Art Monthly July 2009 Number 221

Marking worlds

‘Venice is the only place where all of the art world gathers’, proclaimed 2009 Venice Biennale director Daniel Birnbaum in the lead-up to this year’s 53rd edition.1 Among this gathering, no doubt, was (and will be) a good many from Oz, the Australian art world ‘airlifted to Europe for the three-day vernissage’, as foretold by our Queensland correspondent Vanessa McRae, herself part of this entourage. A record seventy-seven participating countries this year also gives some weight to Birnbaum’s hype, though hype – hot air – it is. Like LA’s Academy Awards or the Cannes Film Festival – glamorous, prestigious and career-changing pinnacles for sure – the Venice Biennale naturally remains a bastion of Euro-American interests.

Having never been to LA, Cannes or Venice, I may not be fit to comment (nor totally free from the tang of sour grapes). In our Biennale coverage this month, we turn to the views of artist-writers who were there. Virginia Fraser, an exhibiting artist at the 10th Havana Biennale (via a group show in France), bypasses any comment on Australia’s representation in Cuba, focusing instead – with characteristic clarity – on the event’s broader dialogue and that of work newly encountered. John Kelly, on the other hand, finds plenty to ‘translate’ from his experience of the Australian work in Venice, a clever though damning critique which responds less to individual works than what’s suggested by their overall national branding, one of his pet concerns.

Ashley Crawford’s coupling of Darwin artist Rob Brown and Blue Mountains-based Adam Cullen in ‘Last of the larrikins’ (which could also rope in Kelly) triggers a chain of Northern Territory-related content. Odette Kelada’s review of the National Gallery of Victoria’s major Aboriginal batik survey, Across the Desert, is overdue (the show came down in February), just as the exhibition marks overdue recognition to a lush-silk oasis of predominantly women’s art. Kelada’s review anticipates Philip Batty’s warm appraisal of maverick Central Australian arts advisor, the late Rodney Gooch whose legacy, in part, rests on his encouragement of Utopia’s artists to replace batik cloth and junting with canvas and paint brush, and on his eventual role as an independent dealer.2 In bringing attention to the pros and cons of this art advisor/dealer influence and the intercultural phenomena of Aboriginal art, our inclusion of Batty’s essay here looks ahead to next month’s National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (with faint echoes of last year’s protest) and to the inaugural Cairns Indigenous Art Fair which hopes to set in train a Top End Indigenous art circuit.

The lure of the Centre remains with Kieran Finnane’s evocation of the work in fellow Alice Springs artist Pamela Lofts’s Requiem for Another, an expansive project which has come home to roost for its Araluen Arts Centre show even while concepts of absence, the impossibility of roosting, strike its core. A similar sense of elegy, strangely enough, pervades Christopher Heathcote’s decisive review of last year’s inaugural Basil Sellers Art Prize exhibition, again timely presented here with a view to the next one (for which entries close late July). For Heathcote, the standout work from this show was not by Daniel Crooks, $100K richer as the eventual Art Prize winner, but Elvis Richardson’s kitsch sports trophy shrine, Field, which ‘brought home not just the fleeting nature of victory, the thwarted aspirations of so many suburban hopefuls’, but the very human ideal that through sport we ‘dare to dream’.

Another (former) arts advisor, and artist, Una Rey unravels a world of exploration and exuberance in the work of four women (Eubena Nampitjin, Ildiko Kovacs, Makinti Napanankga and Aida Tomescu) bound by the materiality, the alchemy of Paint, the language. To the ‘tedious’ question of will there be painting at the Venice Biennale, Birnbaum looks to ‘painting beyond painting’, ‘painterly qualities or interests that materialise in other media such as photography’, which strongly invokes the philosophy behind Melbourne abstractionist David Thomas’s recent work – well matched here with the philosophical bent of writer Patrick Hutchings.

Like a good spectacle – although we do also delve deeper at Art Monthly – we bring you ‘lights’ (via Alexander Knox’s Maxims of Behaviour), ‘sound’ (with Wade Marynowsky’s Boris, the robot), and ‘action’, or at least the ‘act’ of spectacle-making for Brook Andrew’s Theme Park museum installation in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Our cover image this month, virtually straight from a movie set, a re-enactment with a Nigerian actor from her favourite ‘Nollywood’ film, amply portrays that wherever our place in the world, whatever our reference points – Holly, Bolly or Nolly – we all must dare to dream.

Yours (in a smoky haze)
Maurice

Notes
1. Louise Buck, interview with Daniel Birnbaum, ‘Venice Biennale Guide’, The Art Newspaper, International Edition, No. 203, June 2009, Umberto Allemandi & Co. Publishing, p.3.
2. Batty’s article was originally written for the catalogue for Flinders University City Gallery’s 2008 (now nationally touring 2009/10) exhibition Gooch’s Utopia: collected works from the Central Desert.
Above image: Pieter Hugo, Emeka Onu. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008, from the Nollywood series. Image courtesy the artist, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town and Yossi Milo, New York.