Cthulhu in Brunswick

Saw Cthulhu at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute, not the Great Cthulhu that Lovecraft wrote about (I’m not mad), but one of the lesser Cthulhus. Presented by the Centre for Projection Art as part of Frame: a biennial of dance 2023 Cthuluscene by transmedia artist Megan Beckwith was a combination of dance and technology.

The Centre for Projection Art is best known for presenting the Gertrude Street Projection Festival. The Centre’s objective is to activate spaces, and the Mechanics Institute’s forecourt is one of the closest things to a civic square in Brunswick. Various things have been tried for decades to activate it with more or less success. They probably discussed this in very different terms when it was a Mechanics Institute in the 1890s.

Cthuluscene is a dance and video work looping on four screens in the front windows of the white neo-classical building. The windows hadn’t been cleaned, and there were a few cobwebs, but that was the spookiest aspect. If only a spider had crawled out while I was watching.

The animation and motion capture was attractive, but the dance part was the weakest aspect, with conventional moves that contributed little to any meaning. The dancer’s gold tentacles and golden robot form spoke more of absurd luxury rather than cosmic horror. But then considering the “transformative nature of the digital to discover different notions of gender, physicality, and the post-human” is an absurd luxury.

I’m familiar with the horror stories of H P Lovecraft and the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, as will some of my readers. So at least that gave me something to write about. Often I neglect to write about exhibitions like this because there is little to say about them. Sometimes, there is so little to them. Either way, it is a painful exercise to put into words with no pressing reason. It is not as if there is a need to warn people to stay away from a monster—the curse of the two-star review.

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Renn, Adams and Morton

Two exhibitions: Vas Renn and Garry Adams’s “New Works” and Callum Morton’s “Inside Out”.

Vas Renn

Vas Renn and Garry Adams “New Works” in the Gallery at the City Library. Two series of hard-edge abstractions with intense colours working on a grid that entertains the eyes.

Vas Renn’s collaged textiles, the pinstripes and other textiles form geometric patterns. They look like microprocessor designs. I first thought with all the detail that these were digital prints, but looking closer; I could see that they were fabric; they are recycled fabric sourced from charity shops with some additional printing.

All those lines of thread, the warp and weft, are woven into a larger pattern that takes Renn’s work from the micro to the macro.

Garry Adams’s series of seven paintings are all about the arrangement of colours. There are filtered colours and contracting combinations in balanced geometric compositions. These aren’t one series of paintings (the difference in framing gives it away), and Adams has been painting like this for many years.

The title “New Works” is misleading since both artists have exhibited these series separately in the last couple of years at Four Eight Four Gallery in North Carlton. 

Garry Adams

Also geometric, colourful and entertaining for the eye is Callum Morton’s “Inside Out” at Anna Schwartz Gallery. And, unsurprising for Morton, with conceptual and architectural elements. What is surprising is that they are paintings, when Morton is best known for his sculptural work (see my post on Morton’s Monument Park).

Six large paintings the size of the windows in the Sirius Building in Sydney, images where the representational appears to be an abstraction. Along with a series of preparatory like works on paper, with a central “missing image” image. For there is a studied vacuity, an empty architecture, to Morton’s work.

The cartoon-style mouse holes in Morton’s drawings of skirting board reminded me of the one in the shared house I lived in Pascoe Vale, the arch of a genuine mouse hole is flatter.

These and other holes through architecture from the inside out.

Views of Iran and Myanmar

Three exhibitions by women from Iran and Myanmar as part of International Women’s Day is a remarkable and timely achievement for a local council gallery like the Counihan Gallery in Brunswick. A time when we need to see different views and hear different voices from these countries.

Installation view of Shwe Wutt Hmon’s Portraits of the Anonymous

In “Portraits of the Anonymous” Shwe Wutt Hmon the works hang like washing on a line. In Myanmar, it is considered bad luck for men to walk under the washing line of longyi dresses.  So they turned into a symbol of protest, slowing the military advance as they cut lines hung across streets. The works hanging in the Counihan are portraits and statements with texts in Burmese and English. Shwe Wutt Hmon is one of the founding members of Myanmar-based women photographer group Thuma Collective (see the Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize website for more about her work.)

Setareh Hosseini, the visual artist, not the creative Canadian make-up artist of the same name, is exhibiting “I Take My City”. Memories of Tehran from an exile taking geography as a memory, holding the buildings in her hand. The universal and the personal, the public and the personal combined. These lyrical works are typical images by Hosseini, a hand holding buildings against a marble background or a sky, or another open background.

And in the final gallery is “The Elysian Fields” is a multi-channel video installation by Sofi Basseghi, the exhibition design is by Ehsan Khoshnami, with music composition by Ai Yamamoto and performances by actor Salme Geransar and courageous women of Iran on the videos. People say that Paradise is a garden, crossing over into the realm of houries, fairies and genies. Female power in nature, a mystical gateway to the other side, which in the profane world, outside of the sacred garden, could simply be immigration.

Setareh Hosseini I Take My City 2016 digital print

The Wild West of Australia

The world has now heard about the destruction of the world’s largest and oldest collection of petroglyphs (rock carvings) by the Woodside Energy Group (previously Woodside Petroleum) thanks to two protesters spraying chalk dust on the perspex cover on Fredrick McCubbin’s 1889 oil painting, Down on his luck, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in January 2023. Further examination of their actions exposes prejudices about race, law, justice, culture, art’s value, and art galleries.

Western Australia has often been called the wild west, as it has many things in common with westerns. It is a land stolen from Indigenous peoples, ruled by cattle barons and miners.

The destruction of the world’s largest and oldest collection of petroglyphs (rock carvings) by the Woodside Energy Group (previously Woodside Petroleum) started in 2006–2007. Since then, the fossil fuel company has irreparably damaged the rock carvings on the Burrup Peninsula (also known as Murujuga) in WA’s Pilbara region.

The Australian government does not define the destruction of Indigenous art and culture as a crime (unless it is a tradable commodity). Indigenous culture, like the petroglyphs on the Burrup Peninsula (aka Murujuga), are being destroyed on an industrial scale, and even the most egregious incidents, like the damage to the Kuyang stones at Lake Bolac or the destruction of Juukan Gorge, only receive official reprimands or a fine.

However, it is a crime. Australia is an occupied territory with no treaty or other peace settlement with the land’s original inhabitants. Without a treaty, the land is an occupied territory where the ownership of the land is in dispute; therefore, the Geneva Convention applies. The destruction of the property of people whose lands have been occupied is prohibited under Article 53 of the 4th Geneva Convention. The situation is analogous to Russian claims to annex parts of Ukraine, a unilateral declaration that they are now legally part of another country. No, where in the Geneva Convention are occupied people, or their allies, prohibited from destroying the occupiers’ property. This does not give Russia the right to destroy Ukrainian property. Australia is a party to GCI-IV, but Australia’s word is worthless.

The actions of the two protesters, Perth ceramic artist and illustrator Joana Partyka and Ballardong Noongar man Desmond Blurton at the Art Gallery of Western Australia is the best art gallery demonstration yet. A symbolic attack on a symbol of the colonial power to draw attention to the actual crime of destroying the world’s oldest art gallery. Partyka’s damage was symbolic, as was the choice of McCubbin’s painting and the location. The chalk spray, used for marking sports grounds, would not damage the painting—indeed, no damage compared to the actual irreparable damage done to the ancient petroglyphs.

McCubbin’s painting symbolises European colonisation as he depicts European settlers in the Australian landscape. And also because it is a tradable commodity exchangeable for dollars, unlike rock art, which is not tradable because it belongs in its original location.

The Art Gallery of Western Australia is used symbolically by the occupying power, as a token of civilisation, as a venue for state functions, a beautiful decoration for the ugly iconoclasm and state violence.

WA police charged Partyka with one count of criminal damage, nobody has yet charged the so-called Commonwealth of Australian and Woodside Energy with war crimes, but it needs to happen.

The Temple of Boom

As a teenager, I thought the third-scale Parthenon of Calton Hill overlooking Edinburgh was the wankiest construction I’d ever seen. Intended as a memorial to the  Napoleonic War and to emphasise Edinburgh’s claim to be “the Athens of the north”, it failed at both. So I’m not sure about another one of the same scale in the NGV’s sculpture garden.

As a symbol of western slave-ownership delusional exceptionalism, the Parthenon is best not remembered for its white sun-bleached marble but as a painted temple. Given this, I prefer the Temple of Boom to the one in Edinburgh.

The Temple of Boom is the 2022 NGV Architecture Commission and was designed by Melbourne-based architects Adam Newman and Kelvin Tsang. It is a semi-complete classical Greek-style temple constructed around the Henry Moore sculpture. It is not a temple to Athena, for Moore’s figure is an Aphrodite or a Hera, not Athena.

I wasn’t there for the architecture, the Friday night DJ sets or the VR experience of the Acropolis in Greece. I was there to see what guest curated by Toby Benador of Just Another Agency had arranged for the painting of the temple.

I’ve seen art by two artists on Melbourne’s streets: Drez’s vibrant colours and Manda Lane’s black and white vegetation. Manda painted with a brush which she does paint with a brush on the street when she isn’t doing paste-ups. And finally, there is the luxurious floral art of David Lee Pereira, whose work I’ve seen at Beinart Gallery.

The Temple of Boom served these artists well. Street and mural artists have a close and important relationship with their surfaces’ architecture, which is different from how other artists might relate to the surface they are painting. It is also temporary, ephemeral work for which they are well suited. The tree branch from the NGV’s garden grows into the temple, mixing with the built environment like a reverse of Pereira’s painting.

I’m interested in how street artists work in gallery settings. Within the gallery cage’s confines, the wild art will start to exhibit domesticated behaviour. It is kind of a litmus test for art galleries; are they an anaesthetic environment for art or institutions of colonial appropriation? Not that the Temple of Boom is either of these, it is a play space.

I didn’t see it with music playing, and I was there at a quiet time of day.

Peter Tyndall at Buxton Contemporary

Peter Tyndall is a hedgehog (in reference to Archilochus: πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing”). He knows one big thing.

He has been expanding on that one thing ever since he painted his sign over one of his colour field paintings in the late 70s. Ever since then he has named all of his paintings the same (only the date and the courtesy acknowledgement vary):

Someone looking at something is Tyndall’s big idea. It implicates that the viewer is part of the art. The viewer becomes a responder, a person who is anticipated by the existence of the work, just as a letter has an anticipated reader.

Playful, inventive and fun, Tyndall made his conceptual art visually identifiable. When turned on its side, his visual tag of a box with two lines becomes a diamond, a pattern that can be repeated across his work. Even the elevator at Buxton Contemporary had a variation of this pattern.

And there is plenty to see at his first major retrospective at Buxton. The first room shows what Tyndall was painting before his conceptual break; large colour field paintings, mostly in tan. And then the missing link, the painting modified with the inclusion of a symbol Tyndall would use for the rest of his career, the box with two lines, representing a painting hung on a wall.

The way that paintings are hung is important for Tyndall, generally with two long black wires that extend from the top of the painting to screws further up the wall. The label beside the painting became part of the art. His labels are all labelled “Label.” All his labels are identical (only the information about the date and courtesy varies) because they are all details in his single lifelong work.

A good retrospective should show other sides of the artist. There is Tyndall’s mail art, his slave guitar, cast objects, and those on his sculptural wall hangings, made for and exhibited at Venice Biennale in 1988. There are his political engagements with the world, notably his campaign to end the ban on sketching at the NGV and a piece responding to a City of Mildura Councillor complaining that they didn’t get their share of “the cultural dollar”.

But wait, there is more; as part of the retrospective, there are a series of free zines of artwork by Peter Tyndall produced as a “Graphic Design Studio 3” project by Graphic Design majors at the University of Melbourne. 

What was not shown at the exhibition was Tyndall’s blog: Blogos/HAHA. His blog is a work of art and is updated regularly. See my blogroll.

Counihan Gallery summer show 2022

The end-of-year exhibition at the Counihan Gallery’s summer show has the theme of Future Tense.

Tense? I am still masked up amidst a crowd of people at the opening, still concerned about the current wave of COVID. I can’t remember ever seeing so many people in the gallery.

Why am I writing about this exhibition and not others? Hyper-local interest, this is where I live, with the added bonus that Merri-bek has more than its fair share of visual artists living in it. Congratulations to Emily Simek, the recipient of this year’s Noel Counihan Commemorative Art Award, and to Stephanie Karavasilis and Carmen Reid for being highly commended by the judges.

But at my back, I always hear four horsemen drawing near. War, plague, famine and death have been harnessed to the chariot of unimaginable climate catastrophe. Many of the works in the exhibition were activist, most environmental, followed by disability. Pamela Kleemann-Passi Trolley Trouble in Troubled Times records an action by Extinction Rebellion that took place at the intersection just outside the gallery. The fluttering flags contrast the still bodies, their bright colours stand out against the grey tarmac, concrete and stone. It is a combination of protest with aesthetics.

Of course, there was a wide range of interpretations of the theme in a great variety of media and styles, including imitations of cubism, futurism, abstract expressionism and Francis Bacon. However, there wasn’t enough about the location. Kyle Walker’s photographs, The Cat, capture scenes of everyday Brunswick. The photographs are well-composed and poetic without being sentimental.

Another with a focus on the local was Carmel Louise, The East Brunswick, combining photograph and mixed media in a collapsible accordion pop-up book. It is based on the original East Brunswick Hotel and was meant to be critical of the recent high-rise developments along Lygon Street. However, this criticism is muted by the beauty of the paper folding.

Carmel Louise, The East Brunswick, 2022

Bright colours abounded this year; I suspect the cumulative result of many lonely lockdowns. One of these bright works was Claire Anna Watson’s Once when I was six III. An inflated plastic creation involving a mirror, lime green ring, floaties and aubergine. This a contemporary art take on a yoni and a lingam, complete with the aubergine in the middle – emoji reference. Air and inflation have been art components since Duchamp’s Air de Paris (50cc of Paris Air) and early Koons buoyancy basketballs in One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Spalding Dr J Silver Series). And Watson has used vegetable material in previous work. Her artist statement records “floating, hovering between an abstraction of the mind and a nostalgia for what was.”

Claire Anna Watson, Once when I was six III, 2022

While the artists in Future Tense were looking forward, I was reminiscing. Not that want to use Van Der Graff’s Time Pair-a-Docs to go back to the past, but for me, there was a note of past tense in the show. That sentimental, seasonal event, end-of-year feeling, but that’s just memories. seeing new work recognisably by artists I know or have previously written about conjuring ghosts of past years, the evoking of spirits. Shout out to Alister Karl, Julian DiMartino, Marina Perkovich and Carmen Reid glad that they are still alive, creating art and kicking.

Although it is the season of end-of-year shows, the Blender Xmas Party and the 32^nd annual Linden Postcard Show are coming up. I am going to take a summer break (if ‘summer’ is the word I’m looking for, given the recent wintery weather).

Thanks for reading.

Cheers, Black Mark

Leon Van Der Graff, Time Pair-a-Docs, 2022