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Sept/Oct 2010

Bringing the outside in > NSW
May Lane is a very short street in Sydney’s inner west Read More

Cream of the crop > NSW
The Museum of Contemporary Art becomes a hive of activity in preparation for Primavera, Read More

Drawing NOW > VIC
A single black bullet is drawn starkly upon a plain white ground. Read More

Melbourne Art Fair 2010 > VIC
No one could accuse Melbourne Art Fair organisers of treading too lightly. Read More

Social capital
Craig Walsh’s Digital Odyssey is epic Read More

To fair, or not too fair > VIC
Never before has alternative culture been so mainstream. Read More

Weird scenes inside the Art Museum
There’s a scene in the brilliant recent Australian film Animal Kingdom Read More

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In praise of minor masterpieces

By Andrew Mackenzie

Gabriella Coslovich recently pulled up the NGV in The Age, more a gentle chide than a full serve, on its failure to deliver on its commitment to contemporary art. Seven years after its fanfare relaunch it has become clear that a Gursky here or a Mueck there is really the spicy exception to the conservative rule. Historic fare dominates, best
exemplified by the Winter Masterpiece series; from the dark melancholy of the Dutch Masters to the rude libidinal power of Picasso. With a splash of Hollywood bravura these boldly proclaimed ‘blockbusters’ are now enshrined as the linchpin in the gallery’s commitment to broad public appeal. Hollywood blockbusters are of course quintessentially about return on investment. So in the translation of this terminology to art, as long as ‘return’ is not simply measured by ticket sales, they
may have a place. Despite the wonders of virtual communications, when it comes to priceless artefacts in crates travelling vast distances by ship, Australia will remain forever disadvantaged by what Geoffrey Blainey coined the "tyranny of distance". Perhaps in Australia, putting all your eggs into one basket, in this case a must-see extravaganza, is the only sustainable way to see the world’s best, and often most expensive, art.

Elsewhere, the blockbuster is loosing its splash. With the recent resignations of both the Royal Academy’s Norman Rosenthal in London and the Guggenheim’s Thomas Krens (AKA the ‘CEO of culture’) these progenitors of the modern blockbuster exhibition may not have fallen on their swords, but their big buccaneering monster shows look set to go the way of billion dolar Wall Street bonuses.

Bean counting aside, there remain lingering questions as to what the cultural value of an art blockbuster is. Those of you who read my last column on Robert Hughes will make the connection to the perennial dynamic between high culture versus low culture and edification versus entertainment. I’m not against galleries being popular. It’s just a shame that contemporary art seems forever a side-show in the popularity stakes, rarely at the forefront. Challenging and provocative contemporary art will never, it seems, see the ticket sales of venerable modernity. So perhaps the NGV have it right. After all, we travel to the Tate Britain (the old classical pile at Millbank, not the Tate Modern where the tour buses now go) to see Turner or Bacon, not Emin or Hirst. So, the NGV is where you see Bracks or Roberts.

If this is so, thank god for other galleries like the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art (ACCA). With it’s most recent exhibition New09, the Centre quietly and confidently continues to explore the less charted
territories of new emerging Australian art. Compared to the theatrical stage-designed hang of its bigger brother’s exhibitions up the road, this show is disconcertingly lean and shamelessly demanding of its viewer.

Though the word new is one of the most abused words used in modern times, in this case the word is literally deserved, as this is a show of specifically commissioned art works. In today’s straightened times, with galleries doing it tough and many artists getting creative with lentils and rent cheques, an exhibition that commissions new work from a handful of emerging artists is praiseworthy for its social good alone. That this should also result in a series of highly engaging, profoundly thoughtful works is a testament to the achievements of New09’s curator Charlotte Day, and ACCA’s driving force and on-going guardian Juliana Engberg.

The exhibition is presented as a journey, which the gallery lends itself to given its non-orthogonal plan, shifting scale and loop circulation. But as much as it is a journey through space, it is also a temporal journey. This art takes time. On entry, you are first confronted by the spectre of the crude ambulation of two ragged bodies held upright by helium balloons, in the rough form of a man and woman. The man is the artist, Simon Yates. The movement of these crumpled avatars throughout the space, each holding divining rods, is simultaneously disturbing and comedic. Our journey is augured in a mood of lunacy and meaningless motion.

Justine Khamara’s portraits, of herself and her brother, are over-sized photographs backed onto sheet metal then laser cut to allow each to be pushed out from the centre. The result is a pair of protruding volumes that distort wildly as you move around them. One is wide eyed staring into space. The other is in fixed grimace, forcefully denying your gaze. While it is impossible not to project onto these faces a degree of sibling history, as with Yates, this encounter with an artist’s self portrait pushes the viewer to engage in representation at a much deeper level than that of biography.

The installation by Brodie Ellis features a ceiling projection of an extraordinary cloudscape, unique to Queensland’s far north, called Morning Glory. For the first time transcendence is in the air, literally, and time seems to hang, like the clouds. But it doesn’t last. This moment of reverie is interrupted by the loud intrusion of Marco Fusinato’s work next door.

Fusinato has installed an industrial steel structure, rigged with theatre lights, amplifiers and speakers. At regular intervals the structure momentarily blasts white light and a thunderous concatenation of sound that would wake Lazarus. It is the gallery’s very own experiential black hole, and the placing of this work ext to Ellis’ is deliberate and provocative.

Moving through to the next room there is Matthew Griffin chatting with animal rights activist Peter Singer, spliced between 3 screens placed on the floor, trapped in its own loop of staged informality. Benjamin Armstrong’s bizarrely biological ossified forms contain their own quiet confrontation to our corporal world.

Finally, appropriately, an installation by Pat Foster and Jen Berean brings this unanchored odyssey to an end. A sorry fragment of suspending ceiling floats over an empty space. The connecting aperture to Khamara’s room is blocked by a cheap three-windowed aluminium framed door. Strips of tape demarcate it as a work in progress, though progress would be pushing it. The gallery’s point of egress is partly blocked by two aluminium benches, supporting two sheets of glass. These spare fragments do not, for me, recall the
formalism of Judd or Andre. They recall what Slavo Zizek defines as the objective violence of invisible, coercive norms, rules and regulations that dictate the way we live our lives. As I stand in the room, considering its poverty, I think of dumb OHS rules, the infringements of observation, cars that admonish with a bleep, minor traffic violations, and vast dehumanised pits called call-centres. With such spare means as this, I am rendered furious at the expansion of objective violence in our world and our lives. It is a simple, stupid and brilliant work that repeals me. I think it is meant to.

I leave some time later, full of thoughts. This is what a good exhibition does, with minimal resources. Give me a nuanced, crafted show such as this any day over the showy razzamatazz of the next must-see.

Justine Khamara, Dilated Concentrations (Simon), 2008/2009, UV print on stainless steel, 110cm height, 80cm length and a 33cm protrusion from the wall. Courtesy the artist.

New09 is at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) until 17 May.

Andrew Mackenzie is an art critic and Editor-in-Chief (Inside) Australian Design Review and (AR) Architectural Review Australia.