An inclination to dwell on death’s transforming touch and the life beyond can also be traced in Cook’s routine conversations while at work at Jilamara. Often, he tells art centre co-ordinator Cher Breeze of his anxieties about the moment of his entry into heaven. How will people know him there, how will they recognise him? He has a plan: to take a painting with him, stored in his coffin, so his mother will be sure it’s him when he arrives.

Should such intimacies be chattered about in the press? Why does this particular aspect of an artist’s concerns fascinate Nicolas so?  And should your Iconophile worry about this theme in The Roth’s writings? Only because he has been banging this drum for years. Read on…

And P.S. In the same article The Roth perpetuates another myth of Australian art history:

Cook’s own work increasingly is compared with canvases by the modern, Western master who commissioned those same poles for the gallery, Tony Tuckson, a painter whose use of line and colour field weaves a net of associations between contemporary and indigenous art-making.

What kind of weird retro-projection is this? Sure, Tuckson was a key figure in the recognition of Indigenous artefacts as art, but to his credit there’s no iconographic or other evidence that Tuckson’s own work evoked the art he so admired. Sorry, Nicolas, that’s just sloppy art history. And anyway, what does it mean to compare a contemporary artist’s work with a “modern, Western master” who last painted four decades ago? When artist B is neither a postmodernist nor knows anything of artist A, and we’re not into channeling, not just yet. Projection (a Theory for Troubled Minds) such as this says more about outsiders’ own inclinations to meddle with the history of Indigenous art, and to validate their own tastes, retrospectively.

If this is “war art”, what position does it take? Is it sufficient to present upscaled readymades-altered to speak about the subject of war? I think not. One could hardly image a context more removed from the circumstances and experience of war than this. Fiona Banner presents Harrier and Jaguar as the Duveens Commission at the Tate Britain, seen here courtesy of ArtDaily. Each has been transformed (painted like a bird, polished like a mirror) and upended (recontextualised) in the Tate’s neoclassical museum space. The aestheticisation to which these particular functional objects have been subjected is therefore reduced to four actions: selection, surface treatment, re-orientation, and context.

Fiona Banner is quoted as saying: “It’s hard to believe that these planes are designed for function, because they are beautiful. But they are absolutely designed for function, as a bird or prey is, and that function is to kill. That we find them beautiful brings into question the very notion of beauty, but also our own intellectual and moral position. I am interested in that clash between what we feel and what we think.” How very English. Is that clash as in Margaret Thatcher, or Tony Blair? She’s not anti-war, just anti-these-wars, and their cost: “This work is not a direct response to the Iraq war. I marched against the war, we shouldn’t be there and the costs of Afghanistan are too high.”

It’s hard to find more than just the reworked press release to continue this discussion. Adrian Searle gushes excitedly at The Guardian… And Arifa Akbar is awe-struck at The Independent Blogs…

Rosalie Gascoigne, (1917-99), Pink Window, 1975, (Gascoigne Family Collection, Canberra).

Of course the senior figure of significance to this aspect of the local scene is the late Rosalie Gascoigne. As the curators point out, her recognition rocketed from emergence to the Venice Biennale in just a decade or so. It’s arguable that her career as an artist also was a product of the NGA effect – given the strong support and mentorship of its first director, James Mollison. She is represented here by four works, the selection of which more than compensates for the absence of the Cornell and Duchamp – her Parrot Morning 1976 from the NGV is just one of many bicycle references in the show. But it is the work above, one of the great works of her middle phase, which captures the spirit of this show, perfectly combining the urban and the rural, the domestic and the outdoors, which is a characteristic of so many of the works in the show.

Neil Roberts (1954-2002) Cryonic Quintet 1994 (Collection CMAG)

There’s another distinction that could be made in this exhibition between those artists for whom assemblage is the core of their practice, and those for whom it is a means to an end. Neil Roberts and Rosalie Gascoigne were of the former category, and it is mindboggling to consider the time and effort that went into the searching and discovery of the myriad of elements from which their work emerged. At this level collecting materials with the potential to become art is purely instinctive. You can’t go out looking for a cardboard box with a parrot on it – rather, it comes to you, if you’re in the right receptive frame of mind. And so this mesmerising set of totem poles made of cast glass objects on Duchampian stools is the result of years of accumulation, until they coalesced into their final form. And, of course, any work of art which employs collage and assemblage to create new forms and meanings carries the implication of its possible dissolution, as if the poetry of the conjunction of materials always remains essentially tenuous. It is as if the work retains an ephemeral quality, and could just as easily come apart, undoing the creative process in the same manner as it was done.

David Sequeira (1966-) Zen Picnic (1998-2006) (Collection of the artist)

How could you not but be impressed by David Sequeira’s capacity to assemble his materials – here trays, plates and dishes in various (vulgar) plastic materials and colours? These flattened totem poles employ the same process as Roberts – a cumulative building of a final form – and similarly convey a nostalgic familiarity with the historical origins of the building blocks of the work. But here, like Roberts, their mode of assemblage transcends the mundane origins of the materials of the work, and challenges the viewer’s expectations – in this instance in a pictorial rather than a sculptural sense.

Hamilton Darroch (1972-) Resurface 1, 2008 (collection of the artist)

The majority of works in the show have been made in the last decade. Most of the artists are graduates of the ANU School of Art. And yet assemblage is not in any sense a “house style” of the School, or even the core of their teachers’ practice. Ham Darroch now works in London (once as studio assistant to Bridget Riley), and the ancient elements of these works were recovered from the Thames at low tide. He took his Canberra Style with him.  And yes, people still stroll along the mudflats on summer evenings! But what caught your Iconophile’s eye in this case (along with many other such elements to be discovered in other works in the exhibition) was the delicate, elegant manner in which Ham has painted the (new) handles of his shovel, gaff hook and plumb bob sculptures. Perhaps the London light had something to do with it?

With a show like this, you could write such stories five times over. Don’t miss. Read the excellent catalogue. And P.S. There’s a link to the Neil Roberts website in this previous post on ArtWranglers.

I’ve previously pointed to the interesting exhibition EXPOSED at The Tate Modern. It’s about sly photography, from (almost) the very beginning. It has been curated by Sandra S. Phillips, from the SFMMA, and while understandably there’s an American bias, there are some stunning moments. Weegee, Lee Frielander, Lee Miller, Susan Meiselas, you name them, they’re there. Images that define our understanding of photography. Politically Incorrect, mostly. Can’t wait to order the book for the Library.

The book. While I was having my snack, I began to think that the exhibition went off a little bit when in the final room when it engaged with Wilful Artful Conceptualism. By the time we get to Vito Acconci in the late 60s being photographed from behind while filming people from behind, it seemed that the whole thesis of the surreptitious photograph having an ethical tension – the tensions of invasion, control, desire, intrusion, voyeurism – was becoming an art world convention. So I thought.

So I wandered over to the stack of books where a young man was browsing the display copy, and asked him whether I could photograph him reading the Acconci page for Iconophilia. Sure, he said, and we were setting up the shot when an officious little man from the shop zoomed over to tell us we couldn’t do it, and took the book away. Why not? I asked. You’re not allowed to photograph the books, not here, he said. Even surreptitiously? I asked. No answer. What if I buy a copy? You can take it home and do whatever you like with it, he said. It’s for your own protection, he added, firmly. Meanwhile

elsewhere in the gallery people seemed to be able to photograph anything they liked, no problems. But in The Shop?  There are still boundaries to be transgressed, apparently. Especially if it’s against our own interests. When, I ask you, is it transgressive to photograph a consenting adult reading a book? Answer: when the Gallery is already full of photographs taken without their subjects’ consent.

P.S. I bought the T Shirt. Watch out for a person walking around town who has been EXPOSED to transgressive thoughts.

P.P.S see Mark Brown’s review in The Guardian See a slideshow here.

In Das Neue Augustinermuseum they’ve created an inside-out cathedral in the old Museum of the Augustin Monastery in Freiburg. Brilliantly designed by Christoph Mackler. This, to our surprise, turned out to be one of the great museum experiences anywhere. All of the gargoyles and sculptures that were under threat on the magnificent Munster, plus windows, plus the extraordinary treasures of the Museum, are on view under the old roof of the Monastery.

You see things from vantage points that were never meant to be, and the sculptures become animated in completely unpredictable ways. And then there’s the sculptures and paintings of the German Rennaissance (medieval, gothic, high gothic, baroque, etc.)…

Our nerves needed steadying.

St Vitus needed one too.

And the installation is itself a masterpiece of curatorial design. How beautifully challenging it is to show these two Pieta fragments together?

The Museum is full of such experiences. Bravo!

Remarkably coherent and thoughtful, Elliott’s Biennale mostly avoids the pitfalls of political correctness by including art that is thought-provoking, engaging and, in some instances, even beautiful.