Friday Degustation: the lesser of two weevils
No handouts: Bacon
Philip Bacon AM, noted gallerist and philanthropist, has been announced as 2019’s Leading Philanthropist by the Queensland Community Foundation and admitted to the Queensland business Leaders Hall of Fame. Bacon, a stalwart of Brisbane’s [>] commercial gallery sector and long time supporter of regional galleries, is on the board of a number of high profile arts orgs including the Queensland Art Gallery – Gallery of Modern Art Foundation, the Brisbane Festival, the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University and the National Gallery of Australia. At Opera Australia, and Opera Australia. He is of course also known for his long involvement with supporting the work of Margaret Olley. In a profile for Fundraising and Philanthropy Magazine Bacon states that [>] “…I don’t have a structure for my giving. I don’t have a foundation, so my giving is instinctive and personal. I can’t hide behind a set of rules and you can make those decisions yourself,” Philip says. Over the years, he has become aware of what he calls the ‘ecology’ of the arts, that embraces a holistic view of the creative process. It revealed itself to him during his first board appointment, to Opera Australia in the 1990s. “I realised how hard it was to get a show up, and as a result I donate more to performing arts because institutions can’t operate alone or without people,” Philip says. “I rarely give direct financial support to visual artists (except, obviously, by exhibiting their work in my gallery) – I don’t really approve of handouts, and the idea of the struggling artist in the garret really doesn’t exist anymore. And the closer you get to any institution, you realise how important it is to contribute to it.”
The art of drinking
What’s in a name? Quite a lot it seems when you’re in the lucrative market of combining rudimentary painting skillz with booze. The trend for combining after work painting classes with wine is proving immensely popular, with a number of shop-front businesses popping up around Australia. One such establishment, Cork and Canvas in Sydney, attempted to register its business name only to discover Cork and Chroma blocking their application. Per the AFR [>] “Cork and Chroma argued its rival shouldn’t be allowed to register the Cork and Canvas trademark because it would confuse consumers and create a false affiliation between the two businesses. The Trade Marks Office sided with Cork and Chroma in May and ruled that Cork and Canvas couldn’t register the trademark […] The classes are proving popular for hen’s nights, corporate events and stressed out professionals who want to do something creative to unwind. Cork and Chroma doesn’t claim that Cork and Canvas stole its business idea. But it does claim that its rival’s directors knew about Cork and Chroma when they decided to change its trading name from Cocktails and Canvas to Cork and Canvas in December 2016. Cork and Canvas can still trade under its business name, despite the Trade Marks Office ruling it can’t register as the rightful intellectual property owner to the name.”
No Discipline Left Behind
Remember all the angst when it was announced that Sydney College of the Arts was to be moved lock stock and two smoking barrels [>] from its home at Callan Park to the Old Teachers College at Sydney University main campus? Remember how its previous dean Colin Rhodes resigned [>] amid student backlash over the plan? Remember the protests at the [>] Art Gallery of NSW, the student occupation and the shit storm in the media? Well, hey, all that’s in the past now as the move nears completion in 2020 and Sydney University brightly announces that ‘no discipline will be left behind’ at the new home. According to the press release [>] ” In 2020, the SCA will take up residence in the historic Old Teachers College building, which has been completely redesigned with a multimillion-dollar budget by international award-winning architects ARM. And that’s just the start. Once the students move in, they will activate it with their diverse and critically informed creativity, showcasing their work in a dedicated gallery. The new digs have plenty of room for all of SCA’s studios, from painting, photography and printmedia to glass, ceramics and jewellery – and everything in between. SCA comes with traditional techniques along with cutting-edge technologies such as virtual reality. And there’s one other signature SCA ingredient: a stellar reputation for nurturing the next generation of artists…” While many feared the move and new facilities would signal the end of SCA as it was known, the new facilities and main-campus home for the art school suggest all that angst was for nothing. It’s all so bright and shiny. And look at what happened to UNSW’s College of Fine Art when it transformed itself into UNSW Art & Design. Sure, they put a broom through the teaching staff and transformed the once funky and lived-in campus into a real life walk-through architect’s drawing, but that all worked out for the best… Right?
In living color
[>] “The British art establishment often does the world a favor by spotlighting a vanguard American who has been undervalued Stateside. In 1965, London’s Whitechapel Gallery mounted the first retrospective for American painter Lee Krasner, an exhibition that toured British cities before arriving on US shores to remind the public about a great artist in their midst.Now Krasner is having another British retrospective — Barbican Centre’s Lee Krasner: Living Colour the first European show of her work since the Whitechapel exhibition more than 50 years ago. Opening this past May and curated by Eleanor Nairne, the exhibition will move in October to the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt.Enhanced by video installations in which Krasner details her aesthetic practices and belief in painting as an instrument of revelation, Living Colour captures the artist as vividly as it does her art, charting her breakthroughs in the face of 20th-century America’s cultural intransigence and narrow-mindedness to become a leader in the development of abstract art, progressing through cycles of radical self-reinvention across six decades.”
Artist Wins Prize
Famous artist and one-time Australian rep at the Venice Biennale, Susan Norrie has been announced as the 2019 winner of the $50,000 Don McFarlane Prize, for “agenda-setting practices”. According to the press release published in Art Forum.com [>] “….Norrie has been named the winner of [the] annual $50,000 cash prize awarded to Australian artists in recognition of their “unwavering, agenda-setting arts practice” and contributions to Australian art. She is the third artist to receive the prize; previous winners include Pat Brassington and Linda Marrinon. “Over the past three decades, Susan’s practice continues to be strikingly relevant, deeply foreboding and beautifully composed, bringing a moment of poetry and redemption to research driven, aesthetic, social, political, and scientific material,” the prize’s 2019 advisory committee said. “Using art as a tool to remind us of the most vexing and urgent issues of our times, Susan Norrie is a true pioneer.”
Eesti
[>] “Eesti is a video work consisting of field-recordings and photographs taken over a number of weeks in the village of Mooste, Estonia. Arriving at the beginning of winter the incongruous sounds and sights of Mooste initially stimulated the artist’s senses. Relics from the colonial Soviet-era stood alongside traditional Estonian residences; forests stood beside barren winter farmland. However the weight of Mooste’s colonial history and its dark northern winter gradually became oppressive. The low frequencies emanating from local objects began to reflect the harsh surrounds. Through the use of sound and image Eesti explores our emotional response to location and is a study into the psycho-geographic construction of “place”. Lismore Regional gallery, until August 25, 2019.
Follow: @coates_erin
Perth-based artist, curator and creator Erin Coates‘s Instagram account @coates_erin charts her prodigious output, from new work, her recent co-curated sc-fi and contemporary art extravaganza Other Suns at [>] Fremantle Arts Centre, to behind the scenes making-of shots and the occasional happy snap. A worthy addition to your feed…
Assorted Links
Woe is us [>] Arts organisations hit by funding bad news
Meanwhile… “In June 2019, Create NSW invited Expressions of Interest from arts and cultural leaders to join Create NSW Artform Advisory Boards….” Here are the winners [>] Create NSW Artform Advisory Boards
Jerry Saltz challenges [>]“Produce a Perfect Faux Gerhard Richter Painting, and I’ll Buy It…”
What do galleries [>] owe their local communities?
The University of Newcastle is giving you the chance [>] to learn the ins and outs of natural history illustration in under six weeks.
Street Art is a global commercial juggernaut with a diverse audience [>] Why Don’t Museums Know What to Do With It?
Depending who you ask, Cosmo Park is an ingenious urban oasis or an ill-conceived dystopia [>] Suburb in the sky: how Jakartans built an entire village on top of a mall
D.A. Pennebaker [>] Master Director of Documentaries, Dies at 94
“Male artists still make up the bulk of the art market, but women are doing better in terms of auction resales…” [>] A New Study Has Simple Advice for Collectors Looking for Big Returns on Art: Invest In Women
“Most artists struggle to make ends meet [and their] income is made up of a mix of creative, arts-related income and non-arts-income [>] So how do visual artists manage? Is relocating the answer? And how do parents maintain an arts practice?” [>] The Cost of Art — regional artists and accountability
Time Hole: “In 2014 Olafur Eliasson and filmmaker Claire Denis met to discuss their common fascination with phenomena that have not yet been fully explained by science – such as black holes – and their shared interest in abstraction; this short film by Denis, contemplating tests for Eliasson’s work ‘Contact’, 2014, is one outcome of that conversation…”
Dept. of Holy Carp [>] ‘Egyptian Queen’ by Frank Frazetta sets $5.4 Millions USD world record at Heritage Auctions.
[>] Alien Still Hasn’t Gotten Around To Listening To Whole Voyager Golden Record
And finally…
We’ve discussed our love of Ctrl Shift Face‘s work here before, and the anonymous producers of disturbing Deep Fake videos have been putting out lots of new material, including a mostly good superimposition of [>] Sylvester Stallone into Terminator 2. So yes, we’ve been here before, but the strange and chimerical transformations of comedian Bill Hader doing impressions of Al Pacino and Arnold Schwarzenegger is a must see…
Bill Hader was so good in How to Train your Dragon, the weird thing about your clip is that his entire face became Pacino and then Schwarzenegger when he did the impressions