Want a thrill? Want to throw a special party or settle a grudge? Want your dishes washed? “Anything you want to have happen, we will try our best to make it happen,” says Brock Enright, a 29-year-old New York artist and proprietor of Video and Adventure Services. Enright is notorious in the US as the man who performs “bespoke executive kidnappings” for $1,500 a time. He’s persona non grata with the NYPD, fantasy salesman to the stars, and now he’s opened his first London exhibition with a performance-art extravaganza starring his own mother and the Easter bunny.
Kidnapped: Then Charged For The Privelege, The Guardian, September 20.
Sydney is definitely one of the most beautiful cities in the world and when spring comes along, almost to the seasonal second, it is always a prompt to appreciate our good fortune.
Our aqua harbour, big blue skies and beautiful young men and women are close to incomparable; and when you’ve had your visual fill of our natural beauty – say at Sydney’s Circular Quay – you can stroll to Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art to view our visual talent on a more formal level.
Spring time on Sydney’s arts calendar is synonymous with Primavera, the annual exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art celebrating a selection of young (under 35 years of age) artists from across the country. This year under the direction of guest curator Felicity Fenner, Primavera connects with the well-established genre of painting landscape, which is questioned and re-interpreted by a young generation of artists in response to current political and environmental concerns. The selected artists eclectically approach ‘landscape’ and following is a sampling of their diverse interpretations and renderings…
Primavera, Henry Thornton.
Suicide at the British Museum, London: A 30 year-old male tourist was killed at the British Museum after falling from the upper level of the Great Court on 14 September. Although an inquest had not been held when we went to press, suicide is suspected.
Jeffrey Smart may be an expatriate but he is still South Australia’s, if not Australia’s, most distinguished living painter. Barry Pearce also is a South Australian, the first curator of prints and drawings at the Art Gallery of South Australia in the 1970s. He is now head curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
He is author of many monographs – and today, perhaps the greatest of them all, a mega-monograph produced as a vast $120 coffee-table book on Jeffrey Smart. Published by Beagle Press, it is called, simply, Jeffrey Smart.
Although Smart has written an autobiography, Not Quite Straight, Pearce tells the artist’s story again, from a somewhat more academic perspective. That is not to say that he does not delve a little into Smart’s private life, his loves and spats – his rivalry with fellow artist Donald Friend over a particularly lovely young man, for instance.
Get Smart, The Adelaide Advertiser, September 24.
The future of Australian art depends on corporate sponsors donating artworks for exhibition, according to Jeffrey Smart, one of Australia’s most famous artists.
Aluminium producer Alcoa Australia, a long-time supporter of local art, yesterday donated six paintings by Smart and some of Australia’s most significant artists to the National Gallery of Australia.
The paintings include Smart’s Waiting for the train and Playground at Piraeus, plus works by Robert Juniper, Ray Crooke and Fred Williams.
Smart, 84, said he was honoured to have his work at the National Gallery next to paintings by some of his “oldest friends”.
He said he was not opposed to the Government funding and donating Australian art, but corporate sponsorship was vital. “We have to rely on the goodwill of citizens and more importantly on the goodwill of big companies,” he said.
Artist Values Sponsors, The Age, September 22.
Sex, religion, power and money: their conjunction is inevitable. Jason Rhoades‘ Black Pussy … and the Pagan Idol Workshop, which opens tomorrow at Hauser & Wirth on London’s Piccadilly, is an assault on the senses, as well as an affront to sensibility. If it is a calculated insult, it is also somehow indiscriminate, a babble and a confusion.
The Black Pussy of the title has nothing whatever to do with cats. It is the vagina by anything other than its proper name: sprangalang, jelly roll, the choo-choo train and many other ribald, ridiculous, affectionate, obscene and offensive names, written in ultra-violet neon, an eerie black light that makes your teeth fluoresce and your dandruff sparkle. The 427 pussy-words (selected from a much longer, though by no means exhaustive list) are hung and dangled like so many Christmas tree baubles about a mountainous accumulation of stuff.
Sex Gods, The Guardian, September 22.
A desperate dearth of top-shelf artworks is having a profound impact on Australia’s salerooms.
On Monday night, Sotheby’s abandoned its usual practice of putting up to 300 paintings under the hammer at its spring sale and opted for a mere 59 – although one was withdrawn.
Apart from setting a new record for the lowest number of lots to be offered at a mixed vendor sale, Sotheby’s also attracted the fewest people to attend an art auction by any of the big four auction houses.
Still, with a turnover of $4.2 million, the firm generated more dollars per picture than any sale in recent memory. The main reason being that more than 30 of the works had never been auctioned before and many were unknown to the market.
Art Market Off The Boil, The Age, September 23.
Christopher Orchard‘s bald man has undergone several transformations since he appeared in the work of the Adelaide artist more than two decades ago.
None can compare, however, with his latest conversion, from a drawn figure to a character brought to life in paint.
Absorbed in his quest to solve the mysteries of life, the development has proved rather more startling for his creator.
The Bald Trier, The Adelaide Advertiser, September 5.
It was the best kind of training,” says James Rosenquist, recounting his days in the 1950s hanging from a scaffold and painting a mammoth advertisement for Castro Convertible sofas on the side of a building. Rosenquist entered the art world after seven years of working for Art Kraft, the leading billboard company in New York City, and the grand scale and bright colors of those massive signs clearly influenced his later work. But, he explains, the job taught him a lot more than merely how to approach a wide-scale canvas. “It was a school of learning that doesn’t exist anymore,” he goes on to explain—“a union-trade schooling in how to be a professional, making paintings for real people, not for graduate school.” Rosenquist is only one of numerous artists of his generation who look back with nostalgia on their first jobs, positions they held long before they could dream of supporting themselves through their art.
Moonlight Sonata: Artists and Day Jobs, Art News Online, September 2005.
