September/October 08
Artbank: Celebrating 25 Years of Australian Art (SA) > SA
Artbank is the largest buyer of contemporary Australian art in the country. Read More
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green: War (NSW) > NSW
Being assigned the role of an official war artist must be a pretty big ask at any point in time. Read More
Point of View: Eugene Carchesio Explores the Collection (QLD) > QLD
With a career spanning more than 25 years, Brisbane artist Eugene Carchesio has established himself as one of Australia’s most fascinating and thought provoking contemporary artists. Read More
Thousands of Masterpieces
The means by which art is valued, by the dollar, has always seemed to me simultaneously an arbitrary and endlessly fascinating subject. Read More
Two Adventures in Three Dimensions (VIC) > VIC
Given their black gums and yellow bums, “loveable” is possibly not the word that immediately springs to mind when confronted with Julia Robinson’s goats. Read More
Melbourne Art Fair (VIC)
By Megan Backhouse
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.
It’s a mass art-fest of mega-mart proportions that regularly attracts Australia’s top-tier galleries and a sizeable line-up of overseas ones and, last time around, more than 26,000 visitors to the Royal Exhibition Building.
It’s been held biennially since 1988 and, where the newer Art Melbourne fair, which took over the very same venue in April, caters to the more affordable and more gimmicky side of proceedings, the not-for-profit Melbourne Art Fair makes much of it’s more high-brow credentials. For starters, there’s a stringent selection process with more galleries applying to show than can be squeezed in.
Outfits like Anna Schwartz, Tolarno and Niagara (all from Melbourne) and Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 are regular exhibitors but this time around there are several galleries taking out stands for the first time, such as Uplands (which, some years back, hired a limousine to ferry people from the fair to their then city gallery instead), Neon Parc and Sophie Gannon (all from Melbourne) and Sydney’s Sarah Cottier.
While some dealers say they have no choice but to take out a Melbourne Art Fair stand because collectors scale the place buying up big, and commensurately reducing their spending at commercial galleries in the months surrounding the event, Art Fair director Bronwyn Johnson, disputes this. She insists the fair attracts many new buyers, who otherwise would not be collecting art at all and that there is “anecdotal evidence” to suggest that art sales post art-fair are “quite good”.
With stands costing between $15,000 and $20,000, participating in the fair is, to quote Johnson, “not an inexpensive undertaking” but she insists the fair attracts a broad range of visitors allowing galleries to increase their client base.
Marcel Cousins, #3, 105 x 105cm, airbrushed acrylic on canvas. Courtesy Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne.
Not every exhibit, however, is about sales, with fair organisers this year having commissioned two large-scale installations (at the time of publishing, the artists’ names were still under wraps) to be given to public institutions at the closure of the event. Then there are the project spaces, this year spilling out onto the Melbourne Museum forecourt, including experimental pieces by Melbourne’s Damiano Bertoli and Sweden’s Jonas Dahlberg, curated by Mark Feary.
Anne Zahalka’s art fair “project room” is in fact at the Sofitel Hotel, where the photographer spent three weeks as artist- in residence earlier this year. Inside the exhibition building, project spaces have been taken over by Joint Hassles (showing pieces by Melburnians Sean Bailey and Alex Vivian), the South Project (works by Melbourne’s Brook Andrew and Chile’s Claudia del Fierro) and a DVD exploring the notion of memory through the phenomenon of theme parks in Asia by South Korean video and new media artist Kyungah Ham, among several others.
South Korea is also represented by three galleries, and, all up, one-quarter of the total number of participating outfits hail from overseas, predominantly the Asia-Pacific (though there are galleries from further afield, such as L.A. Galerie from Frankfurt and Mother’s Tankstation from Dublin).
While, in the past, overseas galleries have tended to attract fewer visitors and fewer sales than the Australian spaces, Johnson maintains there is a lot of “repeat visitation” from overseas participants who are “building an audience”. And as for Australian artists, she says it is important they not “show their work in a vacuum”.
“This is a fair in the Asia-Pacific region and we should be having galleries from our part of the world. Australian artists want to exhibit alongside their overseas peers.”
Most of the Australian artists represented are showing new work, with there being a strict rule that 80 per cent of the offerings be by living artists. And, as always, there is much back-room discussion about whether the fair with its primary market focus has generated such a following that it can become an annual event, with Johnson saying the prospect is currently being considered again.
Fairs are “popping up all over the Asia-Pacific”, she says, with new annual ones in Hong Kong and Shanghai and a recently established biennial one in Auckland. Trade events they might be, but they are also immensely popular. “People like to go to fairs,” Johnson says. “Fairs turn cities into cultural hubs.”
Peter Robinson, Concatenation and Dispersion, 2007. Courtesy Sutton Gallery, Melbourne.
Melbourne Art Fair 2008 30 July to 3 August
Megan Backhouse is a Melbourne-based journalist who has been writing about the visual arts for more than 10 years.
