Although we had expected to go to sleep over the Christmas-New Year’s break, we were troubled and couldn’t properly drift off. Those die hard artists who run Peloton actually kept the gallery operating between December 25 and now, even having a group show. We salute their dedication and as we lay on the beach sunning ourselves and drinking our favourite summer drink (two shots of vodka, ginger beer, lime juice, a wedge of lime and a generous amount of ice served in a tall glass) we couldn’t help but think of those people sitting there on the mean streets of Chippendale, looking out the window like forlorn Christmas puppies, waiting for a visitor, any visitor, to come in.
The Sun Herald is designed for those in a coma and we read it religiously. The Party of The Week (Sun Herald, S, December 26, 2004) was Emma Balfour’s poetry reading at Hermes. Guests included actor bloke Aden Young, George W.’s daughter Lauren Bush and many others…
“Hosting the most chic pre Christmas soiree, Hermes transformed its terrace with bright orange confetti and hot pink stools to celebrate former model Emma Balfour’s poetic debut. Formerly one of the fashion world’s favourite faces, Balfour now prefers a lower profile, publishing a book of her highly personal poetry and photographs of various beds in which she’s slept. (Tracey Emin eat your heart out.) No one doubted the elegance of the evening and the deliciousness of the miniature turkey sandwiches and mince pies, but what about the literature? Any good? “The terrace looked beautiful,” noted one anonymous guest, “but I studied literature at university, so no comment on the poems.”
We had only been on holiday two days and already we had reached the absolute nadir of summer. A few thousand miles away, the Indian Ocean was claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. You would have thought that such a startling and horrifying spectacle as the Asian Tsunami would have made everyone a little more circumspect in their idiocy, but we were wrong. While John Howard jetted here and there through the region looking like a “statesman”, Alexander Downer was flown to the disaster zone to make observations such as “the wave must have been very strong”. While the Australian government ended up pledging $1 billion in aid with strings attached (you must congratulate us on being so generous), Mark Latham kept a low profile, being on “annual leave” and reminding us all that a job at the top of the Labor Party is the same as it is for any other public servant – do not disturb until after Australia Day.
With such horribleness everywhere, we took our pleasures where we could find them. Normally we steer clear of the Sydney Festival but somehow we found ourselves at a performance of The Black Rider. In the great tradition of Sly without Robbie and Kruder without Dorfmeister, we had the opera without Marianne Faithful. Oh well – the bloke who played the devil looked like Bono and he had a great debauched German accent. The opera itself was like what you would imagine it to be – if someone said “experimental theatre” to you and you imagined Weimar cabaret with expressionistic sets then you were spot on – that is exactly what it was. It also had a great score by Tom Waites and a libretto by William. S. Burroughs that turned two and half hours of crazy body movements and visually spectacular set pieces into an elaborate metaphor for drug addiction.
The real excitement of the night was in the foyer. We often wonder what a “theatre crowd” looks like and to our disappointment they are much like your regular art crowd. We did see a woman sitting on her own in the middle of the mezzanine lounge ostentatiously reading a copy of Oscar and Lucinda while drinking a glass of wine, but the rest of the summer in Sydney people were a let down. We were about to give up hope when we saw a girl who was probably no older than 13 wearing a brand new Marilyn Manson t-shirt standing alone. Her skin was very light, her dyed black hair formed a high, regal hair line and with her matching black skirt and boots, she looked like rock royalty.
The Sydney Festival has put its stamp on a few exhibitions around town. The Bridget Riley show at the Museum of Contemporary Art is a corker. Featuring the best of her early work (and a lot else), this is the best show in town. Unfortunately, like the Marianne Faithful-less opera, this is a cut down version of Riley’s career retrospective that was on at the Tate in London in 2003. Some, like Sebastian Smee, feel as though we have got a better deal of it than having to see everything worth seeing (he claims the MCA show is better “paced” – whatever that means) but we can’t help but feel short changed. Where’s the beef?
Across town at the Art Gallery of NSW, the other big show of the moment is the Bill Henson retrospective. We’re not huge Henson fans. We know the work is good – you really only need to look at it to understand that – it’s just we’ve just never been that taken with the artist’s whole aesthetic. We like the cut screens and the collages, some of the early work is great too, but we feel oddly cut off from the enthusiasm of just about everyone else. It probably just boils down to personal taste – we prefer the cooler climate of Andreas Gursky or, at home, Robyn Stacey. It’s just us.
We did, however, like the shop at the end of the exhibition space with cameras for people who want to get into the whole photography thing, two books on Henson (the $85 catalogue already sold out), novels by W. G. Sebald and Franz Kafka, DVDs of Nosferatu and copies of the latest Australian Art Collector. We think that is what you call “covering your bases.”
