July/August 08
An Ever Expanding Universe (WA) > WA
Because of its title, my initial reaction to this exhibition was one of curiosity. Read More
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC) > VIC
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all. Read More
Melbourne Art Fair (VIC) > VIC
With 80 commercial galleries, 10 project spaces, two specially commissioned installations and anticipated sales at the $10.5 million mark, the Melbourne Art Fair isn’t the sort of place to play things down. Read More
Puberty Blues
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. Read More
Robert Jenyns (NSW) > NSW
Pop psychologists and armchair analysts are masters of the succinct and the obvious. Read More
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers (VIC) > VIC
Curiouser and curiouser... a new approach to gothic. Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present (NSW) > NSW
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. Read More
VIVID National Photographic Festival (ACT) > ACT
Australian photography festivals are seemingly multiplying at a rapid pace, with VIVID being the latest member to join the growing team. Read More
Curating Fragile Art > Off track with Andrew Mackenzie
By Andrew Mackenzie
Rudi Fuchs, director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from 1993-2002 and all-round European art grandee, was once asked what specific skills the curator brings to the job of presenting contemporary art. He said, “curators should show art works in good light and at eye level.” It was a whimsical and honest response; a disavowal of his own very prestigious king-maker profile, while also a genuine appeal to modesty and measure in the estimation of the curator’s role. Faux or otherwise, this disarmingly simple observation represents a generous attitude towards the relative importance of the artwork and art exhibition. A message embedded in the pithy remark is ‘never forget what comes first’.
But Fuchs’s comment was also a rearguard response to a changing world in which the complex theoretical underpinning of art practice has required the proliferation of curatorial and art theory courses in colleges and institutions worldwide. For today’s arts professional, his curatorial position, taken literally, seems rather conventional; blithely ignorant of cultural relativism and the revolution of multimedia time-based art. By contrast, today’s new breed of precocious curators are weaned on a complex mix of studies in gender, class, politics, ethnicity, linguistics, colonialism and post colonialism, globalisation, identity politics, technology, media communications and, more recently, the environment.
I feel for curators. They need to be conversant in absolutely everything, from the language of cyber-pop avatars to the arts funding mystic lingo of ‘place-making’. Curators work on all sorts of weird exhibition themes, from identity politics in the age of Buffy the vampire, to solemn cultural narratives of post communist Asia. Nothing is off limits and everything is in the mix. The challenge for the curator quickly becomes how not to spread yourself too thin. With so much potential cultural ‘stuff’ out there, the temptation might be to dive straight into any given meaty theme, then attach requisite art works. In curatorial terms I’d call this putting the cart before the horse; curating big ideas that art struggles to serve.
As an example, while recently in South Australia for the Adelaide arts festival, I popped into a second hand bookshop. I noticed a few 80s exhibition catalogues which I dutifully perused, (A Forest of Signs, Double-Take, High-Low) only to discover that all three doorstopping tomes, though focusing on three distinct fields (semiotics, history and memory, and the high-low cultural divide), included work by largely the same band of usual suspects from that era: Cindy Sherman, Robert Gober, Bruce Nauman et al. The curatorial theme changed, the artists stayed the same. The art work was good, but the bloated curatorial language, loose theory and casual (North American) assumptions about the rest of the world, was bad. As I put the books back on their shelf, an old curmudgeon within me wondered if curators should stop writing sweeping ‘contextual’ essays that made them sound real smart, and just get on with hanging art at eye level and in good light. This is what I was thinking, when I popped into the Adelaide Biennial, this year entitled Handle with Care.
Janet Laurence, Carbon Capture, 2007-08, duraclear, oil, ash, acrylic, glass, 3 panels, total 100 x 182 x 9.5 cm. Photo Gary Warner. Courtesy the artist and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne.
The Adelaide Biennial is unusual amongst biennials, in that it is restricted to Australian artists. This would be an anachronistic limitation for most countries these days, but for an Australian biennial it is almost pointless, given that one third of this year’s Biennial artists were not born in Australia. Many of the rest are either semi-resident or spend long productive periods working overseas. That said, the Biennial is a worthy centerpiece to the art festival’s visual art programme, this year significantly bigger under the directorship of Brett Sheehy. Handle with Care was curated by Felicity Fenner, who has been carving out a distinct reputation for herself as a curator at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery in Sydney. Unlike in previous years, the exhibition was given the entire lower ground floor space and although the budget seemed not too extravagant, all the works on show were commissioned specifically for the exhibition. As a group of art works it was a good show. As a curated whole, I was less sure.
Handle with Care presented ‘diverse responses to the fragility of the world’, encompassing social, cultural, geo-political and environmental dimensions. It was an unimaginably large premise. Maybe it’s the times we live in, but it seemed to me that this theme could accommodate just about all of the contemporary art I can think of. What art works these days, except for the more benign Archibald portraits, do not exhibit some sign of anxiety or disquiet? Following my perusal of the second hand bookshop, I strolled the galleries wondering how many of these exhibited works were enhanced by the construct of the curatorial premise. In some ways I found that the most engaging works, of say Janet Laurence or Dorothy Napangardi, Hossein Valamanesh or Sandra Selig, lived in a world of their own and had their own store for potency, independent of their context.
Perhaps more importantly, I found the jumbling together of many distinct anxieties just a little too forced. That personal, cultural and natural fragilities appear neatly analogous served the logic of the exhibition handsomely, but is it really useful to draw connections between fragile psychologies and fragile environments? Is there really a connection between nutrient rich run off from farms in North Queensland (currently destroying the Great Barrier Reef) and our consumer obsession with sugar as a displacement of libidinal desire? Ken Yonetani’s sugary installation at the entry seems to draw that connection. But for this happy consumer of Cherry Ripes, I’m not convinced.
Indeed, this analogous association between personal and environmental fragility seemed something of a wasted opportunity. Today’s debate about the environment urgently requires hard political decisions to be made. But this publicly funded biennial, though politically feel-good, was environmentally soft.
In any case, if it’s possible to leave aside the political impact that was so pregnant in this exhibition, was it a good one? Two questions come to mind. Did the show add to the potency of any one of the works? And did the artworks collectively add up to a greater experience than the sum of its parts? I’m afraid not. Handle with Care gets high marks however for audacious curatorial intent. But in the end it seems the wrong show for the right art. Its big idea was too big, despite the quality of art it subpoenaed as evidence. In the end, contemporary art may not
need to be hung at eye height anymore, but the meaning in Fuchs’s line still holds true.
Andrew Mackenzie is an art critic and Editor-in-Chief (Inside) Australian Design Review and (AR) Architectural Review Australia.
