‘Australia’s is a special kind of philistinism, an immovable materialism which puts art and ideas of any kind deliberately and firmly to one side to let the serious business of living proceed without distraction.’ Robin Boyd

Just to the side of the city Matlok Griffiths rides back and forth from Richmond to his studio at the Abbotsford Convent. In his spare time between his job as a graphic designer and his study to be a high-school art teacher, Matlok slips off his Melbourne attire and slips on a pair of long shorts and paint-spattered T-shirt. He might then water the mother-in-law’s tongue succulents that line his small window overlooking Collingwood and fire up the air compressor air as he sprays, sands and slaps paint down on a board or large canvas. The starting point for a painting is usually something domestic: fruit or pot plants or something graphic like the Lacoste crocodiles who popped up everywhere on his recent trip to Cambodia. A hand of bananas, black and shriveled, sits atop his small red tape player. These charred models are resuscitated in paintings with a jazzy array of acrylic and spray-paint colour. Shapes and marks are made and Matlok might scratch his head, leave and have a soy chai before heading back to completely rub away all his work for something new to appear. It seems right when it’s wrong. When it’s allowed to be wrong all sorts of doors may open. As the sun sets in the east over Carlton an array of Philip Guston nobby type characters and cartoony figures and shapes all emerge for a party in this little nun’s bedroom, all feeding off the wholegrain rice crackers and hummus kept on the shelf.

This month Matlok exhibits with four friends who rarely show their art, all a little shy to enter the smelly art stage. Hank Josefsson from Scandinavia, Julia McFarlane, and Rick Milovanonic, musical members of the Twerps. Individually they each made a painting around the theme of ‘fine family living’. The next painting was then made using an element from the last painting. So you get very playful variations on the theme as the language of each artist’s work is digested and then reworked. The finished result is a fresh little show. Hank’s Scandi background and painterly flare give different perspectives and angles all on the one picture plane creating work as one might imagine a very small David Hockney might. Julia’s prints are flat and objects are reduced to shapes and colour. They take a close-up look at architecture and garden features as if walking around a backyard. Rick translates various patterns and features into black and white prints, the lovely reduction and neatness of modernist architecture buzzes with the plant patterns and house angles all singing together.

Hank Josefsson, Julia McFarlane, Matlok Griffiths, Rick Milovanovic, Fine family living, St Heliers Street Store and Gallery, Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne, 1–16 September 2012.

I’ve been struggling to summarise my thoughts on dOCUMENTA (d13). In the weeks immediately following its vernissage, the general response seemed to be one of elation and excitement, with several claiming it was possibly The Best exhibition of the 21st century. It wasn’t to be missed. On arriving in Europe two months later, however, the vibe was definitely cooler and much of the opening energy had (understandably) lulled. Responses, especially among artists, were mixed.

dOCUMENTA is undoubtedly the most highly anticipated curatorial event on the calender and a thoughtful example of high-end cultural tourism. This year’s dOCUMENTA was curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (whom we know from the 2008 Biennale of Sydney), and most definitely informed by Chus Martinez (who is less well known in Australia but is a formidable intellect and ex-chief curator at the MACBA in Barcelona). It was a mammoth affair, as most dOCUMENTAs tend to be, but this year’s expanded its footprint further, including:

– 4 years of preliminary encounters, seminars and preparations (tick)
– a 100-day exhibition and other activities in Kassel (tick)
– a series of seminars and a 30-day exhibition in Kabul (new)
– an 8-day seminar in Alexandria (new)
– a 14-day retreat in Banff (new)
– the publication, 100 notes—100 thoughts, comprised of facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations and conversations (new).

d13 brought together art and research, science and the humanities, past and present. It platformed existing and new conversations among artists, scientists, writers, inventors, philosophers, poets, activists and more. The event underlined art as a living and breathing thing in time and across time, inside and outside the art world, inherently interspersed. To me it read in the context of Donald Brook’s idea of art being anything that affects memetic innovation—and not just those items ordained by us as members of the art world.

In its holistic approach, d13 was too vast to gauge the shape of and imbued with such dynamism that it was difficult to discern the sum of its parts. It existed more as a set of ideas, lines of the body; not so much exhibition as personality, with characteristics and public and private moods; comparable, possibly, to a universe. It left me without conclusion (a nice space) but became more clear in its conceit when I came across a recent quote by Christov-Bakargiev which referred to the exhibition as an ‘obsolete twentieth-century object’. In its scale, structure and skilled conflation of disciplines and activities, d13 exploded the conventional notion of the exhibition.

But sometimes we want an exhibition. At an art event we want to see Art. At an art event occurring every five years we particularly want to see Very Good Art. Most of us, 99% of us at least, are not in a position to travel to four different locations around the globe to experience a curator’s full intent.

The best works on display at d13 in Kassel were the ones that brought art and life together through the artist’s distinct eye, without didacticism or a mandate to educate. Pierre Huyghe’s work, untitled (2012), was remarkable, a truly altering art experience that freely allowed the audience to negotiate their way through a living yet crafted environment that mulched together classical concepts of fertility, entropy and leisure. Murky, uncertain, sensorial and at times foreboding, Huyghe’s work offered a truly profound and unsettling encounter. Joan Jonas’s work, Reanimation (2010–12), although badly situated, offered another high point. Here we viewed the world around us—specifically landscape, its pilgrimage, precarity and representation. Jonas took us on an aesthetic journey that was revealing, sumptuous and smart and didn’t make us feel talked at. Even Trisha Donnelly’s vignettes, which have nothing to teach us outside of the act of looking itself, were quietly potent.

d13’s curatorial approach was no doubt conceptually exciting and challenging, as a good dOCUMENTA should be. For those seeking a more focused and fulfilled object–audience experience, however, it perhaps offered a more uneven encounter. While the director of dOCUMENTA (14) is yet to be announced, let me put my wish list out there: I would like to see a dOCUMENTA that is as conceptually ambitious as this one yet physically modest; a tough and concise selection of works that encourages and rewards close looking; something with a little less fat and spend. If possible, something gentler on the feet would be nice too.

dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany, 9 June – 16 September 2012.

Social climbing

The title of John Spiteri’s recent show at Neon Parc, Still life social climber, could be referring to himself, in a self-deprecating way, but I imagine there is a little salt meant for the audience too.

I wonder what social climbers do, besides being a little blank? Watch being watched. Join in carefully. Show they’ve got the wares. Make a move, get a step ahead—not too far ahead though ’cause they want to be included. Make the next move, there’s the game, something everyone will see and recognize. Maybe Spiteri is suggesting art in Melbourne is a bit like this.

Spiteri’s last show at Chert was titled The house of hair—the full hair-shirt for hard-nut Berliners. I can see that.

All this reminded me of something I read about Francis Alÿs recently, where he was quoted saying, ‘However elliptical you want to be, you have to make contact … The paintings are a way to trap in the viewer’. Alÿs’s exhibition was titled A story of deception, and the writer was hesitating about who was the object of this deception and if Alÿs was at some level disingenuous.

Abstract painting

John Spiteri’s Melbourne exhibition comprised a series of absolutely intriguing and original small paintings on linen. I first noticed their strange quietness—the works seem so reductive. There was a slight feeling of ambivalence and ambiguity. It’s something that you read in the way he has handled the painting process, not so much in the final images of the paintings, which are actually very stylish.

Each of the works is a series of deletions and revisions (or reverses) in paint. The linen starts unprimed before each new layer is put down and allowed to dry for a while. Spiteri has then washed away most of any new surface (what he doesn’t like?) to eventually get a build-up of sedimentary increases of rubbing out on top of rubbing out and only minimal colour. The upper layers include very simple gestures, like doodles, in the paint, never too heavy. There are scratches and bits of line-work and coloured-in bits—not quite absent-minded scribble.

There is a lot to see.

Spiteri’s process of attrition has a bit of ‘horse cure’ for me but he is clearly interested in the structure of the paintings and in finding new means. The abstract in the work, the absence or emptiness or randomness, is actually an opening. Spiteri looks for authenticity in entropy. Each painting is casting for a lesser degree of order (or greater order, if you think about it).

John Spiteri, Still life social climber, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 22 August – 22 September 2012.

The point is, don’t become an asshole. As art-world participants we should be mindful of this, particularly at a moment when the current logics and cults of interaction, participation, production and performance feel especially social. Most of us are over-institutionalized and yet only partially professionalized. ‘Don’t become an asshole’, is demanded of Pecker, the emerging artist depicted in the 1998 John Waters film Pecker. Making this petition is Pecker’s girlfriend and muse, who reluctantly remains supportive when, unwittingly, the photographer is discovered by a New York commercial gallery (and, as the film progresses, is also picked up by its gallerina). Pecker never does become an asshole, but he inadvertently flirts with the idea, as the gravitational pull of success, celebrity and unbridled adoration draws him away from his hometown Baltimore and into the New York scene. The girlfriend’s threat comes into focus again when Cindy Sherman, playing herself, toasts Pecker with a drunkenly exuberant ‘death to irony’ at his post-opening dinner. Waters’s directorial solution to asshole-ism materializes as a celebration of earnestness.

The cursory frequently passes as stylized, full-flavored criticality. It is a nonchalant shrug of sorts: all reaction, no reflection. The cursory regularly infiltrates art criticism, art writing, curation and art-making. I guess I’m doing it right now. A reliance on this formula for engagement and commentary equates to being an asshole. And yet there is a constant call for dialogue and discussion: like a dog chasing its own tail. Ruff! Is ‘the riff’ a kind of work, or labour? Riffing is a key indicator of this shruggery. We seem to talk about it a lot. Riffing on subject matter, on raw material, riffing on different kinds or modes of action and gestures. And we make it lazy in art, unlike it is in music, where it is less ecstatic, less a result of being mesmerized and rapturous; a kind of productive reverence. In art, we also fear overstating this term ‘riff’, because it teeters on the edge of cliché. It suggests a solution to inactivity, to uneasy ‘juxtapositions’ (cliché) and speaks of bridging these things that intuitively relate, but don’t easily match. What we are saying when we use this term is that we needn’t understand or analyse our own or surrounding creative impulses, that engaging in a rigorous way is earnest, and earnestness is to be avoided. When I speak in this way and write in this way, I am being an asshole.

The fields of artistic production and curation appear increasingly narrow. Not necessarily through inactivity, but as a result of their structure. As these roles and what they then offer taper, the space for labour dwindles. And beyond this we are also deskilling as viewers. Some evidence of this is perhaps the architectural over-writing of the gallery space. Inextricable from the history of curating, we need to question why architectural collaboration and intervention continues to be relevant, or broadcast as relevant. More often than not the result is a de-emphasis of the artwork that the circumferent architecture is purportedly in support of and in service to, particularly in gallery spaces which, over time, become laden with their own history. A moralistic tool of post and lintel meaning-making which shrinks us as viewers, making architecture an asshole.

‘Fuckin’ lousy art galleries are ruining this whole neighborhood. Stupid blank paintings and out of focus pictures and those ugly-ass sculptures.’ This observation, made by a homeless New Yorker in Pecker, suggests that whole areas of the city can become an asshole too.

The increased socialization of art has enhanced the lie of casual. Looming large in this arena are the not-so-young YBAs—full of their own art gods of course—serving as a guide for the careerist-casual. From slap-dash to cash. As artists, writers and curators, and as a result of these kinds of influences, does this mean that we have allowed ourselves to de-skill? Because we are certainly getting paid like assholes. Government-funded organizations regularly request invoices for artist fees that equate to less than one week’s worth of studio rent. Getting paid and paying rent are also the blur of once distinct, now competing ideologies of commercial, project and independent gallery spaces. I wonder when the slow-cooking revolution will seep into curatorial and artistic practice, where working from show to show rather than project to project divests practices of rigorous engagement with research and necessary failure (and, hence, editing).

The public interpretation (and performance) of art is often a forum for assholes. I recently attended a series of talks by relatively inexperienced emerging artists and, while each participant displayed his and her inexperience, which is no crime, it was in fact the institution who was the asshole. The artists speaking about their work needed prompting and challenging. This should have been the supportive role of the in-house curators, but it was not, since nervousness hid behind reticence. The role of the curator in this situation is not to be a nervous asshole, but rather the generous (and yes perhaps nervous) host. Language itself can also be an asshole as we are regularly hemmed in by its various applications, rules and rationales in relation to art, not only during times of public performance. The secret code of exhibition applications and grant writing should be available as a course by correspondence. Within this code a whole section regarding artist statements should be detailed. This particular language function frequently trips-up even experienced practitioners and can even work to restrain the production of new work or at least the form it takes.

To play the gentleman’s game, cricketers must wear all white. All white attire being a sign of neatly pressed respect and etiquette pre the scuff marks and grass stains of competitive play. So where does this position us in the arts, in our uniforms of black? Etiquette is strangely out of focus in an industry where the professional and the personal must play nice so frequently. The equivalent of inviting a stranger to watch you undress describes the complex choreography of the studio visit. Its unwritten codes of conduct require articulation and interrogation since it is fertile ground for assholes. Asshole-like behavior can emerge even from experienced artists and curators. What should we expect when expecting a studio visit? I have experienced being called into a studio to take a look at a harried, over-traveled biennale curator (guess who don’t sue) curled up on a artist’s couch. After yawning through the first 15 minutes of the visit, the artist suggested that the curator apply one of her home-knitted knee-rugs, while he caught some Zs before his taxi arrived to ferry him back to the airport.

So when exhibiting asshole-like behavior, the antidote should be to stop work, but not to nap. In the film Pecker, Waters’s solution is to have his protagonist switch professions, declaring he would retire as a photographer to take up filmmaking. But we needn’t go that far. We should, however, reflect on the means of our investment, not only by analysing our ‘product’ (the artwork, the exhibition, the writing), but by scrutinizing the way we communicate and participate. We must reflect and assess our own personal strategy (be it engineered or intuited), in order to engage with empathy, with generosity, or with rigor. And if you aren’t reflecting, then you’re probably being an asshole.

First published as part of the Artspace 25th anniversary publication, Every cloud has a silver lining: Artspace 25, Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand, 2012.

Sometimes I feel like an emotional wreck. I don’t know how to express myself so, frustrated, I end up in a heap, dejected, rejected, bereft, if not by anyone else, at least by common reason, or rationality. Isolated, even abandoned, inarticulate and mute, feeling unloved and lonely. A self-indulgent deluge of descriptors plagues me.

There are often unexpected parallels in daily experience. I am writing a response to an exhibition of artwork that I encountered a few days ago when I could see the beauty and pathos encompassed in the metaphor of Stefan Gevers’s renderings of derelict caravans. But today I suddenly relate to them in a much more immediate and personal way.

There is a tension in the work where the composition depicts a precarious position, a weighted possibility that is a snapshot of a situation. Will it (the caravan) tumble and slide further into decrepitude, or just teeter there for that little bit longer—a stasis—this way, that way, never knowing which. These images are executed lovingly with care and precision, muted colours, fading with nostalgia; some are watercolours. But it’s the use of coloured pencil and charcoal which softly shades the paper giving shape to the sagging forms that I like most. Gevers depicts a figurative death in an almost nondescript yet desolate landscape that verges on the romantic. It could be a wrecking yard in Fairfield, rural backwater or the middle of the desert. The ravaged curtains, broken glass and rusting tin evoke the melancholy spectre of a beauty born of neglect. Here we see the remains, the cadaver, the corpse of a broken heart, or quite literally a broken home.

Stefan Gevers, Secondhand serenade, Stockroom, Kyneton, Victoria, 8 September – 7 October 2012.

When Wandjuk Marika became the first Aboriginal artist to publicly raise the issue of copyright infringement, much more was at stake that one might have initially thought. In 1974, when travelling in his capacity as inaugural chairman of the Aboriginal Arts Board, Marika had been dismayed to discover his sacred clan designs adorning cheap cotton tea-towels ‘published’ in Holland and on sale at tourist shops in Sydney. In his own words (as told to Jennifer Isaacs): ‘when I walked into that shop, and when I saw it [the design] I was shocked. My heart broke’.

By approaching the Australian government to investigate this unauthorized usage, Marika inaugurated a process that eventually, in 1985, would result in the first legal recognition of Indigenous ‘copyright’. As Fred Myers has noted, ‘Wandjuk objected not simply to commodification as a form of desacralisation, but more specifically to the display and use of designs by those lacking ritual authority to do so’. Far beyond what the word ‘design’ might denote in a Western sense, Marika’s clan designs can be visualised as an extension of his very identity, a kind of legal document that sites him within complex cultural, social and geographic networks. ‘Copyright infringement’ then, as a specific Western term, is far from adequate. Perhaps ‘identity theft’ might be more fitting. Within a Yolngu world-view the unauthorized circulation of such designs might have far-reaching and unexpected consequences; synonymous with the power of the country and ancestral narratives they depict, it follows that they too are powerful. To move into the world they need the ‘authorization’ of the artist’s hand.

In 1996, when faced with the decision to support the development of a printing workshop at their art centre, Buku-Larrnggay Mulka in Yirrkala, Eastern Arnhem Land, Yolngu leaders found themselves confronting a similar issue. Would the reproducibility of prints lead to similar misappropriation? Ceremonial leader Garrawin Gumana provided guidance for future Yolngu printmakers and their collaborators by way of a succinct satement, ‘if you’re going to paint the land, you use the land’. That is, in painting or carving the ancestral narratives and designs which usually underwrite Yolngu art, artists must use the very elements of the country they depict: ochre, bark, kapok wood and other materials which are essentially extensions of the land they come to represent. Printmaking, as a technology of reproduction utilizing foreign, industrially produced materials, would have to be directed towards different concerns, that is, beyond country. Here more than anywhere else in Yolngu art the dictates of the sacred would give way to the possibilities of the secular.

Works illustrated here include a recent linocut by Nyapanyapa Yunupingu, whose work has traced a trajectory from personal, non-sacred figuration to mayilimiriw (meaningless) mark-making. Currently celebrated for her bark paintings and recent collaborative work, Yunupingu’s practice began in the print room where she realised her earliest works as colourful screenprints.

Also illustrated are outcomes of workshops undertaken with young Yolngu community members, beginning with photographs taken on their mobile phones. Here the collaborative potential of printmaking in such a context becomes readily apparent. Although relatively humble in form and vision, these works display an important move away from a period style of Yolngu art, a shift occurring at the periphery of the art market’s focus (which remains on original works by ‘star’ artists), yet firmly rooted in the lived reality of day-to-day life. As Nicolas Rothwell has written in relation to this body of work, the task of these young artists is ‘not just to keep alive the traditional designs, and make pleasing art based on them, but to transform a tiny minority society into a strong enclave, operating on an equal footing within the wider nation-state’. For Rothwell, this is a challenge ‘best shouldered by the young, the bicultural and self-confident’. It’s entirely fitting that we see this challenge beginning to be taken up through the medium of printmaking, and placed within a history of robust Yolngu engagement with the ‘outside’ world.

Many thanks to Will Stubbs and Annie Studd for generously discussing the print project during my recent visit to Yirrkala. Yirrkala Printspace enquiries: <prints@yirrkala.com>.

I saw Rob McHaffie’s recent paintings at his studio preview in the Schoolhouse Studios, Abbotsford. Destined for his solo exhibition in September at Darren Knight Gallery in Sydney, this was a one-night only affair, like meeting up with an old friend, several of them in fact. Rob McHaffie’s inspiration, following his Asialink residency at Rimbun Dahan in Kuang, near Kuala Lumpur, brought up all those old flames: Matisse versus Picasso (and why I chose Matisse); the dark heart of Gauguin in Tahiti; imaginary encounters with Le Douanier Rousseau in the jungle; Chris Ofili, after he moved to Trinidad.

Going native is an arch suggestion to make of anyone, but in this globalized world, inspiration creates the only valid continuum. As a white man in the tropics, McHaffie continues a tradition but makes it more kindly and engaged, forging connections that are gentle and humorously self-effacing. Here, he is shown dancing like a puppet in Synchronized dancers holding hearts as in the portrait of Matisse practising his foxtrot. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as in the enchanting nocturnal reworking of a Rousseau dreaming, The first time I saw you was wild. And the one of ‘Eve’ holding out the apple is for me (Feeding the monkey but the monkey has enough).

Everything here is, indeed, excessively luscious, clean, colourful, inspired by the flora and fauna, and the artist’s encounters with the places and people he meets. These paintings work on a number of levels to create pictorial incidents and metaphors that McHaffie’s own written accounts richly fill in with anecdotal detail. I like the tension, also, that he creates in showing the presence of religious belief in everyday life, doubling the traditional role of painting itself as, in essence, a devotional art. These narratives are explored in works such as Mother and child     (a Madonna and child on a motorbike), The naturopath (sitting on the lap of Michelangelo’s Pieta) and Found him! (Christ, with his loincloth and halo, brought back arm-in-arm with two new friends).

Rob McHaffie, studio preview, Schoolhouse Studios, Abbotsford, Melbourne, 17 August 2012.

Rob McHaffie, Let’s see how we go, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 1–29 September 2012.