The Picasso Ransom

The Picasso Ransom – and other stories about art and crime in Australia, (available in paperback and e-book) my second book is a collection of forty-five true-crime stories about the visual arts in Australia: art theft, art forgery, art censorship, art vandalism, and protest art.

The title comes from the famous artnapping of Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria. One of the artnapper’s demands was an art prize called “the Picasso Ransom”.

While that crime is famous, others stories of crimes, from the colonial to the contemporary, are not well known but equally intriguing. Amongst them is an entire exhibition of forged Pollocks, paintings stabbed, art prosecuted as pornography, decapitated statues, and more stolen art. 

I have long been interested in art crimes and have been building up a file of clippings and photocopies since I first heard Picasso’s Weeping woman was stolen from the NGV in 1986. That year I wrote a long essay on the aesthetic issues of art forgery as part of my undergraduate studies, but don’t worry, I won’t be quoting from it in the book. It is not an academic book, it is a true-crime book, and I now think I was wrong about almost everything I wrote in that essay.

However, my interest kept growing, as did my file on art crimes: newspaper clippings and photocopies about art forgers, iconoclastic vandals and graffiti writers. I read more and attended talks and seminars on forgery and iconoclasm.My interest in Melbourne’s public sculpture, the subject of my first book, introduced me to the theft of bronze sculptures for scrap metal.

Writing a blog is a good way of making contacts and gaining experience in an area. I found myself reporting on the accusations, first against Bill Henson and then, in more detail, against Paul Yore. As well as hanging around with Professor Alison Young, “Banksy’s favourite criminologist”, and graffiti writers and street artists.

When I started writing the book about five or six years ago, I had yet to learn how long it would take or how much work would be involved. I was sitting day after day in the Supreme Court. I conducted interviews and exchanged messages with various people, including convicted forgers, graffiti writers, defence lawyers and courtroom artists (the last two are great for name-dropping infamous criminals).

At first, I thought there might be enough crimes involving art in Melbourne alone to fill a book. From the attempted destruction of Serrano’s Piss Christ, the Liberto forgeries, art stolen from Albert Tucker’s home to the arrest of the American graffiti writer Ether, there was a wide variety of crimes. However, I soon learnt of crimes in other parts of Australia that were too fascinating to leave out. There are some intriguing art thefts in South Australia, the earliest attempt of prosecution for forgery in Sydney, an entire exhibition of fake Jackson Pollock in Perth and more. Adding up to over a century of stealing, forging, vandalising and censoring art around Australia.

So, I hope that you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing and researching it. And as a thank you to my regular readers the first three people who comment will get a copy sent to them, anywhere in the world.

The Picasso Ransom and other stories about art and crime in Australia

Mark S. Holsworth

ISBN 978-0-646-87307-7 / ISBN 978-0-646-87308-4 (ebook)

314 pages 216×140 (5.5×8.50”)

The Picasso Ransom

Paperback, signed by the author, postage in Australia included.

A$26.99

It is available at, Avenue Bookstore, Readings Doncaster, Readings Carlton, Dymocks Nowra, Amazon and Booktopia.

Word Made Flesh

I was asked at ACCA’s front desk if I wanted earplugs, and a jar with pairs of yellow foam was proffered. I declined; I’m all for ear protection, but I couldn’t hear anything like a band at the Tote. It hardly seemed necessary. The person then warned me about the content of the exhibition. “Yes, I’ve seen his work before.”

Installation view of the Paul Yore, Word Made Flesh

Textile and assemblage artist Paul Yore’s mid-career retrospective, Word Made Flesh at ACCA, has much to look at and examine. The sheer amount of work, labour, of stitches in time is eye-popping and impressive. And being familiar with Yore’s work, I was amazed that there was so much new work.

What is also impressive is Yore doesn’t give a fuck. He has thrown everything at it. Too often, contemporary art is an empty gallery space with a video projection of a vacuum cleaner or something. Yore fills even the five vast spaces of the ACCA to excess. There is even a room that is double-hung because there is so much.

Even a decorated car, a typical gallery space filler, is a hearse worked to excess, covered in tiles. Two electric organs on either side of it with keys jammed down emit a grinding discord. There is a media overload with images and sound in the final room. Random water-powered beaters hit bells and xylophones.

Language and wordplay are everywhere. Cut up and rearranged, like the found images that he makes collages and assemblages from. The words themselves become found materials. Language is used not as a representation of the world but as a media that has made the world. His studies in archaeology and anthropology at Monash University have been put to good use. Culture jamming, using icons, symbols and logos for his own purposes.

And it is not just the quantity of material. There are also many ideas: religion, philosophy, capitalism…

However, picking one subject and trying to summarise the exhibition is probably a mistake. There is so much to consider; it bedazzles the eyes and boggles the mind to sum it up. And excess, too, is one of those great subjects for art, for art is a way to use part of the excess in society.

Finally, Yore is doing great Australian art, not the old Australian subjects and macho bullshit but a new perspective. It has been a long-standing theme in Yore’s work. It is important because Australia is seldom a theme of contemporary Australian art, and we need an intelligent view of this subject not only the moronic patriotism of the majority. 

Posts on Paul Yore

Given the upcoming exhibition at ACCA, “Paul Yore: Word Made Flesh,” I’ve brought together all my posts on Paul Yore. Most of them are about the police raid on the Like Mike exhibition in the middle of 2013 and the subsequent 2014 trial. There are also two about his 2016 exhibition at Neon Parc.

Paul Yore, Computer World, 2016

My post Gallery Crawl November 2011 records my first encounter with Paul Yore’s art with his exhibition “Monument to the Republic” at Gertrude Contemporary in a single sentence: “Not that there was any deeply political work in any of the galleries or on the street, except for Paul Yore’s ‘Monument to the Republic’ at Gertrude Contemporary, a piss-taking piece of slacker art that represents the Australian Republic perfectly.”

Police Raid Art Gallery

Political motivations behind police raid

Follow up Like Mike

Barry Keldoulis is Fucked is about the censorship at the Sydney Contemporary 2013.

Censorship, Barry Keldoulis, and Paul Yore gives Keldoulis a right of reply.

Paul Yore Justice Delayed  

Justice Repeatedly Delayed

Paul Yore contest mention more on the legal proceedings as I morph from art critic to court reporter.

Paul Yore’s trial day 1

Paul Yore’s trial day 2

All charges dismissed Oct 2014

Paul Yore at Neon Parc, an exhibition in 2016

Paul Yore Artist Talk at Neon Parc 2016

Paul Yore, Love is Everything, 2016 (front view)

Paul Yore artist talk

“What was the most unexpected reaction to your work?” A person asked artist, Paul Yore at an end of exhibition talk at Neon Parc on Saturday 18 June.

Paul Yore (left) and Geoff Newton in conversation at Neon Parc

Obviously the most unexpected reaction was when the police raiding his exhibition at Linden Gallery was unexpected. Yore never expected or intended that and it remains a misunderstood event. Yore found himself caught up in an on going local political issue about funding of Linden Gallery that had been going on for years.

It was unexpected and unintended. “Nobody wants their name to be linked to child abuse forever on the internet,” Yore explained. Yore is not a shock artist; his art is too chaotic and unstable. Shock artists, like Jeff Koons and Mark Kostabi, are more precise in their intent to shock and more focused on their objective than Yore’s chaotic art. Yore doesn’t have a political objective to his art and is cynical about the individual effect of activist artists.

There was the inevitable question from the audience about self-censorship but what can you honestly say about the chill effect. What the court case did do was cause Yore to think about photography’s claim to truth and collage as an issue about truth.

After the court case in 2014 Yore went travelling across Europe looking at a lot of folk art, outsider art and junk yard art. On his return to Melbourne he started to condensed this research into an exhibition at Neon Parc. Yore told the audience that did as much as he could in the time. Time is an important feature of Yore’s work, the handmade reminds you of time, every stitch is a moment in time.

Finally two pieces of advice.

Domestic advice: to prevent your dress riding up on your tights wash with fabric softner.

Advice to artists: do not let your mother attend your artist talk unless you want the audience to hear stories from your childhood. At the end of the talk Yore’s mother tells the audience that Paul has been collecting things since he could walk.

Paul Yore @ Neon Parc

Yore’s exhibition of tapestries and assemblages at Neon Parc’s Brunswick gallery is full of excess, ejaculating penises and a riot of rainbow colours. It is a sensory overload of colours, images, words and sounds; a reflection of a consumer society that has achieved peak stuff. The commercial, sexual and national mix with the religious forms, the altar piece and the temple with tapestries and mixed media art.

Paul Yore, Love is Everything, 1916 (rear view)

It is impossible to write an accurate or fair review of a Paul Yore exhibition without using an unrestricted vocabulary because it is fucking, intense, gay, psychedelic shit. His art is a mix of the infantile and juvenile with the pornographically adult, full of juvenile humour and childish joy. So if you are offended by any words then you are a small minded person who is part of the fucking problem.

The main work, Love is Everything, 2016, is a small building, 359 wide x 415 high x 680 cm long, made of multi-coloured children’s toys, television sets and other excesses of the “final days” of consumer society. As a church, temple or sacred bower it has exterior and interior spaces.

Out the front of the building there is a fountain with a pissing Justin Bieber. Bieber is one of Yore’s obsessions and Bieber also appears as St. Sebastian in Yore’s anti-Christian altar piece, Slave 4 U.

Paul Yore, Slave 4 U, 2016

The sound of running water from the piss fountain joins the chaotic mix with of mechanical and recorded sounds that are part of the installation; a tinny electronic version of the national anthem or a jingo keeps repeating. Motors turn wheels, adding more sounds from toy instruments.

There is so much to look at, so many images, messages, televisions screens and flashing strobe lights. Contrasting, contradicting, transforming even as you comprehend them. A spinning messages of “NO” upside down is “ON”.

Part of his installation 2013, Everything is Fucked, is incorporated into Love is Everything. Yore’s work is an accretion of more and more parts, built up, becoming larger and more intense; in the same way that his tapestries are from small pieces of fabric.

In 2013 members of Victoria Police used a Stanley knife to cut out parts of Yore’s installation, Everything is Fucked, at Linden Centre for Contemporary Art. In 2014 the prosecution was ordered to pay all his legal costs. There is a pile of redundant “Free Paul” t-shirts on the table in Neon Parc’s office and a special fuck you pig for Victoria Police included in Love is Everything.

Paul Yore, Love is Everything, 2016 (front view)

Yore clearly intends to be a great Australian artist; whether he succeeds or not depends more on future art histories than Yore’s art. To be a great Australian artist you have to both make art that is about Australia and make significant progressive art. As progressive art, Yore’s up-cycling assemblages advance on Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbaus and (to advance an ugly, sexist argument) transforms an under-rated ‘feminine’ craft, like an Australian version of Grayson Perry.

Yore continues an artistic critique of Australia that follows on from Juan Davila and Albert Tucker, pointing out the genocide, mass murder and other cruelties. Yore does not preach from a pulpit; he depicts both Australia and Christianity as awful, immature, cruel as his own fantasies. And, it is not all a commentary on obscenity and cruelty, there is a lot of joy and beauty in Yore’s work. In his Computer World tapestry, two images of Tigga bounce on a patchwork of kittens, cartoon characters and kitsch patterns mixed with op-art.

Paul Yore, Computer World, 2016

Final Post for 2014

This is my final post for another year. May I wish Happy 10th Anniversary to Richard Watt’s SmartArts on 3RRR, the Melbourne Prize, Blindside, Brunswick Arts Space and Trouble Magazine; all of which have made an impact on Melbourne’s art scene in their first decade. Another milestone worth recording is that John Buckley Gallery closed at the end of this year.

Melbourne Art Fair 2014 at the Exhibition Building

Thank you to everyone around the world who has read and has subscribed to this blog. It has been a strange year for me as one of the least powerful people in the art world, an online art critic, an independent writer and researcher, a blogger. I have been trying to be more professional about this doing freelance writing for a number of publications. I have my ABN (Australian Business Number) number now. (See my About page for links to most of these publications and also a few of my oil paintings).

I have spent a lot of time in 2014 in the Melbourne’s Magistrates Court covering the Paul Yore case. I have been out of my depth and out of my areas of expertise but it was important to report on the events. (See my post Are You Experienced?) Although Yore was found not guilty and police were ordered to pay all legal costs it left me with this feeling of dread that this will repeat as Australian culture refuses to learn. That case along with so many other aspects of Australian culture, racism, crimes against humanity, lack of human rights, all make me pessimistic about the future.

Sally Fields installation at the Conspirators

It seemed as if some of the major themes of the year was exhibitions titled Wunderkammer and doing art with the idea of taxidermy. Amongst my favourite exhibition this year were the Conspirators curated by Carmen Reid, Performprint by Joel Gailer and Michael Meneghetti at the Meat Market, and In Your Dreams, curated by Edwina Bartlem and Victor Griss at the Counihan Gallery in Brunswick.

For a summary of Melbourne’s street art in 2014 see my previous post.

I would like to take a break, have some more time for reading, my own painting and just relax in the summer heat but as I contemplate a break I start to receive the first invites for exhibitions in the new year. Unlike previous years many Melbourne galleries aren’t closed for all of January, there is an opening at Kings ARI on the 9th of January. So I hesitate to forecast how long this break will be.

I am looking forward to 2015 as my book on Melbourne’s Sculptures is now planned to be released in April.

Cheers,

Mark

William Eicholtz, Courage, 2014

Are You Experienced?

In covering the Paul Yore story I felt hopelessly out of my depth, as an art critic I wasn’t experienced reporting on politics and law. I persevered, determined to follow the story to the best of my abilities for over a year.

From the start, covering the case felt like a futile task as I already knew the outcome, it was as predictable as continued government funding for the National Gallery. Sure, it might not happen, especially if people treated the outcome as predictable and that any energy spent on it wasted but realistically, what are the chances?

If Paul Yore had been found guilty it would just been a further repeat of what happened to Mike Brown with the sentence reduced to practically nothing on appeal. To expect anything else is to expect a revolution, art galleries ransack, Chloe seized by police from Young and Jackson’s…. As much as such a purge might be the wet dream of some right wing conservatives, it is not something that magistrates and judges would want to encourage. What they want is to preserve the status quo.

However in Australia, the status quo includes the random persecution of artists. I’m concerned that this could happen again, not in Victoria, not for a few years at least, after the police pay costs for the case, but to another artist in another state in a couple of years. Following the police raid on the Linden Centre gave me the feeling of the repeated witch hunts in Australian culture.

The typical Australian mob chants: “We don’t like it. Ban it!” Art, books, clothing, people…. “We don’t like it. Ban it!” The mob needs to shut up, listen to reason and understand that just because they are the mob doesn’t mean that they should dictate taste. That instead of banning art and the expensive circus of police raids and court cases that we should engage in a democratic discussion. But what are the chances of that happening?

Being out of my depth with covering a criminal case there were things that I could learn, how to find court dates, get media statements from the police but as I learnt I also realised one of the drawbacks of being a blogger and freelance writer. What I was missing as a freelance writer and blogger was the experience of a large newsroom where I could have consulted with, or even collaborated with, the regular court reporters and the politics reporters.

Now I’m not asking for your sympathy but for you to consider a world with smaller editorial departments, smaller news rooms, more freelance journalists trying to tell larger stories. In the current world experience is too often dissipated rather than concentrated.

Sometimes I felt like a vulture lopping over to the carcass of an artist’s career, amid the flapping wings of other vultures and having a feed on the remains. Choosing to stop by Neon Parc on my rounds of galleries in the city to see if I could pick up something.

I wrote a summary of the case for the online art magazine Hyperallergic and an article for Vault Magazine that examined Yore’s use of collage and assemblage in the light of Max Delany’s testimony to the court.