What can art institutions do?

This year the IMA is 40 years old and is using the year to reflect and reacess what institutions can do now and in the future.  In July the IMA held a symposium panel to discuss what art institutions can do. Five points the speakers make about what artists institutions can do are:

1.  Artists institutions are uniquely placed to select and program contemporary art as artists are more acute about the contemporary than any curator, art gallery or museum director
2. Artist institutions are create an experimental space for artists
3. Artists institutions can serve an alternative space for other voices, overcoming and bias of institutional art
4. Artists institutions are not critiquing culture but creating culture
5. Artists institutions prioritise the ideas of the artist and practitioner

Listen to the symposium panel discussion below.

Some artists that works with the conflicts of migration and the search for home

 Do Ho Suh 

“Seoul Home/L.A. Home/New York Home/Baltimore Home/London Home/Seattle Home,” 1999. Installation view at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, Washington, 2002

Learn more about Do Ho Suh’s work here.

Jacob Lawrence 

Left:  The migration gained in momentum, 1941. Casein tempera on hardboard, 18 x 12″ (45.7 x 30.5 cm)

Right:  And people all over the south began to discus this great movement, 1940-41, Casein tempera on hardboard, 18 x 12″ (45.7 x 30.5 cm)

Learn more about Jacob Lawrence’s work here.

Lindy Lee 

Eating the Immortal Pellet, 2015 black mild steel and fire, 119 x 118cm

Learn more about Lindy Lee’s work here.

Alfredo and Isabelle Aquillizan

Address 2007-2008

Project: Another Country, Installation at South Beach Development, 2nd Singapore Biennale, 2008Entrance and space inside the room. 

 

Entrance space and view inside the room.

Questions posed by 3 Goma Q Artists

Keeping with the subject of art that asks questions, I also looked at some artists from the GOMA Q: Contemporary Queensland Art exhibition also currently showing at GOMA.

Dale Harding

their little black slaves, perished in isolation 2015 (installation view)

In their little black slaves, perished in isolation 2015, Harding examines a his family history.  As stated on the diadatic:

Dale Harding has gained recognition for works that investigate the social and political realities experienced by members of his family, who lived under government control in Queensland around 1930.

As a young Murri, my Ghungalu grandfather Uncle Tim Kemp recalled the death of one young gambi he knew at Woorabinda Aboriginal Settlement. Under the control of the Queensland government of the time and the Department of Native Affairs, she was contracted to work as an indentured domestic at Clermont… As was the longstanding practice, this young woman was locked in her room at night by her ‘employers’ – to deny her any chance of escape and, from some accounts, as an attempt to reduce the chances of sexual assault. This young gambi lost her life after knocking over a kerosene lamp in her locked room. The timber Queenslander caught fire and, as Uncle Tim described, the girl died isolated and alone, away from her home.

Dale Harding creates a work which recreates the room.  The work questions Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people.  Through recreating the room that many Aboriginal people were locked in, the work forces the viewer to literally question what Aboriginal people experienced. Through drawing attention to this experience it, It questions why there is a lack of awareness of this aspect of Australia’s past. The work questions what events have shaped in Aboriginal identity including Harding’s and in turn questions what such events say about theAustralia’s identity more generally.

their little black slaves, perished in isolation 2015 (installation view)

Clark Beaumont

Love 1 and 11 Love I and II, 2014 Giclee Print on cotton rag
Diptych: 74.7 x 112 cm (image) each.; 89.66 x 127 (frame); 82 x 236cm (framed ; overall)

In  Love 1 and 11,  Clark Beaumount question what is involved in contemporary day love?  The work depicts a couple in intimate embrace, yet also trying each other on for size. In doing so the diptych  questions whether contemporary love can be a selfish or even nassistic act.

Paul Bai 

Up/Down (sunrise/sunset) 2012, digitial print (installation view) 

Paul Bai’s Up/Down (sunrise/sunset) questions the role assumptions bring to a work and to experience of the world more generally.  The red squares at the top and bottom of the wall panel reference the sunrise and the sunset.  Which one is the sunrise and which is the sunset is a matter of (like so many things in the world) individual assumption.

Robert MacPherson and some questions he is asking in his work

On visiting the Painter’s Reach at Goma I started to think about some of the questions Macpherson is asking in his work:

• How do you define painting? Is it though Greenberg or can it be extended beyond this notion?  Can painting be a mode of thought?
• How can process create an artwork?
• How can text create landscape or a biography?
• Can there be a relationship between text and object despite the understanding that no such relationship exists?

Ingrid Periz, Curator of the The Painter’s Reach Robert MacPherson at GOMA Talk

The Painter’s Reach, a retrospective exhibition of Queensland artist Robert MacPherson  is currently showing at GOMA. For anyone interested in learning more about the artist and the exhibition, this key note talk by Ingrid Periz, the curator of the exhibition is a much watch.  In the talk she discusses the historical progression of MacPherson’s work, his processes and his influences.

Some of the reasons Ingrid Periz appears to be drawn to MacPherson’s work include:

• MacPherson is a difficult artist to classify: his work has been seen as international yet local, minimalist, conceptual, fluxus, abstract and archival
• While acknowledging Duchamp and Greenberg MacPherson has demonstrated how local content in art is still possible in particular how it is possible to keep the Australian vernacular alive in a work of art
• MacPherson begins as painter, works through the limits of painting as defined by Greenberg and then arrives at a practice which generates endless possibilities within this and other limits.
• The processes the MacPherson employs throughout his practice are compelling for example making work which references his body or the width of a brush.
• MacPherson’s work while referencing history and language MacPherson bends the rules of high modernism
• MacPherson challenges that the understanding that a word does not look like the thing it represents

The 20th Biennale of Sydney in 2016: the Bureau of Writing project participants

Andrew Brooks (Sydney) Beth Caird and Aodhan Madden (Melbourne) Kelly Fliedner (Melbourne) Benjamin Forster (Sydney) Astrid Lorange (Sydney) Sarah Rodigari (Sydney)  have been selected to participate in the Bureau of Writing: a collaborative writing program designed for artists and presented alongside the 20th Biennale of Sydney.

Their biographies as they appear on the Sydney Biennale blog are included below –

Andrew Brooks is a Sydney-based artist, writer, curator and organiser. His work explores the politics of systems and contemporary aesthetics in the extended age of crisis, and takes the form of texts, installations, performances, lectures and sound recordings. He is a co-director of Firstdraft Gallery, a former curator of the NOW now Festival of Exploratory Art and a PhD candidate at UNSW Art and Design. He has performed and/or exhibited in Europe, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.

Beth Caird and Aodhan Madden are both artists and writers. Collaboratively they have worked as sub-editors for Issue 9 of un Magazine, produced the art/writing/labour performance Burn Rate at the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and have exhibited in art spaces across Australia and New Zealand.

Kelly Fliedner is a writer, curator, and co-founder and co-editor of the West Space Journal (with Rowan McNaught), an online platform for criticism and commissions. She was Program Curator of West Space from 2009 until 2013 and has been involved with the organisation in a variety of ways since 2006. She has also worked with organisations such as Monash University Museum of Art, MPavilion, Next Wave, un Magazine, and Melbourne Fringe, and was part of the Gertrude Contemporary Emerging Writers Program.

Benjamin Forster       is not .    ( Primavera, MCA, 12 )     sure .
\    ( NEW13, ACCA, 13 )         was   ( Reading, Stedelijk, 15 )
perhaps.    ( co-editing with rc, un magazine, 14 )        o  they
/               are .   ( , , Firstdraft, 13 )   ACT, WA, NSW based  .
\                   a corpus
/           ( Bachelor of Visual Arts Honours, ANU, 08 )
\                                                                              a body
/ or  (Kynic, CCAS, 13)     she will .    ( Residencies: MCA 13,
SymbioticA 09, PICA 09, CIA 12-13, FAC 11, Helsinki 14, etc )
\      no.              he assures you.  ( Reading, De Appel, 15 )
/            you  may                                   be                unsure.
( My Brain Is in My Inkstand, Cranbrook Art Museum, 13 )
\ of acronym    ( SafARI, around SYD, 14 )     .       of
/                                                                                  number .

Astrid Lorange is a writer, editor and teacher from Sydney. She lectures at UNSW Art & Design, where she researches writing and its relationship to contemporary art. She runs the talk series Conspiracy at Minerva Gallery in Potts Point. How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2014. Poetry books include Eating and Speaking, Minor Dogs, one that made it alike and Pathetic Tower. Other work has been published in Das Superpaper, Artlink, un Magazine, Seizure, Jacket and Cordite, and exhibited at 107 Projects, 55 Sydenham Rd and the Margaret Lawrence Gallery. Lorange regularly speaks, performs, organises and arranges at galleries and festivals around Australia. In early 2016 she is co-curating (with Vaughan O’Connor) Hell Broth, a group show at Firstdraft featuring works from emerging artists, designers and writers.

Sarah Rodigari addresses economies of exchange pertaining to socio-political engagement, shared authorship and new institutionalism. The form of her work is responsive and context specific. Her working
method is interdisciplinary and recent projects take the form of performance, installations, text, video, curating and collaboration. Rodigari has presented work nationally and internationally, and is a PhD candidate in Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. She is a founding member of the collective Field Theory; who make and support art projects that cross disciplines, shift contexts and seek new strategies for intervening in the public sphere. She has written for and edited publications on performance, and is co-curator of the Sydney performance program Restaging, Restaging Histories.

Reflections on “The Biennale” and “The Fair” after reading Seven Days in the Art World

 In her book Seven Days in the Art World Sarah Thorton devotes a chapter to each of her experiences at the Venice Biennale and Art Basel in Switzerland.  Reflecting on these chapters (as well and my own experiences art the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennale and the Sydney Contemporary) I started to think about the differences between the biennale and the art fair.  

While art fairs, like biennales,  are very much marketed as art viewing experiences, the commercial sale of art underlies the art fair. Unlike the biennale, there is no overriding curatorial rationale for an art fair, rather each gallery occupies a booth and curates the booth as it sees fit with the intent of selling the artwork in the booth and promoting gallery.

Although many artists found at art fairs can be also found at biennales (and biennales increase the commercial saleability of an artist), underlying a biennale by contrast, is the view that the biennale is a space for experimentation and a space which facilitates a discursive environment.  While the art fair is often self contained, biennales are larger scale events often spanning multiple locations. Biennales also go for longer periods than art fairs.  While the art fair tends to last a few days, the biennale can go for three to four months.

Claire Bishop’s Chapter 1 “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents”.

Claire Bishop’s Chapter 1 “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents”, in her book, Artificial Hells Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, is a rather heavy but very thought provoking read.  In the chapter, she discusses the ‘social turn’ a term, which describes participatory art movement.  Participatory art relies on the audience being directly engaged in the art making process, acting as a co-collaborator alongside the artist.   Bishop argues that two elements are at the heart of participatory projects: 1. collaborative activities which “work against dominant market forces “diffusing single authorship” and 2. “a channelling of art’s symbolic capital  towards constructive social change” which resists art being understood as a commodified material object.

Bishop highlights that participatory art has proved problematic because “socially collaborative practices have been perceived as equally important artistic gestures of resistance”.  However, Bishop argues it is important to critique participatory projects as art because it is this “institutional field” in which participatory art is “endorsed and disseminated”.  She also argues that without finding “a language to” describe the participatory art we focus will only on its “demonstrable impact”.

Bishop discussed how participatory art can be seen as a political tool through its ability to create social change.  An example, she refers to is Suerflex’s Tenantspin 2000 project which built a stronger sense of community in a run-down Liverpool tower block.

Bishop also highlights some of the ethical issues at stake in participatory art.  One ethical issue is the status between the artist and the artist’s collaborators.  Should both parties have equal status (or control) or is it ok for there to be a power imbalance favouring the artist?

            

The Art of Collecting Art: Herb & Dorothy Vogel

My visit to the UQ Art Museum also prompted thought about another fantastic documentary I watched a while ago called Herb & Dorthey about the New York art collector couple, Herb and Dorthey Vogel.  Using the money earned from their modest salaries as a post clerk and a librarian, the couple amassed a collection of over 4782 works which they stored and displayed in their one bedroom New York apartment. In 1992, the couple donated for free their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art.  Check the trailer out for the documentary below.