Round, see-through plastic records sitting on a shelf accompanied by an adjacent wall of framed drawings. Each drawing is of a record with various lines on them – some squiggly, others ovoid, still others circular. On the other side of the room, up near the ceiling, just under the cornices, are two painted banners, their edges meeting in the corner of the room. They look identical – both are white on black, both have exactly the same text: Mutlu Cerkez Untitled 23 November 2009. And it is so, the two works are called Mutlu Cerkez Untitled 23 November 2009, 2005 by Mutlu Cerkez and the records and drawings are by Marco Fusinato.
This is the new debut exhibition for 2005’s Contemporary Projects at the Art Gallery of NSW (until March 20) and we were feeling that chilly sensation one gets when looking at radically minimalist conceptual art. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue essay by Jason Smith, a curator at the NGV in Melbourne and like the objects it purports to describe, it is a didactic exercise of crossing t’s and dotting i’s. Everything is in place – historical precedent, reference points, continuity within the artist’s practice and the essay even begins with a long quote from Italo Calvino. Nice.
This is perhaps what we should call Orthodox Minimalism where nothing new is ventured within the genre and the fact that the work is weighed down with reference points to antecedents and contemporaries removes all sense of individuality. This exhibition could have been staged anywhere in the world by any number of hundreds of artist working with similar forms. Mutlu Cerkez who has a name that reminds us of the name of a Lovecraftian monster (and will be henceforth known as MutluCerkez, the Old One) at least puts his name in his work to offer some point of difference to all those other minimalists working with representations of time. Sadly Fusinato does not have such a point of difference and must join the ranks of all those other artists working with circles.
It really makes no difference that either of these artists have some other levels of discourse lurking beneath their “projects”. It doesn’t matter that their work is about, as Smith argues, “a shared sensibility concerning time, action, reality, and [the will to] elaborate individual ideas, forms and visual systems that have their sources in immediate environments and the world at large”. The rather unfortunate fact is that both artists – like many others in Australia – have joined the ranks of style that has become a fetishistic replay of form and intent. Minimalism has been utterly co-opted by design and fashion and it cannot escape this fetishism by seriousness alone. If an idea is worth enunciating, surely it is worth doing it in a way that people will actually be able to recognise as art?
Minimalism is akin to high art porn – a style where each deliberate gesture of intent can only be acknowledged within the historical context of that gesture. In other words, Fusinato and MutluCerkez, despite their admirable and icily beautiful art, are replaying forms without connection to the context of the here and now, the decidedly maximal Rococo of the real world. The faux-religiosity of Minimalism’s installation in art galleries confers on it all sorts of associations, but faced with such underwhelming, not to say boring art, you end up hungering for something a lot more individual and idiosyncratic.
Down at Watters Gallery, there is exactly just such a show. Ian Howard and Xing Jun Qin have a collaborative project on until April 16 called Just In Case, a sprawling show of 122 works in two parts each (making 244 separate frames) and is as conceptually tight as a matron’s bun. That it seems messy and untidy in comparison to the air conditioned splendour of MultuCerkez/Fusinato says much about the different generation of conceptualists.
Howard is well known for his 1970s and 1980s works where he toured the world making rubbings of historic walls such as Hadrian’s Wall and The Berlin Wall, then graduating to doing rubbings of military technology such as tanks, ships and aircraft eventually finishing with ICBMs and the guidance systems of top secret American missiles. The works were masterpieces of aesthetic simplicity working on many levels – as a representation of an object, a commentary on the rubbing’s status as a work of art, and the nature of a represented object in relation to the actuality of that object. One famous work of Howard’s in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia is a rubbing of the nose cone and cockpit of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the nuke on Hiroshima in World War 2. That all of these levels were explicable within the work itself says volumes about the vitality of conceptualism in the 70s and 80s – it had not yet a reached a nadir of mannerist gestures.
Howard moved away from large scale work as he became more involved with teaching and administration of various art schools, ending up as the Dean of the NSW University College of Fine Arts. His latest show with Xing, a fellow academic from a university in Beijing and an officer in the People’s Liberation Army, continues fascination with the language of the military. The semi-jokey title of the show refers to the militarization of society and how any location can be the site for an instant war. Preparing for such a war requires the creation of a unique camouflage for each situation. Howard sourced 122 images of different countries and made a camouflage-style painting from the colours in each photograph. Sending both the pattern and the image to Xing in China, the second artist painted into each photo a military situation – solider, a jet, a tank, a landing craft and so on.
The works are hung in pairs – the photo and a painting – and looks for all the world like a meeting between an issue of Soldiers of Fortune and a Tony Tuckson show. Howard makes for a very convincing abstract painter and the pairing with the rather crudely executed images of Xing make both a quick read. You absorb the idea easily and move on to the next pairing, wondering it might have been like if the paintings had been hung alone. Howard and Xing’s “message” is also instant – the world is a potential battlefield – and what you draw from that be it a mere statement of fact or a protest depends entirely on your point of view.
