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

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Counihan Politics and Protest

Thursday evening as I am going to the Counihan Gallery on the tram along Sydney Road. I am thinking about the theme of the exhibition: ‘people – politics – protest’ and Noel Counihan in a cage demonstrating the lack of free speech in 1933. Thinking that if I don’t see the police, or ultra-conservative demonstrators then the art isn’t great protest art… and then I saw the sandbag barricade out the front of the Brunswick town hall. Have the battle lines been drawn? Has Moreland seceded from Australia?

Rushdi Anwar, Art Like Morality, Consists of Drawing a Line Somewhere… is it?

Too good to hope for; the barricade were just an art installation. It wasn’t even part of the inaugural Noel Counihan Commemorative Art Award. It was Kurdish Australian artist Rushdi Anwar’s Art Like Morality, Consists of Drawing a Line Somewhere… is it? and it was part of Morearts 2017, the annual temporary art exhibition. It made me consider the possibility that the best art about people, politics or protest in Moreland was possibly not in the Counihan Gallery’s Moreland Summer Show.

Perhaps, the most best protest art this year in this local came, not from artists but from the Moreland City Council. This year has been a turning point in Australia as sections of society, represented by three inner-city Melbourne councils are officially no longer celebrating Australia Day/Invasion Day. This symbolic act of removal is a clear protest that has not been ignored by the politicians Canberra or by other elements of the far right. Iconoclasm destroying the sacred and creating absence is part of a long tradition in contemporary art as in Marcel Duchamp’s rasée L.H.O.O.Q or Robert Rauschenberg’s work Erased DeKooning. So does the influence of the German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys on organisation and political action as contemporary art.

Noel Counihan would not have understood that kind of post-modern art. Nor do the Moreland City Council consider that their removal of budget items for Australia Day/Invasion Day as a work of art; they weren’t even at the exhibition opening as there were holding a council meeting at the night. However, although they did not intend to be art, it maybe art, just as Noel Counihan’s famous protest locked in a cage may be the best thing he ever did, certainly it what he is most remembered for. It is not a functional thing; it is symbolic, a beautiful and culturally significant creation.

Fleur Summers, Protesting with Feeling

Kate Davis and Hannan Jones, Study for the Speaker

At the opening the artists, their friends and visitors drank wine and had a good time. Compared to what was happening outside the art inside the gallery was summed up with the metaphor of a silent readymade megaphone hung on a white gallery wall. Not that Kate Davis and Hannan Jones Study for the Speaker is that simply, it included an audio and text installation but I didn’t download those elements at the opening.

Looking around the exhibition at the Counihan Gallery at the work of the fifty local artists in a wide variety of media, commenting on a great variety of issues from identity politics to environmental. Amongst these the inaugural Noel Counihan Commemorative Art Award went to Carmel Louise for her work Suicidal Tendencies; a photographic, mixed media collage reflecting on how most people have been watching climate change on TV from the comfort of their lounge. Maybe the media is not the message but a distraction. The judges praised Louise for her dealing with the issue of apathy and her use of contemporary collage. Second guessing the judges is not the role of either the critic or reporter; my role as a critic is to raise larger issues and to point out that rejecting the celebration Australia Day/Invasion Day maybe the most important piece political art in Moreland this year.