In our recent expedition around every gallery listed in Art Almanac for the month of December, we made a terrible discovery. There is a lot of really bad art out there. We were genuinely and truly shocked. We thought that we would find tons of bad art in the Sydney art scene but it was bad in a way that we hadn’t anticipated. We expected to find – and we confess we don’t know why we thought this – a lot of art that failed at being great. That is, artists making art that attempted something that they couldn’t quite achieve and ended up instead as an honourable failure.
What we found instead was a lot of people playing it very safe and not even being very good at that. It’s one thing to set your sights low, it’s another to miss entirely. There is a mass of very conservative art that struggles with the rudiments of technique and skill, colour and composition, form and concept, let alone do all those things well and aiming for the stars. We think we would rather slit our wrists than see another pencil drawing of a female nude with a red stamp of the artist’s name in Chinese characters placed artfully in the lower right hand corner.
So against this background of stultifying mediocrity, we thought of a few shows in 2004 that really aimed high. The artist whose show that comes immediately to mind is What, an artist who had a massively ambitious solo show at the Wollongong City Art Gallery and who turned up again in the wittily entitled but really rather poor First Draft show OK COMMUTER. Via his occasional email, What explained that his work in First Draft was a SAAB engraved with his life story:
“The writing chronicles […] preliminary attempts at masturbation, to the heartbreaking failure of still being considered an emerging artist at the age of 32. It is a long boring story, but you might appreciate the level of depreciation on car resale.”
The artist is now offering to paint scale versions of the Universe on commission. We told you he was ambitious. Sam Smith did a solo show at Gitte Weise that really deserved more attention than it got and we’re really beginning to regret our rather tepid review of Vicki Papageorgopoulos’s show at Gallery Wren – it’s a work that’s really stayed with us. Sophie Coombs collages at Yuill/Crowley, Sarah Parker’s painting show at Mori, Guy Benfield ‘s installation in the Landa Award, Sarah Smuts-Kennedy photographs at Barry Keldoulis, Dale Frank’s paintings at Oxley, James Angus’s truck at the AGNSW, Natasha Johns-Messenger ‘s installation in Primavera, Todd McMillan’s video at Gallery Wren, John Spitteri’s paintings at Kaliman, Patrick Pound’s photo series at GrantPirrie…. There is a lot of great art to be found, you’ve just got to be prepared to do the hard yards. You have to live the art life.
