JOHN MCDONALD
January 17, 2009 — 11.00am
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RARELY has a slighter show had a more grandiloquent title than To Make A Work Of Timeless Art, a selection of pieces acquired from the Primavera exhibitions held at the Museum of Contemporary Art every year since 1992. Primavera was initiated by a bequest from the Jackson family in honour of their daughter, Belinda, who died at the early age of 29. The idea is to show a cross-section of work by emerging artists aged 35 and under.
By now Primavera is one of the longest-running contemporary art events in the country, which entitles the museum to claim it as a success. Yet when one looks back over that procession of shows, the highlights have been few and far between. Most of these surveys have been disappointments, with few truly memorable works.
On 12 out of 17 occasions, Primavera has been selected by an outside curator – a gambit that should ensure a healthy variety – but there is still something lacklustre about the results. Too many inclusions have been trite, derivative and banal, qualities that have never prevented a work from being admired by the curators. Indeed, some of the most wilfully banal productions, such as Shaun Gladwell’s videos, have become obligatory acquisitions for public galleries and big-time collectors.
Later this year, the fast-rising Gladwell (born 1972) will be Australia’s official representative in the Venice Biennale. Those who have yet to become acquainted with this shooting star may sample his wares in the MCA’s upstairs show, To Make A Work Of Timeless Art, and downstairs, in a selection of recent acquisitions. Needless to say, he also features in Current, a massive new book on contemporary art in Australia and New Zealand, put together by the journal Art And Australia.
Gladwell’s upstairs work is a video called Tangara (2003), which shows him hanging suspended from the overhead handrail of a train. Because the film is inverted and played in slow motion, he appears to be doing strange gymnastics with his arms held stiffly out in front. That’s it, basically, although the catalogue discerns a profound reference to Australia’s cultural isolation. “Gladwell hints at this,” we are told, “through his confinement and suspension within the train carriage, conveying a sense of melancholy often associated with the co-existence of humankind with rapid progress.”
Leaving aside the implication that rapid progress is a phenomenon that might take place with or without humankind, this seems a rather oblique way to represent “melancholy”. Whatever happened to the time-honoured figure of a man holding his head in his hands?
Comparisons may be odious but I couldn’t help thinking of a video by the Chinese artist Zhou Xiaohu, called Concentration Camp Training (2008), which shows a large group of actors suspended in mid-air and similarly inverted. In a series of grotesque and hilarious sequences, they go through a training course for the American direct-selling firm Amway, shouting slogans in praise of profit with bulging eyes and hair standing on end.
Then there was Staring Into Amnesia (2007), an extraordinary multimedia work by Qiu Anxiong, who filled each window of a real railway carriage with historical film footage. Walking down the aisle was like waking down a time tunnel of Chinese history. (Incidentally, Qiu Anxiong will be holding a solo exhibition at Gallery 4a in Haymarket at the end of this month.)
I mention these works mainly to show that artists are capable of making outstanding pieces using similar ideas and materials to Gladwell but with much grander ambitions. If the world’s most exciting contemporary art is at present being made in China, that is not simply because the Chinese are making up for time lost during the Maoist years. There is a vision, a boldness and a hunger among Chinese artists that is rarely found in their Australian counterparts. The only nations to show a similar dynamism at present are South Korea and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
Anyone who took the woeful selection of works that passes as a sample of 17 consecutive years of Primavera as representative of the state of contemporary art in this country would be plunged into despair. Looking back over the lists of artists who have been included in these shows, it would appear the MCA has deliberately chosen to acquire the least interesting things. The only piece that demonstrates any trace of sincerity is a painting by the Western Desert artist Yukultji Napangati. Almost everything else is smug, tricksy, smart-arse, ironical and image-conscious. It is a collective portrait of contemporary decadence.
Even figures such as James Angus, Tim Silver and Nick Mangan, who have shown themselves to be talented artists in the past, are represented by small, insignificant items. The catalogue argues that the inclusion of “preliminary pieces”, such as Angus’s Manta Ray (2002), serves to highlight “the often unseen aspects of studio practice”. There is no reason given as to why these “unseen aspects” require highlighting. What sculptor wants to be represented in a museum survey by a tiny maquette? If this is all the MCA could afford to buy, they would have been better advised to save their pennies.
The title work of this show, To Make A Work Of Timeless Art (1996), is an installation by Gail Hastings (born 1965), which has never previously been shown at the MCA even though it was acquired in 1997. One can only marvel at the sense of urgency that drove the purchase of this work, then mothballed it for more than a decade. The great achievement of Hastings’s installation is that it manages to be simultaneously pretentious and nondescript. We are told that, in some mysterious fashion, the artist “extends and enriches the minimalist project of the 1960s” by setting up “sculptural situations” that make us “interrogate art itself and its relationship with its audience.”
There is so much “interrogation” and “subversion” in the language of contemporary art that it sometimes sounds like an induction course for the KGB. In reference to one of my old essays, a well-known artist was known to exclaim: “Criticism like this must be liquidated!”
Perhaps the only credible way to read Hastings’s title about “a work of timeless art” is to see it as broadly ironic. The work of timeless art is a pipe dream, a chimera, a bourgeois fantasy. We imagine some masterpiece by Rembrandt or Velasquez but find, instead, a few white boxes and a couple of framed diagrams. This is not, alas, the kind of experience that anybody but a curator of contemporary art might find satisfying or enlightening.
Hastings’s work may be timeless, but if we take the new Art And Australiapublication Current as a guide, it does not appear to be current. One dreads to imagine the arguments and horse-trading that went on within the editorial committee when they sat down to choose 80 artists, or groups of artists, from Australia and New Zealand, to be immortalised in this volume. First of all, they would have chosen such obvious candidates as Bill Henson, Richard Killeen, Fiona Hall and John Mawurndjul, who are without peer in their fields. Then they would have fastened onto artists such as Mike Parr, Robert MacPherson, Susan Norrie and so on, who are routinely assumed to be important by the art pundits, even though this seems to be a matter of blind faith rather than reason.
Just about anybody who has had a sniff of overseas recognition is included, namely artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Patricia Piccinini, Stelarc, Ron Mueck, Ah Xian, Ricky Swallow, Destiny Deacon, Callum Morton and Francis Upritchard. The inclusion of New Zealand artists is a good thing, showing how closely interrelated the two art scenes have become over the past decade, although it must have made the haggling over inclusions even more torturous. Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy hit the jackpot when their work was chosen for the cover.
A good half of these choices could have been pulled from a hat – in the same way the Australian cricket selectors apparently choose a spinner. The provisional nature of such a survey is implicit in the title, Current, which suggests a constant flow rather than a series of “timeless” landmarks. Those artists standing in the limelight may be forgotten tomorrow. Others will be carried downstream to greater honours and accolades.
One of the book’s essayists, Justin Paton, pronounces that this shifting, provisional status is “a good thing”, preferring the fickle tides of fashion to those heavy-handed attempts to force the hand of history. When put this way, it’s impossible not to agree but the truth of the matter is that history will make up her own mind in her own time. Like the show at the MCA, Current is another ritual offering on art history’s altar, but this god is not so easily appeased.
To Make A Work Of Timeless Art: MCA Primavera acquisitions
Museum of Contemporary Art, until February 22
