Your Iconophile was unsuccessful in his search for clues at the last known address of

In his speech today at the ANU School of Art, ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope revealed that his motivation for dropping the two-year-old percent-for-art scheme was based on pre-election polling and focus group sessions, which revealed that dissatisfaction with the Public Art Program was consistently in the top 5 reasons why voters would switch to the Libs. So, hidden amongst other announcements, the policy was dumped just prior to the last local election. His speech (I’ll link to it when I find it) gave a history of public art in Canberra since the 60s, and some sense that some millions were still to be spent – presumably from other sources. What went wrong? he asked. He had hoped that his “expert independent advisory panel” would have taken some of the heat, but no, it all came back to him, as he “launched” one after another of the new sculptures, a fair proportion of which were “off the shelf” from commercial galleries and Sydney’s Sculpture by the Sea. As I’ve often commented (follow the thread at Public Artefacts in the sidebar), his “expert independent advisory panel” includes only one person with wide-ranging visual arts expertise (the recently appointed CMAG’s Deborah Clark) plus a token visual artist (Chrissy Grishin, aka G.W.Bot). Little wonder the streets of Canberra came to look like a weirdly chaotic private collection, with minor works scattered around higgledy-piggledy, in a manner that seems to lack any vision other than to hedge against the vicissitudes of popular taste. Speaking of which, he has just announced this horrific non-sculpture planned for the streets of Gungahlin. It’s a disaster zone. What’s the answer? 1. Appoint a Curator of Public Art with the authority to clean it all up, to curate the public spaces of Canberra. 2. Emulate Sydney’s Sculpture by the Sea and fill the city with temporary works every year or so. 3. Commission new works rather than just go shopping (sometimes it’s the CM himself). 4. Commission public works that are not necessarily lumps of bronze. 5. Emulate the Serpentine Gallery’s Pavilion program and install great works of architecture in the Dead Heart between the Melbourne and Sydney Buildings. But bronze Bunyips? It may already be too late.

There’s not much you’re allowed to photograph in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands. But there’s no love lost for the feral camels that were culled last year  following the invasions of local communities. Remember the uproar last Christmas when there was a camel plague Docker River? See here. This is where the remains of the cull were cremated. And there are still millions out there. Seriously.

We assumed the big screen in John’s Pizza Bar and Restaurant in Coober Pedy would be the best place to watch the election results fall…

But no. The AFL takes priority. John set me up in the back room where there was a screen with no audience!

As things unfold, the “Coat of Arms” Pizza may be the high point of the night!



Be warned: if you vote for The Bishop and her Pet Monk the folks at Iconophilia can arrange for some gnomely revenge… (For example, this is by Milan Knizak: Andel, 1989, acrylic on plastic. P.S. if this makes no sense to you, there’s a thread).

“…because they’re aerial landscapes you can just swivel them around.” So says the gallery attendant. In a previous post I asked whether it matters that the viewers of Aboriginal art are comfortable installing it to suit their own taste – by making the final decision about its orientation on the wall – in a manner that is unique to this kind of intercultural transaction. Actually, I would want to argue something much stronger: to convert a topographical way of seeing to a pictorial way of looking adds a layer of meaning and value which is essentially alien to the originating culture. My question remains, why does this final aesthetic decision remain unproblematic? Take this example:

The snapshot above includes the painting (on the right) titled Jurnu Kup (Two Sisters), by May Chapman, from Punmu, one of the stars at the exhibition at Chapman Gallery in Manuka. This is a group exhibition Jakilpa Laju Kartyinpa: Bringing a Message showing work by some of the Martumili artists represented in the Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route exhibition currently at the National Museum of Australia.

These two ways of presenting the same painting demonstrates a commonplace lack of resolution of this ontological dilemma. It accentuates two different ways of being in the world, of two different symbolic systems. Clearly, the painting by May Chapman doesn’t yet have a settled orientation. It was advertised and illustrated in the Canberra Times rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise to the way it was hung in the gallery, apparently “to suit the shape of the advertisement”. In the Martumili Artists certificate for this painting it is illustrated rotated 180 degrees (upside down), but described as if it is horizontal. All of which exemplifies the orientation conundrum.

You could argue that it doesn’t matter, because a painting like this is equally valid in any of four orientations. Maybe the artist doesn’t care, or the issue is beyond their ken, or just not on their radar… You could argue these works will always be essentially ambiguous, and therefore the consumer will be wrong three quarters of the time.  If indeed there is a right and wrong. Nevertheless it is usually the outsider (art advisor, curator, dealer, collector) who takes charge, and who decides which way up it should go… The deed is done, whether or not it matters to the artist. So what does this tell us about the asymmetrical relations inherent in such intercultural transactions? See comments…

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…

Your Iconophile admits: I don’t know how to hang a painting. But I’m not the only one with this problem. Let me show you what I mean. This is a photograph of an untitled painting by the Tiwi artist Ian Cook (2003, 480 x 520, who is represented by Jilamara Arts and Crafts Association). It poses questions that are endemic to much of contemporary Aboriginal art. It inhabits a conceptual space in between the practices of one culture and another, where the one makes paintings horizontally, on the ground, and the other culture views paintings vertically, hanging on the wall. The problem in such instances is how should the paintings make the transition? And does it matter? (Of course it matters! Otherwise you might just have hung your best Piet Mondrian upside down.) The image in question is said to be related to the painting on the Tiwi bark baskets called tunga. There are no other clues.

In Aboriginal cultural practice, most paintings are produced in the absence of a pictorial convention which determines a picture’s orientation in space, or indeed in the absence of a convention which depicts space in pictorial terms. Most Aboriginal paintings are made within a topographical conception of space. In addition, many artists work on a painting from all four sides of the canvas. The resultant ideograph (Eric Michaels and others) is then hung vertically on the wall, occupying the social space given to fine art in the western world. It becomes a picture.

Of course there are some conventions in Aboriginal art which are based on indigenous developments of Western pictorial art. There are also indigenous traditions, as for example with those that have evolved out of body painting, where the depiction of figures and forms are oriented in a pictorial space which makes clear their correct alignment for a viewer. Yet even when an indigenous culture has developed its own rules of pictorial space, and an up/down convention of viewing, curators still get it wrong. See how the Musee du quai Branly provides a stubborn example, even when the image is unambiguous, and the practice well documented. Sometimes other contemporary media are similarly ambiguous, intentionally or otherwise – I have even seen a photograph hanging on its side at the National Gallery of Australia – luckily it was quickly corrected when the error was identified! The problem is complicated by the fact that there are many conventions in contemporary art where pictorial and spatial ambiguity is an essential element in the work’s meaning. It was common in Minimalist art (Carl Andre et al) and there are contemporary mainstream painters (like Peter Adsett) who sometimes exhibit their paintings horizontally to explore the potential of disorientation of conventional ways of looking.

So what determines art advisors’, curators’, dealers’, or collectors’ choice of orientation of a picture like this? Sometimes it is simply a sense of balance. Sometimes it is a choice which is to do with the play of colour and tonal weight – a kind of imagining the effect of gravity. In other cases it is a choice how forms seem to orientate themselves in space – even when it is the spectator who invents these spatial/pictorial effects. A cloudscape, an horizon line, a series of overlapping forms suggest themselves. All culturally specific conditioned responses to pictorial stimuli. Often the judgements made reflect the way in which instances of alien painting traditions are seen as a kind of latent potential/presence in the work of the Aboriginal painter. Something in the Aboriginal painting that is a suggestion of an external referent, which allows the beholder to bridge the gap between the cultures – to allow it to make sense – even when the two cultures seems irreconcilable in almost every other circumstance.

Faced with this dilemma it is common to act out a ritual of cultural projection. Faced with ambiguity, the viewer seeks stasis. So a final aesthetic decision is made, usually completely independent of the artist’s own agency – conception, intention, or choice. That decision is the painting’s orientation in space.  Innocently, almost naturally, it is usually an outsider who performs the final act which confirms the painting’s essential pictorial effects and values for the outside world. Thus when a culture possesses no intrinsic pictorial spatial conventions, it is in such a manner as this that the receiving culture projects its own aesthetic framework on the other’s cultural artefact. An outsider decides what looks best. The work is therefore completed by the imposition of the receiving culture’s own aesthetic values. This final act of pictorial effect is as significant as the final layer of paint for the way such artefacts are evaluated as works of art. See? I’ve just shown you four different paintings… Which do you prefer?

My observations above are triggered by this week’s Sotheby’s catalogue, in which there are 286 Aboriginal paintings. 167 of them are spatially ambiguous. How does one feel about the sheer scale of taste projection employed in determining the aesthetic effects which results from the orientation of these pictures, in the catalogue, and therefore for posterity? Who decides? Alas many of us are implicit in the manipulation of this asymmetrical process of cultural reception and interaction, and the consequential projection/imposition of our own taste. What is to be done?

The text above these three figures is not easy to translate. However this triple portrait is said to be of the turn-of-century King, Habibullah Khan, and his two successors, his brother Nasrullah Khan (who ruled for a week after his brother’s hunting accident assassination) and his third son Amanullah Khan, who lasted until 1929. Amanullah Khan is now revered as the moderniser who was responsible for disposing of the British in 1921.

Afghan carpet makers still produce images of Amanullah, now updated with modern militaria to reference the current conflict. Such imagery serves as an evocation of a more peaceful past, as history morphs into allegory, and as the roles of historical figures become mythologised.

is a strangely reliable criterion. What do you hang on your bedroom wall?  So when I came upon this 1929 Rodchenko I decided I could very happily brush my eyes with it morning noon and night into these days of the 21st century. Going forward, as they say. Even though it looks like a print from a scratchy old negative, what would you expect with a subject like this? See the origin of this image here, and treat yourself to the particular kind of time travel that takes you back to the last years of the Vkhutemas. P.S. Perhaps I need a new sidebar category: WISHFUL THINKING…