Welcome to the May newsletter, written on flights between Australia, Africa, Iceland and Europe. No rest for the good we say! Of course we are disappointed not to say devastated to be missing out on the Biennale of Sydney and the reports from our spies make us even more so, but a saturation of work and travel experiences including spending four days in a country where the sun only sets for about half an hour at this time of year (Iceland), is a small compensation. So without further ado, here's our Contiki style slightly belated May newsletter...
Collector’s Footnotes Political correctness, they say it helps get things done...or does it? … more below
Hunters & Collectors choice morsels and feasts …more below
Marketplace
International
Well the best news emanating from the art world, were courtesy of Asian art. The Art HK, which opened with a bang and impressed all who attended (including numerous antipodeans) with its buoyancy, enthusiasm, size and quality. Asian art sold by Western and non-Western galleries to Asian collectors, dominated. Prices like $1 million for a Zhang Xiaogang sold by Pace gallery and $600,000 for a Liu Wei, sold by Sperone Westwater, were common and accessible it seems to buyers from mainland China as well as Indonesia and Singapore. The non-Asian highlights, were owned by the British, with a Damien Hirst formaldehyde work selling for £1.75 million and a sell out stall of works by Jim Lambie.
The fair capped off a rather brilliant Spring season for modern and contemporary art sales for the auction houses. Christie's managed to have a 100% clearance rate in their evening sale and achieved some record prices for classical works.
London and New York Spring auctions were also powering along, with both Christie's and Sotheby's reporting strong sales across all sectors. New York sales confirmed that price levels for established modern and contemporary works are almost back to pre-crash levels.Here are the figures to underscore the comparison the combined Sotheby's & Christie's total for this year was just under $1 billion, it was under $300 million last year and $1.2 billion in 2008.
The re-emergence of hyper-prices was heralded by the Christie's $95million sale of Picasso's 1932 Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, a record for any work of art ever sold at auction. We have to note that the sum was not universally greeted with elation. Two of New York's leading art critics, Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith had some choice words about some of the better uses of that kind of money.
Be that as at May, both houses exceeded their pre-sale estimates and achieved high clearance rates and a few new records and significant highs along the way, including Jasper Johns $ $25.5million, Andy Warhol's Self Portrait from 1986 $29million and a Mark Rothko $28million.
Also interesting were the results of the Sotheby's spring sales of African, Oceanic, Pre-Columbian and American Indian Art in New York, which brought a combined total of $12,383,819.
Cynically speaking, the global art market is looking for fresh blood and new geographic zones are appearing to be it. For our money, while sales of historical artifacts and ethnographic works dominate sales at present, we hope that the new focus on these regions supports the development of a strong contemporary art scene in those regions, alas as usual all kinds of money comes with all kinds of strings attached - ideological or otherwise. But then again, some money is better than none.
Domestic
There was nothing major to report on the domestic front as major auction houses collect their strength and wits for the June/July sessions in Sydney and Melbourne, which will be covered, lauded or maligned in the upcoming editions of this newsletter.
Showtime
Out & About
So here's to the art version of our Contiki itinerary over the past month. First stop Johannesburg
Johannesburg
The whole city is drowning in FIFA World Cup preparations and contemporary art world is no exception except that its only connection to the excitement is an attempt at tenuous expectation that visitors to SA will want to see more than just football when they visit and that art and culture will somehow make it on the agenda. Uhmmm, well that remains to be seen. What we have seen is a nascent contemporary art scene in Johannesburg, facing the same challenges as most emerging art scenes without a strong domestic market/audience and a long way to go towards reaching and understanding the international ones.
JAG - Johannesburg Art Gallery, was featuring (almost too predictably) a major installation by South Africa's main art export, William Kentridge. A work which like many of Kentridge's works surprise us by insularity of their intellectual pursuits. This particular work, focused thematically and aesthetically on Trotskyism and the early Russian/Communist avant-garde. Interesting? Yes. Well executed? Undoubtedly. Begging a question, why are we looking at this today and in today's South Africa? Most certainly.
Nicholas Hlobo at Brodie Stevenson Paintings, is the latest offering from this rising star of the South African contemporary art scene. True enough this not quite "painting" show is very much a testament to the fact that this artist knows and has been coached in what plays well to a Western contemporary audience looking at African art. He uses stitching and string and fabric on canvas with African motifs and sensibility. Potentially this is very potent and emotive material, giving scope for both lyricism and social commentary. Potentially, but not actually in Hlobo's case. He is happy to stay with light and breezy, aesthetically appealing but ultimately intellectually and emotionally under-resolved work which delivers bijoux rather than jewels.
On the other end of town at the brand new and rather spiffy Arts of Main complex, which arrives like a white cube oasis in Jo'burg downtown,Kudzanai Chiurai new show at the Goodman Project Space, provides a diametrically opposite approach. Chiurai pulls no punches at all about his political and emotional content and its dominance over commercial intent. The work is a room size political exposition fuelled by a mix of sex, death and corruption - one of the many and long sitting thorns in Chiurai's side (see our In Focus section on the artist below).This is the first of Chiurai's shows with the Goodman gallery and we hope the space supports his challenging undertakings in the future not only in South Africa but also internationally.
Harare
We counted ourselves lucky to arrive in Iceland during the Reykjavik Art Festival alas visual arts component here too plays poor cousin to performance/music/dance.Of course the other question in a country with population of just over 300,000, is how much can we expect of the domestic collections. Being maximalist, idealist, perfectionists, we always expect a high standard. If you can't be grand and amazing be small and terribly beautiful. The Reykjavik Art Museumgoes half way - the building is lovely if not big. The contemporary art as part of the Arts Festival left us entirely cold - "stunningly innovative exhibitions" - one comprising an installation composed of discarded plastic objects and such and another a series of life-size nude photos of ordinary people. It is reassuring that contemporary art suffers from same defects of imagination worldwide on occasion (yes we are deliberately avoiding naming names here).Two stone-throws away, equally lovely is the building of theNational Art Museum, which gave us a couple of bright moments, with a very sensible and neat selection of Cindy Sherman's movie stills. At this stage of the historical game and given the context, Sherman is beginning to look more and more like a seasoned master, which is her destiny in any case. Across the hall, there was also a tidy and charming selection of lithographs from another unlikely candidate for art sainthood or that is what it would have appeared like during his life - Edward Munch.
On the galleries trail, we also wandered into a room in a converted biscuit factory called The Living Art Museum and currently showing,CharlieHotelEchoEchoSierraEcho by a German collaborative duo ROSEN and WOJNAR, from Berlin and Zurich, who build sack like objects in cement and pretending they living persona and "investigate" their behavior in household situations. More joys of contemporary art! The press release states that their work is in the style of Joseph Kosuth's conceptual art. We think Kosuth might have a few words about that comparison. Our final moment of mirth in Icelandic contemporaneity came from a show at Kling & Bang. To be honest it is just worth it to say, we've been to Kling & Bang and back. What we experienced there was 111 a show by Maria Dembek & Robin McAulay is a series of pinhole photographs documenting the working and living spaces [just the spaces no people] of several contemporary artists occupying a building at Torstrasse 111 in former East Berlin in Berlin, 2009. The exhibition begs every kind of question as to merit and raison d'être but NOT as to the ambition of the artists to have their CV list a show with a gallery called Kling & Bang!
Reykjavik
What we are used to seeing in Harare is group shows of dozens of artists and prize exhibitions and on arrival we were not disappointed on either count. To wit, 35 Anniversary exhibition Gallery Delta, still the only game in town, presented a group exhibition telling the story of survival and endurance as well as the tremendous contribution that the gallery has made towards nurturing young Zimbabwean art talent. Virtually every contemporary artist of note has passed through the gallery and was represented in this exhibition. Our favourite works in the exhibition were from Tafadzwa Gwetai, Virginia Chihota and Misheck Masamvu.
Live ‘n' Direct inaugural exhibition and prize at National Gallery of Zimbabweis a major new sponsored and financially rewarding emerging and contemporary art exhibition launched with the arrival of the new deputy director of the gallery and a famous Zimbabwean art export himself Tapfumo Gutsa. We are generally sceptical of competitions and prizes except that they are a good way to help young artists eat once in a while. As to the decision about who gets to eat, well that is highly debateable as there are way too many ways to rationalise any particular decisions in a very mixed and uneven field, that is emerging art. This was also the case here. What we can comment on is that the emerging and contemporary artists in Zimbabwe are short changed by deficiencies in access to technology, information and very often skills training (we are told that oil painting is not even taught for lack of resources c.f. ideological reason elsewhere in the world). What we see is a lot of creativity and desire to reach out hampered by lack of resourcing and quite often absence of the best tools for personal expression and experimentation. Hopefully (only hopefully) some of the money received by the winning artists will enable them to brave some new frontiers in personal practice.
Sydney
Finally a micro-round up back in the Antipodes emanating from our spies, minus the Biennale of Sydney (!) For those interested in critical perspectives on that front, we are gathering three art critics at 6pm on Tuesday 29 June at Chalkhorse Gallery, 94 Cooper Street, Surry Hills, for a dedicated BoSSydney Review Panel.
Private Practice:
At Breenspace, Nike Savvas made a welcome return to Australian shores with a nice little show. Savvas has always had a joyful aesthetic sensibility and she continues it in this show even if it does tend more towards the purely aesthetic rather than less. We just hope that her sojourn in Australia does not affect Savvas' international ambitions and orientation!
At GBK, Healy & Cordeirolego exercises and space project impressed us as much as all of their oeuvre in general.
On the other end of town, at Roslyn Oxley9, Bill Henson appears to have come up with a personal retrospective in his latest show, revisiting themes from his works in the 1980's and 1990's and 2000's - working through antique statues and Greek ruins through to notionally/potentially underclad adolescents and landscapes. All staying safely away from possible controversy - gorgeously but all all too safely - and we are guessing the clients love that - an allusion to risk with no real challenges.
At Sarah Cottier, we must admit, we were expecting a little more from the Marco Fusinato show. Fusinato has produced some stunningly impressive works in the past but the current installation, This is Not My World which is literally a banner, saying these very words, left us a bit indifferent, but artists need to be given scope for experimentation and occasionally at the expense of the audience.
Sometimes being a contemporary art critic is a question of faith!
Melbourne
Private Practice:
At Tolarno a curious/positive development, Points of View a group show featuring works of Brendan Huntley, Andrew Long, Dan Moynihan, Conor O'Brien, Riely Payne and Jake Walker, demonstrating a definitive intent from the gallery to break through the stasis of its current stable, shall we say.
At Anna Schwartz, Peter Boothwas playing it safe and sellable with a show of untraumatic and average home size and priced charcoal and pastel on paper from 2003 to 2010. Booths themes and orientations have always struck us as being at an angle to what is happening in art and in the world but it is a wavelength that Melbourne audiences respond to and have done so for long time.
At Neon Parc, Trevelyan Clay's new canvases show a diversity of styles and directions, which suggests to us that Clay is actively searching intellectually and aesthetically. Some works are clearly more resolved than others but sometimes it is the imperfections that point the way forward. Certainly, we enjoy Clay's energy and approach and look forward to seeing where this current exploration takes him!
What happens when an artist is not given a choice of country or a choice of his environment? For many artists this is a living reality, whether by economic or political or personal factors. While we often speak of art true art being of its time and of its place, what happens when the place is not one's home? Artists like Kudzanai Chiurai have to answer this question and answer it with courage and conviction. Born in 1981 and part of Zimbabwe's first free generation (after independence) in Zimbabwe, Chiurai is already a art seasoned professional.
Ironically
it was his political convictions and works that precipitated the need
to leave his homeland to study art in South Africa, where he became the
first black student to graduate with a BA in Fine Art from the
University of Pretoria. You can take an artist out of one political
situation but you can't take political convictions and beliefs out of
the artist.
Not being resident in Zimbabwe, Chiurai's did not cease to be sensitive to the social concerns of his environment. His work is a constant and poignant conversation with the world around him, its concerns personal, social, urban, immediate at times violent and at times lyrical. He works in installation and mixed media incorporating urban art (graffiti) as well a photographs and neon. The message dictates the medium, when it comes to Chiurai's work. This is an artist who lives his moment and lives it immediately and it is that urgent immediacy that is winning him support and esteem internationally. He has been showing internationally since 2003 and having graduated from Uni of Pretoria in 2006 has participated in major exhibitions in France, the UK, Norway, Ireland, Finland and the Netherlands, he has also been represented in Art Basel and the Armory Show in 2009. While being of his time and of his place, Chiurai clearly sees himself as first and foremost as an artist, speaking to the world and his career to date and we expect in future will and will continue to reflect this. Kudzanai Chiurai is represented by the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.
Collector’s Footnotes
Political correctness, they say it helps get things done...or does it?
We normally take it for granted that political correctness is a pejorative term in the vernacular that is to say it now describes an enforcement of a sanctioned position which limits rather than creates opportunities. So we were surprised not to say shocked, when at a recent function, a seasoned curator commented "I like political correctness, it helps get things done." Needless to say we did not leave the situation without elaboration and insisted that the said curator account for his position and in turn we clarified ours and you can be the judge. Here's how the story goes in the case for political correctness: It is there for a reason, when we know what the official position of funding bodies is i.e. their publically correct idea of art should be and what art they would like to support, then we can propose the kind of art that they like and get that kind of art funded. A thing of beauty, simplicity and efficiency nothing less. At the risk of harping on the obvious, let us now sketch out what happens when we let bureaucrats rather than artists themselves decide what makes for good useful, politically correct art. Of course we could simply point out the lack of broad based popular support for contemporary art in Australia and lack of international success for Australian visual artists as indicative of the effects but let us just run through the logical steps leading up to that "happy" eventuality. Step 1: Bureaucrats have to account to the government and ultimately the electorate for their decisions. They also (an in Australia that is a given) do not have art education or an understanding of why art is an imperative part of the social cultural fabric in and of itself.
Step 2. As a result they can only be convinced of the merit of funding the arts if the artworks demonstrate (on paper at the very least) a measure of social utility and advancing socially sanctioned (ergo politically correct goals) whether they be gender equality, advancing interests of ethnic minorities, exploring/interrogating gender adenoiditis etc etc. Now this is not to say that these are not important concerns or legitimate concerns for art, however art is not a tool of social policy and art that becomes a tool of social policy is boring, doctrinaire art that lacks intellectual leadership and inspiration (because it has yielded it to bureaucrats). Dali, Miro and Picasso would never have gotten a grant from the Australia Council or from any other funding body for that matter. The phenomenon is insidious and far from uniquely Australian, in our recent travels and teachings working to help artists develop career skills, we encountered in a number of exercises artists using phrases like "capacity building and infrastructure development" and "growing locally and globally" for projects which in the first instance involved in fact renting a workshop and in the second raising funds to help orphans in small rural community. Clearly these artists did not invent these phrases, they were taught to use them - because they work on institutions and help get funding, whether or not they mean anything remotely resembling reality. So we suppose our pragmatic colleague was correct -- political correctness does help things done, but what kinds of things get done and what kinds of people get the money to do them, is quite another matter.
of course the word to the wise is as always, if in doubt, get advice...
Hunters & Collectors
This month we are pleased to feature some new works from Tafadzwa Gwetai a serious new talent hailing from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe (The City of Kings and Queens). These are works on paper, but the challenge to readers is to guess the medium and method that the artist used in production and yes it is a trick question!
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By: owojy (Guest) on 09-09-2010 05:03