Welcome to the February newsletter and 2010! Being challenged by the concept of leisure and a phobia of lying on the beach we chose to spend the month away from the newsletter, er getting even more meshed in the art world. One wonders whether the DNA coding system includes the letters A, R and T, we have a suspicion that ours does! Those who follow our pursuits through occasional updates on Facebook will have noted publication of recent incendiary articles on Relative Merits of Censorship , Art in Zimbabweas well astheUses and Abuses of Economic Sanctions and the Arts. Still others might have noted and taken part in The Sydney Review Panel, a fledgling project that we have started in Sydney to give voice to art criticism and opportunity for debate. The first edition was staged at the Cross Arts Projects, with follow up events in the first series planned for March at Chalkhorse and April at Gallery4a. So for anyone who wanted to take us to task over an exhibition and weigh in on a discussion with experts – now you can (at least if you are in Sydney!). Never let it be said that we are not open to opinions or less than 1000% committed to this thing called Art, so without further ado…
Marketplacedid someone whisper the crisis is over?…more below
Showtime November reviews and December hop to its…more below
Collector’s Footnotes Foreign rights or on being human… more below
Hunters & Collectors choice morsels and feasts more below…more below
Marketplace
International
According to some experts, the art market is totally back to normal, normal being record prices and high clearance rates that is. February sale in London yielded a total of £124.3 million for Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips de Pury & Co contemporary and modern art. The sales achieved three times than the total last year, bolstered mainly by sales of major post-war artists but also with some record prices for younger living artists.
If there was any trend to be observed in the sales is that there is a move away from the glitzy showpiece works of the pre-GFC. Not muchHirst or Warhol to be seen. Instead and impressively serious collectors returning to the market are supporting more sober work. Sotheby’s sale of 80 lots included 49 works of art from an Anna and Gerhard Lenz collection of works from the cerebral, minimalist Zero movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Record prices were achieve for 19 artists including Yves Klein’s Feu 88 which sold for £3.2million, to Lucio Fontana whose had four works in the top ten results of the sale, Chris Ofili at £802,850 and Piero Manzoni at £2.8million.
Domestic
We’ll wait to see how the new and improved international climate plays out in the late March auctions for Deutscher and Hackett and for Menzies in Sydney. It will also be interesting to see how the newly re-grouped version of Sotheby’s performs, in its first auction for 2010 in April in Melbourne.
Showtime
Out & About
Sydney
Public Affairs:
Ann Lewis Collectionplayed second fiddle to Olafur Eliasson at the MCA during summer and there is no reason why that should not have been the case. While clearly a wonderfully diverse if not a particularly deep collection, with some nostalgia inspiring works like a fine John Firth-Smith painting from mid-1970s when he still had punch, promise and a desire to say something. There is a lot for a visitor to enjoy from individual pieces in the exhibition but taken as a whole, the most we can say about the curation is “what a mess!”. While it might have seemed like a good idea to put some traditional indigenous works with Joseph Beuys, without a serious thematic underpinning it looks like a gaffe like most such attempts at “originality”. Equally unconvincing were attempts to find common ground among the modernist abstractionists in the collection.
At Artspace Jayce Salloum documentary film maker, political activist, artist – sometimes one man can take on too much in his work and on this occasion perhaps it was the artist that was a little short-changed by the work. Salloum addresses the idea of connection between people and their native land, through videos giving voice and vision to a range of people who are technically dispossessed or at least presented as such by Salloum – from New Zealand’s Maoris to Native Americans and Palestinians. While the poetry of the words and images is there, equally so is the concern that Salloum is pursuing an overt political agenda, and an incomplete presentation of facts which makes for a work that is better qualified as propaganda rather that art.
Private Affairs:
No one could top Anna Schwartz, who delivered the man and the show with Joseph Kosuth in Sydney in February. Kosuth was as much of a show as the exhibition, delivering a lecture at Art Gallery of NSW and displaying for a slightly astounded big fish of the Antipodean art wading pool an alternative model of how a stellar artist behaves – with warmth, charm and personal generosity. Shocking or instructive, depending on where you stand.
Roslyn Oxley9 attempted to fight fire with fire, with a Dale Frankouting, which yet again confirmed him as one of Australia’s most prolific artists and grandiloquent title writers, as well as the fact that with Dale Frank there is one to please everyone and the white colourful ice-cream ones sell better than the dark ones. The point is yes they look delicious and seductive but we have long since stopped seeing any of Frank’s works as individual and individually important works and is that not the point?
Gallery 9delivered two shows by mid-career artists reaching for the 21st century and new audiences. Simon Blau’sconstructivist/modernist abstractions are showing progressive polish and a reaching out for the contemporary, which now feels more within reach. SimilarlyMichael Taylor’s canvases display a somewhat restless quest for new direction, which occasionally yields lightness and playfulness, which would be even more successful if it was underpinned by a little more edge and satire.
MOP Projects February outing was surprisingly strong and professional looking. (We are used to seeing more student-like experiments there more often than not and sometimes it is so nice to see work that looks actually finished with the idea that someone might want to look at it.) Mellody Ellis’s canvases were very nicely finished and concerted, while the wall piece by Chrissie Lanssen was a nice reprise of 1960’s optical works, which was more refreshing
Pelotonby chance or by design also had an optical wall work by Sophia Egarchos installed in the vitrine of No 19, with similar sense of completion. May be now is the time to be channelling Bridget Riley in Australian art, who can tell.
Melbourne
Public Affairs:
AtNGV Australia: Ron Mueckwas exploring the limitations of his medium and seems to be finding that bigger is not always better and giant size humans, tend to lose the eerie poignancy he is famous for. Conceptually it will be interesting to see how much longer Mueck will be able to carry on making human replicas given the number of other people exploring or exploiting these technologies and images with just as much in-sourced or outsourced technical expertise.
Private practice:
An equally quiet group show driven month in Melbourne galleries, with few exceptions, one being a romantically titled show Folk Songs at UPLANDS, in which Jon Campbell, takes a multi-angular hammer to Australian visual and popular verbal vernacular and breaks them down to their undernourished roots finding the appropriate visual Achilles heel, whether it be the takeaway neon spelling out “underdog” or a back to front souvenir tea-towel with words “Hallal Meats 100%”. More hits than misses.
Out of the more fun group show efforts Neon Parc, Canadian Pharmacycombining the esoteric and occasionally conspicuously obscure talents of the Kingpins, Stuart Bailey and Stephen Bush and a literary contribution in the form of text by Ashley Crawford – a good yarn, short and with fewer than half-dozen words longer than 6 letter –some achievement for an art writer! Conversely Murray White Room, Group showwas a slickly elegant affair and perhaps more for its own sake than anything else, featuring Polly Borland, Eliza Hutchison, Alasdair McLuckie and Sangeeta Sandrasegar.
Joseph Kosuth would probably describe himself as wunderkind in the world of art, rather than the maestro he is now. And wunderkind is a more fitting term for the man who invented the term “conceptual” art, roughly around the age of 20 and produced a seminal work of contemporary art One and Three chairs also aged 20 and whose age almost caused a scandal at Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris, when the organisers discovered that he is only 28. Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio, USA in 1945 and studied at a specialized art school in Toledo from the age of ten until he entered School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1965.
His
objective as an artist was and is primarily about “meaning” and not
mere manipulation of shapes and colours. More than anything it is a
drive to force viewer to be fully engaged in the art work and produce
work in which everything matters. While his work is primarily
considered in terms of exploration of the nature of art
and important to art theory, there is a very strong aesthetic and
intellectual underpinning to his work and a desire to communicate to
his audience to the greatest extent possible.
While works like Five Words in Blue Neon appear to be tautological statements, as in the works literally are what they say they are, to ignore the aesthetic, intellectual and the emotional impact of the colour and the shape of the letters, would be to underestimate the artist and the nature of the concept he is proposing.
While it is appropriate to interpret his work as commentary on art and the meaning of art by developing works mainly by using text, it is equally valid to consider that he has adopted text as both an intellectual and a visual medium. His works then become a three way conversation between the meaning the image and the viewer.
While Kosuth’s works are informed, underpinned by and reference the treasury of his immense erudition from literature to philosophy, they are not rendered inaccessible and elitist thereby. They are designed to resonate with a range of audiences and their contemporary and habitual cultural references as much as they are a reflection of Kosuth’s personal artistic concerns. This is why he has been such a popular choice with large public commissions around the world from Spain to Germany to France and almost (!) Australia. Joseph Kosuth is represented by Anna Schwartz and Sean Kelly Gallery in New York and acquisition of his work usually requires personal bankruptcy for most of us.
Collector’s Footnotes
On concepts and meaning and knowing the difference between the two …
We are having a Kosuth mini-festival this month (why not?) and will use this as an opportunity to elaborate some of our concerns on what we would say is the undisciplined way that the term “conceptual art” has been used and applied to short-change both contemporary art and art audiences. Kosuth’s positions on art are in many ways deliberately radicalised to draw attention to the very crux of the art proposition, which can all start and end with: “Art is about meaning and not manipulation of colours and shapes”. The irony however is that historically there was never a time that art was merely a “different coloured wall” as we like to put it and we can go back to the Stone Age on that one. Kosuth then in some ways is reacting in an extreme manner to shift our focus from the surface and force us to embrace the totality of an artwork. This means that in an artwork everything is important and should be. While it seems that this requires the audience to do a lot of work, to our mind, the heavier responsibility is on the artist. If art is about meaning, and surely it is, then the value of the artwork is directly dependent on the value of meaning that an artist invests the work with and this is the hiccup. Much work that we encounter that is nominally known as conceptual limps with both legs (picture this – that is also a concept!). Firstly it neglects that when we say everything matters this includes the understanding that perception is driven by everything that the eyes take in and if you are communicating idea of slick and polished then it might be useful to pay attention to the surface of your work. Secondly, concept does not equal to meaning or a valuable meaning for that matter. Many young artists we encounter seek to express their inner feelings and end up inventing feeble concepts to convert into artworks.
To put it another way, meaning, merit and value of any such work is entirely commensurate with the insight, intelligence, skill and experience of the artist – everything matters. Kosuth’s work impresses with the completeness with which everything is taken into consideration to effectively communicate a dense complexity human experience, understanding to the nth degree the nature of human perception of size, colour, materials and meanings of words. It is no accident that the walls of the gallery are painted a particular shade of grey, nor is the font selected for the lettering a matter of default. Everything matters. Unfortunately, not everyone is a giant of thought and insight (and certainly not at 23) and not everyone. In order to share something important and valuable with the world, you have to have it to share. Unfortunately, concepts like “war is bad”, “being poor is unpleasant”, “consumerism is bad” “racism is bad” “sexism is bad” “I had a shit childhood” “women are objectified in the media’ and other similarly enlightening and “novel” concepts. These inflatable concepts are usually blown to almost real size works by essays referencing almost invariably “interrogation of identity” and almost invariably two or three French philosophers (if we are in Australia) let’s just say Derrida, Baudrillard or Lyotard with a footnote to Walter Benjamin. Just because something is a concept does not mean that it is a meaningful or an important concept. Lets think about that shall we? If that means NOT making work and going out and doing some hard living, reading and engaging with the world and thinking before being certain that you have earned the right to speak, to conceive and have something important to say to the world, well then we are all for it! And what does this mean for the collectors? Well don’t be bamboozled by long essays and references. Demand that an art work is able to speak for itself. Of course if in doubt as for advice from a party which does not have a vested interest in selling you a heartbreaking work of staggering genius* …
(*for those who wonder, this was a literary reference to title of a contemporary work of literature, but we don’t think it is imperative to know that to get the point J)>
Hunters & Collectors
This month we decide to play fast and loose with this shop window having been inspired obversely by our ruminations on nature and value of concepts and a painting by Norbert Schwontkowski that surprised us at his recent opening at Domenick Mersch gallery. The issues is that the concept of the boat in the middle of the canvas – a seemingly innocuous and generally accessible seascape subject, could not be painted by an educated painter in 2010 without awareness of Peter Doig’s canoe paintings, one of which sold for $10million in 2007, making it one of the most expensive paintings ever sold by a living artist. So the question arises – should contemporary artists stop painting canoes? Of course not, but we would suggest that one cannot at present paint or exhibit canoes turning a blind eye to the existence of Doig’s work. So here’s a little excursion through canoes on canvas…
Moon dog, 2010, oil on canvas, 102 x 152 cm
Peter Doig 100 Years Ago (Carrera), 2001 Oil on canvas
Peter Doig 1997 Oil on Canvas
Peter Doig White Canoe 1991
So here’s to the rites of Spring or the descent into autumn, we stand by to discuss your collecting ideas, dreams and ambitions…and please – go to the blogand tell us what you thought of this issue!
(0 vote)