The weight of expectation bears down heavily on The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Since the demise of Perspecta at The Art Gallery of NSW in the 90s, the Adelaide event is now the only regular large scale museum survey show of contemporary Australian art anywhere in the country. Like most things that stand alone, everyone wants it to be everything they want it to be, and therefore always falls short of expectations. Melbourne curator Linda Michael was brought in to perform what must be one of the most thankless curatorial tasks around and, inexplicably, she settled on the relationship between Modernism and Post Modernism as the organising theme for 21st Century Modern. According to the press bumpf the show is a “large survey of current Australian art inspired by modernism, [that] registers a shift away from the melancholic collapse of certainty that underpinned post-modern art.”
Robert Owen, Spectrum Analysis # 4, 2003/05
from the series Text of Light. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas linen, 198×198 cm
Private collection, Melbourne.
The reaction to this theme has ranged from a guarded curiosity to outright hostility. Broadsheet, Adelaide’s house journal for the visual arts, interviewed Michael, and its questions were unremittingly harsh and judgmental, for example:
BROADSHEET: “You state in the exhibition catalogue that “from the 1960s modernism became increasingly associated with a patriarchal Euro-American canon”—there is ample evidence of this in Australian art of the time and after. Since then, our region has experienced major sociopolitical and economic changes that have exerted equally ma/or influences upon Australia, not only the socio-cultural makeup of contemporary Australia but also artistic expression, especially as seen in recent years; compounded by other influences—overt developments in technology and communications, instigation of numerous Regional biennales, an Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Asialink and others cross-cultural partnerships, and so on. If, as you say, there is a current shift away from postmodernist directives and a return to art making influenced by modernism, to what extent is any of this influenced by our post 1970’s relationship with the Region, or is this a “shift away” still driven predominantly by a patriarchal Euro-American canon? As the lead UK art magazine stated in 2004, [and not a magazine from Southeast Asia, India or China] – ‘modernism is back!’”
And that’s just the question… If you accept the premise that Modernism was followed by Post Modernism [dates to be decided later] then pretty much everything made by everyone is somehow connected to Modernism. And, we ask, how much contemporary art is somehow about art itself? Again the answer is virtually all of it. Either knowingly or not, art made by contemporary Australian artists has grown out of historical and recent developments. It’s just the way it is. The tool kit for dealing with historical art isn’t unique to Post Modernism – parody, quotation and tribute being the most obvious examples. You have someone like ADS Donaldson with a completely sincere tribute to Mary Webb next to Gareth Donnelly’s arch recreation of Modernist masterpieces in miniature next to Robert Owen’s elegant colour charts next to Daniel Von Sturmer’s studio-bound video works next to Scott Redford’s surfboard paintings next to Domenico de Calrio’s collage of bits of famous paintings. What does this tell you – artists are influenced by the history of art and express it in different ways? Some do it intentionally, others don’t. Whoopee-do.
David Rosetzky, Maniac de Luxe, 2004.
Installation view, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne. Courtesy of the artist, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and Kaliman Gallery, Sydney. Photograph: Cath Martin.
Only a purely aesthetic level 21st Century Modern is a very colourful experience. You could walk away from this show just thrilled at how many artists like orange. It’s this season’s colour! Speaking of superficial, we decided we had not done David Rosetzky’s work justice in the past and were determined to sit through his latest installation’s duration. Called Maniac de Luxe, the work is a mirror image. On a grey wall there are two screens. Facing the screen in the gallery space is a couple of wood veneer blocks for sitting on, a Flokati rug and [according to the wall plaque] “Tom Dixon star lights”. We don’t know why this hasn’t occurred to us in the past, but these elaborate stage settings for Rosetzky’s works are, we’re guessing, intended to extend the space of the videos into the gallery. Maybe the idea is to unify the viewer with the subjects of these intimate but scripted confessionals. Instead of uniting us, we feel deeply alienated by Rosetzky’s set dressings and think of ourselves not as beautiful people deeply troubled by the world and the suffering of others, but pathetic poseurs with a shallow and indifferent attitude to misery. Either that or we’re stuck on the set of The Ice Storm. The big question floating around Rosetzky’s work is if he really means it, as if irony could rescue us from what would otherwise be a cringingly sincere plea for help in a cruel universe. That question we cannot answer, for as soon as we saw Matthew Johnson, the Melbourne painter, dressed in a quilted smoking jacket looking like a slightly dented Adonis saying “I just want to teach my son family values…” we ran out of the room.
Arlo Mountford, Requiem to the Negativist Spectacle, 2005.
Untreated pine, steel balls, motion sensor, ball-release mechanism DVD animation featuring Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols, DVD player & monitors. 193.5 x 196.0 x 154.0 cm.
Parody is alive and well, but 21st Century Modern suggests that bitterness has flavoured it too. Donnelly’s Modernist masterpieces in miniature is an idea that has been done many times before, perhaps not this small, but that’s hardly a reason to celebrate. In a similar vein Arlo Mountford’s elaborate installation Requiem for the Negativist Spectacle is so depressing it’s almost pure nihilism. A square scaffold of wood enclosed two video monitors. On the scaffold ball bearings clunk down the runways to eventually fall on the floor while, on the screens, animated historical anti-art figures like Guy Debord, Hugo Ball, Jake Chapman and Sid Vicious dance around in a circle to the Sex Pistol’s Anarchy in The UK. Their heads look just like ball bearings and they fall off. Repeat. If this was a monument to the death of meaning, it should be a thousand meters tall.
SLAVE, however, take the proverbial biscuit, reviving found objects and appropriation as daring gambits for contemporary art. Most of their works had the same title – Momentum Against Civilisation – and ranged from crappy bits of plywood with the Apple computer symbol stuck on to a T-shirt hanging on a peg to an elaborate installation using pebblecrete [accompanied by a pebblcrete manifesto] to an iPod nano with an awful reggae song played by a shit punk band. The work of Kain Picken and Rob McKenzie in collaboration with whole bunch of others, SLAVE’s work proposes an endless procession of other work just like the stuff in 21st Century Modern, a series of actions and installations of aesthetically horrible material arranged beautifully and just so, but completely bereft of meaning for the causal passerby. Has it come to this? Is that the end of everything? It sure felt like it.
Among these examples of youthful brio, John Nixon’s work stands out as elegant and simple and [conceptually] it goes on forever. Back in the 1980s when we first saw his work we weren’t sure, and didn’t really understand where it was going, but as the years have worn on and the works have multiplied exponentially, we have stopped thinking of them as individual works, but like Brancusi’s column, a thing of beauty and complete perversity. In 21st Century Modern Nixon has arrived at orange and black and brown and the works are called Orange Monochromes [with various colours and curved lines]. They look nothing like monochromes, obviously, but we imagine that the other colours are sort of floating on top. Debra Dawes has a similar thing going on with pink lines over white, and you could spend an awful lot of time wondering if they are white lines on a pink backdrop, or pink lines on white. Is this a good thing? We don’t know, but it looks lovely. Nixon has branched out into collecting ceramics from West Germany in the 1960-70 period and we were thinking that if we could afford them, they’d look great next to Andrew Donaldson’s massive orange and red carpet.
Scott Redford, Surf Painting/Yellow Surf, 2005.
Fibreglass and resin over painted foam,
240.0 x 60.0 cm. Private collection.
Another orange person is Scott Redford, and another artist whose work we’ve shied away from being completely honest about. Luckily, the works in 21st Century Modern are fantastic quasi-paintings done on specially shaped surf board material complete with layers of highly polished resin. They are beautiful, intensely coloured pieces which we think are the best work he’s ever done. OK, they have slogans on them like Towards The Establishment of A Surfers Paradise On Earth parodying the Trotskyite maxim, and again, its one of those questions of whether the artist is serious or not, but they are so joyous you don’t care. Redford’s massive model of a proposed art museum with a giant surfboard lent up against it is, according to Art Life sources, a serious proposition to mix art and shopping in air conditioned comfort. The problem with this work, My Proposal for A New Gold Coast Gallery and Museum/First Preliminary Version 2003/2005, is that like most of everything else by Redford it makes us feel uncomfortable. The aura around Redford’s work is that you’re supposed to feel sorry for him – sorry that he’s gay, sorry that he lives on the Gold Coast, sorry that he is isn’t as famous as he clearly thinks he should be. It seeps out of the work like a poison gas and debilitates everyone who comes in contact with it. For god’s sake, if you don’t like the Gold Coast, fucking move.
We wandered out of 21st Century Modern and up the stairs looking for Gallery 6 which, according to the signs in the gallery, had an accompanying exhibition of Modernist art from the collection which sounded like fun. Unfortunately all the doorways at the top of the stairs said GALLERY 7 and although assured by people at the reception desk that it was through the doors to the left, we never found it. Instead, after looking at the permanent collection and seeing a really good painting by Imants Tillers from the mid-1980s, we found a great piece by Belgian artist Koen Wastjin called Puma which was a stuffed puma contorted into the same position as the Puma brand name puma. It was a breath of fresh air, contemporary art that wasn’t about contemporary art, about the artist’s take on their own subjectivity, about their take on their influences, or demonstrating how debilitated an aesthetic can become and still be described as an “aesthetic”. Puma was about the world, the place of the image in society, our relationship to nature and the way in which words create a visual signification of their own meaning. It’s good to be reminded that we can get away from art as the subject of art.
