The Commercial Scene

Tonight I'm heading to Sydney to help set up the Constance ARI stall at the Sydney Contemporary art fair.  Constance was invited as one of two ARIs to showcase work by local emerging artists, which is an indicator of the gallery's national reputation (unfortunately, we just found out that the recognition doesn't extend to the state funding body - the gallery will not be financially supported from January next year.  But that's another story...).  I've never been to an art fair, but I've wanted to ever since reading Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World, which profiles over seven 'days' the auction, the crit, the fair, the prize, the magazine, the studio visit, and the biennale. It's an amusing snapshot at a world full of contradictions, myths, personalities, and most fascinatingly for me, the commercial art scene.  I read it in 2008, the year I commenced my PhD.  I realised that although I had an honours degree in fine arts and was a budding arts writer and artist, I really had no idea what went on in the commercial art world.  I had never been to a high-profile art auction, the Venice Biennale or an art fair, and most commercial galleries I entered made me as nervous as entering, say, an Hermès shop.

Five years on and I have a PhD, I've been to the Venice Biennale twice, and I write for Australian Art Collector. I feel more comfortable walking into a contemporary commercial art gallery (the ones with Picasso paintings on the wall like the one I ventured into on Rodeo Drive earlier this year still freak me out), and I've been to one dodgy art auction. Hell, I've even bought art from a commercial gallery, even if minor.  But I still feel very much an outsider. I am part of the academic edge of the art world; I'm a maker, a writer, a museum invigilator, an ARI committee member and, most significantly, I live at the end of the world: Hobart (or at least that's how some of the international articles about MONA like to call it). 

My first Venice Biennale visit was in 2009.  I was lucky enough to receive a travel grant from the University of Tasmania to present a paper at a conference held in conjunction with the biennale. It was during the peak visiting season - late July - and it was crowded, hot, massive, and super exciting.  My second visit was in 2011. I worked as a team leader at the Australia pavilion during the opening month.  The vernissage - the three days of private viewing before the hoi poloi are let in - was overwhelming.  It was a scene that not even Thornton's book had prepared me for.  You could smell the wealth and exclusivity. Women stumbled over the gravel giardini in their ridiculous heels, men in full suits sweated (artfully, of course) in the June sun (although one man made a point of wearing a toilet seat around his neck), and I even saw one collector walk through the curated pavilion with what was presumably their buyer, pointing at a sculpture meaningfully.  Mega yachts parked outside the giardini venue, the largest of which was occupied by a single man wearing a pair of gold speedos to match his bronzed and buffed skin. Openings were held in ornate of Venetian palaces, and the guests were largely those who had donated enough money to the art foundation in question, which essentially 'buys' you a ticket.

Will the Sydney Contemporary art fair be like the Venice Biennale? Of course not. We don't have that kind of wealth in Australia, nor the draw of the biennale itself. However, I predict I will feel like an outsider.   I'm looking forward to expanding my art education by attending the four day event.  I look forward to people watching, some of the talks (if I have time), and of course viewing the hundreds of artworks on display.

Callum Morton: Wall to Wall

I haven’t blogged for ages. I’ve been deliberating over a number of exhibitions but haven’t actually got round to writing them up properly, so I thought I’d bite the bullet and do a quick one on Callum Morton’s exhibition Wall to Wall at Roslyn Oxley9. Yes, I know it’s not in Hobart, but I was lucky enough to be in Sydney when the exhibition opened and I was blown away by the work.

For those unfamiliar with the Roslyn Oxley9 space, I’ll try to describe it because Morton’s work plays with the shape of the gallery. To enter the gallery, you walk up some stairs where at the top you are confronted with Morton’s first work, Monument #22: Black Hole Relocation (2009), a realistic-looking ‘brick wall’ made of “polyurethane, poxy resin, fibreglass, sand cement”, with a messy black circle painted in the centre. You then turn around, and opening off the small hallway/landing is the main gallery space.

Morton’s Monument #23: Slump (2009), also made of imitation bricks, is a sagging wall, which continues the line of the hallway into the main gallery, essentially cutting the space in half. It’s an unnerving sight: a life-size, seemingly heavy besser brick wall, held up merely by wooden supports and sandbags. Of course, it’s all an illusion, as the materials list indicates, but it still makes you slightly concerned as you walk the thin corridor between the white gallery wall and looming ‘besser bricks’, carefully stepping over the questionably adequate supports.



Morton’s wall falls short of the gallery length and the viewer is able to step around to the other side, the safer, cleaner side, and guessing from the painted surface, the outside. Here, the illusion continues. Painted in a trompe l'oeil style, we see that the geometric shapes are accompanied by shadows that, if you stand in the middle of the wall, emphases the illusion of a buckling wall. If you stand closer to the edge however, the shadows stop making so much sense. It’s disconcerting enough not to want to linger on this side of the wall, even though it’s plainly supposed to be the less ‘dangerous’ alternative.



I have something to admit. I love things that pretend to be other things. I remember the day that I discovered that the ‘metal’ (or chrome paint) on my mobile was peeling off. Was I upset? Not at all, I thought it was terrific. In 1860, Gottfried Semper described plastic’s predecessor, Indian Rubber, as ‘the factotum of the industry [which] lends itself to all purposes… since its nearly unlimited sphere of application is imitation,” and that was almost a century and a half ago. I like to think my mobile, camera, car and ipod, all of which sport a classy ‘metal’ finish, would please Semper.

I’m quite lucky in the visual arts to have so many examples of such illusionism to embrace. On my recent overseas trip I saw trompe l'oeils in the churches of Italy and France, and visited a Fischili and Weiss survey at the TATE Modern, where an entire room was made out of polystyrene objects so carefully shaped and painted that I at first walked through the room without realising they were imitative. Ricky Swallow also practices a similar kind of artmaking - the ‘hand-made ready-made’ as Justin Paton has described it. In short, you can probably understand the basis of my slightly biased enthusiasm for Morton’s plastic ‘bricks’. (Note: these last two paragraphs of rambling have been added after I was trying to work out why I used the words ‘blown away’ to describe an exhibition, and why I couldn’t come up with a more appropriate alternative)

An aspect of this exhibition that really interests me is that Roslyn Oxley9 is a commercial gallery and that Monument #23 work is priced at $120,000. I understand that private collectors are not the only clients of such galleries, and that public galleries frequently purchase work, but really, how is such a work to be handled, where would it be stored, and in the case of a private collector, where would it be placed? (“We’ll place it next to the dining table so that the guests don’t linger…”) I know this is not a new concept, I mean, installations are pretty much standard even in commercial galleries but I often wonder how viable such exhibitions are. Are they subsidised by other shows? Do many installations sell? If so, to whom? If anyone out there works for a commercial gallery, has an answer to these questions, or has ever wondered the same thing, please feel free to leave a comment.

Callum Morton’s Wall to Wall is on at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 26 February – 21 March 2009

The copyright for all images belongs to Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.