I am moving my blog, Culture Critic @ Melbourne to Wordpress where it will be known as Melbourne Culture Critic: http://melbourneartcritic.wordpress.com. I have moved for various reasons, mostly the superior functionality of Wordpress blogs. Sorry for the inconvenience to everyone who has to change their RSS feeds or update bookmarks.

I have been writing this blog for almost two years now. I have really enjoyed it; it has been a good motivation to see more exhibitions and to think more about art. I want to thank everyone for reading, especially those people who have left comments; it has been great meeting people through this blog. I don’t know if I have made any difference in writing this blog, a critic cannot expect to change anything. I have modest ambitions, a few artists, exhibitions and galleries that would have not been reviewed have been written about online.

As this entry has become an advertisement for myself I will note my academic qualifications, my many contacts and my experience in seeing art galleries and museum in Europe, South East Asia and Australia. I have been writing about the visual arts, on and off, for about ten years now. I started reviewing visual arts webpages for LookSmart, during the dot.com boom, but that work is no longer online. After that I wrote for the Paper, some of that is still online, and other magazines, almost all of which are no longer being published. This whole blog has been an advertisement for myself as an art critic or art consultant. I would welcome more work as either.

Filed under: Various - Critical, Cultural & Philosophical | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Monday, 18 February 2008 11:51 AM
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“It’s Not You, It’s Me” is a rather staged exhibition at Hogan Gallery. Timed to open on Valentine’s Day. The exhibition is playing with the idea and images of being heart broken. The exhibition made p. 5 of the rose scented pages of MXNews’s Valentine’s Day issue with a posed photo, three lines and a caption: “Not everyone will be getting chocolates and flowers.”

The exhibition is by Nicole Reed (photographer) and Sarah Hanisch (producer), an unusual combination of credits. There is a lot of production in the photographs: models, make-up, props and locations to produce very staged sleek photographs. Reed and Hanisch have created some striking and fun images for the exhibition. But playing with broken hearts, real or imaginary, seems cruel. The exhibition is not warning of the dangers or expressing the sorrow of heartbreak. It is just a game to Reed and Hanisch, like the game hopscotch emotions that they have placed on the gallery floor.

I also saw a far more romantic exhibition on Valentine’s Day, the Perfumed Garden at Flinders Lane Gallery. This group exhibition has a romantic theme focused on Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Perfumed Garden; a manual of Arabian erotology by Sheik Netzawi. The exhibition is full of beautiful delicate images in a variety of media, paintings, photography and drawings, and a variety of contemporary styles. From the neo-baroque cut paper of Lizzie Buckmaster-Dove to the bright colors of Juli Hass’s fantastically detailed picture of a garden.

Valentine’s Day in Melbourne was full of roses.

Filed under: Art - Exhibitions & Galleries | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Monday, 18 February 2008 11:50 AM
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“Just don’t come from the Western suburbs – Out west! Way out west!” TISM chants in The History Of Western Civilisation on their Hot Dogma CD. But they didn’t come from the Melbourne’s western suburbs.

The Yarra River divides Melbourne into the eastern and western suburbs. Traveling out through Melbourne’s western suburbs is like an architectural cross section of the accretion of suburbs; from Federation mansions of Essendon to the 80s bricks of Keilor East. Some friends invited me to come with them see the Rose Creek Estate, a winery in Keilor East, as part of Australia’s Open Garden Scheme (thanks Jane and Terry). Not what you would expect to find in the western suburbs.

Villa Varapodi in Craig Street is 1.2 hectare garden that slopes steeply down to Steele Creek, a tributary of the Maribyrnong River. It is full of grape vines, olive trees, fruit trees, vegetables and chickens. It was not your usual neat, tidy, lovely, manicured display garden but a highly productive garden. The garden was the work of Tony and Lina Siciliano, who had migrated to Melbourne in the 1960s and started the vineyard in 1989. No, it was not like being in Italy and even the Italian pop music couldn’t convince me of that – it was very strange in the middle of brick suburbs.

There were lots of people looking the open garden and the surrounding streets were packed with parked cars. As well as, the garden there was wine and olive oil tasting, coffee and wood fired pizzas to enjoy. I bought a bottle of the olive oil in an attractively shaped bottle; it will be good with bread and salads. The red wines, except for the expensive Cabernet Sauvignon, were a bit ordinary and the white wines, including a Zibbibo, a kind of Muscat, were too sweet for my taste.

The garden reminded me of my own garden which, although much smaller, is full of fruit trees, mostly planted by the previous Italian owners. I have plum, nectarine, peach, fig, locot (not sure how to spell that, it has a yellow fruit with three large seeds) and, my favorite, the lemon tree. Every night this summer I have heard the flap of the large leather wings of the fruit bats feeding on the fruit. They are welcome to it as I have plenty.

Last weekend was a good food weekend. On Sunday I was at the Hawker’s Bazaar Riverside at Crown with huge crowds of people enjoying the range of Chinese food and celebrating the Year of the Rat. Everyday I am thankful for the migrants who brought something better than English cooking to Australia; I would not eat a meat pie if they were being given away.

Filed under: Various - Critical, Cultural & Philosophical | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Saturday, 16 February 2008 09:19 AM
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Friday, 8th February, eight graffiti artists are painting the grey sidewall of Faster Pussycat, on the corner of Lt. Napier St. and Gertrude St. Fitzroy. The artists were hard at work spray painting the very large wall. Some are up ladders, others are on the street and one is up on the awning writing the name of the shop. This is a legal piece being painted in daylight with a few spectators, like myself watching.

It must have been a bit like this in the Renaissance churches and palaces as people watched the master and his apprentices up ladders working on frescos. Frescos are, like aerosol spray-paint, a fast medium as the artist has to finish painting the section before the plaster dries. So it would have been exciting to watch the paint going on and the image emerging. Except at Faster Pussycat on Friday, there were eight masters and no apprentices. And, unlike, the Renaissance there were two women artists painting as equals with the men.

Eight masters on the one wall might sound like a clash of the titans but there is a harmony, amongst the diverse styles in the use of green as the main color. And there is a diversity of styles, from the rocker and tattoo through to comic book and freestyle graffiti.

I went back a week later to see the finished work and to make enquires to whom to give credit for this great work. I could see various tags: EFC, FT, Trance, SWB TGC, ID Boys, Siloe, Na, Sub rock and Deb. I asked at Faster Pussycat and was told that Caleb from Tattoo Magic was behind it; I asked at Tattoo Magic but Caleb wasn’t in. It reminded me again of the Renaissance. Vasari writes “…one day he (Michelangelo) went along to where the statue (the Pieta) was and found a crowd of strangers from Lombardy singing its praises; then one of them asked another who had made it, only to be told: ‘Our Gobbo from Milan’.”

The wall of Faster Pussycat is now a magnificent work of street art, our equivalent of the frescoed walls of a Renaissance cathedral. But it is not unique; there are many such excellent pieces around Fitzroy and Collingwood. As I was walking around I saw another very large piece on the side of a garage in Sackville St. Collingwood.

In the city I saw some odd and un-attributed street art in Donaldson Lane large, very professionally painted on shaped MDF and screwed onto the wall. These are homage tributes to illustrators and comic books as varied as Dr. Seuss to Frank Miller’s Sin City. The Sin City one has a fun operational peephole camera attached.

In a side note to the commercial value of street art, a shot of graffiti in Melbourne’s Hosier Lane is used in the 2008 Mazada Two TV advertisement. So we know that, in the opinion of Mazada’s Australian marketing, graffiti helps sells cars.

Filed under: Street Art | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Friday, 15 February 2008 1:38 PM
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Imagine if octopus features somehow became a fetish fashion statement for Goths and other PVC wearing people. Now, imagine that you are seeing quality studio fashion photographs for this octopus fetish fashion complete with stockings and high heels. Now you can imagine Sarah Berners exhibition of photographs, Skin-Job, at Seventh Gallery. It is a laugh; it looks so alien and so elegant at the same time.

I started to think: this is art rather than fashion because it is useless. Nobody would every wear something like that, besides to be photographed in it, because you can’t see out. Likewise, the many tentacles are all useless while the suit restrict the wears arms. But that isn’t why it is art, I don’t want to argue that art is useless; Sarah Berners’s Skin-Job is not fashion, not erotic, it is more complex. The attractive photographs amuse and bemuse the viewer. It suggests and hints rather than demonstrates and illustrates.

Sarah Berners’s exhibition was not part of the Midsumma Festival but I would understand if someone made that mistake because the Midsumma Festival, Melbourne’s gay and lesbian festival, is in so many galleries at the moment. I have already reviewed exhibitions at Platform, Vitrine and the Counihan Gallery (see my recent blog entries: Sensuality & Sensibilities, Hot, and Artist Talks). And there are more at 69 Smith St and Off the Kerb, and those are just the ones that I have seen, I haven’t seen the festival’s exhibition program.

I saw Marcus Keating’s installation at 69 Smith St.; Keating exhibited at 69 Smith St. during another Midsumma Festival when I was secretary of the gallery, he has exhibited widely. I like Keating’s work then and I still do, he is a serious artist with a sense of humor. Keating is still working with corrugated cardboard and creating installations. His objects in Badlands reminded me of Ricky Swallow’s simulacra, only made of cardboard rather than wood. However, I didn’t think Keating’s work hanging on the wall fitted the theme of the cardboard objects and wasn’t of the same quality.

Also at 69 Smith St. and part of the Middsumma Festival are Cara Jones digitally manipulated kaleidoscopic images of Melbourne, Clinton Hayden’s delicate paintings of strands of red thread, Tristan Jalleh’s fantastic charcoal and graphite drawings gay zombies. And Michael Brady’s ‘My Pop Life (88-89)’, converting one of the old upstairs bedrooms at 69 Smith St. back into a bedroom, full of eighties pop nostalgia.

When I was at 69 Smith St. I took a look out the back to see how the sculpture garden, that I helped build, was progressing - not very well. The gallery was stagnant when I joined the management committee and has remained stagnant but open. 69 Smith St. is basically just another rental space gallery, mostly featuring exhibitions from groups of art students or other groups, like the Midsumma Festival, despite being in the lists of artist-run-galleries. It is a shame because it is in a good location, a location now officially named with a sign that reads: “Smith Street South – Arts and Fashion Precinct.”

Filed under: Art - Exhibitions & Galleries | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Friday, 8 February 2008 8:32 PM
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William Eicholtz gave an excellent floor talk at the Counihan Gallery on February 2, 2008 as part of the exhibition, Chaos & Revelry. My wife and I attended, along with around twenty other people, a reasonable attendance for an artist’s talk.

I am particularly commenting on Eicholtz’s floor talk in this entry because to write: “Eicholtz is a significant and talented Australian contemporary sculptor”, after he won the 2005 Helen Lempriere Outdoor Sculpture Award, is redundant. The Helen Lempriere Outdoor Sculpture Award is the biggest art prize for sculpture in Australia; it is like winning the Archibald for a portrait painter. But for a talented artist to be able to give a good floor talk is something to commenting on. It is one thing to be able to something and another to be talk about it articulately.

My wife is not an art expert and has a hearing disability but this was no barrier to her enjoyment of Eicholtz’s floor talk. And the cognoscenti enjoyed the talk too. Eicholtz engages his audience; he is articulate and speaks with passion about his art. He is not scared of using technical terms, like ‘cabriole leg’, from design or art history and nor does not scare his audience with them because he uses the term in a way that makes its meaning clear. He is informative about his unusual materials, his traditional techniques, the economics of making sculptures in multiple editions, the inspiration for his art and his aesthetic vision for the urban/suburban environment. For an artist to speak articulately about any one of these subjects is worth noting but Eicholtz can move fluidly between them.

Eichotz talk gave me a lot to think about: not just new information about his art. I am still thinking about his comments on the way that art can become erotic by being coy. Or, how architects have pushed the art out of the urban/suburban environment. And it was Eichotz’s vision for the urban/suburban environment that most excited his audience, a playful neo-baroque vision of a world where art exists throughout the built environment.

A world where humans live in more than just well designed environments.

Eicholtz frequently gives floor talks at his exhibitions and he will be featured in the ABC documentary series, ‘Artists at Work’ to be broadcast in April. I would recommend both, if you get the opportunity.

Filed under: Art - Exhibitions & Galleries | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Sunday, 3 February 2008 5:52 PM
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Chinese tourists pose for photos next to Debs aerosol work on Union Lane, off the Bourke St. mall. Union Lane has become a beautiful gallery of street art thanks to a street art permit from Melbourne City Council. The street art permit is very nicely stenciled onto the wall of this pedestrian lane. It is a perfect group exhibition of contemporary aerosol street art in all its varying styles by many of the major artists: HaHa, Debs, Street Meat, Sick One and many, many more.

On the Upfield Line, there is still a lot of activity in the derelict areas around Macauly Station. The graffiti is the only thing of beauty in the area, so a big shout out to all the illegal artists working in the area. They brighten up my and other commuters dull train journey. Further up the line, between Moreland and Coburg, the green paint that was applied last year to be cover up graffiti is now covered in tags.

A good piece of graffiti lasts a lot longer than a few months. The decade old Alice with the hookah smoking caterpillar piece, on the side of the house near Brunswick Station, has been mostly covered up by new pieces. The old Alice had been there for about ten years and I remember had replaced an earlier piece on the same theme. It was looking very faded, dated and was then hit by a number of taggers and vandals with spray cans. I saw three very young writers working on a fresh new purple piece in the middle of a hot Saturday January afternoon. Their piece is bubble style with 08 worked in as flares. I talked with them a bit but the big age difference between us didn’t help the conversation. They busy and I was going to the Counihan Gallery for an artists floor talk.

I haven’t written about street art so much recently. Instead, I have been enjoying photographing it and I have been making a few stencils. I am having some difficulties in writing about street art because unlike the main art world there are few people from the street art scene giving me information. I often get comments recommending galleries or exhibitions that develop into blog entries but when I do get comments on my street art entry I can’t even follow them up because the email address is bogus. I do not automatically publish all comments (because of spammers) and I don’t publish comments that people ask not to be published. I can be simply contacted by leaving a comment in this blog and I will reply by email. I can understand some paranoia around illegal street art but guys this isn’t helping.

Serious vandalism of 6,000 year old rock paintings in the Western Saharan rocks by UN Peacekeepers with spray cans is reported in the Times January 31, 2008. Officers with ranks as high as major carried out the vandalism. Julian J. Harston, the UN’s representative of the Secretary-General for Western Sahara said: “I was appalled. You’d think some of them would know better. These are officers, not squaddies.” The vandalism is in breach of legislation enshrined in the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.

Filed under: Street Art | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Saturday, 2 February 2008 3:16 PM
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I wanted to see Cecilia Fogelberg’s Super Groupie so I went to Craft Victoria. I was sorry that I had missed the opening. It had a speech and guitar solo from Spencer P Jones, more fun than the usual exhibition opening. In 2006 Fogelberg won the Linden Gallery Postcard exhibition. I first saw Fogelberg’s soft toy art for the first time last year at an exhibition in a shared house in Brunswick and I thought they were fun. She left a comment on the blog and we exchanged emails.

Soft toys have, along with other collectable dolls, are very popular with adults (and artists). Fogelberg’s soft toys are not for children. Super Groupie is a bit of an adult giggle, soft toys of rock stars, Nick Cave, Mick Harvey and Rolland S. Howard, with fantastically long penises decorated with jewels or played like guitars. It is an old joke but Fogelberg has sewn it well, with lots of local character including a full sized, with some working parts, doll of Bon Scott’s crotch. The inclusion of dolls of Steve Irwin and a Germaine Greer (with 1971 era naked body) in this exhibition was a bit odd. But, it was Greer who coined the term ‘Super Groupie’ in 1971, as Simon Gregg, points out in his entertaining notes on the exhibition.

Craft Victoria’s basement level gallery on Flinders Lane holds a shop and several well design gallery spaces. I don’t often write about craft in this blog, especially now that I know that Ramona Barry writes an excellent blog, Words and Pictures, on Melbourne’s craft scene, but there are a number of things that made me want to write about the current exhibitions.

Found objects are now well established in the art world, almost a century since Duchamp exhibited his first readymades. Now they are being cast in gold. On the front cover the February edition of Art Almanac is an example of the work in Precious Nothing by jeweler and goldsmith Caz Guiney. Guiney has cast all kinds of found objects, from nappy pins to bird droppings, in gold and made them into wearable and attractive jewellery. All objects have meaning that can be exposed, enhanced or augmented and Guiney is playful and attractively doing this with what has been discarded. Guiney is also playing the alchemist creating gold from base matter, like something from King Midas’s rubbish bin. Guiney’s exhibition is very attractively and playfully installed at Craft Victoria with the jewellery behind cut-away silhouettes, the gold bird droppings in a bird shaped silhouette. Caz Guiney’s earlier work ‘cityring’ has previously been attacked in both the Herald Sun and the Australian, a high distinction for any artist and outstanding for a jeweler.

There isn’t much of a distinction between the craft and art world, especially with exhibitions at Craft Victoria. Brenda Page’s wall of glass slingshots are as much contemporary art as they are craft. Page’s exhibition of glasswork, “Once Upon…” is also currently at Craft Victoria. Glass slingshots are not functional weapons; they are beautiful.

Filed under: Art - Exhibitions & Galleries | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Friday, 1 February 2008 3:35 PM
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Friday night, an opening at 696, people were spilling out onto the sidewalk. The small backroom gallery was hot, airless, humid and packed with sweaty people. It was Jack Douglas, a young artist’s first exhibition and he had more reasons to sweat than most of the people, especially when I lurched into interviewing him. Artists don’t expect that anyone but friends and family will turn up to your first exhibition and artists don’t expect that anyone who write about their first exhibition.

Ninety years ago it was different, then, in 1918, a local reporter reviewed a 14-year-old Salvador Dali’s first group exhibition in the foyer of the Teatro Principal. The reporter wrote of Dali: “He will be a great painter”. (J.L Gimenez-Frontin, Teatre-Museu Dali, trans. Anthony John Kelly, 1999, p.12) Well, I’m not sure I believe that, but it is a good story; maybe the reporter wrote that about every young artist he saw hoping that history would remember his one success and forget the many failures.

Jack Douglas is a student of the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA). Douglas is exhibiting work in a variety of media but his strength and preference is for pen and ink drawings of faces and figures. There are large three drawings of ‘Trainmen’; based on sketches that Douglas did while traveling on public transport. Douglas has a strong style and a sense of humor. Douglas enjoys the VCA; 30 or 40 years ago an artist like Douglas would not have felt so welcome at the VCA with his figurative illustrative style but contemporary art is more open.

In the contemporary Australian art world there is too much attention paid to the top artists and galleries, Paul Keating’s elite arts. They might be well marketed but they are not the only significant force in art. Consequently far too little attention is paid to artist’s first exhibition, like Jack Douglas’ Suspicious Looking Fellows, and to small galleries, like 696. Will a great artist have a first exhibition at 696? It is a not unlikely; it is a friendly, dynamic, fresh-style of small art gallery.

Filed under: Art - Exhibitions & Galleries | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Saturday, 26 January 2008 01:08 AM
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“ I want communicate to as wide a mass a possible. And the way to communicate with the public right now is through TV and advertising. The art world is not effective right now.” The Jeff Koons Handbook (Thames and Hudson, 1992)

Here are some notes on advertising in the art world: no thesis or argument to organise them, just a series of observations. Please add your own in the comments.

I was amazed to see a billboard advertisement for a photography exhibition by Darryl Anderson at 69 Smith St. The exhibition was over but the billboard was still up. Many contemporary artists have a Warholic dream that they can achieve fame through publicity. A few Melbourne artists like Maria Kozic or Peter Burke have used billboards as works of art, but this was advertising.

Usually only the National Gallery of Victoria or other major galleries uses billboard advertising for their exhibitions. There is also billboard advertising in Melbourne for the Andy Warhol exhibition in Brisbane and the Adelaide Festival of Arts (indicating how many people they think are prepared to travel interstate for art exhibitions). Most small galleries use D5 invite cards and a listing in Art Almanac, Trouble or Art Gallery Guide. There is some variety with the invite cards: 7th Gallery has always had bookmark shaped invites that I use as bookmarks, Many galleries use larger A5 cards hoping that bigger is better but maybe it is just bigger bumpf.

Does any of this advertising aesthetically improve the exhibition? Take, for example an exhibition that I saw in November, Colin Batrouney’s exhibition Historical Fiction at Gallery 101. The exhibition was advertised with a color full page in Spring 2007 issue of Art & Australia. I very slightly prefer the advertisement to the actual work; the close cropping and the absence of the cliché quotes from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland make it a better image than the one’s exhibited. It wasn’t a great exhibition, his photographs were too much like advertising design for my taste, and his drawings varied in quality, but it was well advertised.

Most art magazine advertising is advertising for art galleries, art fairs, etc. It is interesting what products other than art exhibitions are advertised in art magazines; the edition of Art Asia Pacific that I am currently looking at has advertisements for fashion and condominiums in Thailand. You imagine the kind of people that they are hoping to be reaching with these adverts, exactly the same as would buy the art advertised.

Absolut Vodka has done a great deal of advertising in art magazines with a long running series of adverts designed by major international artists. The Absolut art campaign started big in 1985 with a commission for Andy Warhol to paint an Absolut vodka bottle. Since then many major artists, including Haring, Ofili, and Catalan have been involved in their advertising campaign. Absolut also targeted fashion magazines, like US Elle, with the same art campaign adverts.

Filed under: Various - Critical, Cultural & Philosophical | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Thursday, 24 January 2008 11:57 AM
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“Fantastic painting is one of those cultural rag-bag terms that can be used to describe almost any work of art that appears surprising or unusual.” Simon Watney

This is a hardback folio size book with color images of works by 50 contemporary surreal, fantastic and visionary artists from around the world. Some of the artists, like Ernst Fuchs or Alex Grey, are well known others are obscure. Each artist has two pages with generally two of three images per artist.

The terms used in the subtitle to describe the artists in Metamorphosis have been carefully chosen – “Contemporary Surreal, Fantastic and Visionary Artists”. ‘Surreal’, as in having qualities associated with surrealism, is used rather than ‘Surrealist’, part of the art movement. (Some of the artists in Metamorphosis are clearly religiously inspired, Christian and/or New Age, a feature would have made the Surrealists vomit bile.) ‘Fantastic’ rather than Fantastic Realism (another art movement) or fantasy, as fantasy art implies illustrations for the fantasy genre. And, ‘Visionary’ is used rather than religious, mystical or Symbolism (another art movement). Robert William’s term “lowbrow art” would be other terms to describe some of these contemporary artists, but that is clearly not a popular term.

The main problem with Metamorphosis is editorial, there is almost none: no index, no page numbers and no organization to the book. The artists are presented in no order, making the lack of a contents page or index even more apparent. Aside from the artist’s name, short artist statement and website address there is nothing about the artists; no date of birth, no nationality, unless it happens to be mentioned in the artist statement.

Jon Beinart assures me that some of these editorial problems will be rectified in the second edition of the book, and that the book is selling well enough to think about a second edition. Metamorphosis it is the first book that he has published. There are very few books published of the work of fantastic painters, even less contemporary fantastic painters, making Metamorphosis a rare publication. For many years Simon Watney’s Fantastic Painting (Bracken Books, 1984) was the only book I had on the subject. Now there is Metamorphosis. And Jon Beinart is currently preparing Metamorphosis 2 for publication.

Filed under: Book Reviews | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Sunday, 20 January 2008 10:32 AM
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The baroque never died is the contention of the current exhibition at the Counihan Gallery, Chaos & Revelry. Edwina Bartlem, the curator was inspired by Angela Ndalianis’s book New Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. I haven’t been able to write before in this blog that any curated show was inspired by an academic book; a laudable achievement in itself. The exhibition does not disappoint.

Bartlem brings together contemporary Australian artists with “neo-baroque or camp sensibility in their work”. Susan Sontag in her famous 1966 essay “Notes on Camp” defines a sensibility as a consistent private code of perception. This camp sensibility Sontag claims started in the late 17th Century, the Baroque starting in the early 17th Century. ‘Baroque sensibilities’ is a better term than to consider the Baroque as a particular art/architectural period because that period also included many neo-classical sensibilities. Sensibilities, unlike time periods, can overlap and co-exist. And there are other aesthetic sensibilities operating in this exhibition; the psychedelic sensibility of Darren Wardle’s painting ‘Xanax’ and the kitsch/shabby chic sensibilities of Maree Azzopardi.

The star of the show and paradigm of neo-baroque and camp sensibilities was clearly the sculptures of William Eicholtz. Eicholtz’s rocco sheep are piles of fertile, fruit covered, bejeweled wool, his shepards are graceful, camp Adonises. The sheep are made of what looks like ceramics but actually are polymer cement with a synthetic glaze. All of Eicholtz’s sculptures appeared to be made out of something else, fiberglass rather than bronze. But they look as sensuous as marble ceramics or polished bronze.

The exhibition also includes over-the-top drawing by tattooist eX de Medici and textile objects by costume designer Felicity Rose Hardy that are fully loaded with meaning and image. Deborah Paauwe’s beautiful photographs by of girls with beautiful hair in beautiful dresses are more restrained but contain a baroque anticipation of change. I’m not so sure how Kate Cotching’s elaborate cut paper creation fits in the theme but I did enjoy her work, unlike Alex Martinis Roe’s rather dull video installation.

While I do not agree with all of Bartlem’s conflation of neo-baroque and camp aesthetics, it is clear that there are overlapping areas of these sensibilities. The exhibition has been extensively and informatively promoted with Bartlem and the artists involved giving interviews to many of the free papers. With only 8 participating artists the exhibition is not a survey of neo-Baroque art in Australia; a larger gallery would be required for that. There is a lot of art with neo-Baroque sensibilities around, I wrote an entry about the baroque sensibilities in the art of Carole Wilson, Ryan L. Foote and Vincent Fantauzzo early in 2007 (see my entry Neo Baroque).

The exhibition opening and launch of the Counihan Gallery’s 2008 program on Thursday evening was very well attended; someone should write a social gossip blog entry about who was there and what they were wearing. There was the usual wine, nibbles and speeches were made by the Mayor of Moreland City, another councilor, Edwina Bartlem, the curator and Assoc. Prof. Angela Ndalianis. Ndalianis’s speech argued that the baroque was a ”trans-historical state” that used multiple texts to “challenging us to make order from chaos.” And Ndalisanis pointed out that this exhibition was just part of a larger international trend of books and exhibitions about neo-baroque art.

Filed under: Art - Exhibitions & Galleries | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Thursday, 17 January 2008 11:40 PM
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New Years Eve 2007 was the hottest New Years Eve in Melbourne on record, in the hottest year on record. With days and nights over 30 degrees, days over 40 degrees, it is hard to do anything. I have managed to do some painting, oil paints dry quickly in the baking heat.

I have almost finished painting a portrait commission of my friend, Sean, who works at ACMI. Sean works with computers so in the course of taking photos for the portrait I came up with a great pose with a computer. We didn't use it; rather, I took the computer out and put in one of his panoramic photos curving around in the background. Painting a panoramic image is a bit tricky with perspective for me but I now have an excellent pose to use for anyone else who works with computers (and a computer in a painting would date the image to a very few years, like certain fashions). This is my third portrait commission; the fourth if you count my brother and sister encouraging me to paint a portrait of my father for his 70th birthday. I enjoy painting portraits and I would welcome more commissions.

Most of Melbourne’s galleries close for January, if not February, to avoid the heat. How some commercial galleries can afford to have such a long break is difficult to imagine in business terms but the hot dry weather makes it understandable. Other galleries have to open in the heat because they can’t afford such a long break. And the public galleries, like NGV, the Counihan Gallery and Platform are open.

In the summer heat there is the Midsumma Festival, Melbourne’s gay and lesbian festival that consistently includes quality visual arts exhibitions. This year there are two in the Degraves Street Subway. At Platform, Grace McQuilten, Ilynx, might have worked well as a free paper to subverting that paradigm, but as an exhibition it is dull and repetitive. Josefine Kristensen’s
”Lifestyle Choice? The Can Series”, at Vitrine (also in Degraves St. Subway), is more entertaining as an exhibition and subversive of both advertising and social attitudes. And using advertising influenced images in a public exhibition space is an excellent way to subvert Melbourne’s commuter’s attitudes. I am looking forward to seeing the Counihan Gallery exhibition, “Chaos & Revelry – Neo-Baroque & Camp Aesthetics”, also part of the Midsumma Festival. I have been reading up on the neo-baroque and camp in preparation.

“Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but ‘woman’. To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre.” Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp

Speaking of playing a role, I saw the small exhibition “Role Play, Portrait Photography” at the NGV International and I was not impressed. There are some good individual works in the exhibition about role-play but to include photographs that are not about ‘role play’ just confuses the meaning of the one room exhibition. It does not challenge our ideas of stereotypes, as the curator’s didactic panels argue; it suggests either poor curators or collection.

Filed under: Art - Exhibitions & Galleries | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Tuesday, 15 January 2008 10:22 PM
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“To begin uncontroversially: some philosophers live in Australia. The question is whether that fact makes any difference to the way in which they philosophise. It is sometimes said that it cannot, since philosophy is a cosmopolitan subject. But we talk without hesitation about ‘British philosophy’, ‘French philosophy’. Is this just shorthand for ‘philosophy in Great Britain’, ‘philosophy in France’? Let us suppose that it is not. There might still be special difficulties in talking about ‘Australian philosophy’. Should we take special steps to cultivate an indigenous philosophy, or, at least, to link philosophy in Australia more closely to other forms of culture in Australia.”

John Passmore, Australian Philosophy or Philosophy in Australia (abstract of paper, Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, Uni. of WA, 1988). The paper has since been published in Essays on Philosophy in Australia ed. Jan T.J. Srzednicki & David Wood.

Some artists, fashion designers, writers, etc. live in Australia but this does not necessarily mean that there is Australian art, fashion, literature, hip-hop etc. An arbitrary political boundary does not imply that a different culture exists within that boundary. I have serious doubts that there really is an Australian culture, many more doubts than I have about the existence of French culture or hippy culture. And the more that the politicians try to manufacture one, with Australian citizenship tests, Australian values etc. the more dubious I become because cultures grow organically and cannot be manufactured. A culture is more than just an identity, as you can have identity without an accompanying culture. A culture is “not a heap of unrelated phenomena but an organic whole” that “is extended in time”, conscious of its past and present and projecting itself into the future. (R.A.D. Grant, A Companion to Aesthetics ed. David Cooper, Blackwell, 1992, p.100) A lifestyle is a temporal heap of unrelated phenomena that may be more or less manufactured. Traditions are not a culture, as traditions do not project themselves into the future but remain fixed in the past. There may be Australian lifestyles, Australian traditions, Australia may be a major subculture in sports culture, but those things alone do not imply an Australian culture.

What does Australia need a culture to do? And, can a culture do this? Irish, Scottish and Greek culture was needed to prevent complete assimilation into a larger alien empire. Hippies saw their proto-culture as a viable, competitive, environmentally sustainable, alternative to the straight, conformist, consumer lifestyle. Culture could be described is a kind of mass paranoid reaction to a perceived threat that attempts to equip its members to combat the perceived threat. In doing this it is clear some cultures support some horrible and stupid ideals, including racism, sexism, homophobia and violence; it is less clear, what good, if any, any culture does.

When I started this blog I thought that I might write a lot more about culture, I had a plan to write every second entry about something other than visual arts. But I haven’t much of a response from readers about these entries. Although shallow nationalism might be very popular in Australia it appeared to me that there is no taste for deeper cultural analysis. So I am asking readers to add comments if they think that Australia needs a culture and, if so, what it needs this culture to do.

Filed under: Various - Critical, Cultural & Philosophical | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Wednesday, 9 January 2008 11:50 AM
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It has been as hot as hell in Melbourne. Heather B Swann’s impressive Gates of Hell sculpture has been removed from Degraves St. due to it being “maliciously vandalised”. When I last saw it in December one of the fierce dogs heads had been removed; hellish curses on the cur that wreaked it.

I am impressed with Melbourne City Council’s use of language in their sign explaining the absence of the sculpture. Malicious vandalism is the opposite of benevolent vandalism, like the street art that co-existed on the same wall as the sculpture. Ever since I started this blog I have been looking for the right words to express the difference between a work of illegal street art and its deliberate destruction. I didn’t expect Melbourne City Council to give me the words. Street art could be described in these terms as ‘benevolent vandalism’, or, ‘egocentric vandalism’ (that would describe tagging), and not malicious vandalism as there is no intention to destroy or other malice.

Last year I was impressed with the words on an application for “a retrospective Street Art Permit” in Hosier Lane for 167 Flinders Lane (rear wall facing Rutledge Lane). The application noted, “The artwork may evolve over time.” Exactly what you would expect with street art.

Speaking of the right words for street art, I have been looking for the right words to describe the thin dynamic ribbon style graffiti that I have seen in a few places. It might be just one writer’s personal style but the razor cut slashing extreme calligraphy is distinctly different from the fat blockbuster pieces.

In my surveying of recent street art I was surprised to see that it has spread north of Bell St. in Coburg. And even more surprised that some of it was a liner series of notes taped up with electrician’s tapes along the bike path, suburban conceptual street art.

Filed under: Street Art | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Monday, 7 January 2008 3:26 PM
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Contemporary art is aesthetically dependent on gallery spaces; the gallery or museum architecturally and aesthetically frames the work art. Despite the emergence of site-specific works, many works of contemporary art depend on the art gallery setting to give them meaning even existence. Modern art was also dependent on gallery spaces; it was the modern world that created the art gallery, the art museum and the contemporary art museum. The mode of exhibiting art in white walled cubes may appear to be natural and necessary whereas it is arbitrary and only sufficient.

Given that the art gallery/museum has been the prime location for art it is surprising that there has been very little written about the aesthetic impact and other effects of art galleries and museums. Paul Mattick, Jr. of Adelphi University notes this in his entry on museums in A Companion to Aesthetics (Blackwell, 1992); adding that “a quick survey of the British Journal of Aesthetics and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism turns up not a single article devoted to the subject.” (p.297) Mattick did say “a quick survey”; my research was better, because I found two articles in the first volume of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1941 (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy “Why Exhibit Works of Art” and John D. Forbes “The Art Museum and the American Scene”). Neither of these articles is particularly insightful and both conclude that there is an educational function to exhibition. Mattick’s entry in A Companion to Aesthetics is possibly the best article written on the subject; I wish that A Companion to Aesthetics had been published when I was writing my thesis it would have made my life a lot easier.

Mattick traces the history of the art museum from the proto-art galleries of European royalty designed to be impressive displays of power and wealth. To the first art museums that removed the religious, political and moral function of art organizing them and, in that process, expanding the categories of art to include, industrial and non-European arts.

Although the neo-classical architecture has mostly disappeared art museums haven’t changed their function from that of the proto-art gallery, a display of the state’s wealth and power. As displays of power political allegiances are on display in major art museums where the international collection will reflect the countries geo-political position. Those countries firmly in the American camp following the American version of art history in their collections, the Europeans having a slightly different version of art history and post-colonial countries another version.

And if articles about the aesthetic impact of art museums are rare, articles about art galleries are non-existent. This is why I pay particular attention to current gallery practices and to describing art galleries, counting the number of people working in the gallery, the type of lighting in the gallery, the type of space, etc. in this blog. Gallery practice will change but if nobody pays attention it people will assumed that current practice is natural. I wonder how much longer the white walled gallery will continue to be the norm (see my entry The White Room Oct. 06).

Filed under: Art - Exhibitions & Galleries | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Friday, 28 December 2007 08:01 AM
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Looking back on 2007, the contradictions of contemporary culture are chasms. A year when pirate imagery was popular from Vivienne Westwood’s high fashion to popular culture; yet anti-piracy legislation and action was strengthened. A year when draconian anti-graffiti legislation was enacted in Victoria and then enforced with a token scapegoat, Noam Shoan, aka Renks, jailed. In the same year when the ABC documentary Not Quite Art praises street art.

2007 was the year that I first started regularly seeing good video art; some of the best art that I have seen this year are videos. There are so many trends and media in contemporary art that it is difficult for me to make many general statements; the trend of images of animals in art, that I mentioned at the end of last year, has continued but there is less art made from old books around. I do think/hope that 2007 marked the decline of the rental space gallery in Melbourne. Several, like Fresh, have closed and there are more alternatives models for art galleries to rental spaces emerging, like Artholes and 696.

The most over-hyped self-publicizing artist of 2007 was Darryl Anderson who used a billboard to advertisement for a photography exhibition at 69 Smith St. The exhibition by was in October but the billboard was still up above the petrol station on Sydney Rd. north of Bell St. months later. I didn’t think to give such a dubious commendation in my final blog entry for last year but it would have gone to Dean Reilly for his art magazine advertising blitz.

The personal highlight of my year was traveling around Europe. Seeing other cultures makes you aware of your own culture. And I don’t mean the must see wonders of the world but the little details of life make up a culture; streets, transportation, post-offices, laundromats, etc. Tourists should take photos of these things and not the ubiquitous images of the Coliseum or the Eiffel Tower.

After returning from Europe and I am more aware of the lack of bicycle paths, the lack of pedestrian areas and the lack of investment in public transport infrastructure in Melbourne. All of these matters are currently of concern to the people of Melbourne after decades of neglect. Public transport is infrequent, over crowded and too often late or cancelled. Any improvements would greatly contribute to a happier city, as well as, a reduction in greenhouse gases. This is might appear beyond the scope of this blog’s culture focus (‘get back to writing about art’). But the culture of Melbourne includes its infrastructure, the architecture of the city, as well as, the art and the political culture that has allowed the decades of neglect. And I mean decades, the Degraves St. subway was built for the Melbourne Olympics and hasn’t been renovated since.

Thanks to Daniel Dorall, Juan Ford, Naeem Rana and Alisa Teletovic for their interviews. And I’d like to thank everyone, except for the spammers, who left comments on the blog and to everyone who answered my emails and helped make this blog possible. All the mistakes are my own.

Filed under: Art - Exhibitions & Galleries |Various - Critical, Cultural & Philosophical | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Wednesday, 26 December 2007 2:19 PM
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Buskers, sidewalk artists and living sculptures are part of life on Melbourne’s streets; there is more art on the streets than just graffiti. The variety and quantity of buskers in the city is impressive from a dulcimer player to the ubiquitous guitarists. The human beat box on the steps of Flinders St. Station was the best busker that I’ve seen recently. The human beat box could do bass and drums with just a microphone and an amp. He was excellent, doing covers of ‘Stand By Me’ and ‘Another One Bites The Dust’. He was also expressing his artistic desperation in between songs: “I don’t want to be busking for the rest of my life.”

There are also people making art on the streets, the sidewalks of Southbank are covered with the chalk of sidewalk artists. “Screevers can sometimes be called artists, sometimes not.” Wrote George Orwell, I re-read part of his book “Down and Out in Paris and London” to see what has changed in street art since the 1930s. Orwell classifies all street entertainers as “beggars” even the street acrobats. “As the law now stands, if you approach a stranger and ask him for twopence, he can call a policeman and get you seven days for begging. But if you make the air hideous by droning ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’, or scrawl some chalk daubs on the pavement, or stand about with a tray of matches – in short make a nuisance of yourself – you are held to be following a legitimate trade and not begging.”

There are still the occasional street entertainers who are basically begging, like the guy on Swanston Street with his naïve drawings of buildings, but the majority of buskers and sidewalk artists are proficient and professional. Musicians with paid gigs later in the evening, magnificent chalk drawings (generally copies of old masters) on rolls of heavy paper taped to the sidewalk or little craft stalls full of bicycles made of twisted wire. Certain techniques of street art, like painting outer-space scenes using aerosol spray cans and their lids as masking has gone around the world via various street artists.

This change in street art may, in part, be due to the romantic focus that Orwell and other writers placed on them, but there has also been a change in the culture of the street. Street entertainment is now expected by public, and is licensed, or even funded by local councils.

Filed under: Street Art | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Friday, 21 December 2007 01:20 AM
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The distinction between high culture (ballet, opera, classical music) and popular culture (movies, comic books, pop music) appeared to be aesthetically relevant for most of the 20th century. It does not appear to be a distinction anymore, not even at Melbourne’s Arts Centre, where I saw the Nick Cave exhibition and Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann.

The Nick Cave exhibition was a serious almost hagiographic, excellently curated and designed exhibition about the life and work of Melbourne’s most famous punks. This is in contrast to Roger Kirk’s design for Opera Australia’s production of Les contes d’Hoffmann. It was full of doors and movement, signifying nothing. The set looked oppressive, even the triangular mirror ceiling. And the whole production, except for the music and singing, had the feel of an amateur musical.

Both Nick Cave and Les contes d’Hoffmann share one thing in common – melodrama. Both use sensational romantic plots, stereotypes, exaggerated emotions, and musical numbers. Hardly the serious, intellectually deep qualities that 20th century critics liked to associate with high art, but very popular.

Presenting Nick Cave and Les contes d’Hoffmann to the public has another thing in common – historic value. The Melbourne’s Arts Centre is presenting them as artists that have, for reasons not examined, become historic. A century in the future Opera Australia is very likely to do a production of Spamalot because it is, by then, historic and popular. To examine the reasons that a work of art becomes historic requires a kind of archeology of deconstruction. And in the archeological examining these layers of history around a work of art that the distinction ‘popular culture’ may be relevant, although, not for aesthetic reasons.

Robert Maycock in “Glass, a Portrait” (Sanctuary, 2002) argues that the popular arts provided an economic way to bypass the moribund system of academic/institutional arts grants etc. This was not just the case for Phillip Glass and his numerous film scores but also for Michael Nyman, also via film scores, Laurie Anderson and many others. The economics of popular art now provide more autonomy for the artists than the high art system.

Filed under: Various - Critical, Cultural & Philosophical | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Saturday, 15 December 2007 06:56 AM
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Human rights in art is the subject of, Apropos, a group exhibition at Bus Gallery. I’m not sure about the direction of this entry; the exhibition raises a lot of issues. Should I focus on the question of have artists advocating human rights has done any good? Or the inalienable qualities of human rights, the right to be free to have an identity, express your politics, religion, to speak your language, etc. Or the way that Australia ignores human rights as demonstrated by this exhibition in an artist-run-initiative rather than an institutional art gallery, like the Ian Potter or NGV. Or why the mainstream media ignored the exhibition but I managed to catch interviews with the curator on both 3RRR and Channel 31?

Or should I just write about the exhibition, the art and the artists involved? I have seen and written about several of them before, most recently Juan Ford and Ash Keating’s work. I first saw the work of the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi in 2002 at Irene Warehouse in Brunswick and at the Monash Museum of Art, Clayton. I wrote about them for The Paper #34) and talked to Toni, Aris and Hestu from the collective. I was impressed by their cultural activism, creating an art squat in the Institute of Art in Yogyakarta and providing access for artists and non-artists to techniques and materials. Taring Padi’s art uses popular styles and techniques to polemically engage with their audience. In this exhibition Taring Padi have collaborated with two other art collectives, the East Timor Gembal Collective and Canberra’s Culture Kitchen, to produce two large fabric works with screenprinting and woodcuts.

I hadn’t seen the work of Deborah Kelly & Tina Fiveash before; it is a lot of subversive fun and deserves a wider audience. By using advertising style images and techniques, including the use of humor, Kelly and Fiveash attempt to address the public, not just the art gallery audience. Should the direction of this entry be about the way that art and culture can engage with people to raise awareness of human rights? To look at what art has the potential to change the attitudes of the sexist, racist and other oppressive members of our world.

I hadn’t seen the work of Zehra Ahmed before and although I enjoyed it, I wish that I’d seen it on Rage rather than in a gallery. “Permission to Narrate” is good fundamental hip hop, keeping it very real, breakdancing, beat-boxing and spray-painting. At 3 minutes 40 seconds long it is the classic length of a single. The image of a guy in a white kulta breakdancing projected on a background of spray-painted Arabic. Muslim hip hop is nothing new for me but it does show how popular art can change attitudes.

Finally, Australia needs a bill of human rights that limits the power of the government for without it we are all in danger of having them taken away by politicians who would sell their own grandmother if they thought it would buy them votes.

Filed under: Art - Exhibitions & Galleries | Posted by Holsworth Mark at Wednesday, 12 December 2007 11:51 PM
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