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.

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....

Mike Parr and a short rant

This Friday sees the opening of Mike Parr’s survey show at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG). Or at least I think it does. With no advertising, media attention or announcements I really only have word of mouth (oh and something from a friend on Facebook) to confirm that Mike Parr is indeed having a show in Hobart.

Mike Parr is one of Australia’s most well-known and respected living artists. He is known for his confronting performances (see my previous post for a description of his piece in the Sydney Biennale), where he sews his lips together, cuts the heads off chickens, or holds his finger over a flame for as long as possible. You can probably understand why I’m excited about his three-day performance Cartesian Corpse, which will see the normally fairly dormant TMAG open 24 hours a day for the duration of the event.

I will be writing on Parr’s performance and exhibition (which will be co-hosted by Hobart’s new gallery Detached) later in the week. However I thought I’d just have a quick rant about the lack of advertising on Parr’s show, simply because this in not the first time this has happened in Hobart.

Art events tend to be kept incredibly hush-hushed in Tassie. In Sydney, in contrast, announcements of art exhibitions and events can be viewed in the newspapers, on the side of buses, billboards on the waterfront, and yet down here word of mouth seems to be the preferred method of communication. To the outsider who is denied this game of Chinese Whispers, the Hobart art scene is non-existent, and yet Hobartians complain constantly that it’s hard to get art ‘out there’, that mainlanders overlook this state’s vibrant art scene and that we get little acknowledgement in the country’s numerous art magazines (although I believe that there are notable exceptions, such as Realtime and Artlink).

Take another example, for instance, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). Michael Edwards, the director of Contemporary Art Services Tasmania (CAST), at an exhibition opening a couple of months ago, announced that we should be very excited about all the recent developments in Tasmanian art, such as MONA, Detached, the proposed redevelopment of the TMAG, the new Peppermint Bay Gallery, and the possibility of the quarantine shed on Hunter Street being turned into a large art space with the ability to host large travelling exhibitions/ blockbuster shows (that is, if developers, excited about turning every possible building into cafes and boutique accommodation, are fended off). Yet, he said, while everyone on the mainland is excitedly watching Tasmanian, no one down here is talking about these developments. About a month later, The Australian newspaper ran a story on MONA, which alerted the buffoons at the local paper, The Mercury (ironically owned by the same company), to the fact that perhaps art could be news after all (yes, that’s right, The Mercury doesn’t cover art because it’s ‘not news’). Later that week the Mercury ran two gushing double-page spreads in the Saturday and Sunday papers on David Walsh and his impressive MONA.

It’d be wrong to focus on just the Mercury as the reason why the word just doesn’t ‘get out there’. It appears to be a symptom of what I see as an inward-looking local art scene. The Hobart art scene is vibrant, experimental, refreshingly uncommercialised, and incredibly supportive. The art scene has also given me opportunities in relation to curating, writing and my own art practice, that I’d surely not have if I were living in a city such as Sydney or Melbourne. That’s one of the reasons why I’m writing this blog, and one of the reasons why I bemoan the lack of publicity given to exhibitions such as Parr’s.