Entries Tagged 'AVERT YOUR EYES!' ↓

What is wrong with this photograph? In its relentless quest to trivialise its treasures, (vide the moving wallpaper effect of projecting fragments of its Aboriginal Art collection on the walls at night) see how the National Gallery of Australia represents itself with a fragment of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles on the parking signs. Not only a crass concept of branding, but turning the painting into a three dimensional object? Whoever thought of that should creep back to whence they came…

Wouldn’t you love to see the request letter to the Pollock-Krasner Foundation?

“Eco-terrorism”? what were they thinking? See here.

As I’ve observed previously, the Aboriginal Memorial has been dramatically re-framed by the National Gallery of Australia. In its new location it is the jewel in the crown of the NGA’s new extension where it sits (at last) all by itself in its own gallery. This is how the architect Andrew Andersons envisaged it…

The NGA has been using the Aboriginal Memorial in all its advance publicity, including this depleted “virtual” view, but it has only just been shown in its vulgar new “frame” – the roughly crushed black basaltic rocks from the Monaro high plains (“Nimmitabel Blue”) on which the 200 burial poles are now situated.

Normally, museums of this stature go to extreme lengths to exhibit their treasures in their original frames. In this case, the Aboriginal Memorial was first exhibited on red sand at the 1988 Biennale of Sydney, echoing the way the poles are seen in their original locale in Arnhem Land. When the designers came up with this new idea, was there nobody brave enough to say “this is appalling”? “The conservators won’t allow sand” seems to be the excuse of the day. What? Surely anything is possible in the museum of the 21st century? However in this case even the normally outspoken conceptual author of the Aboriginal Memorial, Djon Mundine, seems to have gone to ground. Ouch!

Seems like if the NGA can present a work as contemporary art they can install it however they like by pushing the bounds of moral rights and the artist’s original intentions. However if it’s sacred art, surely there are limits to what you should do with it? The addition of dramatic new material qualities to the work, notwithstanding the cultural origins and potentially alien significance of such materials, is a significant transformation of its reference to the place of its origins. As has always been signalled by the form of the Glyde River, dividing it in two. And so my question is, what is this work, re-framed, now saying?

This is how the NGA first began to trivialise its Aboriginal Art collection in 2007.

The projections continue today. Like moving wallpaper. In 2007, such projections of the Aboriginal Memorial seemed like one more step along the path towards the desacralisation of the work. It is, after all, a memorial. It represents the unrepresentable, in Jonathan Bordo’s words: “[it] is the public sign of an unrepresentable practice – the Aboriginal dead lie outside this domain, outside representation”. (See his essay The Witness in Contemporary Art in Paul Duro: The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, Cambridge 1996, p.187.)

On Saturday 16th October the Canberra Times has published a promotional supplement which features the begravelled Aboriginal Memorial on its front cover. In addition, there is a short article by Djon Mundine culled from material he has published before. No comment on its design transformation…

In a bizarre twist, it seems the whole extension is framed by this ugly basalt rubble. In the gap between the old and new, there is a window which marks the transition from the old children’s gallery to the new Indigenous galleries. And there, hey presto, we find a box gutter full of the stuff. It beggars the imagination to think that it’s OK to use the same material to re-frame the Gallery’s most sacred and significant work of Indigenous art, and at the same time use it to mark the transition between the old and new buildings, or just to improve the look of a gutter visible from the galleries inside…

Amongst the shemozzle that is our public art display in Canberra’s City Walk sits one of my least favourite sculptures: the Danish sculptor Keld Moseholm’s “On the Staircase”, 2005. It was installed (“launched”) in 2009, having been bought, sadly, on a shopping spree at Sydney’s Sculpture by the Sea. But look closely…

Someone has stolen the smallest figure! Does anyone care? Apparently not. The top of the staircase appears to have been mended. As if some arts bureaucrat thought, let’s just patch it and hope nobody notices. A classic case for a Moral Rights lawyer, you would think.

OK, OK, the fact that your Iconophile happens not to like something is always possible. In this case, you might reasonably expect that I would argue that it’s been improved by 25% as a consequence of this nefarious act. But no, whatever my personal taste, I am appalled that public art is subjected to such vandalism. And I’m doubly appalled that nobody seems to care! Who is responsible? This is another argument for the appointment of a Curator of Public Art…

And while I’m on the case, what on earth does the message on the plaque mean? Is it some kind of hedge to an anti-intellectual populism? Just who is being quoted when they say “the more I read the smaller I feel”? The artist? Not that I can find. Was it some famous producer of literary truisms? Alas Uncle Google brings you right back to the plaque, and the press release, so apparently someone with a PhD in Spin thought it up in the office. (A press release in bronze? That sounds like conceptual art.) All the new sculptures have such little homilies, but some of the old ones (like the Les Kossatz nearby) have no identification at all (another moral rights issue). It’s not a good look.

For those who live in Canberra the other significance of August 21st will be that it will be THREE YEARS TO THE DAY since the ACT Government and/or the NCA gave up on their responsibility to do something better with the dead heart of Canberra. I admit, this is not a big picture issue. It’s not going to divert us from Our Forward Momentum. But in Tidy Town such things loom large in the Civic Psyche. Three years ago we started making sick jokes about these sad little readymades which occupy the potentially important – but currently dreadful – space between the Sydney and Melbourne Buildings on Northbourne Avenue. Apparently they’re the foundations for some kind of signage that never got finished. They remain as an accidental monument to civic despair. But wait! There’s something new! They’ve updated the bin! And what’s that in the background?

Signage! It’s a sign that (in the most elliptical way) tells us how important this site really is… Welcome to BUILDINGS OF COMPONENT PARTS. Crikey! Who composed that? And for whom?

Dear Chief Minister, when oh when are you going to ask someone to take control and do something FANTASTIC with this symbolic space? Suggestion: emulate the Serpentine Gallery’s annual Pavilion. See here and  here…

There. I’ve broken my RULE never to rely on italics or CAPS for emphasis…

… we should never forget that the person on the left may one day be Acting Prime Minister. And he on the right may come back as Director of the NGA… If you missed it you can watch the death stare live here.

Look what sells as Non-Fiction at the Perth Airport News Agency! The majority of covers feature either women veiled, or tales of prostitution, apparently. How do we reconcile such apparent extremes? What does this weird conjunction tell us about the popular imagination?

…it’s all been taken care of, thanks to Rep. Michelle Bachmann, seen here on Wonkette. Remember to keep breathing, and watch it all the way through!

Puzzled by the necessity to post warnings against rampant ecclesiastics by the good burghers of Freiburg, I was directed to look again at das Freiburger Munster…

Good grief! What were they thinking? (What were they doing?) But don’t be deterred from risking a visit to see for yourself. It is indeed a miracle the Munster survived… If you missed it, see my previous panoramic view in which I remind you that the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt once said that the church’s 116-meter tower “will forever remain the most beautiful spire on earth”.

Course Code: WOOPS 101. Essential equipment: white gloves and STDs (Steel Toed Docs). Details here on ArtDaily. Higher standards than Christies.