Art update

In the last few days I have made use of my spare (read ‘between con­tracts’) time and seen lots of Art.

1. Bar­bara Kruger @ ACCA. Four install­a­tions. Two moving pro­jec­ted video poems, both of which were good but not shock­ing or par­tic­u­larly thought-pro­vok­ing for me. One room of still text (‘Plenty Ought to Be Enough’) about con­sump­tion and power (‘You make his­tory when you do busi­ness’). One install­a­tion (‘twelve’) of twelve con­ver­sa­tions-cum-argu­ments in which the four par­ti­cipants in the argu­ment are on the four walls around you. The sen­sa­tion is sur­pris­ingly like being trapped in the middle of an argu­ment and not know­ing where to look. The really inter­est­ing thing about this piece was the sub­text (lit­er­ally, text under­neath each image) indic­at­ing either what the speaker was ‘really’ think­ing or a social com­ment­ary on the motiv­a­tion behind speak­ing in that way at that time. So, for example, beau­ti­ful girls in col­lege had ‘I hate myself. I’m pret­tier than you. Why is she talk­ing to me like that?’ or art crit­ics had ‘I’m smarter than you. My taste is more valid than your taste. Everything I love is valu­able. What I hate is worthless.’

I thought these last two were very suc­cess­ful although I’m unsure whether Kruger is saying any­thing new with her con­sump­tion cri­tique, it unfor­tu­nately still needs saying. The con­ver­sa­tion-pieces were excel­lent and varied enough to be con­sist­ently chal­len­ging: topics ranged from domestic viol­ence to stifling fam­il­ies to busi­ness rela­tions to art.

2. NGV Inter­na­tional. While killing time, I dropped into the 3rd floor of NGV and looked at the 19th and 20th cen­tury paint­ing. In par­tic­u­lar I was struck by two pieces, one by John Tunn-some­thing about a mine (man, I wish I’d writ­ten this down) which had an amaz­ing sense of depth of field due to diag­onal lines and shad­ing, and a real sense of the scale and dwarf­ing of indus­tri­al­ism over human­ity… and a piece by St George Hare called “Vic­tory in Faith” that would have attrac­ted me anyway (gor­geous pale-skinned red-haired Irish look­ing girl, lying on straw naked, rope around wrist tied to iron ring in wall of dun­geon, her other arm draped around a naked black girl who has one arm draped back onto the red-head’s thigh, both asleep). This piece became all the more inter­est­ing when I read that Hare was paint­ing this as an image of two Chris­ti­ans await­ing trial by lion and that ‘Hare often depic­ted women in chains and returned to this theme often’. No kid­ding. These days that’s called girl-on-girl SM.

3. Archibald Prize Entrants @ Arts Centre. Some amaz­ing por­trait­ure. Didn’t make notes of artist names, but some strik­ing pieces included the self-por­trait they’re using as the poster (‘Still posing’), the incred­ible por­trait of Bill Hunter, an intense por­trait of Alex Dimitri­ades I really liked and a con­front­ing self-por­trait of one non-model-skinny artist naked with a chal­len­ging gaze at the viewer. I think I’ll go back to this one again before it closes and have a proper look.

4. Liquid Aes­thet­ics. Mid­summa install­a­tion at Black Box. Some incred­ible video works. In par­tic­u­lar, I liked the man-as-kitten explor­a­tion of Asian queer sexu­al­ity, the sen­sual char­ac­ter actor doing an incred­ible job of lick­ing ‘paws’ wrapped in gauze and lap­ping at a huge expanse of milk, the moments of white­ness con­trast­ing his timid­ity and des­pite this a sense of power and watch­ful­ness; the unbe­liev­ably good ‘Clara’, a 6‑minute stop-motion anim­a­tion by Archi­tec­ture in Hel­sinki’s Isobel Knowles (she didn’t write it or direct it, but I know her so she gets the credit – besides, the stop motion is bril­liant) about a girl deal­ing with grief; and the leather-men-kal­eido­scope, a video of two men fuck­ing shot through a spe­cially con­struc­ted kal­eido­scope lens – it’s mesmerising.

And I was plan­ning to go to the Mid­summa open­ing party tonight but hmmm… pour­ing rain in Fed Square with no cover? No thanks. 

From tomor­row, I’m in Tassie until Sunday night. See you all when I return!