Why I’m writing fewer reviews of art exhibitions

When I started this blog in 2008, I wrote a review of a gallery for every second post. Melbourne had over 200 art galleries, and most art exhibitions went unreviewed. Most exhibitions never got any critical attention, good or bad. Now, I no longer review as many art exhibitions. I still go to art exhibitions but don’t write reviews of them. I don’t feel the need anymore and haven’t paid much attention to the commercial gallery scene for a few years.

I have become less enamoured by art galleries for several reasons. Partially because one of the effects of Melbourne’s extended COVID lockdowns was to emphasise what I already knew: there is more to the visual arts than art galleries. COVID restrictions put a damper on visiting galleries, from which I never fully recovered. Now, I don’t think I have the energy to do the long gallery crawls I used to do.

After examining art crimes, I was aware of art galleries laundering money, dealing in looted antiquities, and various marketing scams that create artificial scarcity (NFT art made that too obvious to ignore). And it is not just specific commercial galleries but the institutional galleries providing support for tasteless, artificially scarce, high-end products leading to the corruption of curatorial independence by brands using them as platforms (see my post Is the NGV a high end department store?). Along with the art-washing service they provide their donors.

For example, the NGV does not give providence information to the public, so we don’t know if items in its collection passed through the thieving hands of  Subhash Kapoor,  Dynamite Doug Lachtford or similar dealers in looted antiquities. The NGV’s Olmec collection is no longer on permanent exhibition. It was acquired as a tax dodge in 1980 along with its dodgy provenance (looted or forged). The NGV describes its provenance as “Presented anonymously, 1980” (nothing to see here).

But mostly, I am writing fewer art exhibition reviews because I’m less interested in that aspect of art and culture. When I started this blog, every second post was about something other than art exhibitions: street art, public sculpture, and my other poorly described ‘categories’ of blog posts. I never intended this blog to be about art exhibitions, so I titled it “Art and Culture Critic.” I wasn’t writing to industry insiders; I wanted to write about art for people who don’t read much about art.

There is more about visual culture on this city’s streets than in all art galleries, from public sculpture to street art. And these things are as important, often immediate and public concerns like the actions to remove statues of colonial heroes or the removal of a mural because of accusations of anti-semitism. 

Melbourne’s street art is the most important cultural movement to emerge from this city in my lifetime, and I would have been foolish to ignore it. It was also intellectually stimulating, with several outstanding academics in the city researching the subject. It speaks to a human need to participate in visual culture, not just as a receiver but as a transmitter. And it has the added bonus of joyful discoveries on psychogeographical meanderings around the city.

So, I will still be writing reviews of art exhibitions, but there will probably be fewer of them. If you want more local exhibition reviews, try Memo Review.

In Chelsea you have to put up a sign to say that it is not a gallery.

Evans’s Colonial Confusion

Megan Evans’s exhibition, “Colonial Confusion”, at the City Gallery, is both timely and eye-catching. It highlights the confusion in Australia about the colonial past. It uses the confusion of Surrealist shocks, playful alterations and beautifully rectified readymade to get the viewer to look, think and reflect. Evans is asking: “How do we reclaim our heritage in a way that includes all of it, not just the idealised parts, which are under uncomfortable scrutiny by members of the marginalised non-white culture?” 

In “Colonial Confusion”, falls of polished silverware freeze in silent tumbles as the colonial order is upset. Antique and redundant books with pages painted with beautiful trompe l’oeil images. An elegant child-size black upholstered chaise lounge with table knives for feet bound to stab wherever it is placed. And more…

Books, cutlery, and furniture fill the exhibition space to the ceiling. Evans is both the curator and the creator. Some are her creations, and others come from the City of Melbourne Art and Heritage Collection.

The post-colonial world is not a simple place; there is so much packed away. Conservative fantasies fail to fit with the multiplicity of information now available. Where once dogmatic reasoning could be supported through popular ignorance, it is now unsupportable except through conspiracies of fact-altering or brain-washing cabals.

Evans writes an insightful catalogue essay for “Colonial Confusion”, a personal account of her long career and how we can explore engagements with the colonial past. At times, she critiques her own work: “My early attempts were brutal and didactic.”

Evans is an important Melbourne-based artist with a long career. She is best known for her murals between 1985 and 8 in Northcote and Fitzroy, especially the 44.27-metre-long Northcote Koori Mural. (See my blog post about her murals.)

We all know colonial-style decorations and the ornamentation of wedding cake architecture, but we are confused about what they mean. “Colonial Confusion” is an exhibition I’d recommend to everyone in Naarm/Melbourne with an open mind. There is plenty for the eyes and the mind in this exhibition about where we are now.

Photographers in 2024

I was walking through Melbourne, looking at photographs on the sides of buildings, on double-sided displays outside the Melbourne Town Hall, outside the State Library, around Parliament Station, and inside Arc One and RMIT Gallery. Some were part of the Photo 2024 International Festival of Photography, and others were on exhibition at RMIT.

Jo Duck, Brick Trick on the wall of 99 Spring Street

Looking at Photo 2024 raises the question: What do we expect from a photograph? Innovative and startling images like Jo Duck’s “Razzle Dazzle” series, or depictions of life, photos of cool Africans in mid-century modern Mali in “The Eye of Bamako Malick Sidibé.”

Should photographs be creative, fun eye candy, or polemical creativity for a purpose or simply a technical achievement? Anne Zahalka’s “Future Past Present Tense” at Arc One draws attention to the environmental crisis depicted in fake documentation of natural history exhibitions. Zahalka manipulated unnatural images to emphasise the impact of the Anthropocene. These images build on images from Zahalka’s impressive 2019 exhibition, “Wild Life/ Australia” (see my post).

photograph of photograph in Anne Zahalka’s “Future Past Present Tense” at Arc One

On the meta-level, I’m photographing photographs for an exhibition in Melbourne. It seems so immediate and yet so removed.

What does photography mean now that everyone is a photographer? When almost everyone has a camera? Photography combines technology and art, the practical and the domestic, the human with the digital. Confession of an art critic: I’m uncomfortable writing about photography or describing myself as a ‘photographer’. (Perhaps my lack of appreciation is due to having been poorly served by the NGV. In his review of Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, Dr Marcus Bunyan argues that NGV has poor photography exhibitions and a poor collection.)

I’m asking myself what the meaning and significance of calling yourself a photographer in Melbourne in 2024 is. (I remember seeing 2001 – a Space Odyssey at the Nairobi drive-in as a child, so this is the future. I will keep this post personal because all meaning is contingent on context.) I am repeatedly reminded that it has become transhuman. In the Treasury Precinct, I find myself in the uncanny valley of the future of photography with the hyperreal “portraits of cyborgs and portraits by cyborgs”. However, these sci-fi images miss the point because HAL and his pals are already here.

“execute_photography” at RMIT is a photography exhibition, but don’t expect a lot of photographs hanging on walls. This is not the usual photography exhibition. It is an exhibition as much for the mind as it is for the eye. Half of it is interactive because of the impact of AI and because photography is active, accessible and popular. There are AI-created images and AI-identified images. The curators explain that “Photography is constantly dying and being reborn.”

Also, at RMIT, there is a more conventional exhibition by German photographer Ulrich Wüst, “Wanderings About History.” Wüst’s mundane images of the social and urban transformations of German reunification are dramatic in their precise composition. The absence of figures in his pictures of the built environment only emphasises their implied presence.

There are over 100 sites for Photo 2024 in the city and regional Victoria. During the exhibition, humans and machines will take millions more photographs in this city alone. Machines will take some to show to other machines, and some will never be seen by anyone, human or machine. What does it mean to be a photographer in 2024?

Photo 2024, uncanny valley: photography, tech and the hyperreal, with Paul Montford’s Judge Higginbotham in foreground

Break-In at Oshi Gallery

Unlike bank robberies, art thefts are strange because why would anyone steal art? At 4 am on the 18 December 2023 a group of thieves used bolt cults to break into Oshi Gallery on  Smith Street in Collingwood. They stole tools, paintings and limited-edition clothes and shoes.

CCTV recorded images of the thieves, and through these images, police could track them walking north along Smith Street. The video might help in a prosecution but has been less valuable than art. CCTV images suggest the thieves scouted the location the night before.

Jane Rolls and her partner, GT Sewell, run Oshi Gallery, which specialises in NFTs and other digital commodities. They have promoted NFTs for several years, from the highs to the current lows.

Oshi Gallery estimates that around $10,000 worth of art, clothes and tools were stolen in the robbery. Obviously, the limited edition clothes and tools will be easier to move than the art, even the tangible kind of art. The thieves either knew before or soon discovered that it is not easy to sell art, and even more difficult to sell stolen art. However, selling stolen art isn’t the only motivation for art theft. There are others like personal acquisition, artnapping for ransom and revenge attacks.

What is curious about this art theft is the delay in hearing about it. The usual tactic with an art theft is to broadcast what has been stolen as soon as possible to alert potential buyers that the items are stolen. Yet, for some unknown reason, news reporters waited almost two months before publicising the theft, which was only reported on 10 News First on 2 February 2024.

GT Sewell started off making bespoke objects and doing street art sculptures and is well known in Melbourne’s street art scene.

For more on other art thefts and other art crimes in Australia, read my book, The Picasso Ransom.

In Geelong

I’ve been exploring Geelong and visited the Geelong Gallery and saw some public sculptures and street art. Most of it was located around the Lt. Malop Street area, Geelong’s cultural zone. 

Geelong Gallery needs both more space and a more substantial permanent collection. So it is very dependent on its current temporary exhibitions. When I visited, there was a temporary exhibition of John Nixon’s minimalist prints and an exhibition by women artists from the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY) focused on the Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters, the Pleiades) story. (Curiously, they identify the same stars as sisters as did the Ancient Greeks.)

The permanent collection consists of Fredrick McCubbin’s Bush Burial, a Eugene von Guérard, a Jan Senberg, a Gordon Bennett and a couple of other paintings. The exhibition space for the permanent collection consists of one large room for paintings above one small room for ceramics, in between, on the landing, some nineteenth-century marble statues. These included one from Charles Summers’s studio in Rome; I will return to Summers, who believed he was Melbourne’s answer to Michelangelo, later in this post. It is commendable that Geelong Gallery has both a community gallery space and a learning space, as these spaces are much needed in regional galleries.

Mark Stoner, North

Mark Stoner’s North, 2000, has an ideal, site-specific installation. It’s large sculptural sails or fins forms are a waterfront landmark. Stoner is a Melbourne-based artist whose sculptures are like landscapes. He has public sculptures in Melbourne’s Victoria Harbour and other locations in Melbourne and Geelong.

What most of Geelong’s public sculpture lacks is site-specific installations. Some of it has been dumped in Geelong, like Charles Summers’s marble statue of the future King Edward. It was originally part of a set of sculptures of the royal family adorning the NGV when it was first located in the State Library. Nobody wants them now; Edward looks awkward in his ceremonial pantaloons and stockings. I’m unsure where they all are, but some are now at the Melbourne Show Grounds.

Charles Summers, King Edward

There is also an older generation of public sculptures along the Geelong foreshore with an appreciation for their location. Jan Mitchell painted bollards and the little bronze men or gnomes of the Poppykettle Fountain by D.G. in 1980.

Some bronze cranes were imported to Geelong in the 1880s and relocated to the Botanic Gardens in the 1970s (a few others scattered around the Geelong foreshore). They are from a time when public sculpture was donated by local plutocrats rather than commissioned and curated.

More recent public sculptures in Geelong include a collaborative work with a nautical theme by Julie Collins and Derek John. And Louis Laumen’s The Newsboy (the third statue of a paperboy I’ve seen in an Australian city after Philip Cannizzo’s in Caulfield Park).

Manda Lane & the community

Finally, the street art in Geelong’s city centre consists of a few pieces commissioned by Manda Lane, VKM, and Baby Guerrilla. The community colour-in-paste-up by Manda Lane, who usually works in black or white, is a fun, collaborative piece. Otherwise, there is one service lane off Lt. Malop Street with a few pieces. It is mainly by a local artist, Glummo, who repeats his glum character at various scales, from whole buildings to small paste-ups. Why is his character so glum? Do you know someone from Geelong?

Glummo

The Small Spaces

I miss the small art spaces, Platform, Mailbox Art Space, and all the little curated spaces where art was exhibited in public spaces in Melbourne. They are the antithesis of the all too common contemporary, huge, white-walled gallery space with a single work. When I started this blog (sixteen years ago!), I was writing reviews about these alternated exhibition spaces. They were occupying display cases which had been designed for promotion or mail delivery, aspects of life made redundant by current technology. (These retrospective views should be taken as evidence of my advancing age and irrelevance!)

Platform in the Degraves Street underpass

Perhaps the smallest was TwentybyThirty Gallery, a vitrine 20x30cm in the corner of the door of a bar in Pesgrave Place. Platform (aka Platform Artists Group Inc. or Platform Contemporary Art Spaces) occupied several old advertising vitrine around Melbourne’s two major train stations from 1990 until a couple of years ago when it was closed for the Metro Tunnel construction.

Mailbox Art Space (aka Mailbox 141) has ceased to be some time in the last five years. The small glass-fronted mailboxes were always difficult spaces, but at least most of the mailboxes were illuminated. It had some excellent exhibitions, including a mini-retrospective of Pat Larter’s mail art from the mid-1980s. In this case, the limitations of the space were overcome by its actual identity; what better place to display mail art but in a series of mailboxes?

Although isolated from the rest of the world by glass, these spaces were in public areas, underpasses, laneways, and lobbies. It was a point where the general public met contemporary art.

Jimi Gregg, The Highest Tower, Cathedral Cabinet

There are still shop window art spaces with regular exhibitions, like Cathedral Cabinet in Cathedral Arcade on Swanston Walk in Melbourne. The most recent exhibition I saw was VCA graduate Jimi Gregg’s “The Highest Tower.” Gregg exhibited paintings on cut brick slices with landscapes painted in oil and enamel. The bricks’ proportions suggest panoramic cinematic images, but the images are limited by their small dimensions: roads, rain, landscapes and the occasional figure in muted colours.

Other shop window exhibition spaces include Dolls House in West Preston, DiMase Architects in North Fitzroy, and Dan Wollmering’s studio window in Brunswick.

Art Box Club Unboxing

I’ve been a paid member of the Art Box Club since 2021 and received a limited edition contemporary artwork every month (well, almost punctuality is not part of the deal) for $40. It is a club with under sixty members, very exclusive, and a different way of buying art than the gallery model. It is a not-for-profit that supports artists with a curated selection of art. (It is not the UK shop ‘Art Box Club’ of kawaii-inspired brands.)

Although Joel Gailer started it in 2015, my subscription came about because I was tired of hearing about NFTs, and the quality, physicality, and reality of the Art Box Club seemed like the antidote. I don’t know about the investment quality, but I doubt any work has devalued as fast as an NFT. Markets Insider says: “Out of the top collections, the most common price for an NFT is now $5-$100”, and considering some NFTs sold for millions, this makes Art Box Club a comparatively sane investment.

I asked Gailer if he kept a catalogue of the work, and he said: “No”, so I’ve been laborious compiling my own. In the process, I’ve been reviewing my collection.

All the works are A4 size or smaller. They are wrapped in acid-free paper and mailed to you. There is also a page or two about the artist and the artwork. The variety is good with different print techniques, collages, and even one unique work on paper by women and men, gay and straight, Indigenous, local and international.

I was familiar with some of the artist’s work, having seen them in local exhibitions and written about in this blog: Kenny Pittock, Casey Jenkins, The BOOreaucrats (Peter Burke and Benjamin Sheppard), Mikaela Stafford, Michael Hawkins and Joel Gailer. I haven’t heard of others but have generally been glad to be shown their work. I’m blown away every time I see the paper cut by British artist J.P. Willis, Lovers Pinch (2023), aircraft flying amidst the floral tracery of this window to a decorative modern world.

J.P. Willis, Lovers Pinch