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All the murmurs are there for a no fanfare recovery and exit from the GFC in the art world. The mid-November sales for both Sotheby’s and Christies confirm at least that much. At Sotheby’s proof of the pudding was in, Andy Warhol's "200 One Dollar Bills," which sold for US$43.8 million or more than three times its highest pre-sale estimate of $12 million! The sale yielded a spectacular return to form of $134 million. Conversely Christie's, sales of Postwar and Contemporary art brought in $74.1 million, within its pre-sale estimate of $66.9 million to $94 million.

On the amusing side of things and falling into the category of “it seemed like a good idea at the time” was Phillip’s de Pury’s new take on the auction world with “themed auctions”. The November “theme” was Music. Clearly Phillips do not believe that one art form is enough to generate sales or attention in our multi-flexi-poly-inter-media world, uhmm. In a rather demonstrative chase for publicity they included lots produced by musicians like Pete Doherty, Moby, and Marilyn Manson, alongs side err real artists like Martin Kippenberger, Andy Warhol, Anish Kapoor and Thomas Hirschhorn who to the best of our knowledge never attempted to join any band or orchestra on stage (we will wait to be corrected). To add to the excitement Simon de Pury’s auctioneering was “complemented” by DJ known as as “Doctor Rockit” and or “Mr. Vertigo”, who played music by the featured musician along with each lot.
“Surprisingly” the sale yielded rather modest £1,216,438 (with premium), with just 64% percent of the 221 lots clearing and top lots going to two paintings produced by Damien Hirst in collaboration with the band The Hours (going for £217,250 and £145,250), no stellar records there.
Other top lots included Peter Lindberg’s 1999 triptych portrait of Keith Richards smoking (£109,250); Paul McCartney’s Surfers against Sewage, a surfboard decorated with red painted flowers (£49,250); and Marilyn Manson’s delightfully image-consistent 2002 watercolor, Elisabeth Short as Snow White (A Smile II) (£32,450).

But fun and games aside, things are looking up and signs are also good for sales at Art Basel Miami Beach, with the directors reporting that collectors and museum buying groups are out in numbers that match prior years and the mood is boyant.

Domestic

Tim Goodman is smiling following the success of the first sale since his take over of the Sotheby’s licence and leaving Bonham’s to continue operations solo in Australia. The musical chairs paid off (we have to continue with the theme do we not?) with a sale, which managed to source blue chip works, which have not seen an auction room since the 1940’s like. The overall sale cleared 106 works and brought in $7.4 million being the most successful mixed vendor auction since May 2007.
The prize lot was Russell Drysdale’s Evening, which sold for $690,000 on a pre-sale estimate of $250,000 to $300,000 and was part of a swathe of lots which left post-crisis estimates behind in enthusiastic bidding. Elioth Gruner's Frosty Morning, raced past the $60,000 upper reserve to $82,000, Ethel Carrick Fox's The Spanish Courtyard yielded double its upper limit and sold for $60,000, while the most impressive estimate escape went to recently repatriated Carrick Fox painting, La Maree Haute A Saint-Malo, which reached $420,000 or close to three times its upper estimate.
But what about contemporary art we hear you ask? The good times may be back but if you are an artist with a heartbeat, stop that immediately we tell you!

Showtime

Out & About

On three continents in Africa, Europe and Australia…

Harare

Our first gallery visit in Harare was to the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and the launch of a themed competition exhibition dedicated to cotton, sponsored by the textile manufacturer Cottco. The surprising feature of the exhibition for us was that all the works were for sale and priced to sell (at least by Occidental standards) and featured cotton or cotton production equipment. Well if Phillips de Pury are doing Music, why not cotton? With few exhibition venues and resources, the NGZ is trying to pick up the challenge by becoming the temporary exhibition space for Zimbabwe’s artists, so much so that the permanent collection appears to have gone into permanent retreat. We certainly did not get to see it, but then tough times call for creative measures and in visual art a space with white walls is sometimes the ultimate resource and NGZ has international quality exhibition space even if its good things come in somewhat small packages. So let’s hope that they continue supporting contemporary art and work on more innovative and progressive projects. For one we would love to see the gallery obtaining support for bringing exciting contemporary international artists to Zimbabwe, especially those working in new media.

We were to learn at length, Harare creative art scene is indeed a world of competitions and launches. “Not a day without a launch, a speech and a winner somewhere” could be the new motto for the Sunshine city at a time when reasons to celebrate are in short supply. This is possibly why, competitions are the staple fare for Harare’s premier and pretty much the only representational commercial space Gallery Delta (which has in fact recently became a foundation). Being the only game in town puts enormous pressure on the owners of the gallery Derek Huggins and Helen Leiros to make the most of the gallery as a unique outlet for visual expression and the support for emerging artists and they do an admirable and courageous job. However the very undertaking itself forces the sort of logistic compromises that galleries almost nowhere in the world need to ever contemplate. For instance, as a means of maximising its role as a showcase and attracting attention and sponsorship, Delta runs competition based group exhibitions, such as the Berlin Wall Competition we attended during our visit. The show featured over sixty works by the odd thirty artists and attracted support from both the Goethe Institute and the German Embassy, crucial at the time when the buying public for contemporary art in Zimbabwe along with the rest of the population, has been forced bot prioritise survival. And by survival we mean actual food on the table type stuff and not reducing your international holiday budget dear readers. For anyone booking a stint of silence, insight and poverty courtesy of a Vipassana retreat, do yourself a favour and spend your money on a trip to Harare and win win by contributing to the economy there while learning the Buddhist lesson of reducing your needs and smiling about it. But back to the art in the show - - theme competitions are not a good way to learn about the practice of any artist, especially with a theme, which challenged the erudition of the artists more than their creative abilities. More than a few including the judges it seems prioritised actual rather than conceptual walls as an imperative feature in the works produced. Some of the artists we noted, who overcame that interpretational hurdle and produced poetic and metaphoric works included Virginia Chihota, Masimba Hwati and Misheck Masamvu, whose passionately expressionist paintings literally screamed from the walls and forced us to remonstrate with the director as to why Masamvu did not win. (More about that later…)

Paris

We came back to Paris to be embarrassed by the riches of the West, from the moment we stepped into Deadlines at the Musee d’Art Moderne. A theme show on a different scale and proportion to anything our friends in Zimbabwe could contemplate – featuring significant bodies of work from ten major international artists of different ages, countries and generations, united by the fact that the works chosen for the show were produced prior to and with the consciousness of the artists’ mortality. While the choice of artists remained oblique, Absalon, Gilles Aillaud, James Lee Byars, Chen Zhen, Willem de Kooning, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Hans Hartung, Jörg Immendorff, Martin Kippenberger, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joan Mitchell and Hannah Villiger. However beyond that we found the curatorial effort incredibly impressive and effective. This show made us wish that every exhibition was curated with the same level of respect and reverence for the artist, the same respect and understanding of the critical mass of work that is required by audiences and by an artists to share his vision with us. Each room was curated like an homage and a tribute and duly so. Not all works were of equal merit or strength, however each artist was given an individually designed space in the exhibition from the all gold darkened interior for James Lee Byar’s all gold rooms to a walk through corridor for Felix Gonzalez-Torres photographs to the bare simplicity of the white walls for Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell. What was also interesting to note how little in fact the consciousness of proximate mortality affected the works. Hans Hartung for example produced works of incredible vibrancy and energy and joie de vivre, which dated to the very last two weeks prior to his demise. Perhaps the only sign of self-pity masquerading as pathos was in Robert Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with a skull-shaped walking stick, which is intensely posed, poised and beautifully composed and controlled and unfortunately less for being so. So oddly enough the overall impression we had from the show, was not about art and death but about respect for art and artists. We walked out wishing curators did not wait until the artist ticks the “Dead” box in the living status questionnaire.

Sydney

Public Affairs:

Art Gallery of New South Wales: Making art happen is one of the best ways to spend spare cash and make a big difference in a small country, especially if it permits the kind of scale that John Kaldor could and to be honest, the AGNSW, 40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects survey of Mr Kaldor’s efforts do much credit to him and his efforts to introduce and deliver important international art to Australia. Viewed together the history is equally as impressive as the works themselves – from Christo and Jean-Claude to Bill Viola, Sol LeWitt, Jeff Koons, Nam June Paik. So a big tick from us and we will put down to experience, the concurrent Kaldor Project at the AGNSW by Tatzu Nishi. The profoundly titled War and Peace is the installation currently obstructing the façade of the AGNSW with oversized blue cubby houses cutely hiding the two eponymous Gilbert Bayes equestrian statues, we’ve long taken for granted. The press release tells us that the interiors create a surreal environment.  Now those statues don’t even come close to being the most beautiful things we have ever seen but they are innocuous compared to Nishi’s blue boxes we are subjected to at present and notwithstanding the cuteness the one line joke environments contained within them.
Even less of a tick from us for MCA’s currently showing New Acquisitions: which promises to deliver some of Australia’s most exciting living artists, but succeeds in bringing something more aptly called “we are told these guys are getting sold pretty good, so we buy them too.” It is hard to use words “exciting” in reference to either Gemma Smith’s static cardboard constructions or Moya McKenna’s exercises in brown using brushes and oil paint or Nigel Milsom’s exercises with brushes and black paint. Ironically, there is really exciting art to be had in Australia and it is not that difficult to spot on account of the country being quite small bigger than Zimbabwe but definitely but still small enough for anyone of merit to register on the radar of relevant professionals.  But in small towns, playing nice often counts for more than being good, which perhaps explains the tired selection currently on display to the left on Level 4 of the MCA instead of a hot show that can hold its own anywhere in the world. Stand by for our December/January instalment when we proffer some of our choices for the virtual and actual best of Australian contemporary art for 2009.

Private Affairs:

We got back to town too late to catch most of the November shows and only in time for the final show for the year openings. The upside is we get to indulge ourselves with extra word space on the shows we did catch even if it does force us to take kid gloves off boys and girls, simply because our travels have entrenched us in our belief that even tolerating mediocrity silently helps promote it, so no more. Credit where credit is due and discredit where it is deserved. Alas more of the latter than the former in Sydney in November.

Connie Dietzschold Bill Wright Langue Froid…Cold Lalguage/Tongue as we guessed from the title and the curatorial authorship – was intended to be a nuanced, intellectual orchestration on the theme of art and text/language, starting with the title’s allusion to the expression sang froid (cold blood or impassivity). We have previously commented on how intensely interesting and original, how under-explored, how timely and how relevant the theme of text and art is. However these comments aside, what was most striking in this curatorial effort is that it became an example of curatorial effort overwhelmingly overshadowing and undermining the art. We felt like we were watching an orchestra, where the conductor was gesticulating with such force and physical contortion that all the attention is on him, with the music becoming becoming peripheral. While we genuinely thought well of some of the works, they were so stifled and hamstrung in forced combination with each other (is it really possible to respectfully show works by 30 artists in a relatively small gallery space?). We also questioned the selection of artists into the show, who do not work with text and language as a primary medium of their personal practice or in the context of specific works selected e.g. Homi Vesal, Venske & Spaengel and Lisa Jones. Once again we feel the need to note that curation can only arrive at the big idea by focusing on the art and not the other way around.
   
Across the hall at Danks Street at Dominic Mersch, Tom Loveday’s solo effort was an apposite opposite being a solo show, of non-objectve and non-text based art and unburdened by curatorial conceptual overload. So the self-indulgence had to be taken care of by the artist. The work hangs together very nicely, the formal composition is very well thought out and will fit into most lounge-rooms, and we so wish that we had not read in the bio that Mr Loveday teaches design and achitecture…we are advised that the artist has an “interest in alienation” but surely that is not another way of saying that the work is intended to engage with the audience!
Our last salvo comes at the expense of Gallery 9’s show for Mishka Borowski devoted to her current exploration of glories of paint and toy horses. While hyper-realism is a wonderful thing and the enthusiasm for horses is intensely cute, neither the content nor the theme nor the mastery of technical execution manage to transcend anywhere or to communicate anything more than well what they are and to be honest, pretty has never been quite enough.

Melbourne

Public Affairs:

At NGV Australia: The Ian Potter Centre, Ricky Swallow, The Bricoleur is a survey of the work of an Australian artist currently living in Los Angeles whose biggest audience and market will continue to be home town. Why? Because the seductiveness and the appeal of the Swallow’s wood carving, bronze casting and watercolours is seductive in a narrow context of a place with few comparisons. The poetry in his work is there but it speaks more to a place that has yet to learnt to respect the length of time than any place that already does. And so it goes.

Private practice:

Does an exhibition titled as UPLANDS, Group exhibition, Problem Solving: I wish Charlie Kaufman wrote Relational Aesthetics need a review? We think not. Theorists should theorise and artists should make art – is this not a fair deal? Still pulling the concept apart we spotted some interesting watercolours by Michelle Ussher and a couple of paintings by Seraphine Pick, which reached for something with possibilities in that early Peter Doig sense of the word.

On the almost opposite end of the spectrum, at Neon Parc delivered a solo for Steven Black billed as a “Leipzig school painter”, who delivered a show of classical painting studies and compositions in stark contrast to the Neon Parc stable and general cool grunge ambiance. This of course is in and of itself is interesting even if it leaves us puzzled as to why?

At Tolarno, Patricia Piccinini, forced us to endure her Unforced Intimacies which combined all of her chief artisan’s technical capabilities from casting metal to synthetic creature creation to making video. G-d spare the beasts and children.

Finally at Anna Schwartz, Shaun Gladwell, Recent Photographs forced us to commend the gallery for authoring the following text describing the show: “While the entire project calls upon a set of discursive references, represented in various mediums, the photographs in particular evoke the history of the Australian landscape tradition, and negotiate concepts of the romantic sublime.” Helping neatly these terribly attractive designer shots tell at least a couple of hundred words.

National Gallery of Zimbabwe

December Hop to It:

Harare

First Floor Gallery Launch show and fundraiser for Harare’s very first artist run space ever! If you can’t go there check out the art works which will be posted on the First Floor Gallery Facebook Group Wall and support the young gallery by buying a work (most for US$25)

Sydney

• AGNSW, 40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects
• AGNSW Rupert Bunny artist in Paris
• MCA, Take your time: Olafur Eliasson
• Chalk Horse, MANIT SRIWANICHPOOM
• Flinders Street, Luis Martinez
• James Dorahy, Lit up like a X-mas tree # 4
• GRANTPIRRIE, Michael Zavros
• BREENSPACE, Joyce Hinterding
• KALIMAN, Kathryn Del Barton
• gbk, Thukral & Tagra 315, Sector 23 (opp. Bosedk mega mall).
• Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Charwei Tsai, Water, Earth and Air

Melbourne

• NGV Australia: The Ian Potter Centre, Ricky Swallow, The Bricoleur
• NGV Ian Potter Centre: Long Distance Vision, Three Australian Photographers
• ACCA, Jenny Holtzer
• UPLANDS, Nadine Christensen
• Neon Parc, Steven Black
• John Buckley, John Firth-Smith
• Sutton Gallery, Nick Selenisch
• Tolarno, Patricia Piccinini, Unforced Intimacies
• Karen Woodbury, Kate Rhode
• Anna Schwartz, Stephen Bram
• Murray White Room, Tony Clark

Brisbane

• IMA, Mirror Mirror: Then and Now
• Ryan Renshaw, Scott Miles
• QAG/GoMa, The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT6)

Perth

• PICA, Dominic Show Character, Guest Curator: Jonah Dames
• Fremantle Arts Centre, REVELATIONS: contemporary visions of apocalypse

Adelaide

• GREENAWAY, Imants Tillers  Leap of Faith

Tasmania

• CAST, Members Show
• CRITERION, Scott Redford, Reinhardt Dammn + Honey Pump: New Single Out Now

In Focus

Misheck Masamvu

Post Election Results oil on canvas 2008 It is our custom to avoid meeting artists prior to meeting their work. It is a good policy and saves a lot of red faces and sometimes leads to pleasant surprises. During our stay in Zimbabwe, we had the honour of delivering a lecture and leading a forum on the interaction of globalisation and tradition in the context of contemporary art and the art market. The discussion involved when a hand went up from a young man with dreadlocks wearing a blindingly bright yellow basketball jersey. He asked us “Do you think any foreign person has an ability and a right to say and judge what is and what is not good in art in Zimbabwe?” Our answer was, as it is anywhere in the world – we have no right as critics to judge the cultural content of any place we are not

intimately involved with neither in Zimbabwe nor in Aboriginal Australia, however to the extent that it is Art then we judge it on that human level, which transcends place and history – otherwise how could we feel Venus de Milo, without being Ancient Greeks? To illustrate, we added that just the other day, we were at an opening of an exhibition at Harare’s own Delta Gallery and saw some wonderful paintings by an artist called Misheck Masamvu, which touched us and spoke to us loud and clear and we did not need to know anything about Misheck or his world or the culture of Zimbabwe because they were simply that powerful, that emotional and that good. Just as we were saying those words, the young man in the yellow jersey, cleared his throat, smiled coyly and said..”err that’s me.” Do we really need to say anything more about the power of good art to communicate and connect people? We can say about Masamvu that he is indeed an artist, not only of talent but also focus, dedication, intelligence and ambition, who despite the tremendous difficulties that becoming a professional artist living in Zimbabwe entails, at the ripe old age of 29 has managed to score a full scholarship to study in Germany and has been pursuing exhibitions internationally for over a decade, with a shows with Lisbon, London, Amsterdam, Athens, Munich, Bonn and Dakar. Here’s an artist who clearly views himself as an intellectual activist in his country but a citizen of the world in the best possible sense. Masamvu is represented by Gallery Delta, Harare and his works sell for under US$1000 but let’s say not for long.

Collector’s Footnotes

Hunters & Collectors

This month due to popular support we are bringing you more samples from some of the more interesting young artists we encountered in Harare. Virginia Chihota, Gareth Nyandoro, both also from the stable of the one and unfortunately only Gallery Delta.

Personalised Land (2009) 3 Plastic bags and soils