nobody in the art world

A Year in Review

Well, friends. It’s been a big year. The biggest. Looking back to last year, or even the beginning of this one, everything is fuzzy around the edges. Like I’m looking at it without my glasses on or up through a cold blue body of water.

A lot has happened. A lot has been learned.

Why don’t we talk about it? Here’s an emotive soundtrack to get you in the mood.

A week ago, I found myself in the Exhibition Design department of the large public art institution I now volunteer for. I was surrounded by 3D models of galleries and industrious interior designers, left there by my supervisor to do the first, haphazard sticking-on of tiny, scaled images from an exhibition that I have been helping with. I was in that big office lined with windows onto the river and overhung by trees. I was by myself with tiny paper squares blue-tacked to seven out of my ten fingers, trying to position the various ‘themes’ of the exhibition in a way that made sense and fit the number of works well. Nobody was paying any attention to me. It was like I worked there. I did work there.

Do work there.

Suddenly, in that moment, it seemed to me like all the hard work and uncertainty had been worth it.

Now, there are all kinds of qualifications I can put on this: I do work there (but the majority of the time I work somewhere a lot less enjoyable in order to be able to work for free), I was in that big office lined with windows onto the river (I was very lucky to be there, and in 6 months of volunteering I’d never been there before).

But still. This year, things have come a long way. I’ve written about 34,000 academic words (WOAH I only just counted that), most of them good, or so they told me. I’ve read a lot of books. I’ve spent a lot of time photocopying out of 1960s American art journals. A lot of time in the library. A lot of time by myself. A lot of time at roll top desks. I’ve invested in a thermos flask. I’ve learned how to spell the word thermos. I’ve sat twitching and dry-eyed at Milton McDonalds on a Sunday afternoon, clutching my laptop to my chest and staring out the window at OfficeWorks where my thesis was printing, having forgotten to consume anything other than coffee for eight hours. I’ve cried in my car after carefully unwrapping the finished product and finding it (almost) flawless.

I’ve seen some great art, some in real life and some in pictures. So let’s talk about that.

2011 A Year in Review

I wrote the above in December 2011. It’s been sitting in my drafts folder like an apple sits in your desk drawer; for months reminding you it’s there and making you feel guilty and horrible for being so gutless and lazy and not just getting up and taking it to the bin. I couldn’t trash this article. So I just left it there like a slowly rotting time capsule.

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Go see this

You may or may not remember, but almost a year ago I talked about an artist called Rod Holdaway. I was visiting the AGNSW when I came across a work that he had entered in the 2009 Dobell Prize. At the time I was extremely frustrated because I couldn’t track down an image of the work to share with you.

Very kindly, Rod has recently been in contact with me and provided me with an image. This be it:

Rod Holdaway | Morning Traffic, Enmore Rd | 2009

I kind of feel like it was worth the wait, don’t you? It’s lovely. 

If you are in Sydney, I really encourage you to get along to Stella Downer Fine Art, 2 Danks St, Waterloo. Rod has an exhibition on currently, which runs until 17 December.

Stella Downer Fine Art has also kindly sent me a bit of information about the exhibition: 

ROD HOLDAWAY’S tonal paintings and drawings of suburban life possess a kinetic intensity. HOLDAWAY has a fascination with the built environment. Applying gestural lines, he traces his surroundings as if re-imagining them onto the page. As he fragments and dissects, winds and navigates his way through familiar streetscapes their materiality is simultaneously captured and dissolved. Internalising shifting states of mind, these images suggest a universal register of human feeling that underpins our sense of place.

Stereo Sequences

People of Melbourne! Listen up.

There is a fine exhibition occurring in your fine city and I am feeling rather envious because I will not get a chance to see it. Therefore, I command you to go forth and see it for me. It’d be doing both of us a favour.

Shaun Gladwell: Stereo Sequences

Shaun Gladwell is one of my (and much of the world’s) favourite Australian contemporary artists. He works in video, usually in slow motion, producing videos that are transfixing and poetic. You may recognise him for one of these works, both of which have been shown in Brisbane, either at the IMA or at GoMA, in the last year.

Shaun Gladwell | Pataphysical Man | 2005

Shaun Gladwell | Storm Sequence, Bondi Beach | 2000

Stereo Sequences is a solo exhibition of Gladwell’s work, commissioned by ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image, located in Fed Square), and features what could only be described as stereo video: videoing videoing.

He’s actually brilliant and this is a fascinating idea.

The pieces in this exhibition were filmed in improvised as well as highly choreographed settings across urban and rural Australia, Japan, Brazil, France and Afghanistan

One that I have heard about features two Australian army helicopters, filming as they shift in relation to each other, flying across an arid landscape. 

Just reading about the exhibition, I’ve come across that word - ‘performative’ - that I mentioned in my last post. Excuse me while I refer to my notes.

“The paradoxical relationship between the medium as a conveyor of ‘true’ physical facts and an authorially manipulated, virtual frame”, as Raoul Eshelman, primary writer on performatism in post-postmodern art, puts it.

But it’s more than that, I think; more than a paradox and more something like a coexistence. The happy coexistence of “‘true’ physical facts” and a very obviously constructed, filmic creation. 

Gladwell’s works very much focus on the physical. Physical skill, prowess, finesse, precision, control, and yet there is this otherworldly quality to his work that verges on the hypnotic. And his audience is very happy with the coexistence of these two elements; indeed it is where the powerfulness of his work comes from.

They’re wonderful, I really hope you go and see them. It’s on until 14 Auguest at ACMI.

No such thing as original thought

Anish Kapoor | Cloud Gate | 2004-2006

Doing Honours has me experiencing weekly earth-shattering realisations. It’s been a bit exhausting but also kind of good; I am the kind of person who enjoys brain explosions. Some people take drugs but I guess I am a bit of a nerd. 

If I had to choose perhaps the most pervasive of these world-falling-down-around me, earth-shattering, mind-blowing realisations, it would the slightly uncomfortable idea that the thoughts I have, the experiences I undergo… somebody else has inevitably already had them, experienced them, thought about them, and, usually… written about them.

My whole thesis is based around the way in which contemporary audiences experience photography’s relationship with reality in the post-analogue era (right now). Obviously people have already said stuff about this. I’m particularly trying to break through (what I find are) unhelpful postmodern ideas about representation being a ‘hall of mirrors’ - where reality is represented as being intangible, uncertain, undecidable, entirely contingent on… everything, but, most of all, our changing and changeable relationship with it. I find this interpretation of photography’s relationship with reality somewhat (boring) limiting, and unhelpful in explaining the impact of the particular artist I’ve chosen to analyse.

TURNS OUT SOMEBODY ALREADY THOUGHT OF THAT.

Have you guys heard much about post-postmodernism? It has been blowing my mind for like, almost a week. There is this whole new line of criticism that has been saying that post-modernism is not really useful or relevant any longer, and doesn’t adequately describe the kind of thought that is being produced in art, literature, film, philosophy, architecture, “the humanities”. 

Am I really behind the 8-ball, here? Did everyone else already know about this?

You know American Beauty? Post-postmodern. Life of Pi? Post-postmodern. Who knew?

Anyway, this post-postmodernism goes by a variety of names (post-postmodernism (stop saying it!) is a bit clunky but then again it does take into account the new theory’s contingency on both modernism and postmodernism). I quite like “metamodernism”, which refers to Plato’s metaxy (which intends a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond). As in, there is something between modernism and postmodernism, which is also beyond what those theories offered. 

There is also a related thing called ‘performatism’, and, rather excitingly, in art, post-conceptual realism (going on from conceptual realism, der). Artists who deal in this area are some of the contemporary artists I find most interesting - Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Thomas Demand, and, one that I’ve recently happened upon, Pierre Huyghe. They play with phenomenology (conscious experience) and the tangibly real (‘virtual’ realities, and optics). I think I’d probably go so far as to put Odani Motohiko (who I saw in Japan) in this category as well. 

Sorry. This is really boring, isn’t it.

I don’t really know how to feel about the whole idea that there is ‘no such thing as original thought’ these days. I wouldn’t ever have thought this was the case until this year, but seriously, almost every week the ‘originality’ of my message is eaten away and eaten away and I worry that by the end there will be nothing left. I suppose I’m lucky in that at least my topic is very contemporary. So at least there has been a few centuries’ less opportunity to think of what I’ve thought of, than there has been with some of my peers’ topics.

Our knowledge is increasingly fine-tuned. In order to conduct original research into something (which is a necessary element of any kind of research higher degree), you need to show that you are contributing something new to a field of knowledge. And so it follows that people will begin to find a) new ways to conceptualise things, for example, in light of other things, or b) new applications for ideas that already exist. It just means that anyone’s knowledge will be quite strictly limited to one field. Not likely to be any Renaissance (wo)men these days.

But it is kind of disappointing to find that so many people have written about things that are very similar to what I thought was simply something I’d observed. On the flipside, often it is quite famous philosophers that have done so. Which is a little bit validating. 

All this has caused me to reflect on the human mind, and the fact that people all over the place, at all different times, have had almost the exact same thoughts and experiences that me, age 24, living in Brisbane, Australia in 2011 has had. Kind of like we are not so much individuals as imprints of everyone else who has ever come before us or will come after. I’m not sure if that is a comforting thought or not.

The Toss of a Coin

I really hope you read about this little scandal in the art world last week, because it was FUNNY. At least… I think it was. I may have been delirious/unsocialised after being cooped up in the house with a cold for much of the week, frustratedly staring through blurry eyes and sneezes at what appeared to be a very interesting and relevant essay on digital photography. It was pixelated through my tears - very relevant.

You know how things are funnier when you’re like that. Right? Riiiight?

ANYWAY! This is funny. Okay. So. Around this time of year there is a series of very special prizes awarded through the Art Gallery of New South Wales. We’re talking about the Archibald Prize, the Wynne Prize and the Sulman Prize. Each of them have a list of quite strict criteria and are judged by carefully selected panels of judges. These prizes are highly sought after because of their prestige and their publicity. 

You probably already heard that the Archibald went to Ben Quilty’s portrait of Margaret Olley. This made me very happy. 

There is often a lot of controversy surrounding the Archibald, and last year it was the Wynne that caused the stir. But this particular year it was the deciding of the winner of the Sulman Prize that has prompted all the fuss. 

Read this short blog post on Crikey.com.au for the full rundown.

This is my favourite bit: 

Bell picked 29 finalists out of 633 entries — over two-thirds of his selections contained animals. He said: “I like animals. I was tempted to put in all animals. I was going to make that the criteria but I had to choose some of my friends.”

When questioned as to whether this was an appropriate way to compile the shortlist, Bell apparently responded, “Don’t you like animals?”

He then decided on the winner by tossing a coin in the air and choosing the work that the coin landed closest to. And this was the lucky winner.

Bell himself is known for his satirical works, challenging the Anglo-Australian system of deciding ‘good’ art as well as the taboo nature of critical discussion of Indigeneity in art and the stereotype of the ‘Aboriginal artist’. He is most well-known for his work Aboriginal art - it’s a White Thing. Visitors to GoMA’s 21st Century exhibition will have seen his work Bell’s Theorum (Trikky Dikky and friends) 2005. So really, this decision to flip a coin for the winner of the Sulman Prize should come as no surprise: it is a comment by Bell on the way these things are decided more generally, in his opinion. 

And it’s an interesting point. As well as being quite funny.

In the spirit of

Jeff Wall | A sudden gust of wind (after Hokusai) | 1993

You know, it’s funny. I’ve often compared (mainly in my head but occasionally out-loud after I’ve had a few drinks and become that lovely, loving, warm person who says things like this out loud) that feeling you get in your stomach and your chest when you’re listening to some really wonderful, perfect music, with the feeling that you get when you’re in love, or when you love someone. 

I’m sure that it’s the same feeling, and if it isn’t it is oh-so very similar.

Sometimes - and I feel like I’m making a grand confession here and, thusly, feeling a bit coy about it - but sometimes, I get that same feeling when I look at or read about art. 

This is the sound of a bombshell dropping: 

Ppppppcccchhhhhhrrrrrrrouuuuhgghghghghhgghghghghghghccchhrrughhccrhhrurhguh.

See, I’ve been reading about Jeff Wall. Man, I love Jeff Wall. His art, I mean. I love it. His photographs. I love them. I really love listening to Wall talk about them, and I really love reading about them. And that’s what I’ve been doing.

I said that already, didn’t I? I’m like some kind of lovesick unicorn.

It is kind of lovely though, isn’t it, that art, those tiny, wonderful moments in an image, that ideas, notions, nuanced art-historical referencing, cleverness… can create this feeling in my chest?

A bit over a week ago I got a piercing in my ear, in the top bit around where that bump in the outer curve of your ear cartilage tends to be, if you have one. It’s quite subtle and nice. I like it. I think it’s pretty. 

I mostly did it because I’ve wanted to for ages. For some reason something has always held me back, until one day I realised that if I want a piercing in my ear I should just go right ahead and do it, because this life isn’t a trial-run… this is kind of it. 

So the piercing itself has ended up serving two purposes (well, three if you count ‘being badass’): the first one is looking pretty and fulfilling that desire that I’ve had for so long; the second, consequential purpose, is a reminder to myself that I should be doing the things I want to do in life, not just the things I think I should be doing. I shouldn’t be deferring the things I want to do to some abstract, future life that won’t exist.

In the spirit of this, whenever I start worrying that maybe by studying art and spending so much time thinking about it, I’m doing the wrong thing, I force myself to remember that love-like feeling I get from looking at and reading about Wall’s photographs, and I realise that if I care so much about something that it makes me feel like I am in love with it… well, then that is probably what I should be doing.