick overview of the key Hobart galleries (with lots of opinion), and send her the link with the added bonus that perhaps, just perhaps, it may interest others. Please note, that this is not a comprehensive listing of all Hobart galleries (I’d be here all day), but rather the ones that I regularly or semi-regularly visit and/or ones relevant to contemporary art and this blog.

Plimsoll Gallery

The Plimsoll is the University of Tasmania’s gallery, located at the Tasmanian School of Art on Hobart’s waterfront. The gallery is a little tricky to find as it is tucked away underneath the art school, which is housed in the majestic old IXL jam factory. The gallery has a rotation of three week curated exhibitions with an emphasis on international and interstate artists, although there are often quite a few artworks by Tasmanian artists on show. The Plimsoll Gallery, in my opinion, is one of the best contemporary art spaces in Hobart, showing an eclectic mix of exhibitions, which are usually quite challenging and cutting-edge, but occasionally regresses a little. Unfortunately, over the summer, in Hobart’s busiest tourist season (and when the gallery’s icicle-like temperatures are actually productive), the gallery is used for research post-graduate examinations, and is closed during the week. However, the post-graduate examinations are generally open to the public the weekend following examination, so check out the gallery’s website before you visit.

The current exhibition at the Plimsoll is the Wharmby Collection, which showcases works purchased by the University throughout the 90s as a result of a generous bequest from Marion Wharmby. The exhibition includes works by Sally Smart, Fiona Hall, David Keeling, Hossein Valamanesh, Bill Yaxley, and Elizabeth Gower to name a few, and has a distinct and funky thematic (a nice reflection perhaps, of the collection committee chaired by Lorraine Jenyns). The collection is not yet finished; in fact, the remaining money has grown in the last decade so that a substantial amount remains. The committee hopes to start acquiring works again by the end of the year, with the aim of completing the collection by the end of the year so that a monograph can be produced. It’s a good 90s art show, and not at all as boring as a exhibition with the word ‘collection’ in it, may suggest.

Entrepôt

To get to the Plimsoll, you have to walk through the windy art school tunnel, which houses the Tasmanian University Union-run gallery, Entrepôt. All students enrolled at the University are eligible to apply, both postgrad and undergrad, and as a result, the gallery showcases a wide range of art styles, and more notoriously, standards. Nevertheless, there are few restrictions placed on exhibitors at the gallery (I think there are three rules: you can’t burn the gallery down, brick the door up, or sleep there), and I’ve seen some pretty wacky exhibitions there over the years. Currently at Entrepôt is the TUU-affiliated Sculpture Society’s (unofficial) annual exhibition. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, including few videos, a work using blood samples and microscopes, and some interesting liquid-filled objects to name a few; but it’s definitely an improvement on last year’s show.

CAST (Contemporary Art Services Tasmania)

CAST is similar in its focus on contemporary art to the Plimsoll, but with an emphasis on local art. Located in Tasma St, North Hobart, and harder to find than the Plimsoll, they have a strangely difficult space to show work in despite its regular cubic shape (for some reason even the most imposing sculptures tend to shrink in the space). As the name of the organization suggests, CAST provides services beyond the gallery, assisting artists with grants, advocacy and other such necessities, and is run by an enthusiastic group. They also have some great annual programs such as the Emerging Curator Mentorship, the 3 into 1 show for emerging local artists, and the fun CAST members show (December), which by sheer necessity, is hung salon style. Currently at CAST is About Photography II.

Inflight

Inflight is Hobart’s (relatively) long-running Artist Run Initiative (ARI), which is more challenging to find than the Plimsoll and CAST combined… plus some. Inflight is hidden behind the toilets, which are behind the garbage bins, behind the carpark, behind Kaos café in Elizabeth St North Hobart. The gallery has two small spaces, and so there are usually two shows running at any one time. The work there often wants to be innovative and [insert contemporary art buzz word here], with various level of success, but it’s always worth a look. I haven’t actually been to the current exhibitions, which I understand consists of a curated exhibition in the main gallery and in the smaller gallery, a show by local artist, Iona Johnson.

6a

6a is the new ARI on the block. In the last two (?) years since its opening, the gallery/studio complex, housed in an ex-pet butchers/slaughterhouse, has established itself as an art space to complement, rather than rival, Inflight. The difficultly shaped space encourages site-specific art (if you’ve ever wanted to make a work in a kitchen or bathtub, apply now). The openings are always last on a night’s gallery opening run and usually run quite late, with crowds of younger, scungy, arty types gripping beers and toasties around a fire in an old oil drum in the gallery’s dusty carpark, accompanied by the sounds of local musicians/sound makers. Not quite on the same scale of hard-to-find as Inflight, to get to 6a Newdegate St, North Hobart, look for the meaty sign at the entrance of an industrial-looking driveway between two houses. Ben Booth’s work is currently on show, including some of his wonderful distinctly styled sculptures, and an anxious-making video.

Fine Arts Gallery (FAG)

The FAG is a small Tasmanian School of Art-run space up on the main campus of the Uni, Sandy Bay. I rarely make the ‘trek’ (I think I’ve been in tiny Hobart too long if I think of a trip to Sandy Bay as a significant mission), but I understand that it’s got a new and enthusiastic committee and has had some really good shows recently. Currently on show is the work of 3^rd year painting students.

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

As the major state institution, I probably should have put the TMAG first, however, it just doesn’t show enough contemporary art to warrant an early mention. To give the TMAG credit, there have been some great shows in the last few years - mostly survey shows of the work of artists such as Mike Parr, Patricia Piccinini, and Leigh Hobba. The annual Hobart City Council art prize, hosted by the gallery, keeps getting better too. Funds are apparently an ongoing problem in regards to both acquisitions and exhibitions, but it’s a real shame that such a high profile and prominently positioned institution can’t host a more consistent cycle of relevant and engaging art exhibitions. Currently on display in the ‘art’ area is a small selection of art and craft in a walk-through area (enthusiastically titled The 80s Show); a beautiful exhibition of indigenous fibre works, called Tayenebe; and Jao Tsung-I – calligraphy and painting by the Chinese scholar, which has unfortunately been advertised as ‘the largest…’ and ‘the only…’ rather than emphasising the exhibition’s artistic merits.

Detached

The church-turned-house-turned-gallery, Detached, was unveiled late last year to co-host Mike Parr’s The Tilted Stage with the TMAG. It’s privately owned, but behaves like a well-endowed public gallery. To be honest, I don’t really know much about the gallery, but I like what I’ve seen so far. Detached is currently hosting Brook Andrew’s 8 Months of War, and is located in Campbell St, just around the corner from the TMAG.

Carnegie

The Carnegie Gallery is a Hobart City Council-run gallery hidden above the Maritime Museum in Argyle St (this hiding-the-gallery thing is turning out to be a massive theme in this post). It has an eclectic range of exhibitions, ranging from the best that contemporary art can offer, to the Australian Glass Society’s members’ exhibition. Ignore the Maritime Museum attendants when you enter. They’ll glare at you, but just keep walking up the grand stairs.

Salamanca Arts Centre

The Salamanca Arts Centre houses a number of galleries, but I’m going to list them as one simply because this post is blowing out. The largest gallery is the Long Gallery, which again has an eclectic mix, although they’re less discriminating than most of the other galleries listed above. One weekend you might find a blaring sound art exhibition and a room full of finches jumping on amped up guitars, the next you’ll stumble across a show by the Tasmanian Embroidery Club. Go figure. Next to the Long Gallery is the Sidespace and on the very top floor is the appropriately titled Topspace. The Long Gallery, Sidespace, Topspace, and Kelly’s Garden (an outside, gravel-filled space) all accept proposals, and there’s usually at least one good exhibition on at any one time.

Salamanca Arts Centre is also home to a couple of artist coops, the best of which is called Handmark. Handmark is currently showing a weird and wonderful exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Tricky Walsh. In addition, there are a number of ‘craft ‘n’ art’ shops, many of which are pretty banal, although the jewellery shops are quite good.

Bett Gallery

Bett Gallery is a commercial gallery, and part of the Hobart furniture. It shows quite a mixture of art, although painting seems to be the predominant medium of choice. They also favour male artists. In addition to their shop front in North Hobart, they show work in Raincheck Lounge, a coffee shop just down the road, although these shows tend to exhibit the work of younger, emerging artists.

Criterion Gallery

Like Bett Gallery, the commercial Criterion Gallery tends to favour male artists. Nevertheless, Criterion is always worth a visit. Located in Criterion St in the centre of the CBD, make sure you have a coffee at the adjacent Criterion Café at the same time.

MONA (Museum of Old and New Art)

The Museum of Old and New Art isn’t even finished, but since it’s so eagerly awaited, I thought I’d tack it onto the end of this list. I visited the construction site a month ago and it looks amazing already. Tasmanian philanthropist and owner of Moorilla winery, David Walsh, is building the massive museum (it promises to be the largest private art gallery in Australia) to house his significant (and growing) art collection, a theatre, space for temporary and touring exhibitions, a library, and bar…s. The website is worth a visit even if you can't get the museum yet.

Mega post completed. Again, I must stress that this is all just opinion. Enjoy art.

Why Canvas Prints are the Epitome in Bad Taste

I’ve loathed canvas prints for a long, long time, and for someone who is so openly opinionated on anything from politics to standard roses, it seems strange even to me that I’ve kept this loathing a secret for so long.

Why?

I think I was secretly afraid that it was some kind of art snob bias; however, I now realise that that’s more to do with my living too long in Australia, where any mention of arts funding results in the standard letters to the newspapers, accusing the government of catering to ‘latte-sipping, opera-watching elitists.’ Oh, if only they knew what us ‘elitists’ got up to in the local Artist Run Initiative…

Anyway, back to canvas prints. So why are they so offensive?

1. The most obvious first reason is that they are spruiked in home improvement magazines as a quick and ‘tasteful’ wall accessory that will complement any house colour scheme of your choice. Examples printed on their glossy pages often include the ubiquitous oversized sunflower or frangipani image (sometimes with a suicidal looking dew drop on a petal’s edge), shells on the beach, or a desert landscape. It’s one thing that these magazines call them ‘tasteful’, but they also frequently call these ‘free computer desktop’-like images ‘art’.
2. An oversized flower is one thing, but in practice, many ‘homemakers’ end up getting an oversized portrait of their kids printed on these canvases. Oh, but wait there’s more…. not before converting the digi file into an ‘arty’ black and white. What is wrong with regular photographic paper? Yes, I know that the neighbour has photographs of his kids printed on photographic paper, but hey, his is printed in gloss, you could always try matt… or a better frame…?
3. Shops selling these canvas prints market them as ‘instant art’, and eBay is littered with canvas prints of giraffes and inoffensive ‘abstracts’. Art is rarely ‘instant’, and while I’m not necessarily equating time or labour with good art, it is offensive to artists everywhere that these banal objects are being bought and sold under the banner of ‘art’.
4. Canvases are not an ideal printing material for photographic images. The only reason why canvas is being used is because of the material’s connotations with the fine arts. Yet, taking a photo of your small child with a bucket and spade in its hand and slapping it on a canvas will never turn a family happy snap into a work of fine art, no matter how many pixels your new digital SLR, with optimum zoom and five different coloured flashing LEDs, has. If you want art on your wall, employ an artist. Hell, there are heaps of artists out there that would love to earn a bit of money doing what they love and are good at, rather than stocking shelves of the local Kmart with the latest canvas prints from China. If you ask them nicely enough and promise not to tell anyone, they might even be able to use colours that fit in with your interior design. Yes, it will cost more money than a canvas print, but at least you won’t have something on the wall that is akin in taste to serving cocktail frankfurts at a wedding.

That’s my rant. I probably could come up with many more reasons than the four listed above for why canvas prints are the spawn of the devil, but I’d like to hear other people’s opinions too. Please leave your thoughts.

Venice Biennale: Day 2, Pavilions in San Marco

I’m in Venice for the Arts in Society Conference, which means that day two of my Venice Biennale encounter is fairly limited in terms of the amount of art I can experience (I’m not sure that the word ‘view’ is adequate for a large percentage of the artworks at the Biennale). I manage to sneak away from the conference to see a couple of nearby pavilions scattered around the western San Marco area: the Republic of Cyprus, Estonia, the Republic of Gambon, Luxembourg, Iran and the Republic of Slovenia. Of these pavilions, I’m most taken with Rumours by Socratis Socratous from Cyprus (and no it’s not just because of his name), and the Slovenian Miha Strukelj’s Interference in Process.

Stickers for the various national pavilions in San Marco, assisting victims of Venice's maze-like streets.

Socratous’ installed work is based upon a recent event in Cyprus where a number of palm trees were imported into the country to create an ‘exotic, eastern feeling to the local environment’ (artist statement). Rumours started to spread that Cobra eggs were hidden amongst the roots of these trees and that they had started to hatch. The resulting exhibition includes a large palm tree lying horizontally across the floor, videoed interviews, photographs, a collage of text, and most intriguingly, a room that is shut off from public entry by a clear acrylic barrier. The space is set up to look like a one-room home, filled with a messy combination of bed, carpets, clothes and most worryingly, an empty glass snake enclosure. At the entrance to the room, leaning up against the barrier, is equipment familiar to me as those used for snake handling. I stand at the barrier for a long time, looking for a sleek shiny body. I’m tempted to tap the glass, but after reading Harry Potter I feel guilty about disturbing the potential snake (ridiculous, I know). Then I do something that I still regret – I ask the bored looking attendant (the Cyprus pavilion is hard to find, so I’m guessing the flow of visitors may be a little slow) whether there’s actually a snake in the room. On reflection, I would have preferred not knowing.

Miha Strukelj’s work in the Slovenian pavilion is described in the Art World guide to Venice as examining “the issue of perception in five equal segments via painting and drawing.” Now, I don’t know if he changed his mind sometime between the press release and the work but the exhibition and the above description don’t seem to match up. In fact, the exhibition as a whole doesn’t seem very well resolved, but I’m taken by his drawings, which are directly applied to the walls of at least half of the difficultly shaped bottom floor. Looking at times like a road map, or if you squint your eyes you can alternatively see the outlines of buildings, the drawings lapse in and out of these line drawings and what appears to be planning grids and even scribbled mathematical equations. The wall drawing works well with the odd space, the staircase, and the hall that leads to nowhere. Unfortunately, the freestanding painted canvases and drawings that make up the rest of the exhibition are comparatively underwhelming.

Next up: Day 3 of the Venice Biennale - the Arsenale

Venice Biennale: Day 1, the Giardini

Phew, I just finished my first day at the Venice Biennale. I managed to do an impressive 10am-5pm session at the Giardini, although I would dearly like to go back to see some of the works again. The Giardini is one of the two major venues, along with the Arsenale, of the Biennale, and holds a number of the major national pavilions as well as the showcase curated exhibition.
The thing is, no one warned me about how big the Venice Biennale actually is. There seem to be about 50 other minor exhibitions/venues outside of the Arsenale and Giardini and getting to them all is going to be a task and a half.

The Biennale is a weird experience, kind of like the Disneyland of the artworld. I could even compare it to a Royal Agricultural Show experience. The pavilions in the Giardini are only used for the Biennale every two years; just as the showbag pavilion at the Sydney Royal Easter Show, for instance, is used for only a couple of weeks every year. To be honest, we all came away from the Biennale clutching showbags of sorts too. I’ve lugged back to my hotel room a Collectors ‘showbag’ from the Nordic Pavilion, complete with artist goodies, such as a print, calendar, cigarette lighter and a bronze pea. I also have my new laptop stand (generally, the catalogue de jour) – the Biennale catalogues (yes, the plural is correct). While staring at my ambiguous map in the searing midday heat today, I overheard a couple discussing their next move: “I don’t think I can be bothered with the Australian pavilion” (“Mummy, I don’t want to see the cows, they smell”). As with the RES, the portaloos were creating their own brand of smell in the sweltering Venetian heat, and the food, while not as good as a Country Woman’s Association Devonshire tea, was of similar rip-off value. But just like the show, I came away sweaty but happy, tired as a dog, yet with the knowledge that I’d learned a lot (albeit information more relevant to my field of work than knowing the names of innovative designer breeds of geese).

So, what works can I remember? (always a good test)

Well, the pick of the Pavilions, for me, are:

• The rather sinister Russian group show, with an immersive and interactive environment created by Gosha Ostretsov called Art Life or The Torments of Creative; a couple of sculptures constantly pumped with human blood by Andrei Molodkin; and Pavel Pepperstein’s Perspectives of Development, a series of humourous drawings and paintings predicting weird and wonderful monuments for the future.

• The German representative, Liam Gillick, has kitted out the German Pavillion with a maze of kitchen benches which fill the multiple rooms. The sparse wooden benches seem at odds with the rather forboding building, designed and built during Hitler’s reign. I should probably mention that each of the pavilions have been designed and built at certain times and are a mish-mash of styles from different architectural periods, some of them (such as the German pavilion) reflecting the countrys’ political and social climate of the time.

• The Hungarian Péter Forgács’ With Time – The W-Project, where the viewer is presented with dozens of portraits in various forms, from video to photographs, yet with all the faces anonymous.

• The Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s work, where projected silhouettes of window washers behind ‘frosted glass arch windows and skylight’ present the illusion that the work is on the outside of the gallery while the viewers stare out from within.

• The French pavilion, whilst popularist, has created a false dramaticism that strangely amuses me.

In the main curated exhibition, the outstanding works include Nathalie Djurberg’s Experiment, a seductive oversized sculptural garden filled with colourful weird and wonderful plants, which is accompanied by three projected erotic and rather etch claymations; Tomas Saraceno’s giant ‘spiderweb’; the once interactive series of artworks that date from the 60s by the Japanese avant-garde Gutai group; and André Cadere’s Six Barres de Bois Rond – a 1975 work where he would take these coloured sticks and install them anonymously in public spaces. Cadere is now dead, however, his sticks have been positioned (strangely with labels) throughout the main pavilion. The work in the cafeteria by Tobias Rehberger also deserves a mention. Far more exciting than the CWA show café, the cafeteria has been transformed into a psychadelic maze of wonky tables and chairs, with colourful stripes that transverse the room around rubbish bins, furniture and walls.


The Danish and Nordic Pavilions house my favourite work for the day. The modernist buildings have been fitted out to look like homes, ‘lived in’ places, which suggest a rather sinister narrative. Outside the Danish Pavilion, beyond the ‘For Sale’ sign, is a postbox telling us that ‘A. Family’ owns this house. As you wander around the house you start to make assumptions about who the people are: (fake) works by Frank Stella on the walls, flashy leather bound books, designer furniture…. then you notice that the television has been left on, the stairs in the library violently destroyed, the bedroom a black spray painted devastation. Something is clearly not right.

Moving next door to the Nordic pavilion, where a pool has been built outside the predominantly glass building, the story takes an even more alarming turn – a dead body floats on the surface of the pool. Brain working overtime, you notice the watch and cigarettes that have sunk to the bottom, and shoes and socks on the side of the pool, while the body is otherwise fully clothed. Inside the house, everything from the dirty coffee cup on the kitchen bench and pet hair on the carpet, to the used condom beside the bed is meticulously orchestrated by the collaborative artist, resulting in an engrossing and strangely humorous work.

The problem with major art exhibitions, such as the Biennale, is that you become hyper-observant, and every single object around you is interrogated as a possible work of art. The coloured bike frames chained to stationary objects around the gardens, the esky outside the Nordic Pavilion, the small box next to the toilets…
At one stage, I find myself engrossed, watching a pointy-beaked bird attack a small spring possibly from a ballpoint pen, something that I’d probably not have noticed any other time. However, my attention drew others, and soon a substantial group of people were standing behind me looking at the fire hydrant just adjacent to the bird. Although to give them credit, perhaps it was an artwork.