Down to Hobart on Friday night, and then Mona
(‘Red Queen’) the next
day - with Trang. Both city and museum felt familiar from my previous visit,
the familiarity at times diffuse and at others specific - particularly on
re-encountering individual works from last time. I think I enjoyed this return
visit to Mona more than the first and got more out of it, probably due to both
being more open in the particular moment and more readily able to grasp it on a
second pass - although I hesitate over the second of those, as its cluttered
and non-linear space and arrangement are very much part of the impact.
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A few slices:
Two pieces partaking of the ancient (I also saw
both last time, I think). A small, oval-shaped piece of stone (steatite) - ‘Commemorative Scarab of Amenhotep III’ (Egypt 1379 BCE) -
inscribed on its flat face with tiny hieroglyphics which somehow I found very
affecting. And Brigita Ozolins’
pyramid dream “Kryptos” (2008-10), an eerily
darkened installation in concrete, steel, aluminium, gold and lead, encircling
catacomb walls embossed with raised sequences of binary digits interspersed
with the occasional word (HIDDEN, FOUNDATION, SECRET, DARKNESS, SUN, RAYS,
DEAD, LIGHT, HEARS, SEES, FACE, VOICE, DEATH … ‘death’ was the first that I
noticed, in the square central chamber, having just given myself a shock after
looking up to unexpectedly see my own reflection in the mirror overhead).
David Claerbout’s video installation - actually an extended series of black and
white stills - “The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy
Moment” (2008) had something special to it. A rooftop soccer game, some
birds, and not much more, yet luminously perhaps infraordinary, like some lost
naturalistic piece of French new wave.
E: I can’t go on like this.
V: That’s
what you think.
(Todd McMillan - “Go On”, 2007 - Sydney
staircase, man on crutches)
Others: Tracey Moffatt’s ‘Something More’ series of nine; some
Henry Darger (disquieting); various Roger Ballen (very disquieting); Zhang Huan’s “Berlin
Buddha”; Balint Zsako’s colourful untitled (it had also jumped
out at me last time); Nolan’s
two Leda and Swans; Sandra Selig’s ‘Universes’ (spider silk sprayed
with coloured enamel paint against black backgrounds); Julius Popp’s “bit.fall” at the ‘entrance’ displaying contemporary words including ‘Ukraine’ and ‘MH17’.
* * *
Sydney, NSW Art Gallery, currently on:
the 2014 Archibald Prize, along with the Wynne (landscape
painting or figurative sculpture) and Sulman (subject, genre or mural).
I’ve
never taken particularly to portrait, which makes me particularly susceptible
to responding to and forming judgements about examples of the form to a very
large extent based on my well established aesthetic sensibilities - and,
indeed, on their surface elements rather than the deeper factors that established
those sensibilities in the first place. And so I wonder about my liking of,
say, Sophia Hewson’s “Artist kisses subject” (the subject is Missy
Higgins, the kiss rendered in glowing pastels and light that I’d be even more suspicious of if the artist
were a straight man) and Heidi Yardley’s “Julia DeVille” (moodily on the verge of romanticisation -
though I think actually very good).
One of the pleasures of portraiture is the
chance to see some familiar faces, but they don’t predominate in this year’s
selection, though both Dan Sultan and Cate Blanchett were readily recognisable;
also, there was James Powditch’s faux-movie poster “Citizen Kave” (as it’s clearly intended to,
making me think what a great film it would’ve been, whether made in 1983,
today, or, in fact, never). And one of the more striking - and stronger -
pieces was Paul Ryan’s “Rox”, an expressionistic view of Richard Roxburgh (face only).
More of the finalists for the Wynne particularly
caught my eye. I liked a couple of the semi-abstracts near the beginning (Steve
Burley’s “Hillside landscape” and John R Walker’s “The Darling at
Kalyanka”); also, the breadth
- at once geometric and natural - of Michael Johnson’s “Oceania high low” (the winner of the
prize; the title plaque aptly characterises it as exploring convex space rather
than horizontal perspective), Philip Wolfhagen’s small, dreamy “Landscape
reinvention no 17” (pink-red scrub, a small strip of blue sky) and Max Berry’s “Goat
farm, overlooking Norfolk Bay”,
whose lilacs, mauves, light aquamarines and browns add up to a poetic, not
overly engineered whole. Plus Alexander McKenzie’s Japanese-inspired “Man
moves mountain” - pleasing.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given its scope, the
Sulman pieces drew more heavily on pop culture and pop art. A handful
especially appealed, for various reasons: Andrew Sullivan’s “T-rex
(tyrant lizard king)” with its nice sense of humour and touch of pathos, Cameron Hayes’ teeming, panoplic “Martina Navratilova versus Chris Evert
Lloyd” (children, castle towers, things upside down, detailed,
large-scale), the straightforward but well rendered “Memory Drift”
(Richard Baxter - a wooden house blown off the ground
by the wind, with all the archetypal associations summoned by that image; a
hare looking up at it, a white cat on the roof, a kite tangled on a telephone
wire). And the one I most liked, Jason Moad’s “What death leaves
behind”, very Magritte-ean
with its view of the reflected image of a succulent seemingly growing directly
from an otherwise empty bed in a large circular mirror mounted on a nightstand.
Elsewhere, a Sol LeWitt exhibition (‘Your Mind is Exactly at that Line’), including several pieces that I’d seen in past visits as part of the
rotating collection; I’ve
always thought I should find him more interesting than I actually do, though
the large wall drawing of the five floating cubes against grey backdrop, all
with different coloured sides, was at least striking.
Then MCA - exhibitions good as always.
One, a collection from a Japanese artist called Tabaimo (‘Mekurumeku’), comprising a set of video, projection and animation (hand-drawn then computer animated) works
appearing one by one through a series of dark rooms and corridors, in some
cases using the corridors themselves for the works. There were six, I think
(plus some drawings), all on the short side at around 5 to 10 minutes and all
worth the time, playful and whimsical, the imagery at times fantastic and even
surrealistic but also seeming to invite and open up rather than hold the viewer
at a distance.
To take the first, living up to its title - “Japanese Commuter Train” - by locating the
viewer in a corridor on the interior of a distended hexagonally-shaped room,
with train carriages extending in either direction: intercut with titles that
are both literal and elusive (in ‘Chicken
and egg question’, chickens lay eggs
which then roll through the carriages, from which various things emerge; in ‘Everybody can be so good material’, people wrapped as sushi rolls are laid on
the train floor as giant hands from outside reach in and stuff them into
similarly huge mouths), it offers all manner of oddity amidst the normal
without any reaction from the train’s
other passengers. The others explore different terrain, although a recurring
theme is an interest in water and in blurring the lines between the human body
and other forms of biology (limbs morphing into aquatic vegetation).
The other was Annette Messenger (‘Motion/emotion’), a French artist working with drawing, photography, needlework,
sculpture and installation forms; I think I’ve come across her before. Only a couple stood out, but the two that
did, I really liked. There was “Histoire
des robes” (1990) (‘Story of dresses’), comprising 17 dresses each in long
individual wooden boxes mounted landscape-orientation on a single wall, visible
through glass fronts, with the boxes also containing other framed images and
words, invoking or gesturing towards possible meanings bound up with the
dresses themselves (one, for example, stark: “jalousie”).
And also the installation “Casino” (2005), a darkened room into which
billowing red silk blows across the floor from an adjoining chamber;
underneath, the illuminated outlines of buildings and less identifiable
objects, some gelatinous and vaguely oceanic; the whole evokes the red desert
spaces of the imagination, capped by the mysterious black objects, suggestive
and alien, that descend to the surface at the end.
* * *
And next Brisbane - first time in more or less a
decade - to find a few things going on at GOMA.
“Harvest: Art, Film
and Food”: ‘Objects in circulation’ (looking at the
movement of food around the globe - including Jonathan Froese’s elegant b&w photos of figs, fish,
pawpaw segments), ‘Pop and the
vernacular’, ‘A portrait of labour’ (Tracey Moffatt
appearing again, with another series of kitschily striking photos, and also a
playful 10 minute video, “Lip”, montaging a number of short movie clips
of black women serving white) and ‘Imagining
another future’, themed around
visions of alternatives to the cultural and environmental status quo in food
production and distribution.
My two favourites were in that last section -
both large-scale. There was Tomas Saraceno’s set of ‘Biosphere’ sculptures (2008-09)
- large plastic bubbles attached to ground and walls by webbed rope, about five
or six of them across the large, light-filled central space on the ground
floor. And Emily Floyd’s “Permaculture crossed with feminist science
fiction” (2008) - varnished pieces of timber (circular cross-sections,
blocks, longer planks and one burnt egg-like structure at the centre) laid out on the floor, inscribed with
passages from Bill Mollison’s
books on permaculture and Ursula Le Guin’s and Doris Lessing’s
novels.
“Seen and Heard: Works and Multiples from the Collection”, multiples being (I learned) works conceived and produced as
multiple units. The exhibition is around crossovers between popular culture,
music, sound and visual art, and includes a bunch of record covers (including
some that are iconic for me - Velvet Underground, Joy Division, the Smiths
etc), a bunch of Nam June Paik (I liked his ‘TV Cello’,
2000) and various Fluxus/Cage, Robert Rauschenberg’s screen print
poster and limited edition vinyl for Speaking in Tongues, and Bill Viola’s
visual score to Edgard Varese’s “Deserts”…made me think
about the significance that music has held for me in the past and wonder to
what extent it’s still current, and may be in the future.
Separately, a nice Hiraki Sawa
installation, “O” (2009). Single
darkened room, three large screens projecting scenes from central Australia, an
abandoned house (along with animated white birds and miniature fairground
wheel) and, apparently, the surface of the moon; on the surrounding walls,
smaller tv screens each showing a single rotating object (light bulb etc) with
sounds projected from similarly spinning speakers mounted on wooden plinths.
QAG I only
intended to browse through, and it turned out there wasn’t that much to see. A good de Kooning
landscape, a general survey of Australian art 1840-1970 with an emphasis on
modernism (Nolan stood out again; also the clustering of Roy de Maistre (one of
his also caught my eye at the AGNSW), Roland Wakelin and Grace
Cossington-Smith); and my introduction to the glorious colours of Sam Fullbrook
(best of all “Pike’s farm at Haden”, 1982-7).
