Birds of a Feather Smoke Together

This is the digital portion of an artwork produced for 'The New Leaf: an altered book project' exhibited in Gladstone, Queensland in November 2014 facilitated by Felicia Lloyd.

The important things.

I surprised even myself when I walked away from the National Gallery of Victoria and the only thing I could think about was a painting from 1822.  That’s not a typo. Eighteen twenty-two. 

Normally I’d be super keen to check out the modern and contemporary art on display if I got the chance to go through a major collection like the NGV, and at first I was.  The collection was as impressive as I expected.  Being able to be in a building with artworks from masters like Picasso, Max Ernst, Jeff Koons, Man Ray, Rothko and Lee Kranser is awe inspiring.  It was flipping my switch, so to speak.  I was happy with my experience, taking in the glory of the modern masterpieces and being grateful to be seeing them. 

For some people, this is the kind of art you have to walk past to get to the good stuff; the old, gilded framed ‘classic’ masterpieces.  Realistic paintings of icons and metaphoric poses of animals and brooding, windswept figures.  I appreciate it.  I get it.  Art has a very long history and not all of it appeals to everyone.  That’s cool.  I do like looking at the skill and technique of these kinds of paintings and sculptures, but they don’t excite me the way modern and contemporary art does.  But then again, there’s always an exception to the rule.

After moving through a huge hall filled to the brim with centuries-old works I came across a small collection of works by John Constable.  For those of you who are a little rusty on your 19^th Century landscape artists, Constable is considered one of the best.  He was an innovator in the way he represented the natural world.  He had an undeniable talent for combining truthful and natural representation of the world around him with compositional skill which communicated his own emotional response to that place.¹  He’s an impressive and very important artist, just normally not my cup of tea. 

John Constable

Clouds, 1822

Oil on paper and cardboard

National Gallery of Victoria

At the very top of the view² of Constables, there was a painting of some clouds.  It was made in 1822, and was originally a study for part of another larger painting.  Constable was almost obsessed with the sky.  Clouds (1822), was part of a series of about fifty very detailed studies of different weather conditions around Hampstead in England.³  It’s quite a striking image to be seen with the other regular-looking landscapes.  It has no land references whatsoever.  It’s all cloud and beautiful blue sky.  I think the most interesting thing is that the meaning I read from it was due in part to the position in which it was hung.  I don’t want to make it sound like the only reason I liked it was because of the installation, the painting is absolutely stunning, but its position gave it added meaning.

In a room full of romantic bronze figures, biblical scenes, and foreign landscapes there was this little porthole to the outside world.  Because Clouds is nothing but the sky, it doesn’t reference its native England.  It felt like a snapshot of the beautiful Australian sky just outside.  In that moment, I was reminded that I was deep inside a climate controlled, concrete bunker where stuff is made to last forever.  Constable was speaking to me saying, “Dude, pictures of nature are good, but go outside, it’s all real!  There is no substitute!”  Okay, John Constable probably never called anyone ‘dude’, but the intent was there.  It was a wonderful reminder of the beauty of the world outside, and that we shouldn’t take it for granted.  Through exquisite execution, he is saying that no matter how well we represent the world, that’s all art will ever be, a copy.



The fact that it’s a preparatory exercise being exhibited as a finished work means that it doesn’t operate like the other landscape paintings surrounding it.  It reads more like a contemporary work subtly inserted into a room of antiquity.  Clouds isn’t a representation of a specific geographic location, it could be anywhere in the world, which means that there’s a far greater chance that each viewer will have a connection to it, reminding them of familiar outside spaces.  In this way, the very general image becomes very specific to each viewer.

When I began thinking of the beauty of nature outside the gallery, I was also reminded of the wonders of nature inside the gallery with me, my family.  It was a very serene and grounding experience.   Life’s made better by sharing it with others, and in my case, my kids.  Through the most frivolous thing in the world, art, Constable seems to have the uncanny ability to remind us of the most important things in life.  This humble statement from a master painter made my trip to the NGV so much more than just a visit to another gallery.  Thanks John.

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1   Nga.gov.au. 2013. CONSTABLE : impressions of land, sea and sky. [online] Available at: http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/CONSTABLE/Default.cfm [Accessed: 2 Oct 2013].

2   I just invented the collective noun for a group of Constable paintings.

3   John Constable: English 1776 - 1837. n.d. [Gallery didactic]. Felton Bequest, 1938, 455-4. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Desert Island Top Five

I like art.  You may have noticed already.  I tend to talk about it quite a bit.  As a result, I sometimes get asked what my favourite artworks are, and to be quite honest I have real trouble answering.  There’s heaps of art I really, really like, and I tend to be able to find the positive points of pretty much anything, but I struggle when it comes down to pinpointing the artworks that are my personal favourites.  At best, in the style of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, I can narrow it down to a ‘desert island top five’ artworks I’d want to have with me if stranded in some deserted corner of the globe.

 

Art is experiential.  To count as a real favourite, I think you have to have seen it in the flesh.  In 1917, when Marcel Duchamp titled a store-bought porcelain urinal Fountain, and declared it as art, he pretty much became the ultimate granddaddy of conceptual art (where the ideas being pushed by the artwork are more important than the way in which it was made).  Even though it’s been hugely influential on my arts career, I haven’t actually seen it (well, any of the certified copies on show around the world at least), so I don’t think it should count as a favourite.

 

I feel a bit bad about admitting this, but none of my Desert Island Top Five is Australian.  Or produced by a female artist.  I’m a victim of the European, male-centric history of art.  No need to let me know, I’m well aware...    

 

 

Ken Leslie’s Desert Island Top Five Artworks (in no particular order)

 
 

Donald Judd

Untitled (1972)

http://c300221.r21.cf1.rackcdn.com/donald-judd-untitled-1972-tate-modern-1345216430_b.jpg


 
Donald Judd’s artworks are what you might call an acquired taste.  They’re interesting in an intellectual way.  In a nutshell, Judd’s theory was that he wanted to make artworks that were somewhere between painting and sculpture.  He called these artworks Specific Objects, and they operate in their own little sphere of art.  Untitled (1972) is a perfectly produced brass box sitting in the middle of a huge room in the Tate Modern in London.  You can see how it was constructed, and you can tell that it’s been produced to exact specifications.  Because of its sheen, you can see a blurry, shadow-like reflection of yourself as you approach it.  The artwork is reminding you that you are a viewer in a gallery looking at a piece of art.  It’s the most honest artwork you’ll find.  Art about art, how am I not going to like it?



Mark Rothko

Untitled (c.1950-52)

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7TSbE7p08RE/S-2V15

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Another artwork I experienced at the Tate Modern to hit my list was Mark Rothko’s Untitled (c.1950-52).  I’ve talked about this experience before, but I’ll recap for those of you who aren’t regular readers.  When I was at uni, I looked quite closely at Rothko’s work through art journals and slides.  The writing always mentioned the spiritual experience of sharing a space with one of these big, blurry paintings, and in the back of my mind I always thought they were blowing their response way out of proportion to make their article sound ah-may-zing.  Until I stood in front of one myself. Holy guacamole, they were right all along!  It was like a spiritual experience, and I could have stood there for hours just staring.  If my wife didn’t physically move me away (true story), it would have been the security guards at the end of the day.  This was probably the most moving art experience I’ve had to date.

  

Stonehenge

http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/stonehenge/whole.jpg

Alright, so Stonehenge isn’t really a piece of art.  It’s definitely not contemporary art, but it’s my list and I’ll include it if I want to.  I was lucky enough to be one of the lucky few to be part of a tour group allowed to actually go up to the stones and touch them.  At a distance, it’s a beautiful arrangement of things in a beautiful landscape; up close, the history and (dare I say it) magic seems to ooze out from the stones themselves.  It’s an amazing experience.  Walking around the stones, I found some graffiti scratched into one of the surfaces.  I was blown away when I worked out that it was a date from the 1800s, but a few moments later I couldn’t believe my eyes when we found a date in Roman numerals.  Running my fingers in those perfectly arranged grooves, I realised that the monument was thousands of years old when the millennia-old graffiti was new and crisp. 

 

Ai Weiwei

Table with two Legs (2005)

http://arttattler.com/Images/Europe/Germany/Munchen/KunstvereinMunchen/

Ai%20Weiwei/06-HDK_AiWeiwei-table-with-two-legs.jpg

 

Ai Weiwei is the artist du jour.  Despite my usual reluctance to jump onto any bandwagon, here he is!  I saw his Table with two Legs (2005) at the Queensland Art Gallery, and immediately loved it.  Made from 350 year old furniture, it’s beautiful sacrilege.   This is an artwork that’s full of contradictions.  Its creation has destroyed a slice of antiquity, but now that it’s in the care of a major gallery, it will be kept in pristine condition in a controlled environment, much better than any private ownership ever would, protecting it forever.  The beautiful, useful object has had its functionality stripped.  It no longer has a utilitarian purpose; its only purpose now is beauty, with no function.  If you asked any history buff, they’d say that the table has been destroyed, but the manner in which the ‘destruction’ occurred was with precision, great care, and perfect craftsmanship.

Andy Warhol

Campbell's Soup Can (1962)

Photographic image of QAGoMA Catalogue

 

To those who know me, seeing Andy Warhol on this list should come as no surprise.  The artwork, however, might be.  When I visited the Warhol retrospective at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, there were a few stand-out pieces.  The huge (whole wall sized!) painting full of motorcycle parts and Catholic imagery was amazing, and the famous Disaster Series was so much more powerful than I had expected,  but there was a single ‘soup can’ painting that I thought was head and shoulders above anything else there.  Campbell’s Soup Can (1962) is an incomplete painting, but a complete artwork.  It’s outlined, but not filled in and still has masking tape across it.  I think it tells a hidden story about Andy Warhol himself.  Warhol tends to be branded by his own propaganda, the whole ‘I want to be a machine’ and public obsession with celebrity and fame paints him in a very superficial light, but the thing that often gets forgotten (or ignored) is his incredible eye for design and beauty.  This half-done artwork shows bravery that many artists lack.  Knowing when an artwork is complete, and understanding that that moment doesn’t always happen when your plan says it should is a very, very difficult skill to develop.  Andy got it.
 
So, that’s it.  My Desert Island Top Five.  I’ve got two honourable mentions though... Gimhongsok’s Canine Construction (2009) and Tony Tuckson’s No Title (c.1970s) (That title doesn’t help you in any way, but it’s one that I saw exhibited at the Museum of Brisbane in the early 00s.  Just know that it’s probably the best example of Abstract Expressionism ever.  Ever.).  This idea of favourites really interests me.  I’m quite sure that if I wrote this list again in a year’s time, it would be very different.  Maybe I will and we’ll see what it looks like.
 
I’d love you to add some comments here with your own Desert Island Top Five.  Even a partial list will do.  Share the love, people and let’s see what floats your boat! 

 

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Thanks to Sharne Wolff for her help with this one.  Follow her on twitter, well worth it. @sharnewolff. 

And thanks to the lovely Daena Scheuber whose idea this post was.  Follow her on twitter too!  @DScheuber.

 

The images used in this post were taken from web sources.  All care has been taken to link / credit those sources.  This blog is a not-for-profit type thing, in fact I haven't even added any of those annoying little ads down the side of your screen.

TEDx Rockhampton: Let's fill our schools with contemporary art!

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to be invited to be a speaker at TEDxRockhampton.  If you don't know what a TED conference is, then you need to check 'em out at the TED website.  They're awesome, and I still feel pretty humbled by the fact I was asked to be a speaker.  

Obviously, I was speaking about art, but in particular, how we should be making more of a focus on the arts in our primary schools.  You can go to the TEDxRockhampton site to view a video capture of the live stream (well worth it, there were heaps of amazing talks!), or you can read my original version below.

Before you do read on (and I'm sure you will...), I'd like to thank the whole crew of TEDxRockhampton, and in particular Treassa Joseph who was the curator of the event, for putting on such a wonderful event.  I can't wait for TEDxRockhampton 2014!

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In 2008, I was on holiday in London with my family.  One day, I made everyone go to the Tate Modern to see the works of art first-hand I had studied and loved from journals and slides back home as an art student.  I didn’t quite get the experience I had expected.  I marvelled at the Pollocks and Judds; I was in awe of the overwhelming beauty of Monet’s Waterlilies; just as I thought I would.  It was a painting by American artist Mark Rothko that stopped me in my tracks.  Of course I’d seen images of his large-scale, colour field paintings and read about how seductive and engaging they were, but this painting literally took my breath away.  I gasped and I couldn’t move.  It ate me alive.  I stood slack-jawed until my wonderful wife actually moved me away from it.  Even after years of study and making art, being in the presence of this one painting, I felt like my eyes had been opened, and I often think back to my ‘Rothko moment’.  I could show you a slide of the painting, but showing an image of an artwork that needs to be experienced in the flesh seems a little redundant.

Back to the here and now.  As a primary school teacher and artist, I’m passionate about the role of the arts and creativity in our children’s education, but at the moment I’m afraid we’re pushing our kids towards an arts-less society. Recent neuroscience research from the United States tells us that interaction with The Arts in an education setting can play very real role in helping to create critical, flexible, hard-working, and creative students with significant long-term memory improvements.  These are the kind of kids we want to become the future leaders of our communities.  The ability to be a creative and flexible thinker is now thought of as one of the most important traits for business and industry leaders.  Unfortunately, the subject area that best teaches this is given little to no importance, both by the bureaucracy of education systems and by educators ourselves.  I’m afraid for this to continue.  I’m worried that an appreciation for the arts could be a dying trait.

The Arts currently has a recommended allocation of teaching time in primary school classrooms of between 4 and 5% of total teaching time.  This equates to only 40 hours a year to cover Visual Arts, Media, Music, Drama and Dance for year levels up to Grade 2, and only 50 hours a year to Grade 6.  I’m not going to stand here and say that all subjects should be given equal teaching time, I understand that literacy and numeracy are a huge focus, but one hour a week seems pretty slim for a subject area that will improve problem solving skills, critical thinking, and mental flexibility, all in a way that gets kids excited, motivated and enthusiastic about learning.

  

Teachers can often be their own worst enemy.  It’s a job where children look to you in an expert role, but what happens when you don’t feel like an expert yourself?  So many people believe that they’re not ‘creative’ and therefore not qualified to teach The Arts.  For many years the concept that being a creative genius is like a God-given talent, and if you don’t have it, you shouldn’t try has been inadvertently pushed through our education system.  It usually happens in one of two ways, arts assignments dropped onto desks and telling the students to ‘have at it’, thereby completely abandoning good teaching practices of providing guidance and support (no teacher in their right mind would introduce, say, division without explanation and giving working examples, so why do it for The Arts?), or the other, more detrimental outcome of reducing The Arts to colouring in on rainy days.  Both of these situations allow for the children who are more practiced or feel more comfortable in the arts excel in their own way, and the less confident students feeling lost and ‘uncreative’. 

I’m not saying that these are necessarily bad teachers, it’s just that they feel ill-equipped to carry out the syllabus effectively, and for many years they have been allowed to treat a subject with a smaller focus as a worthless subject.  But if the same situation was to be applied to another area, let’s say, a teacher not providing any instruction in English because they didn’t feel confident in it, they would be totally condemned. And rightly so.  It would just be nice to see some more equality.  If students are passing through our school system feeling uncreative, they will enter and leave university with the same self-concepts, becoming teachers who will be doomed to continue the vicious cycle.  More needs to be done both at the school level and at the teacher training level to improve the confidence levels of our beginning teachers in the Arts.

Having said all of this, the tide is slowly changing for the poor, neglected arts. Uber-popular arts education champions like TED legend Sir Ken Robinson are advocating for a complete rethink and reorganisation of the structure of our education systems to embed creativity as a core, guiding principle. But unlike Sir Ken, I’m working in a classroom right now, and as much as I would love it to happen, the allocation of hours dedicated to the arts or a total reshaping of our education system is not going to change any time soon.  I’m not sure we’ll ever see a nation-wide, standardised Arts test.  I believe that one day, the importance of creativity and the arts will be given more emphasis, but in the years (maybe even decades) it’s going to take to make those monumental changes, we urgently need to do something for the students in our system right now. 

  

We need to approach the problem from a new angle.  I believe that we can enrich the small amounts of time we do teach the arts so that each sliver is powerful and meaningful, and at the same time, enhance the built environment of our schools.  Let’s fill our schools with contemporary art. We should be installing actual examples from working contemporary artists.  I’m not talking about delivering a set of mass-produced prints to every school and classroom, or getting kids to paint a mural on every wall, but having experts curate high-quality contemporary art to be put on permanent display in the open areas of our schools. 

Good teaching practice says that we should cover the walls of our classrooms with instructional charts and aspirational examples of literacy and numeracy, yet the exterior of our schools are generally, a fairly dreary affair.  Where in the rulebook does it say that these high quality examples need to be confined to interiors of classrooms?  In fact, where is the rulebook at all?

There’s nothing stopping schools putting restrictions on the work of artists.  They’re very creative people after all.  We can say that the large-scale graphic design piece on the tennis court wall needs to include a horizontal line at net height.  We can say that the sculpture needs to safe for students to sit on, around, or under.  We can install sound-based art, or interactive art.  Artwork isn’t necessarily delicate, fragile, never-to-be-touched objects.  Hardy, weather-proof, graffiti-proof, 2D and 3D public art has existed for millennia.  We can demand artwork that meets and reflects the needs of the school, students, and community without diminishing artistic intent or meaning.

Creating an art-rich environment like this has many positive benefits for our students.  The exposure to contemporary art every day gives the arts value.  We tell our students that English, Maths and Science are important by dedicating time to them, but that means that the reverse is also true, that the Arts are not important because we rarely teach them.  Investing in art will finally tell our kids that art is important because we choose to surround ourselves with it.

  

The selection of these artworks is crucial.  The last thing I want to do is come out here and promote schools to coat every wall in a half-baked alphabet mural; or the school’s football team logo; or painting a million, boring, counting hopscotch games.  As bright and colourful as these things are, they don’t inspire us, all they do is fill the space.  The key is to install bold, complex, and intellectually challenging artworks.  If an artwork makes children (and adults for that matter) ask the question ‘why’, then it’s doing it’s job.  Why is it so big?  Why is it that colour?  Why is this thing even here?!  These questions are the start of critical thinking.  They’re the simple questions that lead into complex and in-depth contemplations.  And the great thing is that the teachers don’t even need to know the answers to any of the questions at all.  All they need to do is foster an honest conversation about possibilities, meanings, or opinions, then the students have engaged in critical thinking that they themselves have initiated and directed.  That five minute dialogue with a student while they line up for class sets them up for a day full of deep questioning and learning.  What a rare and wonderful thing! 

Being surrounded by challenging and unexpected artworks also helps the children to take risks.  When they understand that, yes, that is art.  And no, it doesn’t have to cater to everyone’s taste, then they may be more willing to take that responsible risk, and express themselves in honest and unique ways.  It helps to remove the fear of engaging in the arts.  Too many people say, ‘Oh, I’m not one of those creative people.’  Those people are wrong.  They are creative.  It’s just that the idea that they can be creative has been beat out of them by a system that devalues its worth and rarely leads by example.  When students are prepared to take risks, they become better mathematicians, scientists, technicians, writers and thinkers.  If exposure to a piece of challenging contemporary art could potentially start that process, then I feel that it is our obligation as educators to make it happen.  Sir Ken Robinson explains that our education system is based on an industrial model where employment and work skills are the ultimate goal.  Introducing contemporary art and artists into the school landscape may help to broaden the horizons of our students and bolster the arts sector in the future. 

  

The familiarity that comes with coexisting with an artwork gives the students a new frame of reference for the arts.  They are more able to make connections between artistic concepts during arts lessons because they have actually experienced the scale and presence of real artworks.  Something that many families may not voluntarily do in this day and age.  And it will give the real pleasure of growing older with an artwork.  When you have a high quality piece of art in your home, you experience it daily, but it doesn’t become stale.  When you change, when you grow, you see and experience it differently.  Imagine being surrounded by amazing, gallery-standard artwork throughout your formative, primary school years.  Imagine how your perceptions of the works (and art in general) would grow and change.  Those subtle changes of meaning and experience can’t be replicated in a 30 minute lesson.  By bringing contemporary art into our schools, we have a chance to expose our students to long-term benefits rarely afforded to many in our society.

Art breeds pride.  I believe that a school full of art wouldn’t become a target for graffiti and vandalism.  Street art and community murals are one of the best graffiti deterrents.  In fact, at my school, there is one particular Indigenous mural next to a sink.  Children have obviously washed out paintbrushes at this sink for many years, with the occasional student putting a handprint on the wall behind it.  The funny thing is though, the handprints have never gone onto the mural.  This sink is next to a Prep & Year 1 classroom.  Even five-year-olds understand that you don’t mess up art.  A school full of art is a school full of pride.

I’ll deal with the issue that I’m sure is flashing like a neon sign in your head right now: great idea, but who is going to pay for all of this?  Here in Australia, arts funding is available from both State and Federal Governments.  And it’s fairly substantial.  The Queensland Government through Arts Queensland periodically releases funds for public art, most notably, Art Built-in (1999-2007) and art+place Queensland Public Art Fund (2007-2012) which injected well over ten million dollars into public art projects.  For State and public schools, the co-contributions may even be zero, meaning you could install a significant piece of work for nothing but paperwork.  Arts Queensland also partners with Education Queensland and the Australia Council for the Arts to run the Artist in Residence program which is specifically aimed at getting working artists directly involved with schools to improve student outcomes.  Failing that, there’s also lucrative private and community-based funding which can be explored, such as philanthropic foundations and even crowdfunding.  Creating an art-rich environment does takes money and huge effort, but the benefits far exceed the costs.

We have the chance to embed so many of the amazing benefits of the arts into our education system, without having to sacrifice crucial hours spent on literacy and numeracy. So let’s change the way we approach arts education; swerve away from a scary, arts-less future; invest in contemporary art for our schools, and give our students their very own ‘Rothko moment’ every time they step inside our school gates.

The Bayton Award 2013: Rockhampton Art Gallery

It’s obvious that the Central Queensland region has a lot of artistic talent.  The Bayton Award at the Rockhampton Art Gallery, now in its second year, is quickly becoming a real showcase event.  It’s almost like the Grand Final for local artists.  

Usually, the Bayton Award is a biennial event. In 2012, it was coupled in its off-year with the Gold Award as a way of introducing both events to the public.  Repeating an event like this has its pros and its cons.  Although the momentum and success of last year’s exhibition has spurred on so many entries, quite a few are very, very similar to those seen 12 months ago.  I’m not saying they’re not high quality artworks and that they’re not worth looking at, it’s just that artists aren’t necessarily that fast at evolving and developing vastly different styles and concepts within their own practice.  For me, the once off, one year gap hasn’t given quite enough breathing space since the last time it was run.

Having said that, it’s an exhibition that really is worth seeing.  We can possibly tell that the selection panel for the show has had the same concerns as I’ve just mentioned,  mainly because of the influx of photographic work that’s been included, which is quite different from last year.  This makes me really happy, not because I’m a photography nut (actually, photography generally leaves me feeling a bit cold and wanting...), but because it’s an artform which doesn’t always get the attention and honour that painting does.  The photos which made the cut are all really interesting.  Moody landscapes, abstract-looking macro shots, and even a flatbed scan of a face.  It’s quite an interesting array of styles to break up the dominance of painting.

Ponies, Cars and Push up Bras
Felicia Lloyd
2013

Felicia Lloyd’s Ponies, Cars and Push up bras (2013) is probably the most refreshing photographic work in the exhibition.  A weird mix of photography and readymade stickers, that seems that it’s at the same time reminiscent of good times as a preteen girly girl, and cruelly sarcastic about the manufactured nature of growing up in the post-1980s.  I like it.

Monkey Business
Kobie Swart
2013

Royal family
Sandy McLean
2013

But let’s face it, I’m a tragic for (good) painting, and I found it in the 2013 Bayton Award.  There’s a few pieces I thought were standout.  I quite liked Royal family (2013) by Sandy McLean, mainly because it features something not seen in many other works in the show: people.  This is quite different from figures, the random, nameless human form; the three women featured in this painting are real folks.  It’s not a photorealist, technical masterpiece, and it doesn’t need to be either.  It’s all tinted an ‘outback’ red, overlaid with vague explanatory text.  It’s a memory of people long gone.  Royal family was painted with heart, and perfectly captured the feeling of those flashing fragments of fading memories of people and times you can’t get back. 

The artwork which won this year’s prize is a cracker too.  Monkey business (2013) by Kobie Swart is a colourful, somewhat surreal triptych.   It’s a whimsical, detailed image that draws your attention with its fine crafting and illustrative style.  Swart’s painting is fun to look at.  I think that sometimes we, as viewers of art, tend to over analyse things a bit too much.  There’s nothing wrong with liking an artwork because it’s pretty, or interesting, or as in this case fun.  I’m sure there’s a whole lot of symbolism and meaning going on in here with the hidden monkeys and luna tea parties, but that’s not really my concern with this one.

Australian magpie attack
Stephen Homewood
2013

If I was the judge of this year’s Bayton Award, I’d be putting the blue ribbon (or orange rectangle as the case may be) on Australian magpie attack (2013) by Stephen Homewood.  No doubt.  It’s equal parts Adam Cullen and Jean-Michel Basquiat.  If you don’t know who those two guys are, it doesn’t even matter.  This painting is alive with colour and movement.  It’s packed with images and words and cryptic symbols, yet it’s not over-crowded or cramped.  Homewood has made this fresh, layered, street art inspired style look effortless with excellent colour choices, medium control, and obvious design sensibilities.  The idea of this painting being a woeful tale of being mowed down by a vicious bird is really only half of the story.  It’s a window into the artist’s mind.  Full of symbols and references to unknown information, none of the marks on the canvas seem unintentional, leading me to the conclusion that it’s a tale only the artist can completely unravel.  I kinda like the idea of having a beautiful map of someone’s thoughts, but not knowing what it points to or even what language it’s in.  I’d be quite happy to find out this painting makes it into the Rockhampton Art Gallery collection.

The 2013 Bayton Award is well worth a look.  Considering my previous thoughts on the length of hiatus between exhibitions, and the standard of this year’s entries, 2015 should be phenomenal.  But in the meantime, make sure you see the best and brightest of our region’s artistic talent.

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The Bayton Award is on exhibition at the Rockhampton Art Gallery 8 June - 7 July, 2013

But the Archibald Prize likes you...

Each year, the Art Gallery of New South Wales puts on “Australia’s most extraordinary art event”[1], the Archibald Prize.  It’s a huge deal.  Unfortunately, it may be one of the only times in the year when the general public gives a tinker’s cuss about contemporary art.  So why do art critics seem to give it so much grief?

Each year, mud is slung at the Archibald by those whose opinion we’re all supposed to trust because they’re the professionals.  In The Australian, Christopher Allen gave us the angle that there’s too much painting based on photography and that the whole show is staged for people who don’t know anything about art.[2]  A weird combination of criticisms, I think.  It’s hard to complain about an exhibition being too populist and whinge that the paintings which make it up use a common frame of reference for most, considering that most of us carry a camera everywhere we go.  I can only imagine that Mr Allen would much prefer the Archibald Prize to be made up of heaps more painterly, difficult-to-relate-to paintings, and generally be a far more unpopular event.

Del Kathryn Barton
Hugo
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2013/29358/

John McDonald (writing for The Sydney Morning Herald) on the other hand, called Del Kathryn Barton’s 2013 winning portrait of Hugo Weaving “basically a coloured-in drawing, as much an illustration as a painting”.[3]  Well, at least it doesn’t look like a photo, I guess.  In a fairly scathing preview of the prize, McDonald referred to some of the finalist’s work as cloying, stultifying, unpleasant, and trying too hard.  So apart from swallowing a thesaurus, he’s pretty much said that the whole field weren’t good enough examples of art to be part of a showcase event.  I guess he needs to keep his cranky reputation going by biting the hand that feeds him.

So, the Archibald Prize features too much work that looks like a photo, paintings that are little more than illustration, or are flat and dull, or generally not up to standard.  Arrrgh!  There’s not much left to hang!  It’s the same kind of people who complain that there’s not enough funding for the arts in Australia, but you can’t take the line that the arts should be totally elitist and at the same time expect the general public to fork over tons of cash to keep it going.  “Hey!” I hear you say.  “You’ve said before that you don’t mind art being a bit elite, stop changing your mind, Leslie!”  It’s true, I think art-making should be a bit elitist, but art appreciation is for everybody and if the Archibald Prize caters for a non-art-viewing public, great.  At least contemporary art is getting some sorely needed exposure.

The one thing that the critics all seem to agree on is that the trustees of AGNSW, the folks who select the winner, have no idea what they’re on about.  There are so many art prizes around the nation all year round which are judged by critics, curators, directors and an assortment of other arts professionals, why shouldn’t there be one judged by an arbitrary group of arts-interested “political cronies and captains of industry” (as Joanna Mendelssohn so aptly put it)?[4]  Again, it’s the idea that the general public has any form of ownership of the arts that the critics seem to be frustrated with.

Whether the critics like it or not, the Archibald Prize is popular, and the negative responses they put out year to year can only be doing them, and the arts in general, a disservice.  For the people who only really experience the arts through the Archibald, they may only read one review a year.  And to consistently see it run down by the very people who are supposed to champion Australian art, the only conclusion they can come to is that it’s not worth visiting an art gallery or seeing a play or reading a poem or listening to music because apparently we only produce crap in this country.  No wonder people will visit the Tate, MoMA, or the Louvre when they travel, but will never go to a major gallery in their own country.  Contemporary Australian art isn’t rubbish, and art isn’t just for the people ‘in the know’, it’s for everyone.

I have no problem with the Archibald Prize whatsoever.  It may be a little idiosyncratic for Australians to love portraiture, but what’s wrong with that?  We celebrate everything else that’s unique about our society and culture, so why not celebrate our public fascination with pictures of people.  It’s like an annual anti-tall poppies syndrome extravaganza, showcasing some of our best and brightest citizens.  Especially when you don’t know the subject of the portrait, you find out who it is and learn a little more about our wonderful and diverse community.  That is, until they announce the winner, and then we can all argue about which painting we thought should have won.  But people talking about which piece of art they thought was best seems a whole more productive than picking out the pieces you thought weren’t up to scratch.

I think a big thank you should go out to all the artists who enter the Archibald Prize, whatever their style.  They obviously don’t mind the exposure and public recognition that comes with being a finalist.  I can honestly say that I’ve never heard an artist complain that they’ve become too popular or that too many people appreciate their work.  The facts are quite plain: the Archibald prize is a drawcard for AGNSW; artists aspire to win it; it creates positive exposure for the arts; and it generates funds for the arts.

I only hope that the 2014 Archibald Prize is met with some positive press for a change.  Instead of whinging and moaning about every tiny detail that doesn’t meet our ridiculously high standards, let’s talk about all the good stuff, and finally be proud of our nation’s most prestigious art prize.  I know I am.

Mitch Cairns
Self-Portrait
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2013/29361/

Abdul Abdullah
The Man
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2013/29356/

Michael Zavros
Bad Dad
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2013/29394/

Xu Wang
Self-portrait (interviewing Maoist victims)
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2013/29391/

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[1] Artgallery.nsw.gov.au (2013) Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes 2013 :: Art Gallery NSW. [online] Available at: http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/archibald-wynne-sulman-prizes-2013/ [Accessed: 23 Mar 2013].

[2] Allen, C. (2013) Portraiture that looks like a snap to paint in Archibald Prize. [online] Available at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/portraiture-that-looks-like-a-snap-to-paint/story-e6frg8n6-1226597610423 [Accessed: 23 Mar 2013].

[3] Mcdonald, J. (2013) Vines, an indefinable lifeform - but where's the insight?. [online] Available at: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/vines-an-indefinable-lifeform--but-wheres-the-insight-20130322-2glat.html [Accessed: 23 Mar 2013].

[4] Mendelssohn, J. (2013) Australian art's great circus: loving and loathing the Archibald. [online] Available at: http://theconversation.com/australian-arts-great-circus-loving-and-loathing-the-archibald-12904 [Accessed: 23 Mar 2013].