Entries Tagged 'DÉCOR' ↓

“Westfield”, “municipal”, “truly awful”, “ungainly” are just some of the expressions Robert Bevan uses in The Oz here.

Do architects have a sense of humour? They must have. Yet when an architect puns, it’s a private joke at the public expense. When is a column not a column? When it’s a pun, stupid. The primary architectural feature of the National Gallery of Australia’s new facelift is this singular column. Judging by my photograph of their photograph, above, the purpose is to assert its status as an icon, signifying the character of the new building. There’s certainly nothing like it in the old building – although admittedly the Nolans are now shown in a new gallery shaped like a spa-bath. Now let’s think this through. Like a temple, a proper museum needs columns to signal its entrance, right? Maybe we can make do with just one column? That appears to support nothing? Except maybe a plastic dome? Get it?

Here’s the approach…

There’s no word in the architectural lexicon for a thing like this. So maybe this virtual column can be interpreted as both an oh-so-cautious nod towards postmodernism, while at the same time it reinforces the sphere and dome theme, to the left and right of the entrance, and inside as well. The problem is, like much of postmodernity, it’s a one-liner. So every time you swing by, you’ll be reminded of the same visual pun thing.

But wait! There’s more… Just beside the front door there’s a broken column, a modest little neocubist artefact, reminiscent of the style of the late Mari Funaki, but with no apparent attribution. It stands on a base inscribed to commemorate the opening of the new galleries. It’s about life-size, and it leans as if it wants to have a rest against the glass wall.  In its ambiguous anonymity it carries a certain mysterious status. As an artefact without the authority of an author, it somehow suggests a subversive purpose, loitering with intent, seemingly condemned never to reach the status of a work of art… Perhaps there is a prize for guessing its identity?

Methinks someone’s lost control of their signifiers… Want more? The thread continues here.

Thanks to Helen Vivian’s detective work, I was fascinated to read how the London-based Frieze had reviewed Utopia: the genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, the Emily Kame Kngwarreye exhibition at the (then) new National Art Centre Tokyo, while on tour in Japan from the new National Art Museum in Osaka, in June 2008.

Contrary to the self-adulatory press this exhibition received in Australia, in this review Edan Corkhill makes no mention of its institutional origins (The National Museum of Australia) or its local curator, Margo Neale. According to this reviewer, it’s all down to its Japanese curator, Akira Tatehata, as is his “impossible modernist” rubric. As is to be expected, cross-cultural projection is the primary means by which the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye is to be understood in such circumstances. Once in the mainstream of contemporary art, the problem is just how is Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s (or her contemporaries, for that matter) achievement to be judged?

In this instance while the reviewer’s point is to congratulate the curator for stepping outside “the Euro-American mainstream… [which is] a watershed in Japanese museum history”, the standards of evaluation remain firmly within its mainstream rhetoric. So, one finds the curators quoted exclaiming that it displays “all the techniques honed by the Abstract Expressionists”. Once Terry Smith had compared Emily to Monet, everyone else was on the same track. Janet Holmes a Court is quoted as proclaiming “she’s up there with Monet, Modigliani (??) and all the rest…” This is an example of what Darren Jorgenson refers to as “codes of similitude”. By the way, that’s the same M. Monet who, as this reviewer coincidentally commented, had by comparison, seemed “fiddly” when seen in the same venue…

Following our previous thread, I was also interested to read that while describing the extraordinary scale of Emily’s work, (in relation to the dimensions of the National Art Centre’s walls) the writer informs us: “the artist painted on the ground, so the work’s orientations are determined by the curator”. So there you go. It’s mainstream. In black and white. And still my problem remains unresolved…

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?

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…

at Yulara. I wonder does the boutique approach work at the souvenir end of the market? There are some quite well-known names amongst this “display”…

Let your eyes wander over the curvaceous 1949 Delahaye 175 S Roadster designed by the Russian/French Iakov (Jacques) Saoutchik, and you’ll understand why it was formerly owned by the British actress Diana Dors… read the story at ArtDaily. And, btw, what was that colour called? P.S. Yours for $3.3m.

Don’t you love that attitude towards public art meets public transport!

find “a matter of taste” in the left hand side bar under “works” and follow the slide show of Fulvio Bonavia’s wearable edibles

More? http://unhappyhipsters.com/